Faith

[A/N: warning: arguement turns into fluff! fluff alert!]

Ellie shoved her yearbook in my arms and said, "You better write something good." I laugh and grab my pen. 'Ellie, you are radder than rad can be. I think that you and Sean are the longest running couple in all of Degrassi history, a year and a half! haha. Anyways, I've had a great time with you this year. Don't forget me. I'll be back, You don't know when, You don't know why, but I'll be back so be on the lookout. -Delia.' She passed me back my yearbook.

Yep, It was June, three days before school was supposed to end. Craig and I had officially premiered as a couple on May 26th, Prom night, and everyone was okay with it. I'd signed everyone elses yearbook, even Manny and J.T.'s but not before recieving something I'd been waiting for.

"'Can I talk to you?"

It was Manny, all heaving bosom, body glitter, and a too-short skirt.

"I never got a chance to apologize for what happened between you and J.T.," she said.

"Why now?"

"Because this is it, isn't it? It's never going to be like this again. We'll see eachother from time to time, I'm sure, but it's never going to be like this again."

"Thank God."

"I just want you to know that J.T. and I are in love."

Ack.

"Manny, I understand that you want to apologize so you can go off into the summer with a clear conscience, but quite frankly, I don't really care about you and J.T. anymore."

"Then if you don't care, you can hear me out."

It was clear that she was hell-bent on unburdening her soul, so I gave her the go-ahead.

"Girls with low self-esteem have sex soonger, and more oftern, than girls with high self-esteem," she said.

"Oh, which must make me the queen of self-esteem." I snorted.

"Well, yes, actually..."

"Oh Christ, Manny, I am not in the mood for any of your bullshit."

"No, listen," she said. "But guys with low self-esteem postpone sex and have less of it than guys with high self-esteem."

I thought about this for a second. "Chicken or the egg."

"What?"

"Maybe the reason they have low self-esteem is because they're not getting laid. It's a chicken or the egg situation."

"Puh-leeze," She said, though I could tell I had stumped her. "That's not the point. The point is, I realized J.T. and I were both suffering from low self-esteem, which seems to stem from out sexual histories."

"Or lack there of."

"Right."

"Okay. That's fantastic. So are we done now?" I said, looking around for Craig.

"No. Listen," she said, grabbing my arm. "I realized we could help each other. And we have. I know you think he's just another gys, but J.T. is this first one I've truly cared about."

I didn't say anything.

"I'm just sorry that it went down the way it did, and I want to thank you for being as cool as you've been about it."

This was ad close to humane as Manny could ever get.

"Friends?" she asked as she extended her hand.

I know I was supposed to by pass her hand, bow down, and kiss her pedicured toes for her compassionate apology. Like hell I would.

"Whatever, Manny." and I walk away.

I grab Craig's yearbook out of his hands and hand him mine when we're at my locker. I write, 'Craig: There is nothing I can write in here that I won't be able to tell you in person. Forever, Delia.' and hand it back, and we get into his car and drive to his house now that school was over.

I just realized. I can't write about love. It's harder than writing about sex.

As happy as I was to be alone with him I couldn't stop myself from asking the question that needed to be asked.

"If I ask you to tell me the truth about something, will you?"

Craig propped himself up of his elbow so we would be eye to eye. "I have never not told you the truth about anything," he said.

"That's subject to debate," I said.

"What subject isn't up for debate?" he countered.

"An honest answer to the question I'm about to ask you is not subject to debate," I replied.

"Okay. Ask me."

"What about the girls?" I asked.

"The girls..." he replied.

"How many girls before me?" I'd heard from several people at school that Craig was a player and spent all summer fucking any person with a vagina.

He buried his face in my neck and groaned. "Why do you need to ask me that?"

"Why do you need to keep the truth from me?"

"Because I don't like to talk about it."

"Why? Because you feel guilty?"

"Not exactly."

"Then why?"

"I'm at peace with my moral failings."

"So you didn't think that anything you'd ever done is wrong?" I was about gather my clothes and leave at this point.

"I just don't see the poing in beating myself up. I tihnk it's more productive to conventrate of being a better person rightn now that punishing my self for who I was in the past."

This was is. I'd been holding back for months about this. Manny may have forgiven him, but it was time for me to get it out of my system.

"How can you not feel any guilt for cheating my on my best friend and getting that girl pregnant and killing the baby because you thought with one of your organs?"

"That is-" he caught himself. "That was the old Craig, not the Craig you know."

"Oh really?"

"Yea," He said. "Yea, I thought with my organ, but it was a mistake. I loved Ashley, but she pressured me too much for me to be the perfect boyfriend, so we could get married and have perfect children and live in a perfect house. That wasn't me."

I knew it was the truth.

"Then why'd you do it with Manny?"

"To see how I felt about Ash. Or to test my feelings about myself. It depended on where I was."

"Do you miss her?"

"Never."

"Really? Not ever?"

"Never," he replied. "Life is actually more interesting without her. Manny complicated me."

"Why did you let people think you were a Super Stud when you weren't?"

"Because I've learned that you can't control what othe rpeople are going to think about you. The best you can do in life is not piss yourself off."

That was a very profound observation, I thought. I would be much better off if I lived by it. Then I started thinking. If the Manny thing wasn't as true as I thought it was, maybe the stuff about the girls was all hype.

"So going back to my original question..."

"Delia..." he said, biting into his pillow.

"How many girls? Or was that highly exaggerated, too?"

He gritted his teeth in an embarrased smile that made it clear that the stuff about the girls hadn't been exaggerated one bit.

"Oh, Christ."

He took my hand.

"Delia, since the first time we really spoke, that time by your locker, you are the only one who has ever mattered. I don't want to talk about the girls before you because none of those girls matter to me now, just like J.T. doesn't matter to you now. Fortunately for us all, love does not worke on an exclusive first-come, first-served basis. Think of Spike and Mr. Simpson, or Ashley and Marshall, and everone else who would've missed out if it did."

He wanted to say more, I could tell.

"What?" I knew what he wanted to say. And I needed to hear him say it.

"So you aren't the first girl I've slept with. But it's the first time I felt like is was more that just fucking, it was making love, as hackneyed as it sounds.

It was totally the cliche of the perfect of a reformed male slut to say to the girl he's recently re-devirginized. But this time,I actually wanted to hear it. I needed to hear him say it because I knew it was the truth. I finally believed it. I believed him.

"Knowing you waited for so long, then picked me..." He stopped again. He pressed his fce into the space above my navel, his hands grasping my hipboned, as it to brace himself for what he was about to say. "It means more than you will ever know that you picked me to be your first."

"I just wish I hadn't been such a moron," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"We could've been together all year," I said. "Think of all the time we wasted."

"It's like I said before. There's no point in dwelling in the past," he said.

"But we could've spent so much more time together--"

"Delia," He inturrupted, pausing to lightly kiss the tip of my nose. "By going through what we have, we help each other be the poeple we're supposed to be."

"But..."

"As complicated and confusing as our courtship was, it happened the way it had to."

"But..."

"Delia, we were perfect in our imperfection."

"But..."

"We are the way we are supposed to be."

I pause to breathe in his scent. "Craig Daniel Manning."

"Delia Blair McKenzie."

"I love you." we whisper to eachother simultaniously.

[A/N: It's not the last chapter! There's one last chapter that's heartbreaking for our two favorite lovers.... Liberty and Towerz! Hahah just kidding. You know who.]