Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(59)

“Is that code for ‘until Thanksgiving’?” he asks with a weak smile.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe. It actually kind of makes sense, since it’ll be the next time we see each other in person. And it’ll give us enough time to really try at school, you know? To make a real effort to live our own lives without depending on each other all the time.”

“Yeah,” Aidan says, “but it’s about a million years away.”

Clare smiles. “It’s three months.”

“That’s a long time.”

“It’ll go fast,” she promises, but he only shakes his head.

“Not fast enough.”

Beyond the edges of the porch, the rain arrives all at once, sweeping over the house in a fine mist that sends Bingo scrambling off Aidan’s lap and over to the door, where he scratches insistently. Clare is about to get up and let him in when her mother appears, and the dog goes flying inside without a backward glance.

“Ten-minute warning, you two,” she says, poking her head out and giving Aidan a little wave. She glances over at Clare, who is still wearing his oversize sweats. “Uh, were you gonna change…?”

“I’m okay,” she says. “We’ll be in soon.”

Once they’re alone again, Clare can still feel Aidan watching her, but now his mouth is twisted up in an effort not to laugh.

“What?” she asks, tucking her feet up beneath her.

“Nothing. It’s just a good look for you. And the perfume is nice, too.”

“Perfume?”

“We stink,” he says with a grin. “Like fish.”

Clare rolls her eyes. “My parents won’t care. And we’re staying in a hotel tonight, so it’s just for the car ride.” She tugs on the drawstrings of the hoodie. “But just for that, you’re not getting this back.”

What she can’t bear to say is that, really, she just wants an excuse to keep him close.

“Shouldn’t be too hard to find another UCLA sweatshirt at UCLA,” he says, and then he shakes his head in wonder. “I can’t believe I’ll be there later today.”

“I know,” Clare says. “It’s so weird. I’ve looked at a million pictures of Dartmouth, but it’s still hard to imagine actually being there.”

“I can picture it,” Aidan says, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’m seeing leaves. Lots and lots of leaves.” He opens one eye to look at her. “Is it always fall at Dartmouth? I think every picture I’ve ever seen has some sort of foliage.”

“Yes, it’s always fall at Dartmouth.”

He closes his eyes again. “Just what I thought. And I always imagine you sitting on a bench, for some reason, under a tree with a million different-colored leaves—”

“Even purple?”

“Sure, why not?” he says. “And you’ll just be sitting there with your bag of books and your cup of coffee and your fall coat, thinking important, college-y thoughts.”

“I have a feeling,” Clare says with a little smile, “that what I’ll actually be thinking about is you.”

“At first, yeah,” Aidan says, looking over at her with a more somber expression. “But not later. Trust me on this. The day will come when you’ll be sitting there looking up at the sky, and you won’t be thinking of me at all. You won’t need to anymore. And it’ll be a good thing, because it means you’ll be happy.”

“I don’t know,” she says quietly. “That’s pretty hard to imagine.”

Aidan only smiles. “You’ll see,” he says, closing his eyes again as he listens to the rain. Clare watches him for a moment, desperately trying to collect all the little pieces of him that she hopes to take with her: the freckles on the tips of his ears, his pale eyelashes, the curve of his hairline, even the half-moon bruises beneath each eye.

“There’s a third option, you know,” she says, and when he moves his head to the side, his eyes take a second to focus.

“To what?”

“To us,” she says, her heart straining hard against her rib cage. “We keep tossing around these two possibilities: End things now or let it fizzle out. But there’s a third option.”

“What,” he asks with a wry smile, “happily ever after?”

“No,” she says quickly. “Come on. I’m serious.”

He raises his arms in a stretch. “Okay, then what?”

“Later.”

“There is no later,” he says, holding out his wrist. He taps twice on the glass face of his watch. “Time’s a-ticking.”

“No, that’s the third possibility,” she says, her words nearly lost to the hum of the rain, which has wrapped the porch in a glossy curtain. “That we’ll come back to each other later.”

Aidan’s eyes are fixed on her, and there’s something hopeful in his gaze, something expectant. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says. “After we’ve learned some stuff and done some things. We keep thinking there are only these two choices: We either grow apart or grow together. But maybe we can just kind of each grow on our own, and see how it goes. And then later, if it’s right, we’ll come back to each other and start again.”