Helping Seth had proven a weak diversion from everything that’d been bothering me since we’d come back to Wilmington. I knew Trevor was buried in class work, so I didn’t want to dump on him, but the truth was I was beginning to question what I was doing here. Not entirely true; I knew why I hadn’t already quit, and that came down to the man currently sitting in the passenger seat of his Jeep while I maneuvered my way towards the state line. I prayed we could get through this weekend without him asking me again to tell him what I’d been preoccupied thinking about because I doubted he’d be able to understand how close I was to walking away from school. The only thing keeping me in Wilmington was him.

I’d seen the way he glanced at his laptop as I finished throwing clothes into a duffel bag this afternoon. He had a huge paper due next week, making this a ridiculously bad time for us to leave town. He’d argued when I suggested he work on the drive, insisting he hadn’t wanted to bring any schoolwork with him. I knew it was his way of proving he could put me first, and while I appreciated the gesture, it wouldn’t do either of us any good for him to be obsessing about everything he’d have to do next week to catch up. As a compromise, we’d agreed that he would work on the drive down, then again in the mornings while I slept. Once my eyes were open, he would stow the laptop somewhere out of sight so we could focus on one another.

The GPS warned me to take the next left, and Trevor started packing up the mess of notes he had strewn all over the front seat.

“Make some headway?” I asked, reaching across the seat for his hand. He let out a sigh and tipped his head back as he closed his eyes.

“Yeah, thanks for understanding. Hopefully, I’ll be able to finish the first draft when we get back to Wilmington. Then I just have to get through the revisions and have the paper polished by Friday.”

“I told you, I don’t have a problem with you working on the paper this weekend,” I reminded him. We both got out of the Jeep when I turned off the engine and he came around to meet me as I pulled our duffel out of the back seat.

“I know, but I want this weekend to be all about us,” he countered. He slid his palm into mine and I waited for the tension that normally came with any sort of PDA, but it never happened. Trevor turned his face to the cool but sunny sky and sucked in a deep breath. “School’s not going to get any easier, but we need to do things like this so we don’t lose what we’ve got.”

“Babe, if this is about you worrying that I’ll get sick of waiting around the dorm while you’re studying, we could’ve talked about it at home.” I dropped the duffel to the ground and pinned him against the side of the Jeep, not giving two shits who might see us. He shivered as I slid my hand under his Hurricanes hoodie and leaned in to press my lips to his. Nothing heated, just a simple reminder that I was with him for the long haul. “I knew when we were ten that you’d wind up going to school so you could get paid to find the answers to the world’s problems and I can’t wait until the day you walk across that stage to get your degree.”

“You’ll be right there with me,” he pointed out. Guilt churned in my gut, because I wasn’t so sure he was right about that. Lying to my parents to protect our secret was one thing, but I couldn’t remember ever having lied to Trevor, even by omission, other than when I first realized I thought about him the same way our buddies thought about our female classmates, and that was totally different. Or maybe it wasn’t. Back then, I kept my thoughts and feelings to myself because I didn’t know what in the hell I wanted, and that was the exact same position I found myself in now.

“Yeah, I’ll always be there with you,” I responded, hoping it was enough of an answer to satisfy him for the time being.

It must’ve worked, because Trevor pushed me back and slid under my arm. The faintest hint of apprehension showed on his face, but I felt the heat and anticipation when he looked back at me. “Come on, I don’t want to waste our weekend standing out here talking about what we will or won’t do between now and Sunday afternoon. I can take this one weekend off from studying, it’s not going to sink my entire future, but ignoring you might.”

“Not a chance,” I assured him, squeezing his fingers in my grasp. “I know there’s a difference between you ignoring me and you focusing on what you need to do. You’ve always been more considerate of others than you realize. That’s probably one of the first things I ever grew to love about you.”

“Aww, and here I was thinking you loved me because I was adorable.” He sidestepped to bump his shoulder against mine and we both laughed.

“Well, that’s obvious, but with you, I get the whole package; looks, brains, and a great heart. What more could a guy ask for?”

