“It’s giving me the wrong idea,” he says.

The pull is undeniable. It’s a new definition for what I’ve felt between us during the past few days. It’s no longer a hint. It’s now a demand. Not from him, but from the universe, calling on us to decide here and now what we’re going to be. What we could be.

I step forward. Our boots nearly touch. I could put a hand on his chest or reach up to his sculpted cheekbones and the stretch of his neck exposed to the cold. “Wrong isn’t the right word,” I say.

“What is, then?” he asks, his face suddenly serious.

“This.” I pull him close, lifting myself on my toes. For a moment, when I lean forward, I feel the warmth of his breath in the air.

I kiss him.

   Fitz

I KNOW HUNDREDS of words to describe kissing. In this moment, I forget every one of them.

Part of my mind wants to find the right words to define Juniper’s lips on mine, a way to categorize and recall right now for years to come. The rest of me, though, isn’t thinking in words. Only feeling. The feeling of everything in my entire being rushing into the precise point where we connect. The softness of her skin, warm and electrifying and undeniably her. The cumulative charge of a week’s worth of unlikely crossings and surprising closeness. Instinctively, my hand finds the bend in her back, pressing her closer. Our lips part. The kiss deepens, and the world disappears.

Eventually, we pull away. It was only seconds, but they’re seconds that could have been eternity for their irreversible impact on me.

From the dizzied echoes of my brain comes one thought. I say it without thinking. “Kissing me isn’t a word.”

Juniper frowns with flushed cheeks. “What?”

“You said wrong wasn’t the right word,” I explain. “I asked you what the right word was, and you kissed me. Kissing me isn’t a word,” I repeat, aware of how dumb this sounds.

Coyly, Juniper hooks her fingers in my belt loops and tugs me to her. “No,” she says. “It’s better, right?”

“Considerably.” With her chin tilted up toward mine, I feel my mental faculties beginning to leave me once more. This time, it’s me who bridges the inches between us, brushing my lips to hers. It’s just like the first time, right down to the awe I even get to kiss this incredible girl. In this place frozen in time, the river poised on the edge of falling forever, I genuinely believe we could remain here forever too.

Between kisses, my mind finally figures it out. The word to describe this moment.

Perfect.

   Fitz

WHILE I WOULD have welcomed the idea of spending the rest of the day making out by the waterfall, when we part, Juniper checks the time on her phone and immediately declares we have to go. I don’t press her to explain, knowing the interruption has to do with her itinerary, and nothing gets in the way of Juniper’s itinerary. We eat our cold, somewhat-squashed sandwiches in the car while Juniper drives the final hour to Pittsburgh.

The city is thick with trees, ice hanging from their bleak branches in front of low concrete-and-stone buildings. The streets have the nonsensical, uneven directionality of colonial roads retrofitted for cars. We pull into the visitor parking lot for Carnegie Mellon University, a school Juniper must have chosen without telling me. It wasn’t listed on either of our original itineraries or the one we created together.

I close the car door and then pull out my phone. “Should I look up how to get to the admissions building?”

“Nope,” she says quickly. She starts walking, and I follow her. “We’re not going to the admissions building.”

“Then where are—”

She silences me with a kiss. “Just follow me,” she says.

I don’t object. She leads me through the wide-open fields cutting through the campus while she consults her phone for directions. We end up in front of a low beige building with arches over the green-trimmed windows. Wordlessly, Juniper opens the door for me. We file in, bumping shoulders with college students holding heavy textbooks and looking exhausted. Juniper turns corners in the hallways of white-and-burgundy brick until we reach the entrance to a large lecture hall. Students trickle in, taking seats spread out across the auditorium.

Juniper stops by the door and faces me with nervous excitement. “I thought we might sit in on this class.”

“Is that allowed?” I ask, stepping aside to let a short woman wearing a long dress and boots pass us. She walks right up to the podium and pulls a laptop from her bag.

“I emailed with the department head, and he said we were free to audit whatever class we wanted,” Juniper says. “Since it’s the middle of finals here, the only classes are review sessions.”

I lean past her to peer into the filling auditorium. The sight of students flipping through notebooks, halfheartedly typing in their computers, sipping coffee from Starbucks cups is striking in a way I can’t quite describe. There’s something distinctly quotidian about the scene. A day-to-day ordinariness I hadn’t anticipated. With every tour I’ve been on, I’ve built this perception of college as this huge event. Something we work toward and then achieve. The object of countless discussions and brochures meant to exaggerate and entice. But this review session, these somewhat sleepy students, this half-full hall—they’re nothing grand. It’s quiet and common and real. It’s one moment in thousands of nearly identical moments these students will have. I will have. If not here, then somewhere.

It makes next year real in a way nothing has before. This everyday, unremarkable view of college life is somehow bigger and more significant than a thousand tours or information sessions, parties or Primal Screams.

It’s scary, but kind of thrilling.

“What class is it?” I search the room for indications, titles on textbooks or handwriting on the whiteboard. I figure it’s probably related to architecture, given Juniper’s evident anticipation.

“It’s called the Nature of Language,” Juniper tells me. “Carnegie Mellon has an excellent linguistics program. This is the introductory course.”

It takes me a moment to understand. “Linguistics?” I repeat. It’s not a topic either one of us has expressed interest in.

“You have a gift for words, Fitz. I thought . . .” She takes my hand. “Let’s just go in and listen.”

I nod numbly, touched and overwhelmed by her thoughtfulness and her effort in talking to the department head, finding the class, rerouting her trip. I guess I should have expected Juniper would bring the same care and intensity to others that she brings to her own life.