Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Epilogue: The End

“Quinton,” I said.

“Calm down,” he told me, grinning. “It’s fine.”

“No, we’re definitely going to die.”

“Lena, we’re not going to die.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I do this a lot.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

He rolled his eyes and swung around, hooking his arm around me and dragging me with him as he moved back to his original position, anchoring me to him. He squeezed my waist and said, “We’re not going to die.”

I looked at the slicing water skeptically.

“Trust me,” Quinton said, tugging at a sail. “I know what I am doing.”

It had taken three months and a lot of nagging, but eventually Quinton convinced me that sailing would be fun, and that I would like it, and I finally agreed to go, just to appease him. Now that we were so far away from land that I could barely see it on the horizon and I felt just how windy it was, I wasn’t feeling this whole sailing thing, not one bit.

The only plus side was Quinton was wearing this shirt that really hugged those amazing muscles on his arms, and it’s really nice. I couldn’t stop staring at them for a good straight ten minutes, and thankfully he just thought I was watching him sail and not checking him out, or else that would have been very, very awkward for me.

The last three months have gone by like a dream. Quinton graduated and decided that he was going to go to Yale, which made me feel very intellectually inferior, but I was more excited for him than mournful for my own lack of brain power. Felton decided he liked the looks of Boston College and he’s planning on there, staying pretty close to home; close enough that my mother didn’t lose her mind when he told her that he was leaving home, at least. I still had another year stuck in Waltham but I couldn’t find it to be that much of a bad thing now. Especially when my parents got me my own car.

That was pretty freaking sweet. When they told me they got me a present, I was totally expecting a mountain bike and a letter that said I was SOL.

Colonel and Norma lately have started to talk a lot more about going to the same college, deciding on which one to go to together, and I had no doubt that they would last forever. They were just one of those couples where, if they didn’t make it, it would be a pure injustice in the world. Kline was still dating Mathieu and had been for a surprisingly long time, a half year now, and they were cute together, if a strange couple. But Quinton said that Matt worshiped the ground that she walked on, so in the end I approved, even if it was kind of strange when we were over the Lancaster house at the same time.

I haven’t told Quinton that I loved him yet, but I was waiting for a moment that it felt real. Some couples say it so early that the word starts to seem like a mundane one, one without all of the feelings that make up the colors of the world. I wanted to mean it when I said it. I wanted him to know how much I felt it when I said it to him, and I wanted him to know that he didn’t have to feel obligated to say it back. We had to be at a certain stage for that, and I wasn’t afraid to admit that we weren’t there yet. We spent so much time together and I knew he cared about me but we weren’t in a rush to do anything, to say anything—we had all the time in the world on our side, and we didn’t need to rush a thing.