“Gabe?” Trevor slowed as we walked into the lobby. I stopped behind him, my hand coming to rest on his hip.

“Yeah?” I leaned in to kiss the back of his neck. Trevor gave me shit for how often I needed my lips on his body, but I couldn’t help it. We had years of perfect chastity to make up for.

“That was kinda cheesy. Did you log into your mom’s Kindle to read her smutty novels while I’ve been busting my butt?”

I scoffed. As if. I didn’t need to read about fictional romance when I had the perfect fairy tale unfolding right in front of me. Well, almost perfect, if you didn’t take into account my quarter-life crisis.

Trevor stepped up to the desk and gave them both his and Randy’s names. The clerk looked around him to me and I waved. She grimaced, most likely wondering how two dudes who barely looked old enough to vote were staying in an upscale condo for the weekend. Or maybe she knew and wasn’t a fan of man-on-man action. Her loss, because I couldn’t think of many things better than action involving myself and one man in particular.

The condo was nothing like I’d expected. The Bruce family had always lived modestly, and this place seemed way out of their budget. I realized that thought had gone straight from my brain and past my lips when Trevor hip-checked me. “Don’t let Mom hear you say that. She’s still ticked at Dad for getting sucked into this timeshare thing. Personally, I think she loves being able to get away when she has time off work, and Dad knew she’d never have gone for something like this if he’d asked her ahead of time.”

“Yeah, DeeDee sucks at doing things to make herself happy.” Kind of like someone else I knew, but I pursed my lips to make sure that thought stayed right where it belonged. Trevor spent so much time trying to keep the peace with everyone else that he wound up sacrificing his happiness⁠—our happiness. I was trying to work on not being so bitter about his obsession with his personal closet, but the longer we were together, the harder it was to hide. Just one more thing I tried to pack away so I could enjoy this time with Trevor.

* * *

Trevor seemed to have thought of everything for our mini vacation. He’d scouted out a local Thai restaurant, even though he wasn’t a fan of the food, because I’d been bitching about how I missed decent Pad Thai. Then, we walked out to one of the piers and sat in silence, listening to the waves crash against the pylons. It was cold as hell, but that was okay by me, because it meant there weren’t many people out this late at night.

I pulled Trevor close to my side and smiled when I felt every muscle in his body relax. I wondered if he was thinking about all the times we’d talked about our dreams in life and he’d told me how he could never imagine living more than an hour from the coast. Even Raleigh was too far inland, he said, because he wanted to be able to jump in his car whenever he wanted to feel the sand between his toes.

I reached over and brushed the stray hairs off his forehead. He looked up at me and smiled, making me wish I could get my phone without disrupting this state of bliss he’d found. I wished like hell I could promise to put that look on his face every chance I got, but I couldn’t go around making promises like that. Not now.

“Everything okay?” Trevor asked, wrapping his arm around my waist as he curled closer to my chest. “You seem distracted lately.”

“We can talk about that later,” I suggested. I couldn’t tell him I was thinking about dropping out of school. As soon as I said those words, he’d freak the fuck out and go deaf to anything that followed. But I had to tell him about my chat with Levi. Monday night, I’d start the new job I hadn’t even mentioned to him. He didn’t go to Port Java often, but I couldn’t risk his study group deciding to go there and him seeing me behind the counter. I wasn’t sure what the future was going to hold for me, but Levi needed reliable employees and I needed money that wasn’t tied to my schooling.

Rather than spew everything at once, I decided to focus on the most critical admission. But even that needed to be tempered in a way that wouldn’t upset my amazing, overly sensitive boyfriend.

“I envy you sometimes,” I admitted, kissing his hair.

“Seriously? Why? I’m a basket case half the time,” he scoffed.

“True, but that’s because you want to have everything figured out. And most of the time, you do. You know what you want and you work for it.” Trevor was the steady in my life, the anchor keeping me from drifting away.

“And yet you give me hell because I’m obsessive about thinking of everything that could go wrong before I start anything.” He had a point, but again, that wasn’t because I thought it was the wrong thing to do, only because I wished I could be more like him and teasing was easier than admitting my own failing.

