He nuzzled at my hair. I willed my frantic heart to quiet. I wasn’t ready for anything more with him yet, despite the screaming of my quivering bits. Lucky for me, Leaf wasn’t looking for anything more, either. He was content holding me against his body, stealing occasional kisses and whispering how pretty he thought I was. We spent two and a half movies like that, twined together like cats, until I dozed off on top of him, comforted by his warmth.

And when my phone beeped at eleven thirty to remind me to go home, stupid, your curfew is at twelve, he woke me up from my nap and piled me into the car like a sleepy toddler. We pulled into my driveway ten minutes early, so we spent ten minutes kissing and making plans for Saturday, at his place again, with more movies and cuddles.

I walked into the house in a daze. It had been, without a doubt, the best date of my entire life.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Seven

One date became two. Two became three. Three became four. Four became officially a couple. We rejoined our friends at Morgan’s house to watch movies on Fridays—Devi was brought into the fold easily—while Saturdays became “our night.”

“Our night” consisted of dinner at his place followed by more movies, which became a bunch of kissing, over-the-clothes groping and me falling asleep on him because incubating a tiny human was hard work.

It was pretty simple.

It just didn’t stay that way.

Because.

“Are you ashamed of us?” Mormor asked over dinner, ever combative.

“What?” I looked up from my plate and stared at her. “Where is this coming from?” We’d been talking about my impending Teen Mom social group for most of the meal, but apparently, Mormor had something else she wanted to talk about, and she broached the subject with all the grace of a bull elephant.

“You have a boyfriend. You’ve met his father, but you’ve not brought the boy here.”

It was true. I had met Mr. Leon the previous week, before he was out the door to go to his security job. He was as quiet as Leaf was chatty. He seemed really nice. The only problem was he was a listener instead of a talker, to the degree that I felt the need to fill the quiet with noise because, otherwise, he was just looking at me and smiling a lot and it made me nervous.

So I talked about the baseball card collection I’d started at seven. I’d collected for two years, and then promptly lost the binder at school and was so emotionally traumatized I’d given up baseball for good. But that was okay because I’d organized the cards by which players I found the cutest and not by any stat that any real baseball fan would care about, so I wasn’t a “real” fan, anyway, apparently.