I only heard two words. “Your girl?” I repeated because I needed confirmation.

Grabbing my face, he rested his forehead against mine. “My girl.”

“And the expiration date on that title would be?” I asked because I had to. He was Jude Ryder. Milk left out on the counter didn’t expire as quickly as Jude’s girls did.

“How about we take it one day at a time?” he replied, that warm breath fogging my mind again.

I wanted to kiss him so badly I had to fight every urge and primal instinct to keep myself from following desire to delivery because I needed clarification. I needed answers. “I thought a girl like me, the marrying kind,” I began, giving him a look, “was entitled to more than just one day at a time.”

“You do,” he said, letting my face go and stepping back until he was leaning against the opposite wall. “But I don’t.”

Processing logical thoughts was easier with him four feet away. “Is that one of your go to lines when a girl asks for something more than a twenty-four hour Jude furlough?”

Tapping the back of the wall with his heel, he looked down the hall. “No, that’s what I answer when a girl I’m falling hard for, the only girl I’ve fallen hard for, wants to be in a relationship with someone like me.”

And we were back at the starting line. The whole Jude-doesn’t-deserve-anything-but-pile-after-pile-of-shit thing was wearing on my last nerve. “You know, Jude, you’re half as tough as you think you are,” I said, “and twice as nice as you hope you aren’t. So don’t try to sell me the whole I’m-a-cancer thing again because I’m not buying it.”

His eyes were shining when they looked back at me. “You’re not, huh?”

“Nope. I’ve got you all figured out, Jude Ryder, and I expect someone like you to give someone like me more than just one day at a time.”

“So what then? You want me to make some lame ass comment that we’ll be together forever? We’ll take our dying breaths together beside each other in bed?” he said, his voice soft.

“I’m a realist,” I said. “Lying and making promises about forever is almost as bad as one day at a time.”

“So what, my sweet, beautiful, complicated Luce, do you want from me?”

I was looking at it, but I wasn’t sure if I could have it. I wasn’t sure if a person like Jude could ever be claimed. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Oh, Luce,” he said, grimacing, “just when I thought you were getting better, you deliver a line like that.”

“Ryder,” I warned, “nice try attempting to divert this train, but I’m at the wheel and this one’s staying right on the tracks until you answer my question.”

He hit the back of his head against the wall a few times. “Okay, so something between one day at a time and forever,” he said, searching the ceiling for an answer that would appease me. “But you want an honest answer too, right?”

“Only you would have to clarify that,” I groaned.

He nodded once, meeting my eyes. “How about,” he said, rendering me witless with the look in his eyes, “I’ll be here, each day and every day on, as long as you want me to be?”

I finally got that whole, be still, my beating heart line. “And that’s the honest answer?”

Jude crossed his fingers over his chest. “Honestly.”

“That’s a damn fine answer, Ryder,” I said, walking up to him. It was a moment of intimacy and vulnerability, and passion was certainly there too, but all I wanted was to be in his arms. Mouths joined, hands exploring, nothing else could have made the moment more consuming than it already was.

Tucking me close to him, his arms held me like they were incapable of letting go. “This is a damn fine response too, Luce.”

I laughed into his shirt, wondering how a boy with his reputation could smell like soap and sunshine and could say the sweetest things I’d heard. That’s when, as was becoming a pattern at Southpointe High, I had a revelation.

Our reputations weren’t who we really were, they were who people told us we were. Some of us fell into that trap, while others fought their entire lives to break free of them. Jude was no more the bad boy with a dead end future than I was the skanky slut everyone said I was. The difference between our assigned reputations was that Jude accepted his like it was penance for some wrongdoing.

“So you think you’ve got me all figured out?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

“Pretty much.”

Jude’s head nodded above mine. “Okay. So when’s my birthday?”

No idea.

“What’s my middle name?” he asked. “What was the name of my first pet? What’s my GPA? How many stitches have I had? What size shoe do I wear?” he continued on, throwing out an unending stream of questions, none of which I knew and all of which were impersonal, one word answers.

“So maybe we need to have a day of Q and A or something to get all the detail stuff out of the way,” I answered, wondering how I could know so little of him, yet still feel like I’d never known anyone better, “but I know enough to know nothing you could tell me about yourself could change that.”

“You don’t know how much I wish that were true,” he said against my head, running his fingers up and down the length of my back.

As I was debating on whether to respond or just let that one hang in the air, a few couples came jogging down the hall.