27. Chapter Twenty-Seven
Percy
Two hours.
I stand at the top of the stairs and look down. The TV is going, Stanley is talking to it, Rowan is running water in the kitchen, a chair scraping, somebody laughing. I stand there and listen to all of it, wondering when the house is going to sleep.
They have to go to bed soon. But it’s not like I can force them, so I walk back to my room and strip the bed.
I remake it, which I’ve never done in the middle of the night in my life.
Then I look at the room and see it the way she’ll see it — a bed, a milk crate I use for a nightstand, a lamp with no shade, a desk, a broken top drawer.
Nobody’s ever been in here. Nobody. And it’s nothing to me, it’s just a room with my stuff in it.
But now there’s a spike of panic as I look at it, at how little there is, at what she’ll think of it.
There’s nothing to fix. I fix the bed anyway. The pillow. My clothes in the drawers just in case. I take the puck out of my bag and hold it. I put it back in.
Downstairs, Stanley is still going.
I sit at my desk and listen to the house. Benson goes first. I hear his door at 12:20, and the relief is immense.
The TV cuts off a while after. Then Rowan.
I feel the door under mine shut. Two down.
Shortly after, I hear Blue walk into his bedroom.
The house drops a level of sound the way it does, settling, and I stand in the middle of my room tracking it, breathing shallow, waiting on the last one. Because it’s always Stanley last.
He’s on the stairs — I know his feet, I know everyone’s feet — and he stops on the landing, and there’s a long second where he doesn’t move.
My stomach goes straight through the floor, because if he knocks, if he wants to talk, if he’s in one of his one-in-the-morning moods where he needs an audience, it’s over, all of it.
I hear his door, but I don’t trust it. I give it ten minutes. I listen to the house go all the way quiet, every board, the fridge kicking on, the wind, and nobody up, nobody awake, the whole place asleep around me.
My phone lights up.
Penelope: Here. Down the block.
I go down through my own dark house, sneaking like it’s high school all over again. I stay quiet, skipping the creaks, and then I’m reaching for the front door. I open it slowly, making sure that the house is completely asleep. It is.
Her car’s half a block down under a dead streetlight.
She gets out when she sees me. And even in the dark, I can see she’s been crying.
The question comes up in me hot and immediate.
Was it him. Did Theo do this. What happened tonight.
It’s right there. But I don’t ask. I keep the question locked in my mouth because if the answer is him, I don’t know what I’ll do with it, and if it’s something else, I’ve got no right to ask, and either way, asking is not my place.
“Hey,” she says, quietly.
“Hey. You have to be quiet going in.”
She nods.
I take her back the way I came, and the house is a minefield now, every board a risk, and I’ve got the whole map of it in me.
At the front door, I put my hand at the small of her back to steer her in ahead of me, and it’s the first time I’ve really touched her — not a jacket over her shoulders, not catching her before she falls, but my hand flat against her, guiding.
Her warmth goes up my arm like a live wire.
I feel her breathe under my hand. I move her past the third stair, my fingers pressing left so she skips it, and up, slow, one at a time, the house dead silent, Stanley’s door six feet away, and I don’t breathe until we’re in my room and the door is shut behind us.
And then we’re in my room, and it’s different.
She’s not the girl from the freezing hallway who told me about light with her hand flat on a wall.
Something’s happened — it’s all over her, whatever it is, close to the surface, filling the small room — and I’m raw too, from the lot, from two hours of listening for silence, and there’s no cover in here for either of us.
No music. No party through the floor. No book, no drawing, no tea.
Just a shut door, a dark room, and the two of us in it.
She didn’t bring anything. There’s no bag, no sketchbook, nothing in her hands — and I don’t have anything either, and there’s no movie to put on because I can’t afford any streaming platforms. It lands on me all at once that there’s nothing to do.
Every single time we’ve ever been in a room, it’s had a thing in the middle of it — a drawing, a screen, a shift, a walk — something to look at instead of each other, and there’s nothing here.
I stand by the desk. She stands by the bed. Neither of us moves.
“You can sit,” I say, and my voice comes out wrong. She sits on the edge of the bed, and I sit in the desk chair, and there’s four feet of dark room between us and nothing in it.
We don’t say anything. We just sit there in the dark. The house is dead asleep around us. The whiteboard is twenty feet down the stairs with all the rules written on it about why she can’t be here.
Her eyes look around the room for a second, landing on the paperback on my nightstand.
“Is that the book you’re reading?” she asks softly.
“Yeah.”
She looks at it, and then she moves back on the bed until she’s against the headboard. She pats the space beside her. “Read to me.”
