Page 27 of Text Me A Kiss

Chapter Ten

Kady

“You saw your boyfriend recently, didn’t you?”

“Yup,” I said unabashedly and without surprise. Olivia always knew. Not that I tried to hide it, and there was no need to. She had met him a couple times now and approved his closeness to me, her best friend. I’d even told her his real name and the complicated secret we had to keep from my parents.

“I don’t know how you’re finding the time to have a social life with graduation so close,” Olivia sighed, snatching a shirt out of her laundry basket. She sat on the floor folding laundry, and I was lying on my stomach on her twin XL dorm room bed doing some reading to study for the looming final in one of my theoretical classes. “I think that cute pianist thinks I’m making excuses to avoid him after that date.”

“The date where you kissed and broke his glasses?”

“Whoa, okay, hold up!” Olivia had her hands on her hips. “I didn’t break his glasses. They were already broken, and I just broke the shitty patch-job he did on them. I refuse to take the blame for that.”

“Well, he probably thinks you think he’s weird. Or cheap. Or something.”

“See, Kady, most college students actually are cheap. Not all of us manage to find ourselves a billionaire in disguise.” She tossed a sock at me and it landed on the page I was reading. “Especially not one that handsome. You two are actually disgustingly cute together, even if he is like an entire foot taller.”

“He is not!” The sock disappeared into a cup on the desk with a wetplopafter being tossed back and forth between us for a moment. “He’s like… eight inches taller. Maybe nine.”

“Whatever you say.”

Did I talk about Graham too much? Probably, but if I talked about him as much as I thought about him, I’d never talk about anything else. “What time is it?” Olivia’s phone was right next to her knee, and mine was about a thousand feet away on her desk with the sock cup.

“9:47.”

“Oof. I’m out.” I snapped my book shut and shoved it into my backpack. Shoes on, light jacket on, backpack on… oh, phone in pocket. “See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah. To study,” Olivia reminded me, her usual, peppy good cheer replaced with a crease of worry.

“You got this. We got this.” The beautiful moment of strength between two college students was ruined by the wetslapof the sock against Olivia’s face.

“Bitch, I will end you—”

I dashed out of her room into the shared living room, giggling. Her roommate stopped with an orange slice in her mouth, and the quizzical expression on her face sent me tripping over myself with laughter as I smacked through the door and ran down the hall.

The night air was cool, but not cold. The reaching skyline of Manhattan had mostly escaped the grip of winter by this time. Just in time for finals, the last couple days of April had ushered in perfectly acceptable temperatures of around 60 degrees. Nocturnal insects chirped from the trees nearby, the grass recovered from its long incarceration beneath the snow with shoots of green, and people walked through the signs of spring in warm-weather wardrobes.

It was beautiful, pleasant, and fresh, and I usually hated it.

Not spring. I loved spring. I hated that every time spring rolled around and brought new life to the world, I was busy dying under a elephantine load of finals work.

This year, though… something was different. The city that I’d become accustomed to so unwillingly across the semesters hadn’t changed. The slow transition of season hadn’t changed.

I had changed. More specifically, I had met this really great guy online and I’d started looking forward to each new day and the new things I would learn about Graham, even during this busy time.

Graham.

Three days ago, I had suddenly really, really missed Graham. Not like a “damn, I wish my boyfriend was here” moment. This had been a “I’m going to curl up and cry for an hour because I miss him so much” moment, and really, it hadn’t been a moment. After admonishing myself and trying to beat my wayward brain into submission for about half a day, I finally gave up, called Graham, and poured out my feelings to him over the phone.

“No.” His brief—but compassionate, as always—reply had left me thoroughly emotionally off balance.

“What?”

“I can’t fly out there right now. Today is—” Rustling on the other end. “April 28. You have finals all next week.”

I stared at the basket full of clean ballet clothes and the books and papers that littered the table. “Yeah, but—”

“No buts. Focus hard, and I’ll fly out right after finals. Okay?”