Lou and I went for a walk on campus and through Jackson Gardens. Everything was nice and peaceful. He stopped and kissed me just outside the gate to the gardens. The kiss was so gentle and soft, although having our first kiss after just hanging out for so many weeks was a little awkward. We ended up making out in his dorm room later. I was grateful he didn’t try to have sex or anything more.
A few days later, he gave me something he wrote during class to let me know he was thinking about me. It’s a whole sheet of narrow ruled lined notebook paper front and back that he wrote my name on over and over and over and over again. He has really tiny handwriting, and the letters are all capitalized; I don’t know how many JOEYs are on that paper. It’s just line after line of little JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY and a few ….s in the middle of more JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY JOEY. He was quite pleased with it and proud, looking for my reaction. I’m glad he was thinking about me, but it kind of freaked me out; hopefully he was just bored. I had no idea what to say, so I mumbled something like, “oh wow,” like I might say to a child who drew a crayon picture of me that accentuated an unflattering feature, like my big ears. He took the paper back and said he wants to keep it. He put it in a little lock box he has along with letter I wrote and a little piece of paper with my name and address. I don’t know what else is in that box. I still have the rose he gave me when we went out in the spring. I didn’t preserve it right, so it is all dried up, but it’s holding together for the most part.
After the kiss and that note, he stepped up the pressure to be together, and I didn’t have a good enough argument for why not, so I guess we are boyfriend and girlfriend now.