I kissed her because she was happy and because she didn’t automatically tell me that she didn’t deserve something like this. We’d come a long way from that day she sat across me dressed in convict orange, looking like every bad thing that happened in the world was her fault and her burden to bear. I kissed her because she was mine to kiss and that was what made me happy.
“That’s the thing … this truck is yours, so you can do whatever you want with it. You can let it sit until you finish school, you can run it on the weekends, once you figure out what you want to do with it, you can hire someone to run it for you, or you can even sell the damn thing and invest the money back into your education. The options are endless and the choice is yours to make.”
She buried her face in the side of my neck and I shivered as her icy nose rubbed back and forth below my ear.
“You trust me to make the right one?” There was laughter in her voice and an alluring glint in her eyes as she pulled back and smiled up at me.
I grabbed her face between my hands and lowered my mouth back to hers. “Right or wrong, think of the stories you’ll have to tell after you make it.” I couldn’t wait to be a part of every single one of them. She was the beginning, middle, and end of the best story I had ever been lucky enough to be a part of. She always made for interesting plotlines and dramatic twists. Whatever story we were living was never going to be boring or predictable, and there was no one else I ever wanted to reach the climax, or a climax, with. The silly analogy made my lips twitch as hers rubbed softly against them in a whispered thank-you.
As long as my story and her story ended the same way and on the same page, with her and me together at the end of it, I didn’t care about the decisions we were going to have to make along the way, good or bad, because I knew all the important ones we would be making together.