“FOUR YEARS WILL go by so fucking fast,” I hoarsely remind her as I hold her face with both of my hands, afraid to death of letting go. “We are going to look back and laugh at how silly we’re being right now.”
“Promise?” she whispered against my lips. I couldn’t answer her. If I did, I would cry like a fucking baby. Both our futures had been outlined and written in the stars before we’d met. We had made those decisions solely for what we had wanted for our lives. We didn’t know the other existed.
Maybe destiny had thrown some kind of curveball our way. Showing us the possibility of what we could have down the road but knowing the beauty of it saying goodbye was going to be impossible. She was off to college on the East Coast in a couple of days, and I was off to boot camp in Texas.
Seventy-three days changed my life.
Seventy-three sunshine-filled days with her made me look at life in a whole new way. I understood love songs that played on the radio and old poems my grandmother used to quote. The idea of being away from her for four days was agony. Four years… Jesus Christ, it was unimaginable. So instead of answering with words, I tersely nodded and kissed the middle of her forehead, her bangs in the way, but I didn’t care. Jesus, how the hell was I going to survive this?
“Okay,” she whispered so damn strongly but still shutting her milk chocolate eyes away from me, “You should—”
“Five more minutes.” It had been our thing from the first day we’d met.
Five more minutes.
It was what we gave one another when we didn’t want to say goodbye but had to go our separate ways. Why couldn’t this have happened two years down the road? Three?
“Five more minutes,” she repeated. Her hands around my waist tightened, and I let go of her face so she could rest it on my chest. So she could hear the way my heart beat. For her.
In those five more minutes our hearts synced. They beat simultaneously. One for the other.
No matter what the next four years had in store for us, we’d always have the last five minutes and seventy-three days. We had fallen in love in the span of a summer. Not puppy love or hormonal lust most eighteen-year-old newly graduated from high school kids did. Not even close.
She was mine, and I was hers.
The kind of love that both contemporary and classic authors wrote about. The kind of love I prayed found its way back to one another.
