Page 73 of Forever Then

Our chairs still tucked flush together, I lean deeper into my seat and Connor does the same. I don’t know why I rest my head on his shoulder, but I do. I don’t know why his fingers trace shapes over my knuckles, but they do. Are we ever going to figure this—us—out?

You have to be willing to talk about it, Gretchen!

“Guys look at you, too, you know,” he says.

“What?”

“Earlier you were talking about women noticing me and I’m saying that men see you, too.”

I scoff. “Yeah, well, I don’t tend to keep their interest for long.”

His body tenses. “Why would you think that?”

“It’s how it’s always been. They expect me to be a certain way and eventually they realize I’m kind of boring and I’m quiet and…”

The motion of his fingers over my knuckles stops. “And what?”

I sit up and turn to face him. He shifts to meet me.

“And,” I say, “I don’t give up parts of myself very easily.”

“Will you tell me?” he asks.

“There’s not much to tell. You already know about the stuff that went down in high school.” He nods stiffly. “And I um…I didn’t really date at all freshman or sophomore year of college.”

I couldn’t force the memories of those two years away no matter how hard I tried. Freshman year was full of so much promise and hope and it was all wrapped up in Connor. Then year two hit like a freight train. Hopeless and lost, I had to figure out how to adapt to a life where I’d suddenly woken up and a limb was missing. All the confidence that had taken me so long to get back, gone.

“I dated a guy for a few months junior year and he was reallynice. I liked him.” I didn’t love him, but I’d given up on that by that point. “But I always kept him at arm’s length…physically. He never pressured me though.” I clear my throat. “Eventually, I decided to rip the band-aid and just do it, but when the time came…I couldn’t. He was really understanding about the whole thing.

“He drove me home, kissed me goodnight and I thought everything was okay, but…I don’t know, he suddenly got really busy and couldn’t make time to see me. It took a couple weeks, but eventually he stopped calling.”

If the silence between us was a movie screen, you’d see snapshots of every text, every phone call, every video chat that propelled me through my days as a freshman on campus. Hundreds of miles from home, Connor became my anchor, my safe space. I never said the words out loud to anyone, but I fell in love with Connor Vining that year. Before I ever tasted his lips or knew how good it felt to be pressed up against him, I loved him. I was ready to give every piece of myself to him on that balcony. He held my entire heart and I trusted him with it, implicitly.

“Who else?” he grits out. The anger, the pain in his eyes—it hurts him to listen to this.

“Why do you want to know so badly?”

“Because I need to know, Gretch.”

I tilt my head. “You plan to defend my honor, QB?” It’s a sorry attempt to lighten the mood. Not surprisingly, Connor doesn’t take the bait.

“Maybe,” he seethes.

I huff. “Good luck with that because the guy last fall was a foreign exchange student from Scotland who weighed like 300 pounds. A legit modern-day Viking. He’d have a field day on your pretty face and I’d prefer to keep your face intact.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“Not any more than the previous guy did.”

“What happened?”

I release a heavy sigh. “He was looking for a semester fling and I wasn’t that kind of girl.”

“Keep talking. What else?”

“Good God, Connor. You wanna know? Fine.” I drop my voice to a furious whisper. “He waited until our sixth date when he had his tongue down my throat and his hand down my pants to tell me that he didn’t want to be seriousormonogamous.”

The tense lines of his face pull tight. He pushes both hands through his hair, cursing under his breath.

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