Golden Boys (Golden Boys, #1)(82)

My parents dash off stealthily, proving that they do in fact love me and will not be embarrassing me in this, my time of greatest vulnerability. He gets closer to me, and I count down the seconds until his eyes meet mine.

When they do, something releases inside me, and I feel the tears well up in my eyes.

He’s here. He’s here, and he’s perfect.

HEATH

He’s here.

He’s really here. It almost seems unreal, after ten weeks apart, but here he is. He’s wearing a button-up shirt (in Florida, in August) looking like a total goober amid entire throngs of people wearing Disney shirts or tank tops, but it’s so perfectly him that it’s taking all my resistance not to run to him.

Wait, why am I not running to him?

I see Diana step to the side as I jog in his direction. He’s smiling so hard, and it must be matching my expression because my face already hurts. He walks up to me, and for once, in the crowd, it’s just us. It’s me with my hand on his shoulder in my truck bed as we look up to the stars. It’s me with my arms wrapped around his body after I win a baseball game. It’s me with my hands on his face in the quiet of my truck, pulling him toward me so quickly yet savoring every millisecond before our lips touch.

The taste of his spearmint gum gets passed between us as our lips pull against each other, again, and again. I put my forehead into his, and I’m no longer in the future, seeing the days, months, years that we have to come—I’m fully in the now.

“I love you,” he says. “I’ve loved you so long, I thought I’d never be able to say it out loud.”

I kiss him harder, and it starts to dawn on me that we’re in public, and his parents and Diana are probably lingering in eyesight.

“I love you too,” I say, with one last kiss, for now. “But … you already knew that.”





EPILOGUE

SAL

The four of us take our seats on the picnic blanket on the baseball diamond behind Gabriel’s house. As per usual, Gabe’s mom has shoved about eighteen pounds of food in our hands to carry out here, and as we spread it all out, I wonder if I’ll ever be hungry again.

Reese was the first to get back, and his family instantly had a huge welcome party that none of us could attend. Not even Heath, which was pretty devastating to him, because (1) he loves Reese’s family parties, and he was sure he’d get all the cousins’ names right this time, and (2) it would’ve been his first chance to show up as Reese’s boyfriend.

Reese asked me, once, why he couldn’t have what Gabe and I had, and I found that to be an intensely silly question. Gabe and I didn’t have anything but an addiction to each other, with years of complicated friendship being buried by habit and lust and, honestly, the need for real love.

I found love in what I do, of course. I’m not really interested in a boyfriend right now, even though I think it’s wild that I was the only one who came back from this summer without one. I may not have a boyfriend, but thanks to the senator’s secret bid for the presidency, I have some sort of plan to get me through the year. And for the first time in a while, I feel like my mom has my back too. And that’s enough.

We’ve spread the blanket out like we did before, but the dynamic is different. For one, Heath won’t stop wearing tacky airbrushed tank tops, which is a problem. But also, it’s a little strange to have them sharing the same corner of the blanket, sneaking kisses when they think we’re not looking.

Reese eventually showed us all his designs, and that was the moment I stopped thinking of this as some odd hobby and started thinking of it as his inevitable career. His illustrations have always been smart, but his designs are next level. It sounded like the feedback he got from his classmates all summer was impossibly frustrating, but it obviously did him some good.

Heath’s back to practicing baseball eighty-five hours a day, but he’s working hard for that Vanderbilt scholarship. He impressed the scouts a lot last year, and he’ll be off to some training camps throughout the year that will hopefully secure him some sort of scholarship. He’ll end up somewhere, but I don’t want to be in the room when Reese realizes he’s bound for New York and Heath is bound for Tennessee.

Heath’s dad’s apartment, though, is way better than he let on. It’s not huge, but it’s nice. And they don’t have to mow their lawn, which is something I would literally kill for. I don’t think he and his dad are perfectly happy, but they’re talking more than they used to. And Heath has started cooking more? I don’t know, suddenly he’s embracing his eastern European heritage and their apartment smells only of cabbage, but I guess he was looking for family all along, and he found it. Diana is even coming up for a visit soon. She seems a little intense, based on her IG comments (I haven’t followed her back yet, and she’s pissed), but she cares a lot for our boy Heath, so she’s good in my book.

… I should just follow her back.

Gabe and Matt are together, and they are so obnoxious about it that I think that’s really all they got out of their volunteer experience. Or maybe I’m just a little jealous. My bed is a little chilly some nights. But it’s for the best.

Because Gabe really is happy. He was such a mess when he left. I never expected him to fully reinvent himself—because, again, he just needed to figure out he was already awesome—but he did come back a different version of himself. He’s excited about college, which his dad and sister are ecstatic about, and he finally knows he can make friends. Which we all knew, you know, being his friends and all. But sometimes it takes Gabe a little longer to get out of his head.