Alyson Derrick

Did you ever think we’d date?”
I open my mouth, struggling to find the right thing to say. All that comes out, though, is a single word. The truth. “Yes.”
“Do you still?” she asks, rubbing salt in the wound.
I shake my head, pulling my eyes away from hers. “You like Cora.”

It was always you, Alex

And with those words, the barriers I’ve put up to shield myself from the world are finally knocked down. The boxes where I’ve locked my feelings away completely disintegrate. Until it’s just Molly and me and that force that’s been pulling me toward her since the very beginning. But neither of us is fighting it anymore.

“I love you too, Alex Blackwood,” she says, and it’s all the things I never knew an “I love you” could be, meeting me exactly as I am, without a single condition.
It’s coming home instead of running away.
Her hands unlock behind my neck, sliding down in between us. “Well, I guess I got the girl after all,” she says.
“See? I told you my plan would work.”
“Shut up.” She laughs and reaches out to grab the collar of my T-shirt, tugging me into another kiss.
And for once I actually do.

I’m just not good at opening myself up to people. I’m not good at making friends. When you spend as much time as I have worrying about what to say and how to say it and it still comes out wrong, it just becomes easier to not say anything at all

When you spend as much time as I have worrying about what to say and how to say it and it still comes out wrong, it just becomes easier to not say anything at all.

Of course I let the ties go. The casual acquaintances, the hookups, the friends I never really talked to outside
of school, keeping my personal life tucked away in a little box.

The only person I really held on to was her. Until tonight.

She said “I love you” and I stopped myself from saying it back to her. She asked me to say one thing about how much she meant to me, and I couldn’t.

I couldn’t just tell her how Saturday mornings with her are the highlight of my week.

But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. I messed it all up because she asked for the moon, and I couldn’t give it to her yet.

She’s the first person I don’t want to say goodbye to, and here I am running away.

When you spend as much time as I have worrying about what to say and how to say it and it still comes out wrong, it just becomes easier to not say anything at all.

This year, though, I don’t have to be quiet Molly Parker with the crippling social anxiety. Things can be different at Pitt.

This is college. It’s a fresh start, a chance to rewrite myself. People are always saying that things get better in college, and I have to believe that. This can’t be all there is.

It has to get better.

I don’t think I can make it through another four years of—

Crash.