Officially Us

14 - Cheers, Ms Brontë; for being the first love of my first love.

Trying to manoeuvre five people, four bags and one surfboard on two buses and a train turned out to be nowhere near as challenging as I anticipated it would be. Seth, Brayden and Hadley were surprisingly well behaved. They seemed to be enjoying the adventure of leaving the house enough that everything captured their interests and kept them from causing any trouble. Saying that, I didn't really expect that they would — they were good kids, and they respected every word that came from Sadie's mouth, including cautions to be careful and not annoy anyone.

I loved how much they admired and looked up to her. I imagined it was the same way that I looked at her, except without the obvious 'I really fucking want you' overtones which were getting harder to disguise with every time she looked at me.

We sat side-by-side on each bus and train we caught the whole way down, with our thighs slightly kissing each other, and it was fucking glorious. I wanted so much to put my hand there but figured it might be inappropriate considering I still didn't know for sure that she was wanting me to. Before I did anything like that, I wanted to know that she would be completely okay with it. I really didn't want to screw this up.

Once we were safely on the bus, an uncomfortable silence settled in which I assumed was the result of neither of us being brave enough to start the conversation we needed to have — or, at least, the conversation I wanted to have. I didn't know where her head was at.

I had the lame — albeit genius — idea to play Twenty Questions, both to fill in the silence, and to generally get to know her better. It also gave me the opportunity to craft my questions in the lead up to The Real Conversation I wanted to have later.

"What do you want to be when you're older?" I asked.

"That's cheating! I already know what you want to be. There's no benefit for me in asking that," she said, feigning annoyance. If she were standing I'm sure her hand would have been placed firmly on her hip in opposition to my skewing the rules in my favour.

"I never said I was going to play fair, Sade. I just said 'let's play'," I grinned at her.

"Fine. If that's how you want to play it, let's play," she said, her smile creeping up at the corner of her mouth. She was going to make me work for my answers, and I had no problem with that at all. "What do I want to be when I'm older?"

"Yep," I said.

"Free," she said definitively. It wasn't what I meant and wasn't the response I expected, but then again, most things she said were a lot deeper than the boring, superficial answers I'm sure I'd give, even if they were four-letter, one word responses. "Same question."

Trying to match her level of depth, instead of my usual 'chippy' answer, I said, "Influential."

"How are you not already influential?" she asked.

"I've achieved nothing meaningful so far in life. I want to be important to someone and make a difference," I said.

"You are important to many people, Ruben, and you have made a difference. Trust me," she said seriously.

"To whom?" I said, playing up the naivety of my question.

"I don't like this game," she chuckled to herself, looking away from me and back out the window.

I reached towards her face, turning it back towards me. "To whom, Sadie?"

"Uh, Tanner," she stalled. "He now has a male friend who is smarter than him. I'm sure it will be beneficial for him to have someone around to drop his massive ego down a few notches."

I laughed, knowing what she meant by that. His mates were great, but they weren't the brightest people around. "Anyone else?"

"You really like torturing me, don't you?" she said, still not looking at me.