Page 41 of Past Present Future

In any other relationship, a question like this might be terrifying. Too much, too soon.

We’re only eighteen and nineteen, I might say. We’ve only been together six months.

And yet with Neil, everything felt serious right away. Maybe it was because we were on the precipice of graduation, knowing that anything we started would be tested in the fall. We were already thinking about the future. Or because we’d both had our hearts broken, and we respected each other too much not to jump in with both feet. Eyes open.

That was how it was supposed to feel—I’d been so certain of it all summer. We were serious about everything in our lives: school, our futures, each other. We were giving this everything we had or nothing at all. There was no in-between.

“Going to bed early while our kid stays up to make out with their boyfriend?”

He laughs a little, but then: “You know what I mean.”

Neil McNair is a deeply sentimental person, and it’s one of the things I like most about him. After all, he was the one who said “I love you” first—or wrote it, technically.

I allow myself to really, truly consider it, that kind of future with him. Picking a city to live in. Decorating an apartment together, bickering over what to put on the walls. Coming home from work, cooking together in the kitchen.

Falling asleep together every night.

I don’t know yet if that future includes kids, if that’s something I want, and I don’t know what I’ll be doing.

But even as I try to resist painting some idealized portrait of the future, Neil is there. He’s at the front door, in the kitchen, beneath the sheets of a bed we probably found cheap on Craigslist.

My eyes fall shut, that vision suddenly seeming so real.

All I know is that I want this, him, as long as I can.

So I burrow closer to him, because this is the good part, the two of us cocooned on the couch while snow falls outside, and say with complete sincerity: “I hope so.”

ADRIAN

The Quad is BACK, baby, and ready to wreak havoc* upon Seattle!

*meet up for a casual dinner or something

CYRUS

Equal parts embarrassed and excited.

NEIL

That one HURTS. Where’s the loyalty?!

SEAN

Don’t say you’ve outgrown us!

ADRIAN

What do we think, Hilltop Bowl? For old times’ sake?

SEAN

I could destroy at least two whole baskets of their nachos.

NEIL

I’m in, minus the nachos. Cheese isn’t supposed to be that color, Sean.

CYRUS

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