For Us (The Girl I Loved Duet 2)

“Oh?” she giggles. “More than I am right now?”

“Yes.” I make sure she’s listening to me. “I know we don’t live together, but if we’re trying this, we’re going to try it for real. You’re not allowed to come without me. No going home and thinking about me and touching yourself. If you’re not with me and you want to come, you have to call me. Because I’m in charge of that.”

Amber goes so still that for a second I think that she’s not breathing. And then she’s kissing me and we’re both laughing and tangled together again in the sheets.

15

Amber

Past

It’s perfect. The shabby little apartment that I’ve got in lower Manhattan is perfect. It is shabby, but it’s supposed to be. New York is overpriced and crowded and even possibly saving money on dorms is hard with these prices, but I feel good about the decision. I was planning on going to college and being fully independent, and now I can do that.

I flop down on the couch, exhausted. My parents helped me move in yesterday, and my apartment is still a crazy mess of boxes and crap everywhere, but it’s mine. Now I can have people over, I won’t have to worry about roommates and awkward shower sharing. Yeah. This was the right decision.

Opening my phone, I flip to the text message because it’s become a habit. I look in case there’s something I missed, in case it’s not really a message saying that the number is out of service. In case for some weird reason Peter has suddenly decided to re-activate his number and text me out of the blue. But looking at it today, I feel tired. Tired of it and the space it’s taking up in my brain.

I close out of it and instead start to organize everything that I’m going to need for the first day of classes tomorrow. It’s going to be crazy and I’m so excited. I’ve got a stack of books as long as my arm, and some extra supplies that I’m going to pick up in the morning. I haven’t got a backpack, but I’m going to take the risk that film school doesn’t actually require us to bring our books to class and get more of a feel for it tomorrow.

It’s been months since I came here for the interview, but everything seems like it’s moving so fast. I got the letter saying that I’d been accepted a week after I interviewed, almost like they’d just waited for me to come in so they could send out their decision. I sent Mr. Davidson a thank you card, because I honestly don’t know if I would have gotten in if it weren’t for his recommendation. He sent me a nice text afterward, but he didn’t really seem to want to take credit even if it was his words.

But the week after that, we started looking for apartments, and then I was singing a lease and it’s been full couple of months of shopping for furniture and dishes and everything I took for granted in my parents’ house that I never thought that I was going to need. Now I have to put it all away, but I feel the deep urge to take a nap.

I’ve just closed my eyes when my phone buzzes on my chest. It’s my mother.

“How’s my college girl?”

“Tired,” I say. “I’ve been unpacking and I was just going to take a nap.”

I can practically hear the frown in her voice. “Don’t push yourself too hard.”

“I’m not. All of this is just exhausting.”

“Got that right,” she laughs.

I sigh, snuggling down further into the couch. “What’s up?”

“Not much,” she says. “I was just starting to make dinner and was thinking about you. Remember, a call a day keeps the mother away.”

I laugh in spite of myself, because she’s said that phrase to me approximately a thousand times in the last two months. Five hundred of them possibly in the last week. “Maybe I’ll order my first New York take out,” I say.

“I didn’t buy you all that kitchen stuff for you to just order take-out the whole time,” she scolds, but I can tell she’s not serious.

“Half my kitchen is still in boxes. If I wanted to spend three hours trying to cook while also trying to dig through everything to find the cheese grater, I would. But that will have to wait till everything’s unpacked.”

She laughs. “Fair enough. But really, I just wanted to check in and make sure that you were doing okay.”

“I’m good. It’s going to be good.”

“It is,” she agrees. “I don’t want to keep you. Take your nap!”

“I will. Love you.”

“Love you,” she says before the line goes dead.

I’m about to take my first New York nap in my first New York apartment. I wonder how long it will be before I stop calling things ‘New York.’ Probably when I finally start to feel like I belong here. I’m not sure when that will be, if ever. But there’s one thing I can do.