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Chapter Eighteen
Declan
Our hearts beat an average of eighty beats per minute.
One-hundred-fifteen thousand in a single day.
Forty-two million,in a year.
And yet somehow, it feels like mine has skipped every single one of them over the past three-hundred-and-something-too-many days, and only just starts beating again when I spot the very top of Jude’s head making its way through the crowd in the busy terminal.
I fidget, my hands twisting together in front of me.
Now that I’m here, I’m kind of wishing I made that sign I thought about making. But it felt silly, and then I ran out of time and had to rush here, but having something to keep my hands busy would have been really nice right about now. Because I don’t know what to expect. Even though we’ve talked all year—mostly in text, catching up every other day or so—I don’t really know where his head is at now. How he feels about last summer, or me in general, or what this summer in New York is going to look like.
We’re still friends, at the very least. Closer now than even last summer. Slipping into a friendship over the past ten months that’s felt easy, natural.
We talk about our days, and our classes, and our frustrations, about football and my job at the coffee shop and our plans for the future, as far as our professional aspirations go. We play Nevernight together on the weekends. We’ve even built our own guild within the world. And I finally told him about knowing who he was—SebCarter33—and the nights I used to fall asleeplistening to him play. But we don’t talk about the desperately-want-to-know things. Like last summer, and what all those shared moments between us meant—or what they mean for us this summer. How much we’ll be seeing each other while he’s here.If he’s dating someone.
That last one I would know if he ever posted on social media, but he doesn’t. And Addy and Boss broke up three months into our fall semester, unfortunately, so I can’t ask her, either.
She was heartbroken, of course. But she’s with Jonah now. Lean, tan, dark hair, wire-framed glasses, super bookish and a little bit nerdy, Jonah. Boss’s opposite in almost every way. She’s seemed happy, though. Happier than she was, anyway, when she was missing Boss from fourteen-hundred miles away.
So, again, I don’t really know what to expect this summer.
A year feels like a lifetime ago, and yet it feels like no time has passed at all. Especially when I finally see Jude’s smiling face slipping through the crowd. A smile breaks out onmyface.
It takes him a moment to pick me out in the scattered mess of people waiting, but then he does, and his eyes widen at the light pink that now colors my hair. His steps are slow, his lips pulling up at the corners, and it feels like he’s moving in slow motion, but then time warps back to speed, and he’s stepping forward and I’m lifted into his arms in a deep, embracing hug.
Spice, flora, and thunderstorms.His scent tears me through time, bringing me right back to last summer.
The firmness of his hug, the deep rumble in his chest, the feel of his breaths at my neck as he holds me, the way everything quiets and settles and narrows in on this moment. I didn’t realize how much I just…missedhim.
He lowers me to the floor, but I refuse to let him go. His chuckle reverberates through me, and he pauses where he stands in front of me before gliding his hands over my cheeksand framing my face in between his palms. His gaze—still gray, still turbulent, still hypnotizing—pierces through mine.
My breaths are stuck in my throat, lodged in my airways, as he lowers his mouth, pressing it firmly against my own.Soft, and warm, and somehow still familiar.
And then he’s pulling away, kissing my nose, and my cheeks, and then each one of my eyelids.
When he stretches back and stands at his full height, I know he can see the blush working through me from the inside out. It spreads through my cheeks and dips low into my stomach.
“You ready?” he asks, his lips tipped in a gentle, lopsided smile.
I mull it over for a minute, not wanting to break away from this moment but knowing we have to. “Yeah,” I manage to say, a little more breathless than intended. “I’m ready.”
He chuckles again—another soft breath of laughter—and loops my arm through his, hugging it against him as he guides us through the airport.
And admittedly, ridiculously, I still don’t know what any of it means.
______
We step out of the airport terminal, and all the noise rushes into our bubble at once.
Cars honking, tires rolling over asphalt, brakes squealing as they pull into the pick-up and drop-off lanes, the sharp spurt of a whistle—security urging people to hurry through their hellos and goodbyes—the roar of a 747 taking off and flying overhead.
Jude holds my hand firmly in his and guides me across the street through the mess of it all.
“The car is just over there,” I point in the general vicinity of where I parked Addy’s car, and he makes some sort oflow, grunting noise in confirmation that he heard my words, squeezing my hand tighter.