“Well yeah, that’s because there’s planning ahead, and then there’s Trevor-level planning. Tell me something, how old were you when you decided you wanted to spend your whole life doing research?”

He seemed to think about that for a minute and then shook his head. “I really don’t know. It’s weird, now that you mention it, but I truly can’t pinpoint a moment when I knew this was what I wanted. It’s like I decided at some point and then it became inevitable. When we got older, I loved biology, so it seemed like my best bet was to combine the two.”

“Exactly. And when other kids were trying to figure out how to con their parents into buying them the latest gadgets, you were begging DeeDee and Randy to let you go to science camp. You used to look at college catalogs the way other kids looked at skin mags.”

“That’s probably because looking at women’s breasts never did anything for me.”

“Not the point. The point is, you’ve always been driven by your goals. I wish I had even a fraction of your ambition.”

Trevor cupped my cheek in his hand. “Babe, you don’t have to know what you’re going to do with the rest of your life right now. Heck, if you asked around, I’m pretty sure you’d realize there are more kids like you at school than me.”

“Maybe, but sometimes, I wonder if I’m wasting my time going to school without having an end goal in mind,” I admitted. Not at all what I’d intended to say, but I couldn’t take it back now.

“You’ll figure it out.” Fuck, he sounded so certain, I almost believed him. I clenched my eyes tight and sent up a silent prayer that it’d be so easy. “And I know you’ve been spending more time doing things with your friends, but you’re still spending a lot of time in the room. Do you think, maybe, part of your problem is that you have too much time on your hands?”

Fuck. How did he do that? Without realizing it, Trevor steered the conversation back on the track I’d been trying to avoid.

“Yeah, that’s one of the things that’s been bugging me lately.”

“I’m sorry I haven’t been around. I promise, once we get back, I’ll look at my schedule and figure out if there’s a way for us to have at least one night during the week totally to ourselves.”

“Trev, don’t.” He’d tried that already, but there weren’t enough hours in the day with the course load he was taking. “I’m not telling you this to guilt you into staying home to keep me company. You shouldn’t have to. You don’t have to. We’re never going to make it if you’re constantly having to make time for me. I get that you want to get your degree as quick as you can. I want that for you. Now, I have to find a way to be okay with being on my own. And I think I found a way.”

“How’s that?” The wind picked up and Trevor shivered. It was getting damn cold and I knew we needed to head back to the condo soon or we’d be popsicles. I took his hand and stood; we could finish talking while we walked.

“I’m going to pick up a few shifts at Port Java,” I told him.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? What about school?” Ugh. We were getting dangerously close to what I didn’t want to say.

“It’ll be fine,” I promised. “You’re the one who was saying I’m on my own with nothing to occupy my mind too much of the time. This is the perfect solution. Besides, Levi is used to having to work around coed schedules. But right now, he’s short-staffed and he’s spending so much time behind the counter he doesn’t have time for anything else. It’s a win-win.”

Trevor grunted. Obviously, there was a lot he wasn’t saying. I was grateful to him for letting me make my own decision, not that I really thought he’d try and stop me from doing anything.

“If it’s what you need to not be such a grump all the time, go for it,” he finally conceded. “But I still want us to find one night that’s just for us. I won’t make any study dates and you tell Levi you can’t work. Deal?”

“Absolutely.” We sealed our promise to one another with a kiss under the streetlight as a light rain began to fall. We jogged back to the hotel as the bitter January wind pelted us in the face and the rain intensified. By the time we reached the lobby, both of us were dripping water all over the marble entryway and the night clerk did not look amused.

Both of us toed out of our shoes as soon as we entered the condo and left a trail of sopping garments between the door and the bathroom. Trevor grabbed towels while I adjusted the water temperature in the colossal shower. It was stupid, but finding a way to have a shower this opulent was one of the first real goals I’d set for my life. Well, and to have said shower be in the home Trevor and I built together, because Trevor would always be the ultimate prize. I had him, now I had to keep him.