There are a lot of things that don't bother her.

On the bus, their fingers tangled together as their hands rest on his knee, and the old man staring and staring. Or sometimes, the old man is a middle-aged woman, stuffed into an ill-fitting suit, and he looks angry in a way that she doesn't understand. Sometimes he is much younger, and there is Jay-Z leaking out of his headphones, and she can't tell if his eyes are jealous or betrayed.

But she smiles, and she puts her head on his shoulder, and it doesn't really matter.

Or her parents, who have never said anything about it, and are kind and generous to him when he is in their home, but are distant in a way that she recognizes. After they met him, on the car ride home, her father had said simply, "Well, that was a surprise," and the silence of the radio wasn't dense enough to slow the impact of his words.

And while his parents are so warm to her, and she never wonders what they say in her absence.

But that, too, is okay. They will come around, or they won't; what they think has no bearing on what is.

But sometimes...

And this is silly; she would never say it out loud. When the feeling rises up in her she pushes it way, way down; deeper than before, in hopes that someday it will be too far gone to resurface:

Sometimes, when his eyes wander, she feels the narrowness of her hips; the shape of her eyes; the limp of her hair. She thinks: I can never be those girls. I can never be that girl, the one whose parents' don't take pause, the one who doesn't elicit hatred and misunderstanding from strangers. And she wonders if--just sometimes--he doesn't wish she was someone just slightly different; someone who did not make them stand out by simply holding hands.

Because she likes the sharp contrast of his body under hers. Sometimes, when she feels young and easily wondered, she will press their hands together hard, palm to palm, and cross her eyes until all the colors blur. And she likes the way they fit together, his hand on her hip, her head tucked into his neck. She likes his easy laughter and his furrowed brow and the way he says, "I love you," like it's a secret just for them, whispered into the curve of her ear.

And so she doesn't think of those other things, not anymore than she has to.

But what she does think about is how much these things bother him, and how there's nothing she can do to protect him.