Stay with me

“Uh-uh. Where you going, Mia?” He wrapped his long arms around my waist, pulling me back. Shrieking, I fell on top of him and onto his small bed. “Gavin might think differently, but you’re not leaving,” he said through a laugh. Ollie rolled me over to his side, and when our eyes met, our laughter slowly faded.

We were so close, his staggering breath reached my lips. His fingers applied an eager amount of pressure to my side as his eyes wandered from my eyes to my mouth, and I had to concentrate on breathing to make sure I still was.

“Ollie …” I breathed.

He trailed his fingers up my arms, and I couldn’t seem to move. My body was under a spell of him. His warm hand left my arm and reached behind me for the phone still playing the Gavin DeGraw song.

Ollie turned his back and dangled the phone in front of him. His eyes darted over to me then back at the phone. “Should I kiss Mia?” he asked, then pressed shuffle.

I held my breath.

We can’t kiss. I don’t kiss.

It was a bad idea, but I couldn’t seem to escape him. Did this mean I wanted to kiss him? I didn’t know exactly what I was hoping for.

It seemed like forever had passed before a song played, but I knew it couldn’t have been longer than a fraction of a second.

A beautiful acoustic melody from a guitar filled the dorm room. Another song I didn’t recognize. The screen read it was “Rhythm Inside” by Calum Scott, and I couldn’t understand what was happening.

Ollie closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and let it slowly go before he paused the song and tilted his head to face me. “Mia, this is fucking crazy. I really want to kiss you …” His gaze moved back and forth between my eyes and my lips. “Fuck do I want to kiss you, but I want you to listen to these words even more because I couldn’t have said them better myself. Everything he says is how you make me feel when I’m around you.”

I tried to swallow as he pressed play and placed the phone above our heads. He turned back on his side to face me. Calum’s beautiful voice played in our ears, and Ollie moved the hair from my face and said, “Just listen.”

And I did.

By the middle of the song, I had lost all sense of my past and future. The only thing in front of me was Ollie—my present, and I was surprised I still had a pulse because his eyes on me were breathtaking. It was as if they didn’t belong anywhere else.

A mixture of panic and peace swept over me, and I couldn’t make sense of it. My breath caught in my chest, and an undeniable pull brought my hands behind his head and into his brown hair. I nestled my face into his neck, and Ollie wrapped his long arms around my waist, pulling me close against him.

The coconut smell of his skin and his breath in my hair washed away the panic, and all that remained was the peace. It was the feeling of walking through the doors of your home after an extended vacation. The feeling of the bell ringing after the last class of the day, and the taste of ice-cold water on a hot day in July.

Peace.

Out of all the things that could have happened in his room, hugging him was never a possibility in my mind.

The lyrics said to show him what I was feeling, and for some unexplainable reason, I wanted to be close to him. Around Ollie, I actually had a feeling, and it overwhelmed me. I couldn’t remember the last time I had hugged anyone. But I didn’t want to hug anyone else. I wanted his arms around me, and to keep this satisfying feeling inside me for as long as possible.

He slowly, gently rubbed my back as he breathed into my neck, and we held on to each other as our legs intertwined—unsure of where he started, and I ended. Ollie didn’t say another word, and neither one of us reached for the phone to ask another question. We lay in his bed as he cradled me and let the rest of the songs play out the way they were meant to.