Thirty-Six

thirty-six

It turns out scoring a farewell tour back to camp is as easy as asking my parents for a lift. That, and Mickey wasn’t kidding—there were full-blown rumors circulating that I’d been eaten by a bear, so Victoria encouraged a drop-in before the whole of Phoenix Cabin turned the place upside down trying to find out the truth.

I’m expecting to see Finn hanging out at the front desk in that lazy way he always does in the morning, but he isn’t there.

“He’s got a flight to Chicago tonight,” Jemmy informs me, after she and Izzy and Cam finish squeezing in a hug made awkward only by how vigilantly all three were avoiding my cast.

“Yeah,” says Izzy, popping the top off a pen with her molars. She gestures for me to hold out my wrist, and starts signing the bright blue plaster. “But he seemed pretty happy about it.”

So am I. I hope it works out between him and his mom. I have a feeling I’ll be hearing from him and find out soon enough.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving. Half the camp is ditching us,” says Cam.

My arm gets shifted in turn so each can sign, and then all three stare at me solemnly. I’m afraid they’re going to ask what happened. Afraid that I’m going to blurt it out and tell them, because I’m bursting to tell someone—Connie had to leave before I could tell her anything important.

“Stay in touch,” says Izzy instead. Like she’s putting a bookmark in the conversation; like she doesn’t have to ask now, because they’re going to ask later. “I’ll put you in the group text when we’re all out of here.”

“You better.”

My parents are still busy talking to Victoria when I pop out of the front cabin to look for Leo. I don’t have to look very hard—he’s already walking toward the office with long, purposeful strides, looking windswept and frazzled and like he didn’t sleep much last night. Our eyes find each other’s and he stops in his tracks so fast that my face burns, realizing he must have also been looking for me.

And somehow, just like that, this seems like the least scary thing I’ll ever do. I cross the distance to Leo, letting myself look him fully and completely in the eyes for the first time in months, drinking them in without any self-consciousness or fear.

He stares back, and it’s already there. It isn’t something we’ve realized. Just something we’ve always had, maybe, that got lost, and is finally found.

I hold out my hand.

“Do you want to go for a walk?”

He stares at my fingers, his eyes flitting over to the cast on my other side before settling back on my face. I keep my hand out, waiting.

“Yeah. Let’s.”

It’s almost embarrassing, how fast the warmth floods through me when his hand wraps around mine. The surge is quiet but powerful, the kind of burn that steadies me. Neither of us says anything, not even when I squeeze his fingers and he gives mine a quick squeeze back. But I start walking, and he follows, and the rhythm is so easy that we might have been walking like this our whole lives.

I lead him down a path I’ve walked with Savvy and Rufus before, an early-morning one that I know well. We walk, hand in hand, until I’m almost certain I can feel his heartbeat against my palm as loudly as I can hear my own.

“I saw the Instagram post,” he finally says.

“I think it’s my best work.”

Leo lets out a sharp laugh, kicking a heel into the grass. “I’ve seen enough of your work to know that’s a lie.”

I squeeze his hand another time before I let go, settling into a spot on the grass that overlooks the water. Leo hesitates, then sits down next to me, staring out at the shore.

“You read the caption?”

“There was a caption?” Leo asks. He looks worried. “I haven’t been captioning any of your posts—”

“Here,” I say, handing him my phone. I already had the page pulled up, so we don’t have to worry about it loading. I hold the phone out to him and let him read, watching the expression on his face shift.

He reads the quote, half murmuring it under his breath. After weeks of working on that Benvolio essay, I have the character’s quote memorized: Soft! I will go along. And if you leave me so, you do me wrong.

He spent enough time crafting his own essay for Romeo and Juliet in his junior year that he knows it, too.

“Abby…”

I take the phone from him, my fingers grazing his and lingering. It’s the kind of deliberate gesture that might have terrified me a few days ago, but I feel buoyed in it now—in this faith I have in myself to say what I need to say.

“So, I’m gonna be starting summer school. In like two weeks.”

Leo’s shoulders slump a bit closer to the grass, expecting me to break the silence with something else.

“I read over the email last night,” I tell him. “We’re doing an intensive in Romeo and Juliet. Same essay all over again.”

He’s as engaged as ever, even in this moment when it is suddenly clear to me that he thinks I’m about to disappoint him. He leans back, like he’s settling into something—not the ground beneath us, but acceptance.

“Just—different thesis.”

I hold my gaze on him, waiting him out. Watching the way his eyes are brewing as they watch the water, the curve of his set jaw, the rustle of dark hair against his ear. Watching until he realizes I’m not going anywhere, and he has no choice but to look back.

“I was thinking … I had it wrong on the last one. Or at least, my heart was never in it.” I lean in closer, lowering my voice. “This one will be about why we all need a Benvolio.”

Leo lets out this little breath of surprise, a quiet understanding that spreads into his face, sparks in his eyes, and curls the edges of his lips. “You’re going to need supporting evidence for that thesis, you know.”

I grin back. “I think I’ve got enough of it right here.”

There is an undeniable crack in his expression then, something that splits deeper than his face. “Abby,” he says. “I’m … I’m still leaving in September.”

“Yeah. To New York, not to Mars.” I lower my voice. “You read that quote. I mean it, Leo. There’s nowhere you could go that would change my mind.”

He presses his lips together, his eyes searching mine. “You say that now, Abby, but it’s a year. Thousands of miles. And I want this. I want you.” He takes my hand in his, tight enough that I know he means it, but loose enough that it would be easy for me to let go. “But you’re … you’re a forever kind of person to me. You always have been. And I don’t want to start something this important when it might be ended because of things we can’t control.”

I can’t claim to know what the future holds—whether the two of us will be equipped to go the distance, or what kind of people we’ll be in a year or two or more on the other side of it. I can’t even say where I’ll be, let alone where he might.

But it isn’t the knowing that matters. It’s the feeling that does—and this is deeper than the miles between us, more enduring than any odds we might face.

“Our lives are going to take us a lot of places,” I say softly, tightening my grip on his hand. “Like you said—things happening for different people at different times. But the way I feel about you … that’s never going to change. So if you really feel the way that I do…”

“I do,” he says. “Plain as Day.”

We both start to smile, but our grins snag on each other, pulling us closer than we expected—then as close as we can get.

Kissing Leo is so easy that I almost miss the moment it happens, the way you don’t remember opening the front door when you come home, or how you don’t wake up in the middle of the night to the same loud noise you’ve heard a thousand times. Like this isn’t the important moment, not the one that really defines anything; it’s just a moment built smack in the middle of all the other ones. A moment that carries you through to the next but isn’t any more or less important than the others because the end result will always be the same.

What isn’t easy is once it starts happening, because there is no way to make it fit—it isn’t just the clench of my gut, the heat pooling out of it, the tingle of skin on skin. It’s the overwhelming flood of sensations, and everything they’re built on. Knees knocking on top of the jungle gym. Late-night texts under the covers. Stolen bites of still-cooking meals. This current that has hummed under me my whole life, roaring and breaking the surface, crashing into every part of me. I could kiss him and never find the start of it, never find the end. I could kiss him and lose myself in a world we already share, now lit up in colors I never thought I’d see.

When we pull apart we’re both grinning, foreheads pressed together, eyes with identical sparks.

“I can’t even tell you how long I’ve wanted to do that,” says Leo.

Confidence blazes through me, making me feel like I could snap fire into existence, strike lightning at will, control the tides.

“So show me.”

Leo laughs, and so do I, and he catches my laugh with his lips and this time when we kiss, I know I’ve finally reached the one height he’ll never ask me to come down from.