Conventionally Yours (True Colors)

by Annabeth Albert

  An overlook near Rifle led to some great pictures for Professor Tuttle of the river and the mountains and some stolen kisses in the car as “just one more” ended up being long moments of bliss. I had no idea what all of this meant, only that I loved it. I’d waited my whole life for kisses like these, and I wasn’t about to ruin it by overthinking it the way I always did. Conrad liked me, improbable as that was, and he wanted to kiss me. Repeatedly. That had to be enough for my analytical mind, which kept wanting to figure out the trajectory of where we went from here. But I’d spent a lot of years with that brain standing between me and fun, so I tried hard to enjoy this instead, saving up memories that I’d be able to take out later to remember back to these perfect moments.

  The light was starting to shift as we reached Grand Junction, where Conrad had the brilliant idea of grabbing sandwiches and drinks from a little shop on the business loop and then taking the food and the money we saved to nearby Colorado National Monument. We watched the sun start to set over the brilliant red rocks with our impromptu dinner picnic, gorgeous shades of pinks and purples I’d never seen before, the sky hanging like silk curtains over the giant rock formations and scrubby vegetation in the valley below.

  “Do we need to start thinking about where we’re stopping for the night?” I asked as he leaned against me. We were using a rock as a table and a blanket from the car as seating. And apparently my new job was as a backrest for Conrad. Not that I was complaining. We’d managed to find a quasi-private spot, mainly Conrad’s doing as he seemed to have a sixth sense for good spots to be alone. But alone was something of a mirage since the amount of traffic we’d been battling said that the rest of humanity wasn’t that far off. “With all the summer tourists around here, it might be harder to get a room than back in the Midwest.”

  “Already on it. I made good use of my time with your phone while you were driving.” Conrad grinned like my dog, Emma, when she actually managed to perform one of her tricks for a treat. “Arches is one of the best places in the country to see the stars, apparently. And I used one of those last-minute-deal sites to nab a teeny cabin at one of those motel places that have a lot of separate cabins, all in a row.”

  “Oh, cool.” The prospect of that kind of privacy with Conrad all night long was almost more thrilling than the promise of stargazing. Thrilling and also daunting. Kissing was one thing, but I wasn’t sure I could compete with whatever skills his prior hookups had offered. Ingenuity, especially that kind, was hardly my strong suit. Pushing aside my reservations, I focused on what I was good at—logistics. “Your card was okay to make the reservation? Want me to get you cash when we’re back in Grand Junction?”

  He made a face. “Yeah. Cash would be good. Hate how close I’m playing this. Just wanted to do something nice for you.”

  “Financial realities don’t negate the niceness of your gesture,” I said reasonably.

  That made him laugh. “See that’s why I l—like you. I get that being literal can be a challenge, but sometimes I like how simple you make things.”

  “Yeah, well, I miss a lot of jokes and subtext,” I grumbled, not entirely sure I liked his compliment.

  “Sorry. Not trying to say that it’s not hard. And I’ll just have to be more obvious. Luckily, I’ve never been that good at subtlety.” He turned, unmistakable intent in his expression, sunset reflected in his eyes, his gorgeous features more compelling to me than all the natural beauty surrounding us. And I didn’t have be the master of reading of social cues to know to pull him closer, to meet him halfway in a kiss that made my toes curl in my sneakers. He tasted sugary, like his citrusy soda but also something else, something I couldn’t name but that made him my new favorite flavor of everything. His lips were firm but supple, a contrast that I loved exploring. Learning from earlier, I used my tongue to outline their contours, memorizing their velvety feel and the way he moaned and held me tighter when I ventured into his mouth, in a way that had heat zooming all over my body, an almost giddy sort of pleasure.

  Groaning low in his throat when I tried to repeat the move, he pulled away. “Better head out if we want to make our date with the stars.”

  Date. I’d never had one of those, had nothing to compare it to, but the perfection of this day would be hard to beat. It had set a ridiculously high bar for all future encounters to try to live up to. Not that I wanted other encounters, some future with faceless people who weren’t Conrad. No. I only wanted this, right here and right now, even if there was no viable strategy for keeping him beyond this trip, beyond this brief moment in time.

  * * *

  “See, wasn’t it worth beating those losers to get here?” Conrad grinned from his perch next to me on the hood of the car. We’d parked on a tiny side road, no other cars or people for miles. Above us, a glittering canopy of infinite stars stretched like something out of an astronomy text. On multiple levels, I couldn’t believe I was actually here. “Look at these stars. If we’d gotten arrested in Denver, we never would have made it here.”

  I wanted to quip about how if he hadn’t kissed me that morning, we wouldn’t be here either, with this wonderful rapport between us, a closeness I’d never had with another person. But I simply didn’t know how to find the words for that. So instead, I went with something else that had been on my mind since Denver.

  “I’m not sure I liked how that game went.”

  “What do you mean?” Conrad frowned, pausing midnibble on a handful of the caramel popcorn we’d brought with us.

  “I didn’t like needing you. Not being able to win outright on my own. Needing your cards to bail me out.”

