Wanderlust

21- The Four-Letter Word

*Starting today (obviously) I am going to update every day, since there's only three more chapters after this one. Enjoy! By the way, I'm very addicted to this song <3*

“Okay, I’ve gone as long as I can. You need new clothes, Thomas.” I declared after we had breakfast the next day. Today was a Saturday- day eight for this adventure, and we planned on making it to San Francisco today.

“Come on, it can’t be that bad.” He defended. “I’ve taken showers and stuff.”

“Neither of us have been able to shower in the past three days, and you have been changing between one hoodie and one T-shirt for the past eight days. You need clothes and we both need to shower. However, we only have like, three or four hours until we get to San Francisco and my dad will let us shower there, but you need clothes or you’re riding in the back.” I teased him, crinkling my nose in mock disgust at the stench emitting from both of us.

“Well, then you stink too.” Thomas huffed.

We were sitting in the grass beside the car, which is where we decided to have our breakfast of fruit and raw toast. We were on our last bits of food that we had stocked up in the SUV so we had to go somewhere soon to get food. “Well, if I’m so stinky then I guess you can’t stand even touching me.” I said with a teasing shrug. “You wouldn’t want to kiss a stinky person.”

I’ve had a day a few days to wrap my head around the concept of kissing Thomas, I’ve had 24 hours to comprehend the concept of actually dating Thomas. Yet, neither one of those two ideas seem to make sense inside of my head.

How can one simple and common activity such as kissing cause my brain to just shut down and act all different? Whenever I kiss Thomas, my brain just malfunctions and I can’t understand why. People kiss all the time, and if people felt the way I feel when I kiss Thomas, then how are people not in comas all the time? Because I feel that if I continue to kiss him, that will be my fate. I’ve accepted it and I’ve decided that it’s well worth the risk, but I’ve also decided that it’s not normal to feel so overwhelmed just by lip to lip contact with that boy.

And the other side of this, dating. That doesn’t make any sense to me either. Why would he want to call me his girlfriend? I’m awkward, desperate, lonely, stupid, and I could make a list a mile long about things that are wrong with me, so I don’t know why he even asked me in the first place. At first, I thought that maybe it was because he felt bad for me, but then after a while, I would found him staring at me when he thought that I wouldn’t notice, and he’d hold my hand even when he didn’t have to, and he’d kiss me out of the blue and he’d smile that ridiculously addictive smile, even when there’s nothing to smile about. I don’t think that he only felt sorry for me, I just couldn’t figure out what he saw in me, I guess.

“No, I think I can look past it.” Thomas insisted with a boyish smile.

He leaned over to put his lips on mine, but I stealthily sprang to my feet with a huge grin and a giggle escaping my lips. “Too late.” I chirped, running behind a nearby tree.

“I’m quicker than you.” Thomas said as he swung himself around the tree before I could get away, so that he had me trapped between him and the tree. My back was scraping against the bark, but I ignored the annoying itch, even though I could barely feel it with Thomas distracting me with his face only an inch from mine.

The thought that I’ve only known him for a week and a day had popped into my head only once during these past few days, but I quickly brushed it off when I also realized that in those eight days, we’d been through so much that many people could never imagine, and we weren’t normal. We weren’t normal people and we weren’t a normal couple.