Chapter 1 #4
“Yeah, no, sounds good.” His voice is even. Too even. “We’ll be there.” He looks back at Penelope. “Thanks for the invite.”
“Yeah.” She closes the fridge. “It’s going to be fun. Mara will text you the address. We’ll be there by eight.”
I nod. “Okay.”
She picks up her coffee cup and walks past us toward her bedroom.
At the door, she pauses. She turns her head — just barely, just enough — and her eyes find mine, and for a half-second I see something on her face that I don’t yet know her well enough to read.
Concern, maybe. Or recognition. Then her door closes.
The living room falls quiet.
We go back to my bedroom and shut the door.
I keep a careful distance between us, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
I hate that I’m on edge. I think he can feel it, so he doesn’t push.
And that’s the thing about him. To his credit, he doesn’t push.
He flops onto his back on my bed and pulls out his phone to occupy himself while I sit at the desk and dive back into studying.
The air settles, and everything feels normal between us.
He tells me about work. There’s a new guy who started at the warehouse who can’t lift a pallet without throwing out his back.
He reminds me how much he hates that I’m at Camden U and how he’s considering buying a new truck with better mileage.
I make small noises in response. Mhm. Yeah. That sucks. Oh. I don’t absorb any of it. I’m reading the same paragraph of my research methods textbook for the fourth time.
The afternoon goes.
The light shifts.
At some point, Chase falls asleep with his phone on his chest, his mouth open, and his ankle crossed over his knee.
I look up from my textbook and watch him for a long minute.
His chest rising and falling. His hair flat against his forehead.
He looks young when he sleeps. He looks like the boy I met two years ago at a party, the boy who told me I had pretty eyes and asked for my number, hands in his pockets, like he was bracing for me to say no. He was sweet, then. He’s sweet, now.
I love him.
I do.
I love him in the way a girl can love a boy who has been there.
I love him the way you love your favorite blanket.
It’s always the one you reach for. It lives on your bed.
It’s a blanket that does the job. And I’ve had to stop Mila a hundred times whenever she’d ask me if he’s the one, or if he sets my soul on fire.
I didn’t want my soul to be set on fire after everything I went through in high school.
I wanted the comfort of a blanket. I think I deserved that much.
However, I’m twenty years old, and I love a boy I will not marry.
I know that much, and I still don’t know what to do with it.
I go back to studying.
Mara texts me the address. I message Mila to come over to get ready. The sun goes down. Penelope leaves the apartment with her keys jingling — I hear them through the door — and twenty minutes later, Mila is at the front door with a bottle of vodka in her hand and her hair already done.
“What’s that for?” I ask, looking at the bottle.
“Don’t you know the rule?” She walks past me into the kitchen and sets it on the counter like she lives here. “Never show up empty-handed.”
I nod. Right. Of course. I am the worst house guest in America.
Chase is up. In the last hour, he’s eaten half a frozen pizza I baked for him, taken a forty-minute nap, washed his face in my bathroom, put on a different shirt — a different version of the same shirt, navy instead of grey — and asked me three times if I’m almost ready.
He’s back on his back on the bed, scrolling, one ankle crossed over the other knee, boots still on, and I have decided that I’m not going to mention it.
I walk back to the mirror and redo my eyeliner. I take a tissue and wipe a smudge off my cheekbone. I lean in and stand back, and I lean in again. Mila is leaning against my doorframe with her arms crossed, watching me.
“Do you need help?” she asks.
“I almost got it.”
She looks past me. “Hi, Chase.”
“Mila. How’re you?”
“Excited to party. Are you drinking tonight?”
“Maybe a beer.”
She raises an eyebrow at me in the mirror. “Should we take a shot before we go?”
“Yes, please. Let me finish this really quick.”
I finish my mascara. I lean back and look at my eyes. They are popping. Mila steps up next to me at the mirror, and she looks at me, and she mouths, very slowly, very deliberately, the words wow, you look hot.
I look at myself in the mirror, and my whole body tingles low and slow because I do look good. But I’m terrified of going to the Hawthorne House. What kind of name is that for a house anyway? It’s so intimidating.
Chase hops off the bed and stands behind me. He’s too short to look over my head in the mirror, so he stands to the side, and he whistles low. “Wow.”
Mila smiles at me in the glass.
“You look hot too,” I tell her, and I mean it, because she does. Her hair is in soft waves. Her mascara is perfect. She’s wearing a green top that does things for her boobs.
She squeezes my arm. “I’m so excited you transferred here, Melly, and look, you’re being invited to parties!” Her eyes widen. “We have to take advantage of your new roommate.”
“No, I love her,” I say quickly because I do.
“You know what I mean.”
I do. But I want a real friendship out of this. I don’t want Penelope to be a means to an end. I want her to be someone I know in five years, who I send Christmas cards to, who I tell my children about. I only just moved in, and I’m already attached.
I blow out a sigh. “Is my outfit okay though?”
Mila looks me up and down. She looks at Chase, who is back on his phone. She looks back at me and whispers, “Do you have your blue top?”
I inhale. The blue top is the one that matches my eyes. The blue top is the one Mila made me buy in a TJ Maxx years ago, the one she said would — I remember her exact phrasing — take a boy down.
“I don’t think it’s the right night for that,” I whisper back.
She nods. “Okay. Yeah. You look good. You can never go wrong with a white tee and jeans.”
I walk to my dresser and spray myself with the perfume my mother gave me for Christmas — vanilla and something floral, very safe, very sweet — and I pull out my phone.
“I’m texting Mara that we’re on our way.”
“First,” Mila says, “let’s take a picture.”
I lean my back against her shoulder. My hair falls onto her collarbone, and I tip my chin up and try to look like someone who knows what to do with her face in a photo. She takes three quick shots in the mirror.
Chase rolls his eyes. “Come on.”
It deflates the moment by just a notch. Mila is unfazed. She keeps posing. We burst out laughing as Chase huffs and walks out of the room, and the laughter is the first real thing I have done all day.
We walk into the kitchen and take a shot.
“You guys are killing me,” Chase says, leaning over the counter.
Mila scowls at him. “Don’t be a buzzkill, Chase.”
He looks at me like I’m about to defend him. I lift a brow and take my first shot of the night. I’ll be needing more of this later.
When we hit the sidewalk, the air is colder than I expected.
“It’s an eighteen-minute walk,” I say, checking the map on my phone.
“We should just take my truck,” Chase says, pulling his keys out of his pocket.
I open my mouth to say no — to say it would be nice to walk, I’d like the air, and I wanted the time with Mila to settle my nerves before we got there — and I close it again, because Chase has already started toward the parking lot.
We climb into the cab of his truck.
I’m wedged between them. Mila’s perfume — something sharper and more confident than mine — fills the small space.
The dashboard glows blue. Chase puts on his music, which I have developed a complicated relationship with over two years.
It’s always the same six country songs on a loop, the kind of country that is only about trucks and beer.
I inhale when we pull onto Hawthorne Street shortly after. Cars are parked end to end on both sides of the road. My heart is consistently thumping against my ribs. My fingers, in my lap, will not stay still.
Chase finds a spot. He parks and cuts the engine. The silence in the cab, after the music, is enormous. I pull out my phone and start texting, praying that Mara will walk out the front door to get us.
Me: Here.
Mara: Coming!
“Ready?” Chase says.
I nod, even though I’m the opposite of ready. I have never, in my whole life, been less ready for anything.
Mila reaches over and grabs my arm. “We’re going to have fun tonight,” she says into my ear, low enough that Chase can’t hear.
I grip her hand. “Yeah.”