I wanted to imagine that Ocean was thinking what I was thinking: that he, too, felt this thing between us building with terrifying, breathless speed and didn’t know how or even whether to slow it down. But I couldn’t know for certain. And Ocean had gone quiet for so long I started to worry. He didn’t move from my bed as he scanned my room again, and my knot of nervousness grew only more wild.
“Too weird?” I finally said. “Is this too weird?”
Ocean laughed as he stood up, shook his head, and smiled. “Is that really what you think is going through my mind right now?”
I hesitated. Reconsidered. “Maybe?”
He laughed again. And then he glanced at the clock on my wall and said, “Looks like we only have a few minutes left.” But he’d come forward as he spoke. He stood in front of me now.
“Yeah,” I said softly.
He stepped, somehow, even closer to me. He slipped his hands into the back pockets of my jeans and I almost gasped and he pulled me tighter, pressed the lines of our bodies together and he leaned in, rested his forehead against mine. He wrapped his arms around my waist and just held me there, like that, for a moment. “Hey,” he whispered. “Can I just tell you that I think you’re really, really beautiful? Can I just tell you that?”
I felt my cheeks warm. He was so close I was sure he could hear my heart pounding. Our bodies seemed soldered together.
I whispered his name.
He kissed me once, gently, and lingered there, our lips still touching. My body trembled. Ocean closed his eyes.
“This is crazy,” he said.
And then he kissed me desperately, without warning, and feeling shot through my veins with a searing, explosive heat. I felt suddenly molten. His lips were soft and he smelled so good and my mind had filled with static. My hands moved from his waist and up his back, and, in an accidental, unrehearsed movement, they slipped under his sweater.
I froze.
The sensation of his bare skin under my hands was so unexpected. New. A little frightening. Ocean broke our kiss and smiled, gently, against my mouth.
“Are you afraid to touch me?” he said.
I nodded.
I felt his smile deepen.
But then I trailed my fingers along the smooth expanse of his back and he took a quick, sudden breath. I felt his muscles tighten.
Carefully, I traced the curve of his spine. I touched his waist, my hands moving around his torso. He felt so strong. The lines of his body were deeply, alarmingly sexy. And I was just beginning to get brave when he clamped his hands down on mine.
He took another unsteady breath and pressed his face into my cheek. Laughed, shakily. He didn’t say a word. He just shook his head.
The pleasure of being this close to him was unlike anything I’d ever imagined. It was hyper-real. Impossible. His arms were around me now, strong and warm and pulling me close, and he just about lifted me off the floor.
There was a tiny part of my brain that knew this was a bad idea. I knew Navid could walk in here at any minute. I knew my parents were just moments away. I knew it, and somehow, I didn’t care.
I closed my eyes and rested my head against his chest. Breathed him in.
Ocean pulled back, just a little. He looked me in the eye and his own eyes were heavy, suddenly. Bright and deep and terrified.
He said, “What would you do if I fell in love with you?”
And my entire body answered his question. Heat filled my blood, the gaps in my bones. My heart felt suddenly alive with emotion and I didn’t know how to say what I was thinking, what I wanted to say, which was—
Is this love?
—and I never had the chance.
Navid knocked on the door, hard, and we were like shrapnel, flying apart.
Ocean looked a little flushed. He took a second, looked around, looked at me. He didn’t say goodbye, exactly. He just looked at me.
And then he was gone.
Two hours later, he texted me.
are you in bed?
yes
can i ask you a weird question?
I stared at my phone for a second. I took a deep breath.
okay
what does your hair look like?
I actually laughed out loud, before I remembered that my parents were sleeping. Girls never seemed to care about the state of my hair, but guys had been asking me this question forever. It was always the same question, and they never seemed to grow out of it.
it’s brown. kind of long.
And then he called me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” I smiled.
“I like that I can imagine where you are now,” he said. “What your room looks like.”
“I still can’t believe you were here today.”
“Yeah, thanks for that, by the way. Your parents are amazing. That was really fun.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t excruciating,” I said, but I felt sad, suddenly. I didn’t know how to tell him that I wished his mom would get her shit together. “My parents are officially in love with you, by the way.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m sure they’d trade me in for you any day of the week.”
He laughed. And then he didn’t say anything for a while.
“Hey,” I finally said.
“Yeah?”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.” But he sounded a little out of breath.
“Are you sure?”
“I was just thinking about how your brother has terrible timing.”
I was only a beat behind; it took me a second, but I suddenly understood what he was trying to say.
I’d never answered his question.
And I was suddenly nervous. “What did you mean,” I said, “when you asked what I would do? Why did you phrase the question like that?”
“I guess,” he said, and took a sharp breath, “I was just wondering if it would scare you away.”
There was a part of me that adored his uncertainty. How he seemed to have no idea that I was just as far gone as he was.
“No,” I said softly. “It wouldn’t scare me away.”
“No?”
“No,” I said. “Not a chance.”
27
Twenty-Seven
Ramadan was over. We celebrated, we exchanged gifts, and Navid devoured the contents of our entire kitchen. The fall semester was quickly coming to a close. We were tipping over into the second week of December, and I’d managed to keep some level of distance in place between myself and Ocean for as long as either of us could bear it.
It had been almost two months since the day he’d kissed me in his car.
I couldn’t believe it.
In the quiet, relative peace that surrounded our careful efforts to be inconspicuous, time sped up. Flew by. I’d never been so happy, maybe, ever. Ocean was fun. He was sweet and he was smart and we never ran out of things to talk about. He didn’t have a lot of free hours, because basketball was a demanding extracurricular activity and a massive time-suck, but we always found a way to make it work.
I was happy with the compromise we’d made. It was safe here. Secretive, yes, but it was safe. No one knew our business. People had finally stopped gawking at me in the hallways.
But Ocean wanted more.
He didn’t like hiding. He said it made it seem like we were doing something wrong, and he hated it. He insisted, over and over again, that he didn’t care what other people thought. He didn’t care, he said, and he didn’t want a bunch of idiots to have this much control over his life.
Honestly, I couldn’t disagree with him.
I was tired of hiding, too; I was tired of ignoring him at school, tired of always giving in to my cynicism. But Ocean was a lot more visible than even he knew or understood. Once I started paying closer attention to him—and to his world—the subtle gradations of his life began to come into focus. Ocean had ex-girlfriends at this school. Old teammates. Rivalries. There were guys who were openly jealous of his success, and girls who hated him for being uninterested. More important: there were people who’d built their careers on the back of the high school basketball team.
I knew by now that Ocean was really good at basketball, but I didn’t know just how good until I started listening. He was only a junior, but he was outperforming his teammates by a wide margin, and he was, as a result, attracting a lot of attention; people were talking about how he might be good enough to win all kinds of state and national Player of the Year awards—and not just him, but his coach, too.