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She smells like cigarette smoke and Old Spice.
She doesn't like the frilly, floral scents of women's deodorant, and for a while the two of you both wore Irish Springs and it was a little weird so she benevolently switched so all your clothes didn't smell the same. She doesn't smoke as much as she used to, but it still clings to her like a ghost, wrapped up in her braids and lingering on her skin when you press your nose against the back of her neck. All smoke used to smell acrid to you, but there's a distinct difference between what she smokes and what the kids huddled behind the theater hide in their jacket pockets.
The smell is thicker in her car, clogging your nose and seeping in to your own clothes, because she's always stressed when she leaves work and picks you up from school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, leaning against the hood of her Toyota with her gloss-slicked lips wrapped around white paper, her teeth shining when she grins as you huddle your way out of the building and in to her bony arms.
She's 21 to your 17, and you fit neatly under her chin like you were made to. She's skinny as a whip, her elbows and knees always jabbing in to the generous flesh around your abdomen (but she likes it, lays her head on your stomach when she's reading and blows raspberries that make you shriek when she thinks you aren't paying attention). Sometimes she takes you straight home, sometimes you go get ice cream or stop by the library, and sometimes you just sit in the car, laced fingers resting atop the gear shift while she bitches about her co-workers and her boss.
You met at the book store, actually. She'd already graduated by the time you started high school, but you had always found comfort and solace in literature, so when you found her crouched down behind one of the book shelves reading Spider Man comics, her braids pinned up to the base of her skull and her piercings glittering in the artificial light, it shouldn't have surprised you that you fell as hard as you did.
She was the unattainable older girl, who laughed loud and long and flipped off her shift manager when she got fussed at for spending her time on the clock talking to a gawky little kid who more often than not didn't have the money to buy anything. You were painfully awkward, always mumbling because of your chronic Outdoor Voice, wearing oversized clothing to hide the baby fat you were never able to shake. But she would lose her fingers in your hair when she tucked you under her arm, cutting of your air supply, and sometimes when you would catch the last bus home and bring her a cup of coffee when she was working late she would look at you with a tenderness in her eyes that made your heart hurt.
She kissed you when you ran in to her at the pharmacy (you were picking up your asthma medicine and she was picking up cigarettes and hair ties), and it was the first time you ever saw her away from the scent of fresh ink and paper and the flickering light over the biography section. You fumbled the gallon of milk you were picking up for your mom, and her lips were slightly cracked but her skin was so soft, you nearly swooned right there in the middle of the aisle. Her shoulders were bare in her wife beater, and as your hands lingered on the gooseflesh rising there, she smiled against your teeth and asked "have you ever had a girlfriend, shouty?".
Your parents don't approve. She's crass, unrefined, and going nowhere fast. Your parents want you to have Plans, ambitions, a higher goal in life than someone who spends her money on cancer sticks and tattoos and is content to work at the bookstore until it closes or she finally punches a customer in the face. Your family is firmly middle class, and you know your parents had always wanted the house and white picket fence and kids and dog, but all you want to do is wrap up in the afghan her grandparents made for her and try and scream over her as you duke it out on her third-hand XBOX.
Her apartment is just one big room with a third of a kitchen and the shittiest bathroom you've ever seen, but she has art everywhere, taped on the wall with such voraciousness that you don't even know what color the paint is. Most of it is scribbles, tattoo ideas, book titles, shopping lists, camera phone pictures of the two of you trying on Halloween costumes and terrorizing the children waiting in line to see Santa Clause. She doesn't have a bed, just a futon that's obviously been well-loved, but it's hers, and by extension yours. She tries to get you to stay sometimes, brows pulled down and her skinny arms insistent around your waist. There's a pleading in her eyes that speaks of a loneliness she does such a good job of covering up that she even fools you, but you know what your parents would do if you didn't come home one night, so she kisses your chest, right above your heart, and walks in silence back out to the car.
One day you won't have to leave. You can take your courses online, work part-time so you can help pull your weight and maybe even buy her earrings sometimes when something catches her eye. You'll be there in the morning when she throws her alarm clock across the room and make the first pot of coffee despite the sleep still clouding your own eyes, and you'll kiss her, drowsy and still warm and coffee on her breath, before she slips out the door and you crawl back in to bed. She'll make dinner, even though she likes to pretend all she can do is boil water for macaroni, and you won't even tease her about the Fuck The Cook apron she loves so much.
But today, you lay under the afghan, her shoulders and back bare to your fingers as you trace black lines punctuated with golds and pinks and oranges, her smile sleepy and content as you dance down the protruding knobs of her spine. You'll kiss where the sun streams through the broken blinds, warming her skin, and return her muttered complaint with a curse of your own. But beneath the harsh words is a softness, a familiarity, and it feels like love, and it feels like home.