40. Chapter Forty
Penelope
He’s not supposed to be here tonight.
There’s a road game Thursday, and Coach Fuller runs them into the ground the day before one.
Percy told me himself he’d be dead on his feet, and then at eleven my phone lights up — you up?
— and twenty minutes later, he’s coming through my door smelling like the cold, and neither of us pretends this is about talking.
I get his jacket off him in my bedroom. He backs me into the wall and kisses me like he walked across town for exactly this. His hands are already under my shirt, cold from outside, and I gasp against his mouth and feel him smile into it, which he almost never does.
“You’re freezing,” I breathe.
“You’ll warm me up.”
Six weeks ago, he couldn’t get a sentence out with my hand on his chest, and now he says a thing like that low against my jaw, and I forget my own name.
We don’t make it to the bed. We barely make it off the wall.
And after, on the floor of my bedroom with his shirt under my head and his heartbeat going down slow under my hand, I think about how he has an away game in thirty-six hours and should be asleep three miles from here, and how he came anyway, and how I’d have been sick with disappointment if he hadn’t.
He texts first. Constantly. That’s the part I’m not used to, weeks in.
I’ll be at the firm and my phone will buzz — what are you drawing — and it undoes me every time.
The man who rationed every word now just texts me in the middle of the afternoon because he wonders.
He sends me nothing texts. He sends me the score of games I’m already watching.
One night, he sends me a photo of the ceiling of his room, no caption, and I understand it means I’m lying here thinking about you, and I put my face in my hands.
There’s a French phrase he says against my hair that he won’t translate, and I’ve stopped asking because I like that it’s his. There’s a chair by my window he sits in and reads while I draw.
I think I’m in a relationship. A whole one, complete, load-bearing.
It’s just invisible.
“You’re never here anymore.” Ivory says it from the couch on a Sunday, not accusing exactly, but not not. I’ve got my keys in my hand. I’m going to Percy’s — the house is away, he’s got it to himself, a rare whole evening — and I’ve told her I’m going to the studio.
“I’ve got a deadline.”
“You always have a deadline.” She pulls her knees up. “You know we haven’t done a night in like a month? You canceled twice. I’m not — I’m just saying I miss you. You live here, and I never see you.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” And I am. “After this project. It’s eating me alive.”
She looks at me a second too long. “Is it the project?”
“What else would it be?”
“I don’t know, Penelope. That’s kind of my point.” She lets it go, because she’s Ivory, but there’s a thing in her face when she goes back to her phone.
I take my keys, my lie, and I go. I feel the distance between us open another inch, and I let it, because the alternative is answering her, and I can’t answer her.
The group chat is the harder one.
Gianna: Girls night on Saturday. My place. Non-negotiable.
Gianna: Penelope, you’ve bailed the last three. I’m sending someone to your apartment.
Mara: She’s right, you’ve gone MIA.
I want to go so badly. These are the first real friends I’ve ever had, and they’re fun and kind, and I keep bailing on them.
But Gianna is Benson’s sister. She lives half her week in that house.
And I can’t sit in a warm room with her, three margaritas deep, and trust my own face when the team comes up — when the goalie comes up — because one wrong flicker and they’ll know.
So I force myself to reply because at some point, I want to return to our friendship.
Me: Ugh, I can’t. I’m swamped with the firm. Next one I promise. Love you girls.
Gianna: You said that last time.
It almost cracks on a Tuesday, at a coffee place near campus.
I’m at the counter, and I hear Gianna before I see her.
She’s with Mara, two tables back, and I go to lift a hand, and then I look at who’s at the table beside theirs.
Blue. Percy’s Blue, the silent one, the one who sees everything, hunched over with a coffee, alone.
Gianna waves me over. I sit, and I’m two feet from Blue Golding, who might know Percy more than I do. I keep my face flat, my voice even, and I don’t look at him because I’ve never properly met him.
“You know Blue?” Gianna says, offhand, tipping her head at him. “He’s one of the Hawthorne boys. Blue, this is Penelope.”
Blue looks up. His eyes pass over me once, reading nothing into me because there’s nothing to read — I’m just a name Gianna said, a girl at a table.
If he remembers a night a year ago when somebody spilled a beer down the front of his goalie, it doesn’t show.
It probably doesn’t even register. Why would it?
“Hi,” he says, and goes back to his phone.
“Nice to meet you,” I say. My heart’s racing so hard I’m sure the table can hear it.
I make it four more minutes of small talk, and then I mention I have somewhere to be.
I walk out into the cold with my hands shaking around my cup because I feel guilty, and I hate secrets. I hold my head higher as I walk away.
I don’t tell Percy any of it. I don’t want him to worry.
Percy comes over on Friday, and it’s good, it’s so good.
His hands are in my hair and his weight is over me.
He’s still careful with me, and in the middle of it, with him breathing my name into my throat, it hits me sideways that I can’t take him anywhere.
That I will never sit at a table with him and my friends.
That there’s no version of this where I get to just have him in the daylight, walk into a room with my hand in his, be a girl who’s seeing someone and say his name out loud like Ivory says Drew’s.
I push it down. He’s here, he’s warm, he’s mine tonight. I pull him closer and don’t let the thought finish, because I love this — I love having him — and the thought doesn’t have anywhere good to go.
He falls asleep, and I lie awake in his arms and think. I think about how I have him. All of him. He’s opened up in ways I never thought he would. He laughs, he cuddles, he tells me things, and I would never undo one second of it.
But I’ve started ignoring my roommate who will be gone next semester and whom I will miss deeply.
I’ve bailed countless times on the girls I love and want to see.
I’ve finally found a friend group, and I let it go on purpose.
My life outside this room has gone small and quiet and full of lies, and I did every bit of it myself, to keep the one thing I can’t stand to lose.
I’m too far gone to be angry about it. Too in love.
It’s a trade I made, and I’d make it again — over and over, for him.
I nestle my head against his chest and listen to his heartbeat.