I don’t move.
She’s got the book in her hand and bright brown eyes.
I’m looking at her, and my throat’s gone tight.
There’s a wall coming up in me fast and hard.
She’s asking for the one thing I don’t give anyone.
She has no idea what she’s asking of me.
She’s sitting there waiting, open-faced, asking me knowing I’m going to give it to her.
I stand up and sit down against the headboard beside her, because it’s her, and because I’ve already decided tonight that I don’t care what it costs. I pick up the book, but my hand won’t open it.
“It’s in French,” I whisper.
“The girls said you speak it,” she says. “Is that true?”
I look at her. What girls?
She blinks back, waiting for my answer.
I clear my throat and nod.
“Really? Are you fluent?”
“Oui, c’est vrai.”
Her eyes smile before her mouth does. And now that I’m this close to her, I see a small dimple under her right eye. I accidentally look down at her parted lips for a second. Then I meet her eyes.
“Y’a pas de quoi être impressionné.”
“Huh,” she says softly. “So you’re quiet in two languages.”
It pulls something loose in my chest before I can stop it — not quite a laugh, but close, the first one all night.
She’s smiling at me in the dark like she’s pleased with herself, and she should be.
It’s a good line. She has no idea how close she just got to it.
Being quiet is the only thing that ever kept me safe.
But she’s smiling at me in the dark like it’s a cute thing, a quirk, and I let her keep thinking that.
“Where are you from? I thought you said Maine.”
“I am,” I say, turning to the book.
“Wait,” she says. “Don’t shut me out.”
My eyes flick back to her face.
Her smile is sad. “Please.”
Fuck. Her face guts me. She thinks I shut her out? I shut the world out, and it’s nothing personal.
“I’m from Maine, I swear.”
“So, you took French or something?”
I shake my head. “My dad is French Canadian.”
“Oh, did your parents divorce, and that’s why you don’t go back to Maine?”
I love the innocence in her question, but tonight’s not the night to talk about it.
“Do you––” I pause because I hate that I’m ignoring her question, but I also can’t answer it. “Do you want me to read to you in French or do you want me to translate?”
She looks at the book now, understanding that I don’t want to talk about it.
Her expression softens. “In French.”
I nod.
She settles against my side. Not a lean, exactly — a shift, a weight, her shoulder against my arm and her knee not quite touching my leg — and the gap that’s been in every room we’ve ever shared is just gone, closed, her warmth all down one side of me.
I go still with the book open on my knee, and every inch of where she’s touching me is lit up and loud.
She smells like cold air and whatever she wears.
I feel her breathe. I hold the book, so my hand won’t do anything else.
“I can’t understand it,” she continues. “That’s the point. Just read.”
So I read.
I read the words on the page very quietly — a man walking through a city he used to live in, the rain, a café that isn’t there anymore — my voice going quiet and even in a language I have not said out loud to another living person since I was a kid.
She doesn’t move. She listens to the sound of it with her eyes half shut, and it’s just noise to her.
I get to the bottom of the page, and I don’t turn it. I keep going, and it isn’t the book anymore.
“Je t’ai regardée partir ce soir avec lui,” I say, in the same low, even voice, the same rhythm, so it still sounds like the story. I watched you leave tonight with him.
She makes a small sound, content, settling closer, and I keep going.
“Je savais pas que quelque chose pouvait faire aussi mal.” I didn’t know something could hurt this much. My voice doesn’t change. I keep it flat, soft, and story-like. “Je sais pas quoi faire de ?a.” I don’t know what to do with that.
And then I say the thing I’ve never said to anyone in any language. “Je pense à toi tout le temps. J’arrive pas à te sortir de ma tête.” I think about you all the time. I can’t get you out of my head.
“Je lis même plus le livre, mais t’en as aucune idée parce que tu parles pas fran?ais.” I’m not even reading the book anymore, but you have no idea because you don’t speak French.
I look at her.
She looks back at me and offers a small smile.
“Peut-être qu’un jour, je vais trouver le courage de te dire ce que je ressens vraiment. Mais en attendant, c’est tout ce que je suis capable de faire. Te lire un livre.” Maybe one day I’ll find the courage to tell you how I really feel. But until then, this is the best I can do. Read you a book.
I let out a quiet breath.
“C’est pathétique à quel point?” How pathetic is that?
I continue reading the book like nothing has changed, and she doesn’t know the difference. She leans her head back, and after a couple more pages, her breathing changes. It goes long and even, the way it did on a couch a year ago on Christmas Eve.
I keep reading after she’s asleep until my voice gets tired.
“Bonne nuit, Penelope.”