Page 44 of To Save Him

I could see him shrug as he looked at the stars above again.  “Eh…if you’d started early.  So you were about twenty when you had Gabe?”

That he remembered how old Gabriel would have been melted my heart, and I felt my eyes fill with tears.  I was glad he wouldn’t be able to see that.  My voice was soft but he still heard me when I said, “Yeah.”

Then he turned his head again and he somehow looked older to me at that moment in the shadows.  “So big deal.  We’re not the same age.  It doesn’t change the fact that we’re attracted to each other.  If you don’t care, I don’t either.”

So…it was okay.  He was pronouncing it so.

I nodded.  “All right.”  But I had no idea where we would go from here.  And, somehow, it all felt easy now—no pressure.  Maybe we’d just go about things the way we’d been doing and figure it out along the way.  I started pushing my feet against the ground, bending and unbending my knees so I was kind of swinging a little as we stared at the stars in silence.  The AC/DC tune I’d been listening to earlier was stuck in my head, and—after a while—I started humming it.

I heard Brandon chuckle then.  “Is that what I think it is?”

“What do you think it is?”

“Sounds like ‘You Shook Me All Night Long.’  AC/DC?”

“Yeah.”

He chuckled again.  “Is that a hint?”  Oh, God.  My jaw dropped.  Talk about Freudian.  I was struggling for words but couldn’t find any.  I struggled to read his expression, but his hand on my cheek told me all I needed to know.

 

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