Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [104]
She fit her key into the loose lock. So imprecise was the lock she suspected it would turn for virtually any key in the dorm. Maybe any key in the world. It was a tarty little lock.
She swung open the door and felt once again the familiar appreciation for her single. Who cared if it was seven by nine feet? Who cared if it fit more like a suit of clothes than an actual room? It was hers. Unlike at home, her stuff stayed the way she left it.
Her gaze went first to the light pulsing under the power button on her computer. It went second to the steady green light of her camera’s battery, fully charged. It went third to the glimmer of shine in the eyeball of a large, brown-haired, nineteen-year-old boy sitting on her bed.
There was the lurch. Stomach, legs, ribs, brain. There was the pounding of the heart.
“Brian!”
“Hey,” he said mutedly. She could tell he was trying not to scare her.
She dropped her bag and went to him, instantly folding up in his eager limbs.
“I thought you were coming tomorrow.”
“I can’t last five days,” he said, his face pressed into her ear.
It was so good to feel him all around her. She loved this feeling. She would never get used to it. It was too good. Unfairly good. She couldn’t dislodge her worldview that things balanced out. You paid for what you got. In happiness terms, this always felt like a spending spree.
Most guys said they’d call you tomorrow and they called you the next Saturday or not at all. Most guys said they’d be there at eight and showed up at nine-fifteen. They kept you comfortless, wanting and wishing, and annoyed at yourself for every moment you spent that way. That was not Brian. Brian promised to come on Saturday and he came on Friday instead.
“Now I’m happy,” he said from her neck.
She looked down at the side of his face, at his manly forearm. He was so handsome, and yet he wore it lightly. The way he looked was not what made her love him, but was it wrong to notice?
He rolled her over onto the bed. She pried off her running shoes with her toes. He pulled up her shirt and laid his head on her bare stomach, his arms around her hips, his knees bent at the wall. If this room was small for her, it barely contained Brian when he stretched out. He couldn’t help kicking the wall now and then. Tonight she was glad not to have to feel guilt toward the guy in 11-C.
It was something like a miracle, this was. Their own room. No hiding, no fibbing, no getting away with it. No parent to whom you must account for your time. No curfew to bump up against.
Time stretched on. They would eat what they felt like for dinner—or at least, what they could afford. Later, they would fall asleep together, his hand on her breast or the valley of her waist, and wake up together whenever they liked. It was so good. Too good. How could she ever afford this?
“I love you,” he murmured, his hands reaching up under her shirt. He didn’t hang around for that beat, that momentary vacuum where she was meant to respond in kind. His hands were already up under her shoulders, unbending himself over her for a real kiss. He didn’t need her to say it back.
She used to have the idea—an untested belief, really—that you loved someone in a kind of mirror dance. You loved in exact response to how much they were willing to love you.
Brian wasn’t like that. He did his loving openly and without call for reciprocation. It was something that awed her, that set him apart, as though he spoke Mandarin or could dunk a basketball.
She plunged her hand under his T-shirt, feeling his warm back, his angel bones. “I love you,” she said. He didn’t ask for the words, but she gave them.
Excerpt copyright © 2007 by Ann Brashares. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Also by Ann Brashares
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
The Second Summer of the Sisterhood
Published by Delacorte Press
an imprint of Random