Page 25 of Harper

“Lower-48, for sure, then South America—especially Chile and Argentina, and maybe Antarctica. Um, let’s see…and then Sweden, Norway, and Finland—”

“You really want to go so far from home?”

“That’s the whole point, Joe—to see somewhere else, to experience something different. And going far away from home will make us love it all the more when we return.”

“As long as we’re together, I guess I’m in,” he says, though his tone lacks the same enthusiasm it had when he was spinning tales of us raising a family in Skagway.

I lean up, looking into his eyes.

“Can I talk to you about something?”

“Anything.”

I bite my lip. “You might not like it.”

“Talk to me about it anyway.”

“Keep an open mind?”

“Always.”

I sit up and reach for my dress, pulling it over my head. Joe pulls on his T-shirt, then sits with his legs crisscrossed, staring at me expectantly.

Gulping, I decide it’s best just to blurt it out before I lose my nerve. “What do you think about breaking up in August when we head off to school?”

His eyes widen. His brows furrow. He frowns at me.

“Don’t get upset! It’s not forever. It’s just to see how it feels for us to be independent.” I can feel myself cringing, but I’m trying to be honest with him. This has been on my mind so much I feel like we need to discuss it. “We’ve been together since we were—”

“Harper, after what we just did, you want to—”

“I know my timing sucks, but it’s been on my mind, and we just graduated and—”

“We just had sex for the first time, and you want to break up?”

“No!” I say. “I want to have sex with you all summer and then break up.”

My attempt at lightening things up fails miserably. He blinks at me in a stupor, then shakes his head in disbelief.

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“Why?” he demands, a sharp hurt narrowing his eyes. “I don’t get this! Not at all! I love you. You just said you loved me, like, ten times. Do you?”

“So much!” I rush to reassure him, taking his hands in mine. I thread my fingers through his, then curl all ten ofthem together. “I love you so much, Joe. What we just did was amazing. For real.”

“Okay. Good. We love each other,” he says, squeezing our hands together gently. “So that’s that. We’re not breaking up.”

Something inside of me bristles at the absoluteness of his declaration. “I still think we should talk about it. We’ve been together since we were fifteen.”

“So what?”

“I don’t know,” I say, unexpected tears burning my eyes.

Am I ruining a good thing for no good reason? Am I the biggest fucking idiot who ever lived?

“Why would you even suggest this, Harper?”

I tilt my head to the side. “What if you meet someone else at U of A?”

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