Kyle glanced over at me and grinned when he saw what I was looking at. “Aren’t you gonna get rid of that old thing? It’s embarrassingly sappy, if I remember right.”
I clutched the paper to my chest, a look of horror on my face. “I’ll never get rid of it, you callous brute. I love it. It’s cute and wonderful and it makes me smile.”
He just shook his head and smiled at me, then turned up The Avett Brothers’, “I and Love and You” and we held hands, listening to the song we’d made love to more times than I could count. We looked at each other and then away, sharing mutual memories of the things we’d done to that song.
The cabin was several hours away, and of course I ended up falling asleep, not waking up until Kyle’s lips brushed mine and his voice whispered “we’re here,” in my ear.
Kyle was leaning in my car door, stroking my cheek with the backs of his fingers. I stretched languorously, ending with my arms around Kyle’s neck. “I’m too sleepy to walk. Carry me.”
Kyle’s lips pressed kisses along my neck as I stretched, sending me into a paroxysm of giggles, and then he swept me up into his arms and lifted me effortlessly out of the car and up the three steps onto the cabin porch.
“Keys are in my pocket,” he said.
I dug in his pocket, pulling his keys out and sorting through them until he indicated the correct one. I unlocked the door quickly, still in Kyle’s arms. He wasn’t showing any signs of strain except for tightening in his lips. He carried me over the threshold and in through living room stopped at the stairs to the second floor.
“Hold tight, baby,” he said. “We’re going up.”
I kicked and tried to slip out of his arms. “You’re crazy. You can’t carry me upstairs!”
He let me down, but as soon as my feet hit the stairs he leaned into me, pressing me back into the stairs. I landed on my butt and kept going, pulling him down to my mouth. I lost myself in his kisses, then, and forgot about the step gouging into my back, or the fact that my hair was caught under one shoulder against the next stair. Next thing I knew, I was in his arms again and we were moving up the stairs. I heard the strain in his breathing, but he carried me up into the master bedroom and laid me on the bed. He crawled on with me, pushing my shirt over my head, his palms stuttering on my ribs, palming my br**sts. I arched into his touch and fumbled with the button of his jeans.
We christened the hell out of that bed.
As we lay in the afterglow, Kyle’s fingers tracing patterns on the expanse of flesh between my br**sts, he turned to meet my gaze, a serious look in his eyes. “Have you decided on college?”
We’d been discussing it on and off for awhile now. We’d both taken the SAT and ACT and had sent applications off to a dozen colleges and universities each. We’d talked about where we wanted to go, what we wanted to do. What we hadn’t done was talk about whether we were going to go to the same place. Our conversations on the subject had a kind of unstated assumptions that we’d stay together and choose colleges based on somewhere we’d both go.
I shrugged, not liking the topic. “I was thinking Syracuse. Maybe Boston College. Somewhere on the east coast, I think. I want to major in business.”
He didn’t answer for a few moments, which I took to mean he didn’t like my answer. “I got accepted to Stanford. They offered me a huge scholarship.”
“Football?”
“Yeah.”
That much was obvious. His grades were good, but not scholarship good. He’d been approached by several different universities over the last few months. He expected more as our senior year wound down, though.
“Stanford is in California.” My voice was unattractively flat.
“And Syracuse is in New York.” His hand stilled on my skin. “I did get an offer from Penn State.”
I nodded. “I guess the question is, are we making these decisions together? I mean…what if you decide Stanford is the best place for you, and I really want to go Syracuse?”
“I don’t know,” Kyle said, not quite sighing. “That’s what I’ve been wondering. The offer Stanford has on the table is really enticing. Penn State is pretty good, but Stanford is…Stanford.” He shrugged, as if to say there simply wasn’t any comparison.
Long minutes passed. I wasn’t sure what to say, how to get us past this. Eventually I sat up. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’m hungry.”
Kyle sighed, as if the relief of leaving the discussion aside was a weight off his shoulders. We fired up the grill and had a lovely domestic moment grilling burgers and corn on the cob together. There was an unopened case of Budweiser cans in the pantry leftover from a party held here over the summer, and we drank beer together. Neither of us were hard partiers. We would go to our friend’s get-togethers and we’d have a drink or two, but we weren’t the type to get obliterated. I’d only been drunk once, and that had been with Kyle over this past summer. We’d convinced Becca’s cousin Maria to buy us a fifth of Jack, and we’d taken it to the dock while our parents attended some political soiree.
Being drunk had been fun up until the shots started catching up to me. I ended up puking and passing out on the dock. Kyle carried me to bed and watched me until he was sure I wasn’t going to choke on my own vomit. After that, I decided getting hammered wasn’t my thing. I had friends who seemed to live for the weekend parties, for getting drunk and hooking up.
I had Kyle, and that was enough.
After dinner, we built a fire in the firepit out by the lake and went skinny dipping once the sun went down, laughing and chasing each other around the inlet. There was an island about a quarter mile out into the bay, a tiny bump of land with some scrub pines and bushes a thin beach. Kyle and I had been swimming out to that island together since we were kids. This time, we swam out and made love on the sand, laid naked in the warm late summer air watching the stars twinkle and shimmer, talking about nothing and everything.
Talking about everything, but avoiding the heavy topic of the future and colleges. It was heavy on my heart, because something told me we wouldn’t come to an easy or pleasant decision. Kyle was set on Stanford. I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. I really wanted to be on the east coast, close to the financial center of New York City. The plan was to major in business finance and get a killer internship in New York, then get a job with Dad’s company, but legitimately, working my way up with no strings pulled, no favoritism showed.