Page 96 of Only You

“You couldn’t keep them with you. For all the reasons you told me before, none of those have changed, and also because you deserve to live your life for you.” I took a small breath and ventured an addition. “For us.”

He didn’t miss it. “For us?”

“Well, we’re a couple, right? We’re building something together, aren’t we?”

“We sure are.”

“Okay, well, it’d be hard to do that with your brother and sister around, and if you’d wanted that, if that was something you felt called to do, then okay. That would be one thing, and, if that was the case, we’d still find a way to make us work. But it wasn’t, and it isn’t. You’re allowed to be happy.”

“I’m allowed to be happy,” he repeated, like it was a mantra to drill into his heart.

“Yes, we’re both allowed to be happy.” It’d taken me far too long to figure that out, and now that I had I wasn’t going to let Daniel bring us both down with his anxieties about it.

“We’re allowed to be happy.”

“Yes.”

“Youmake me happy.”

My heart tightened and released. “You make me happy too.”

“In fact, I’m happy right now just hearing your voice.”

There was no way in hell I was going to mention Minty to him now. He deserved so much more joy than just this moment, but if talking with me now made him feel better, then I wasn’t going to bring him down.

“I miss you.” I whispered the words despite being alone in the kitchen.

“I miss you too. I could drive to you. Right now.”

I was tempted, so incredibly tempted to tell him yes, to do that, but I had an early morning and a test. “I wish you could.”

“The test,” Daniel said with a sigh.

“Yeah.”

“I can’t wait until midterms are over. I’m going to take you out on a real date. Do things right.”

“Dothingsright? Or do me right?” I teased.

He laughed. “Both. When it comes to you, I want to make sure everything we do is right.”

“I’ll settle for good and honest. That’s all I want.”

He laughed again. “We can do that. That part will be easy.”

I smiled, my heart in my throat.

Easy.Just the way honesty should be.

Imagine that.

Chapter Eighteen

‡

On Friday morning,I noticed signs posted around campus for a performance-art piece calledCream My Faceto be performed in the University Center courtyard that afternoon at three o’clock. A sick feeling started in my gut as soon as I saw it.

Nothing I said to Minty before class started could dissuade him, and I sat next to him, a ball of anxiety, through Donnie “Green Gills” Huggins’s entire lecture about the psychology of sexual intimacy—yet another thing that I was pretty sure was not on the typical Psych 110 syllabus.

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