Fangirl

like he had an accent. A drawl. A drag on his vowel sounds. She couldn’t tell if it was for show or not.
    “When I get you up to my room” had become a joke between them.
    They didn’t have to meet at the Union or wait for Reagan to leave them alone in Cath’s room. They could hang out at Levi’s house anytime.
    But, so far, Cath hadn’t let that happen. Levi lived in a house, like an adult. Cath lived in a dorm, like a young adult—like someone who was still on adulthood probation.
    She could handle Levi here, in this room, where nothing was grown-up yet. Where there was a twin bed and posters of Simon Snow on the wall. Where Reagan could walk in at any minute.
    Levi must feel like somebody’d pulled a bait-and-switch on him. Back when they were nothing to each other—back when she thought he belonged to somebody else—Cath had crawled into bed with him and fallen asleep mouth to mouth. Now that they were seeing each other (not really dating, but everyday seeing each other), they only sometimes held hands. And when they did, Cath sort of pretended that they weren’t—she just didn’t acknowledge it. And she never touched him first.
    She wanted to.
    God, she wanted to tackle him and roll around in him like a cat in a field of daisies.
    Which is exactly why she didn’t. Because she was Little Red Riding Hood. She was a virgin and an idiot. And Levi could make her breathless in the elevator, just resting his hand—through her coat—on the small of her back.
    This was something she might talk to Wren about, if she still had a Wren.
    Wren would tell her not to be stupid—that boys wanted to touch you so badly, they didn’t care if you were good at it.
    But Levi wasn’t a boy. He wasn’t panting to get up somebody’s shirt for the first time. Levi had been up shirts; he probably just took them off.
    The thought made Cath shiver. And then she thought of Reagan, and it turned into more of a shudder.
    Cath wasn’t planning to be a virgin forever. But she’d planned to do all this stuff with somebody like Abel. Somebody who was, if anything, more pathetic and inexperienced than she was. Somebody who didn’t make her feel so out of control.
    If she thought about it objectively, Abel might actually be better looking than Levi in some ways. Abel was a swimmer. He had broad shoulders and thick arms. And he had hair like Frankie Avalon. (According to Cath’s grandma.)
    Levi was thin and weedy, and his hair—well, his hair —but everything about him made Cath feel loose and immoral.
    He had this thing where he bit his bottom lip and raised an eyebrow when he was trying to decide whether to laugh at something.… Madness.
    Then, if he decided to laugh, his shoulders would start shaking and his eyebrows would pull up in the middle—Levi’s eyebrows were pornographic. If Cath were making this decision just on eyebrows, she would have been “up to his room” a long time ago.
    If she were being rational about this, there was a lot on the touching continuum between holding hands and eyebrow-driven sex.… But she wasn’t being rational. And Levi made Cath feel like her whole body was a slippery slope.
    She sat at her desk. He sat on her bed and kicked her chair.
    “Hey,” he said. “I was thinking that this weekend, we should go on a real date. We could go out to dinner, see a movie.…” He was smiling, so Cath smiled back. And then she stopped.
    “I can’t.”
    “Why not? You already have a date? Every night this weekend?”
    “Sort of. I’m going home. I’ve been going home more this semester, to check on my dad.”
    Levi’s smile dimmed, but he nodded, like he understood. “How’re you getting home?”
    “This girl down the hall. Erin. She goes home every weekend to see her boyfriend—which is probably a good idea, because she’s boring and awful, and he’s bound to meet somebody better if she doesn’t keep an eye on him.”
    “I’ll drive you home.”
    “On your white horse?”
    “In my red truck.”
    Cath rolled her eyes. “No. You’d have to make two round trips. It’d take a thousand dollars in gas.”
    “I don’t care. I want to meet your dad. And I’ll get to hang out with you for a few hours in the truck—in a nonemergency situation.”
    “It’s okay. I can ride with Erin. She’s not that bad.”
    “You don’t want me to meet your dad?”
    “I haven’t even thought about you meeting my dad.”
    “You haven’t?” He sounded wounded. (Mildly wounded. Like,