  “Dude. That’s the whole point of teams, right? Working together. Needing each other. I needed the big, expensive stuff in your deck to make mine work better. If you hadn’t been able to put out rare cards with high scroll cost, then my deck wouldn’t have worked as well.”

  I considered this. “I don’t like being dependent. Which I know seems converse to the rest of my life—living at home, listening to the moms’ ideas for my future. But I don’t like feeling like I’m not up to a challenge. I’ve had enough of that.”

  “Join the freaking club.” He bumped shoulders with me. “If this last year has taught me anything, it’s that relying on others sucks. I get it. People aren’t often trustworthy either. They let you down. Jobs that were supposed to last don’t. Friends who were supposed to stick around leave.”

  I wanted to promise him that I wouldn’t let him down, that I’d be different, that I’d be the one who stuck around. But I wasn’t sure I could keep that promise, so instead, I squeezed his hand.

  “Anyway, trust me, I understand wanting to be independent.” He held my hand tightly. “But sometimes winning means figuring out how best to use others’ resources.”

  That sounded a bit mercenary, even for me. “I don’t want to use you,” I whispered.

  “Then don’t.” With that, he kissed me, stars above us, galaxies worth of emotions unspooling in my chest. When we kissed like this, I felt like the person I’d always wanted to be—ten feet tall, powerful, confident. Liked. I spent so much time pretending that things didn’t matter, pretending I didn’t care about being alone, but when we kissed, I no longer felt left out. And all those rules and cues that often seemed beyond me became so easy when he put his arms around me.

  Instead, it felt like the best kind of game—like taking turns that built on each other. He did a concrete action like licking the seam of my mouth. I did something in response like capturing his tongue between my lips, making him groan and shudder. Back and forth we went until we were both breathing hard, losing all track of turns, both winners, and maybe he was right and it didn’t matter who went first or second or who did more when we had the same common goal.

  His hand was warm, urging me closer as his mouth continued to coax more gasps from me. My own hand got bold, toying with the hem of his T-shirt, fingertip
grazing the warm skin of his back, making him hiss and break the kiss.

  “I’m supposed to be showing you constellations.” His laugh was as unsteady as my breathing.

  “I like this better,” I assured him, even as I let him scoot back a little. “But sure, teach away.”

  “You’re going to kill me.” He rested his head on mine, tucking me against his shoulder. I liked this almost as much as the kissing, liked the calm closeness of simply being here like this. The night air was chilly, even with the picnic blanket around our shoulders. He pointed up at the sky. “So okay, that’s the North Star. And from there you can start to make out different constellations.”

  As compelling as him talking science was, he didn’t make it very far through his astronomy lecture before we were kissing again. I wasn’t even sure who started that round, only that one second he was talking about Orion’s Belt, and the next we were lip-locked as urgently as if we hadn’t already spent huge chunks of the day like this.

  “Damn. You’re hell on my astronomy knowledge,” he said as we came up for air.

  “We’ll just have to do this again.”

  “We will,” he said firmly, eyes linking with mine. There was a message there. A promise maybe even, and that made it easy to gloss past the con and everything it represented, everything that could happen, good and bad, and to focus on our return trip—to fantasize about more days spent like this. With him not having a job to get back to, maybe we could even stretch it out further… The thought made a happy shiver race through me.

  “Cold?” he asked, pulling me closer.

  “Not really, but maybe we should go? Should we go find the cabin place?”

  “Yes, we most definitely should get a room.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. I maybe liked him silly best of all, but even him adorable didn’t stop the flock of elephant-sized butterflies migrating through my insides.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said quickly. Too quickly.

  “Please mean it like that.” He lightly tickled along my ribs. I was ticklish to start with, and even through my shirt, his touch made electricity crackle all along my torso.

  “You’re better at this than me,” I groaned because I wanted to touch him too and had no idea where to start. And no idea what would happen when we got back to the cabin.

  “You like science, right?”

  “Uh…yeah.” I didn’t completely follow him.

  “Well, after kissing you all day, I can definitively say you are excellent at it. Too good, really. But you know, if you want to keep testing that hypothesis…”

  “Dork.” I pushed at his arm, but not hard enough to actually move him. I was pretty happy exactly where I was, even if the conversation was less than comfortable. “I mean I don’t know what to do. What comes next. I hate not knowing the rules.”

  “There are no rules.”

  “That’s not helping.”

  “I’m serious. I know you like rules and all, but there really aren’t any for this. This is just us messing around. It’s not brain surgery.”

  Saying it was that casual for him really didn’t help, so I made a frustrated noise.

  “Does it help if I say we can keep kissing—and only kissing—when we get to the cabin? We don’t have to do anything else simply because there’s a bed there. That’s not like…a requirement or something. I mean, sleep at some point would be good. And maybe some horizontal kissing, but I’m not asking you to go further than you want.”

  “I want,” I groaned. “I just need…a map. Guidelines. Something.”

  “Good.” He kissed me again, a quick, hard one. “Think you could let me navigate for a while?”

