Heart Bones

“All the stuff you’ve kept secret from me isn’t really stuff that counts.”

“How do you know if you don’t know what secrets I’m keeping from you?” he asks.

“I don’t have to know anything about your past to know you’re a good person. I can tell by your actions. I can tell by the way you treat me. Why would it matter what kind of family you have, or how rich you are, or what the people in your past meant to you before I showed up?” That negative thought is back, so I take my finger and smooth out the wrinkles in his forehead. “Stop,” I whisper. “You’re too hard on yourself.”

Samson falls onto his back and brings his hands to his chest. He stares at the ceiling for a moment, so I scoot closer to him and lift my head up, resting it on my hand. I touch his necklace, then walk my fingers up his neck and begin tracing his lips.

He tilts his face toward mine. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this?”

His words are more of a question, so I immediately shake my head. “I want to.”

“It’s not fair to you.”

“Why? Because I don’t know everything about you?”

He nods. “I’m worried you wouldn’t be saying yes right now if you knew the whole truth about me.”

I press my lips to his, but only briefly. “You’re being dramatic.”

“I’m actually not,” he says. “I’ve just lived a dramatic life and you might not like it.”

“Same thing. We’re both dramatic because we have dramatic parents and dramatic pasts. We could be having dramatic sex right now if you’d stop feeling so guilty.”

He smiles. I sit up and take off my shirt. The worry in his eyes disappears as he slides me onto him so that I’m straddling him. He already feels ready, but he brings a hand up and traces a finger slowly over the lace edges of my bra like he’s in no hurry at all.

“I’ve only ever had sex in Dakota’s truck,” I say. “This will be my first time in a bed.”

Samson drags his finger down my stomach, stopping at the button on my shorts. “This will be my first time with a girl I have feelings for.”

I try to stay as stoic as him when he makes that declaration, but his words move through me so hard, I frown.

He brings his hand up to my mouth, sliding his fingers across it. “Why did that make you sad?”

I debate shaking my head to avoid answering that question, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned this summer, it’s that secrets aren’t really as valuable as I used to think they were. I go with honesty. “When you say things like that, it makes me dread when we have to say goodbye. I wasn’t expecting to end the summer with a broken heart.”

Samson tilts his head, looking at me with complete candor. “Don’t worry. Hearts don’t have bones. They can’t actually break.”

Samson rolls me onto my back and takes off his shirt, and that’s enough to appease me for about two seconds, but then my thoughts are right back to where they were before he got half naked.

He lowers himself on top of me, but before we kiss again, I say, “If there’s nothing inside a heart that can break, why does it feel like mine is going to snap in half when it’s time for me to move next month? Does your heart not feel like that?”

Samson’s eyes scroll over my face for a moment. “Yeah,” he whispers. “It does. Maybe we both grew heart bones.”

As soon as he says that, I grip the back of his neck and pull him to my mouth. I want to catch as many of those words as possible and trap them inside of me. His sentence lingers in pieces, like his words are floating around us, between us, and absorbing into me as we kiss.

He might be right. Maybe we did grow heart bones. But what if the only way of knowing you grew a heart bone is by feeling the agony caused by the break?

I try not to think about our impending goodbye, but it’s hard to experience something that feels this perfect without being acutely aware it’s about to be taken away.

Samson sits up on his knees. He fingers the button on my shorts until it pops open. He keeps his eyes on mine as he pulls down the zipper and begins to slide my shorts off me. I lift my hips and then my legs to help him get rid of them. He throws them aside and then takes a moment to soak up the sight of me. I like seeing myself through his expressions. He makes me feel prettier than I probably am.

He pulls the covers over us and lies down next to me while he removes his own shorts. It’s not uncomfortable in any way, so I have absolutely no hesitation when I remove my bra and panties. There’s a level of ease with him, like we’ve done this with each other a dozen times, but I’m filled with the anticipation of someone who has never experienced this at all.