He opens his mouth, then closes it. Finally, he nods in agreement. Gently turns me towards the blanket fort. “Go lay down. I’ll bring food.”
“I can’t,” I tell him.
His brow furrows. “You’re not hungry?”
“No, I can’t move,” I explain with a small smile as I point down at my buckling legs.
He follows my finger, that frown shaping into a comprehending grin. Delicately, because I tell him my head’s spinning, he lifts me in his arms. “We’ve gotta do something about your fucking knees, princess.”
As he takes me into the blanket fort and sets me on my bed, I sniffle, “But you’re so good at carrying me.”
He rolls his eyes, tucking me in with blankets and fluffing pillows behind my back so I can sit up. Turns on the movie, and while Lindsay Lohan’s narration of her home-schooled-in-Africa origin fills the room, he fetches two heaping bowls of chicken noodle soup.
At some point, stomach full and more tired than I realized, I must doze off. Because when I open my eyes, the movie’s over. The room is dark but for the dim glow of the shamrock-lights. My face is smushed against Spencer’s chest. It swells with steady breathing, and when I look up, he’s fast asleep, arms around me.
I’ve lost track of time. It has to be late, though, and my foggy brain remembers why that’s important. I tug on Spencer’s shirt, slightly shaking him and whispering his name.
“What?” he mumbles without opening his eyes, nuzzling into the pillow under his head.
“Your flight,” I remind him. “You missed it.”
He opens his eyes, and laying this close to him, his gaze fixed on my face, I see that dark color is a deep, rich brown, brought to life by the lights hanging above us.
Voice gruff with sleep, he says, “You mean this isn’t a Florida beach?”
I release a shaky breath into his chest, my shoulders shaking with more tears. Tears and sniffles and a smile I can’t tame down, the relief in me is so overwhelming.
Spencer presses his lips to my forehead, warm and tender. Smooths his fingers through my hair. And holds me tighter against him.
22
Kennedy
After he decides to stay, I get a crash course in Spencer Armstrong.
Lesson #1: The woodsy scent is from his body wash.
“Are you sniffing me?” he asks when, after he showers Sunday morning, I bury my nose in the back of his shirt as he scrambles eggs at the stove.
“No,” I say, overplaying a sniffle to corroborate the lie. “Did you use my shampoo?”
“No.” He avoids looking at me. I still see his smile. I reach under his shirt, brushing my fingers over his skin, and he jumps. “How the fuck are your hands so fucking cold?”
Lesson #26: He honestly hasn’t slept with anyone other than me since February.
“Not even that girl, the cheerleader from our party?” I ask him over setting down tile letters for the word ‘FLAPJACK’ on the Scrabble board between us.
“We kissed at the party. I walked her home. Then I left. Nothing happened,” he tells me. Uses the ‘K’ in my word to spell out ‘DICK’.
“Challenge.”
“You just got a triple word score.”
“We agreed—no cuss words!”
Lesson #183: Spencer is serious about football.
“So, the draft next year, what happens if you don’t get picked?” I ask as he braces his knuckles on the floor and pushes up, over and over again.
“I’m… getting… picked,” he grunts out.
I pause, following the flexing of his chest muscles and the rigidity of his arms. “Then what? After you’re picked, after you become a big time football star, what are you going to do?”
He finishes his rep. Rolls onto his back for sit-ups. I take a chance to admire his backside from this angle. “Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“You don’t have a ten-year plan?”
“You do? The fuck am I saying—Of course you do.”
Lesson #1501: For someone so dirty, he might be even more of a clean freak than me.
“Why Italy?” he asks, washing the bowls we’d used for leftover soup, spotless and sparkling.
“Ashton chose it,” I explain, distracted when he puts away the bowls exactly where they were. His respect for my kitchen organization makes me sigh. Or maybe I’m just still fatigued. “But I also wanted to try a real Italian espresso.”
He smirks, glancing at the coffee maker, which he’d placed on top of the cabinets, far out of my reach until I’m rested enough for caffeine. The fiend.
“And you had to cancel your trip because… why?”
“Because Ashton went instead.”
“So?”
“I can’t do the same study abroad program I planned to go on with my ex.”
“The fuck you can,” Spencer wipes down the counter where we’d just ate. “Do what you fucking want, instead of making plans around on other dipshit—Kennedy?”
“Hmm?” I glance up from my careful attention to each meticulous stroke of his washcloth. He rolls his eyes, turning to the drained sink as he rolls up his sleeves.
“Where’s your multipurpose cleaner?”
I blame my swoon on the fatigue. Definitely the fatigue.
Lesson #2763: He’s a major cuddler.
“This girl,” Spencer peers over my shoulder Monday night when I feel well enough to open my laptop and review notes from my interviews with Summer. “She seriously knows everyone on campus?”
“Mhmm. I made her tell me all about Rylie, who didn’t even start here until the fall,” I say, leaning back into his chest, his arms around my waist. “It’s uncanny.”
“And all these Off the Record things, you’re not going to write about any of them?”
I frown. “Do you think I should?”
It’s a question I’d asked myself after every interview. Because those things, Summer’s most intimate stories, those are details that make attention-grabbing headlines.
Spencer’s breath ruffles my ponytail. He turns his head, watching the basketball game on the TV. I think he’s forgotten my question, but then he closes my laptop. “It’s really no one else’s business, is it?”
He pulls me tighter into his embrace,
