Boyfriend for the Summer

I move her from my lap and dive for the book, laughing. “There’s no ‘have to.’ I want to,”

“No, Eric, don’t.” The terror in her tone makes me stop short.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing.”

I give her a look that tells her that I’m onto her. “You’ve never minded me reading before. But you do now. Why?”

She looks down and mumbles something, so I move back to her and make her look at me. “I missed that.”

“It’s about you,” she sighs and looks thoroughly embarrassed. “I’ve been writing about you and I don’t really want you to read it, okay?”

Pride and satisfaction bubble up in my chest. “You wrote about me?”

Seph covers her face with my hands. “Yes. You’re all I can think about, of course I wrote about you.”

“Why are you embarrassed? I wrote about you too.”

“I don’t know,” she shakes her head. “I just feels…like a lot.”

I pull her hands away from her face. “Well, if you ever feel like you’re okay with me reading it, I would love to. But I would never force you. I nearly fell apart before playing you the song, so it’s not like I’m a stranger to nerves or anything.”

“You didn’t seem nervous.”

“I was. And I never get nervous.”

She bites her lip. I hope that she never loses the habit because I love it. “I’ll think about it.”

“Good.” I pull some Starbursts out of my bag and offer them to her, just like I did on the first day of camp. This is the first time that I’ve been able to get more. “You can chew while you think.” Her eyes go wide and I laugh. “I’m kidding.”

She unwraps the candy and eats it. I take one too. And we sit in silence for a few minutes. Finally, I have to ask. “Did you mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“That you might be with me.”

She looks down. “We don’t have to talk about the future right now.”

“We do have to talk about it sometime.”

“Do we?”

She looks so miserable that I want to drop it, but I can’t. Because I want to know what she’s thinking. “Talk to me, Seph.”

“I’m being stupid, I’m sorry.” She swipes at her eyes and tries to turn away, but I don’t let her.

“You’re not being stupid. But I can’t help if I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

“I’m just scared,” she says. “This is so perfect, and I’m afraid that the real world will ruin it. That we’ll try to make it work and get so frustrated by logistics that everything will fall apart and it will ruin all of our memories. Or that we’ll go back to our ordinary lives and realize that the other person isn’t really what we imagined.”

“Does that mean that we shouldn’t try?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “There are moments that I think that it’s too perfect, and so we should leave it here. Where it’s safe. And then I think about that and it hurts too much to breathe. Then I think about losing you to some other reason and that hurts too. You scare the hell out of me, Eric.”

Leaning forward, I press my forehead against hers. “You scare me too.”

I was going to tell her that there’s every possibility that the troubles she’s envisioning might not be there. But it’s not set in stone, and if I gave her that hope and then took it away, I think it would crush her even more than her current fears.

“So what do we do?” she asks.

“I’m not sure. But I know that nothing has to happen right now. We’re still here in the bubble and like hell am I going to let this get between us, no matter what time we have left.”

“Okay.” She relaxes against me, and I rub my hand down her back.

“And Seph, I refuse to treat us like a countdown either. Nothing is going to change for us. Not while we have right now.”

She nods but doesn’t say anything, and I hold her until the sadness passes. For both of us. I can’t say that her fears aren’t valid. When we’re back in the unpredictable chaos of the world, so many things can happen. But all I know is that I want her.

I don’t care if people say that teenagers can’t fall in love for real. I don’t care that we’re young. All I care about is the fact that I’m in love with Persephone. And unlike the mythological Hades, I want to be with her all year round.

No matter what.

17

Persephone

Six Years Ago

The little town an hour outside of camp where Eric lives is adorable. He smiled and charmed his way into letting us tag along with the staff to pick up supplies for the last week of camp.

It’s a nice little break, and riding in one of the cars with Mabel is sweet. She likes old fifties music and doesn’t care that we’re snuggling in the back seat of the car the way the counselors in the other car might. She actually smiles when she sees us in the mirror, and I like to think that she fancies herself responsible for us. Or at least aware of exactly when we started.