  “You are the one who’s been here before.” My tone was probably less than charitable because I hated my own inexperience so much. I just wanted to know what all those other guys knew, wanted to know exactly how to make him happy in a multitude of different ways.

  “Hey now. I thought we were done calling me indiscriminate?”

  “That was me being grateful,” I protested. “Really. I’m glad one of us knows what they’re doing.”

  “Oh, Alden. None of us know. Not really.” He rubbed my head like a freaking puppy as he climbed down from the hood of the car. I wouldn’t say I pouted, but I also wasn’t particularly talkative on the drive to the motel, which turned out to be as advertised, several rows of tiny log cabins, all surrounding an outdoor pool and main building with a check-in desk and other amenities like a small convenience store.

  Ours was one of the smallest, a single room with a quilt-covered bed, slim counter with a coffee maker, and narrow bathroom in the rear of the space. The one bed, not particularly huge, might as well have been a tarantula for how welcoming it seemed and how wide a berth I gave it as we set our things down.

  “You okay? We survived last night, remember?” Conrad’s forehead creased.

  “Last night was different,” I whispered, swallowing hard.

  “I know.” He took my hand, pulling me closer to him, near the window through which the sky continued to twinkle. “Do you want to pretend that we didn’t—”

  “I suck at pretending. And no, I liked today. It was the best day ever,” I admitted.

  “Me too.” His eyes were as soft and generous as I now knew his lips to be. And warm with concern, which I knew was my fault for freaking out. I didn’t want to freak out. Didn’t want to ruin his nice gesture of finding this place. And I wasn’t scared. It was more wanting to be good—no, great—for him. Perfect. I hated not knowing what to do or say to make that happen.

  But if I’d learned nothing else over the course of the day, it was that Conrad was exceedingly easy to distract. It didn’t take more than me leaning in for his eyes to shift from worried to something else, something hot that made my pulse thrum.

  He flipped the light closest to us off, and by the light of the moon and stars, we kissed standing up for what felt like an eternity. And honestly, stars could have gone supernova and I’m not sure I would have noticed, drunk as I was on his taste.

  Time ceased having meaning for everything except my increasingly weak limbs, each kiss melting more of my knee joints until finally I was the one to pull away, gasping, “Horizontal kissing?”

  “Not going to make you too nervous?” His voice was kind even as he was already heading toward the bed. “We could simply lay here together too.” Stretching out on the bed, he patted the spot next to him. “We don’t have to kiss.”

  “I kinda think we do.” Voice serious, I lay next to him, not touching, but close enough to feel the heat rolling off his body. It felt like the very atoms that made up my body were one zooming particle away from disaster. Or unmitigated triumph, a human particle accelerator. The jury was still out on which was more likely. “I need to make sure my…passing grade isn’t a fluke.”

  He smiled, wide and pleased. “It’s not. And damn, I love when you joke.”

  “I am capable of humor.” I frowned at him, equal parts frustrated and turned on.

  “I know. And I like that. I like when I’m not the only wacky one.” He tugged me closer, our legs tangling.

  “You’re not. But it wasn’t a joke. I take my science very seriously.” Hovering my face over his, I studied his eyes, which reflected both the dim bedside light and the magic of the earlier moonlight kissing. “And you said I was good—”

  “Alden?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Shut up and kiss me now.”

  I did, following what I’d learned so far about what he liked—him being the one in control, me responding to his lead. But he also liked when I tried things, as evidenced by the way his chest rumbled and he held me tighter when I sucked on his tongue. We were close enough that I could tell he was as excited as me, but he seemed quite happy to take our time, not pressing for more than kissing, and letting me explore.


  If anything, I was the one who wanted to plunge ahead. Driven by an instinct I still wasn’t sure whether to trust, my hands roamed over his back, snaking under the smooth cotton of his T-shirt. He moaned his approval as I cataloged each of his lean back muscles. Rolling to my back, I pulled him more fully on top of me.

  “This okay?” Voice rough, he had glassy eyes and unsteady hands on my face as he brushed my hair off my forehead. I basked in the effect I had on him.

  “Yeah. But I think this is the part where you navigate.”

  “Maybe we both can. Go where it feels good.” He kissed me again, sweet and slow, and it was impossible not to follow him. Go where it feels good. That was silly because it all felt amazing. His lips on my mine, warm and urgent. His hand tangled in my hair, other hand on my side, pulling me even closer. His body against mine, strong and insistent. And maybe my brain still didn’t know the protocol, didn’t know what to do, but my body did, moving with his. On their own, my legs shifted, bringing him more fully against me, thighs seemingly made to cradle him like this.

  We kept kissing as our bodies set a slow, hypnotic rhythm, lips like magnets that would stray to cheeks and ears and necks only to return to each other, hungrier than ever. I’d always thought of this as a path, a clear destination, definite mile markers along the way, but in actuality, it was more of an ocean of sensation, all directions equally pleasurable, no map required. It was a journey for sure, but not a progression as much as a ride, floating along on good feelings until I almost couldn’t stand it anymore.