Ugly Love: A Novel

Six years earlier

Ian knows.

I had to tell him. After the first week of school, he knew everything became Rachel.

Rachel knows Ian knows. Rachel knows he won’t say anything.

I give Rachel my room when she moves in, and I take the spare bedroom. My room is the only spare bedroom with its own bathroom. I want Rachel to have the better room.

“Do you want this box in here?” Ian asks Rachel. Rachel asks what it is, and he tells her it’s all her bras and underwear. “I thought maybe I should just go ahead and put it in Miles’s room.”

Rachel rolls her eyes at Ian. “Hush,” she tells him. He laughs. He likes that he’s in on such a private thing. That’s why he would never tell. He knows the power of secrets.

Ian leaves after all the boxes are unloaded. My father passes me in the hallway and pauses. His pause means I should pause, too.

“Thank you, Miles.”

He thinks I’m okay with this. With the fact that he’s allowing another woman to push out the last reminders of my mother.

I’m not okay with it.

I’m just pretending to be okay with it, because none of it matters. Rachel matters.

Not him.

“No problem,” I say.

He begins walking, then pauses again. He tells me he appreciates that I’m being nice to Rachel. He says he wishes he and Mom could have given me a sibling when I was younger. He says I make a good brother.

Words are awful when they come out of his mouth.

I walk back to Rachel’s room. I close the door.

It’s just the two of us.

We smile.

I walk to her and wrap my arms around her, then I kiss her neck. It’s been three weeks since the first night I kissed her. I can count the times I’ve kissed her since then. We can’t interact like this at school. We can’t interact like this in public. We can’t interact like this in front of our parents. I can only touch her when we’re alone, and we haven’t been able to be alone much in the last three weeks.

Now?

Now I kiss her.

“We need a few guidelines so we don’t get ourselves in trouble,” she says. She separates herself from me. She sits at my desk, and I sit on my bed.

Well . . . she sits at her desk, and I sit on her bed.

“First,” she says, “no making out when they’re home. It’s too risky.”

I don’t want to agree to that rule, but I’m nodding my head.

“Second, no sex.”

I’m not nodding anymore.

“Ever?” I ask her.

She’s nodding. Oh, I really hate that nod.

“Why?”

She sighs heavily. “Sex will make it that much harder when our time is up. You know that.”

She’s right. She’s also completely wrong, but I have a feeling she’ll figure that out later.

“Can I ask what rule number three is before I agree to rule number two?”

She grins. “There is no rule number three.”

I grin. “So sex is the only thing off limits? And we’re talking penetration, right? Not oral?”

She covers her face with her hands. “Oh, my God, do you have to get so specific?”

She’s cute when she’s embarrassed. “Just clarifying. I have a lifetime of things I want to do to you and only six months left to do them all.”

“Let’s leave the specifics up to the situation,” she says.

“Fair enough,” I say, admiring the blush in her cheeks. “Rachel? Are you a virgin?”

Her cheeks grow even redder. She shakes her head and tells me no. She asks if that bothers me.

“Not at all,” I say, being honest.

She asks if I’m a virgin, but her voice is timid when she asks it.

“No,” I say. “But now that I’ve met you, I kind of wish I was.”

She likes that I said this to her.

I stand up and prepare to head to my new bedroom to begin rearranging. Before I walk out, I lock her bedroom door from the inside, and then I turn around and smile at her.

I slowly walk to her.

I take her by the hands and pull her up. I wrap my arm around her lower back and pull her against me.

I kiss her.