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It’s been almost three months since Jemma and her family moved to the States. Her father got a wonderful job with a research team, and her mother is teaching classes at a university. They tested her for her placement at the high school, and she’s fairly certain that when she starts up at the end of the summer, she’ll be the only fifteen-year old in the senior class.
She’s still not sure how she feels about it. But she knows how she feels about the boy that lives in the house on the other side of the cornfield.
Grant Ward is older than she is, but not by too much. She sees him around town, with other people. With girls. She wonders, every time they meet, why he chooses to spend his time with her.
But he does.
Sometimes she’ll catch sight of him by the fence at the property line, and he’ll wave a little bashfully until she waves back and goes outside. Other times she takes her books and a blanket and sits in the field until he comes to find her.
One night, they lie in the field together while she points out different stars and constellations. They’ve turned their bodies in opposite directions so they can press their cheeks together. She lifts her hand to point. “And that’s… Are you ashamed of me?”
He turns his head so fast that he bumps his nose against her ear. “What?”
She purposefully keeps staring up at the dark sky. “I don’t know. I just… we don’t really go anywhere, which is fine, we don’t have to go anywhere, it just seems like you don’t want anyone to see us together-”
“Jemma.” He murmurs quietly, rising to one elbow so he can look down at her face. “That’s not it at all.”
She bites her lip. “Really?”
“I don’t like to share you.” He nearly whispers, eyes traveling her face from her forehead to her chin. “I really, really like spending time with you. I like talking to you, I like listening to you read, I like how good you are with my little brother. I like everything about you.”
“Oh.” She blinks up at him, the sharp lines of his jaw, the warmness of his eyes. “Okay. Then, forget I said anything.”
He leans down and presses his lips to her forehead. “I’m sorry that you felt that way.”
She’s still trying to process the fact that he’s just gotten as close to actually kissing her as he’s ever gotten. “I like you, too.”
He smiles, though it’s really just a slight upturn at the corner of his mouth. And this time, when he leans down, it’s a real kiss, her first kiss.
There’s many more after that, in the field, in her backyard, in the halls of the high school. At the movies, a football game (American football, anyway), the science museum.
And after they graduate in the spring, he shows up in the driveway in his car, announcing they’re going on a road trip. Her parents couldn’t really trust her any more than they already do, (he also asked their permission weeks ago) so she packs up a few duffel bags and climbs into the passenger seat.
They work from the car’s GPS, their phones, and a road map of the United States, winding their way through cities and past landmarks. She’s never loved a summer so much in her entire life.
It’s good that they have that summer, she supposes, when they head off to separate colleges in the fall. They do their best to keep in touch, and as she gathers PhDs, she’s approached by a man in a suit about the Academy. It’s not until they’re on the phone two weeks later that she finds out he’s been approached as well. (It takes her very little time to figure out the statistics of that, not that they matter.)
The worst part is that when they join up together, they’re assuming they’ll have more time together.
They don’t.
It breaks her heart, and she knows it breaks his too, when they decide to split up. It makes sense for them, the logical side of her insists. She still cries for days.
She meets Fitz, and loves all of her classes. She doesn’t pass her field assessment, but she hadn’t really expected to do that. She and Fitz make it through Sci-Ops together, get sent to a research team in a lab in Germany together, then Scotland and back to the US.
It’s been years since Jemma Simmons had last spoken to Grant Ward, but when she turns around on the cargo ramp of Agent Coulson’s plane to see him walking toward her, her heart still beats as wildly as it did the first summer she met him.