Nick and Charlie
by Alice Oseman
Publisher-Recommended Age: 14 years and up
Library section: Young Adult Fiction (13 years and up). It was previously located in the Juvenile section (8-12) before we started to raise awareness.
page 146: We stay up late just talking and browsing the internet and watching videos and talking again, laughing, dozing off. I wonder what it’d be like to have a whole life of this. I think it’d be pretty great. Not gonna lie.
And then one minute we’re lying there and the next we’re kissing, and it’s not like this is anything particularly new, but it feels new. It feels like we’ve been forced apart for a century and this is our reunion, a mix of relief and desperation, both of us clinging to each other on his bed, and when Nick breaks away to kiss my neck I just stop thinking entirely.
How is it that this still makes me so … How have two years gone by and I still feel like this in his arms? We kiss for a long time, like it’s two years ago and wete on Nick’s lounge sofa trying to watch a film. Impossible. I can’t think about anything else when he’s running his hands so gently through my hair, across my back, over my hips. I ask if we should take our clothes of and he’s saying yes before I’ve even finished ay sentence, and then he’s pulling my T-shirt off and laughing when I can’t undo his shirt buttons, he’s undoing my belt, I’m reaching into his bedside drawer for a condom, we’re kissing again, we’re rolling over obviously you can see where this is going.
I don’t know if its because were feeling especially emotional, or were just tired, or these past couple of weeks have been too much, but this time reminds me so much of the first time we had sex.
We were both fucking terrified, and the whole thing was kind of terrible because we didn’t know what we were doing. But it was good too, so good, because we were a mess of emotions and we were scared and excited and everything felt new. So, this sort of feels like that.
Nick touches me like he’s scared that any minute I could disintegrate forever. When we’re finally undressed completely he just stops and stares like he’s trying to memorize every second of this. When were moving he keeps saying my name over and over until I find it too ridiculous and tell him to shut up, but he just grins and keeps on saying it anyway, whispering it against my skin just to make me laugh. I hold him so tight against me, as if that’ll keep us here, keep him here with me.