Page 93 of Canadian Boyfriend

“Wake up.”

She opened her eyes slowly. She was confused, initially, but when she realized what was happening, she sat up abruptly, like a caricature of someone waking from a nightmare, except wonder was written all over her face, which was illuminated by the dancing lights.

Then she burst into tears.

“Oh, sweetheart.” The endearment slipped out, but she either didn’t notice or didn’t mind, because she rushed to assure me she was crying happy tears.

“At least I think so,” she added.

She was christening herself. I was honored to witness it. “Look over there.” I pointed in the opposite direction from where she was looking, where there was an especially eerie violet pulsation. She twisted around, and I tugged her arm gently to get her to lie back down. She’d have a view of the full sky that way.

She came easily, and to my shock she snuggled back in against me. “It’s so beautiful,” she whispered, “but also kind of… melancholy?” She shook her head. “Not melancholy, exactly, but too powerful to be just straightforwardly beautiful.” Another head shake. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, I know what you mean.” She transferred her gaze from the sky to my face—there was enough ambient light, and we were close enough, that I could just see her features. “Don’t you think those two things are kind of intertwined?” I asked. “It’s beautifulbecauseit’s melancholy. It’s a complicated kind of beauty.”

“It feels like you have to earn it.”

Exactly. “And you have, haven’t you?”

“So have you.”

“Maybe so.”

I smiled at her, and she kissed me. I was in love with Aurora Lake, she was kissing me under the northern lights, and it was about as far from low-stakes as it was possible to get.

20—CHRISTENING

RORY

Why had I ever thought that ending the physical stuff with Mike Martin was going to protect me? I’d put a stop to it in order to prevent myself from getting too attached. Yet here I was—in love with him anyway.

Which was its own problem, and one that would need to be dealt with, but in the meantime I was undergoing some kind of catharsis under the northern lights in freaking Canada, and I was kissing Mike Martin because he had played a big role in getting me here. Not just physically here, meaning freaking Canada, but to the point where I was a person who ate ice cream and drew boundaries with my mother and hadn’t had a panic attack since that first ballet class.

I mean, I took his earlier point: I had done the work, with a big assist from Mary-Margaret. But all that time, he had beenthere, paying the insurance bill, making me grilled cheese, teaching me to skate, showing me, via his interactions with Olivia, what love was supposed to be like.

I’d stopped having sex with Mike Martin because I hadn’t wanted my heart to get broken. But now I could see that it wasgoing to happen regardless of what I did or didn’t do. This dude was 100 percent going to break my heart. No, he already had. He’d cracked it open, and what did Leonard Cohen say? That’s how the light gets in?

The great—the new—thing was that I knew I could survive it. That the light the cracks let in would be worth the pain.

And if it was going to happen regardless, why not give in, now, and take what I wanted? Be happy with what I had in this moment, under this sky, and not think about tomorrow or the next day or the next?

The moment my lips hit his, his arms banded around me, and he rolled me, sleeping bag and all, so I was lying on top of him. Being Mike Martin, he checked in with me, whispering a concerned, “I thought we weren’t doing this anymore.”

“I know. But can we just… do it anyway?”

He cracked a huge, delighted grin. “We sure can.”

We kissed like in the old days when that was all we did. Except not, because it was clear we were going to do more. It was clear to me, anyway. Mike Martin was not going to push it. I was going to have to make the move. I peeled my face off his. He must have thought I was calling a halt to the proceedings, because he groaned in a way that did wonders for my ego.

“You got any condoms in your Mary Poppins bag?” I asked as I shimmied out of my sleeping bag.

The question startled him so much he bonked his head back against the ground. “Why would I have condoms?”

“Because we might have sex? Because you’re a Boy Scout? Aren’t Boy Scouts supposed to always be prepared?”

“Totally different organization from the American Boy Scouts, actually. It’s just Scouts—we let girls in. And I don’t know about mottoes, but our oath—at least in Cubs, whichwas as far as I went because hockey got too time-consuming—wasDo a Good Turn Daily.”

It figured. I snorted.

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