Chapter 10
Blue
She’s on top of me.
That’s the first thing I register. Before my eyes are open, before I’ve remembered what room I’m in or what day it is, before any of it, my body knows there’s a body on it.
Warm. Solid. The weight of her chest on my chest. The slow weight of her breathing against the side of my neck.
A hand under my t-shirt at my ribs, slack, palm flat.
I don’t move.
I’m not awake enough to be careful. I’m awake enough to know not to move.
The room is grey. Almost light. Some bird is going at it outside the window. The house is quiet around us.
She’s breathing into the side of my throat where it tickles.
I tilt my head down without moving the rest of me. Her face is turned toward me. Her mouth is open just slightly. Her hair is across my collarbone in a dark wave I can feel against my skin, and I don’t move because if I move, she’ll wake up, and I’m not ready for her to wake up yet.
The mustache I drew on her face last night is still on her. It’s smudged on one side. Where her cheek’s been pressed to my shirt.
She’s still asleep.
I brush a piece of her hair back off her forehead.
My hand does it on its own. I tuck the strand behind her ear, and she makes a small, soft sound in her throat and burrows her face deeper into the side of my neck.
My whole chest goes warm in a way I haven’t felt in a very long time, and I just lie there.
I lie there for a minute. I don’t think. I just have her on me.
My arm under her has gone numb. Fuck. I have to pee. I can’t hold it in any longer.
I move her slowly.
One hand under her shoulder, one at her hip, and I roll her off me toward the wall side of the bed.
She makes a small, unhappy noise in her sleep.
Her hand under my shirt slides away from my ribs, and her cheek leaves my neck.
She settles on her side, the hoodie bunched at her back, her hair across my pillow.
Her mouth is still open. Her eyes don’t open.
I pull the blanket up over her and tuck it under her chin.
I sit up. The room spins for half a second and then steadies. My shoulder grabs hard when I push up on it. I look around for my hoodie and realize that the only one I have is on Melly. The bedroom is cold, but I man it as I cross the room.
I look at her in the bed before I open the door. She’s small in it. The hoodie is around her like a shell. One bare leg is out of the blanket — she must have taken off the nylons at some point, I don’t remember her taking them off — and her hand is under her cheek.
I open the door slowly and pull it shut behind me.
The hallway is quiet. The single yellow bulb is still on. Somebody left a Solo cup on the runner.
I cross the hall to the bathroom and close the door.
I pee, wash my hands, and splash cold water on my face.
I stand at the sink with the water dripping off my jaw, and I look up at the mirror.
I look like I haven’t slept. The eyes are bad.
The hair is bad. I’m hungover but not destroyed. I look like a guy who had a night.
Then I see a mark. My brain clocks it as a hickey, but there’s no way.
I know for a fact we didn’t do anything inappropriate last night, so I look closer.
It’s a smudge. A thin black smear across my collarbone, half an inch above the neckline of my t-shirt.
I lean into the mirror. It’s from the pen I drew her mustache with.
It’s where her face was pressed against my throat all night. Her mouth at my collarbone.
I have her face on my body.
I put my hands flat on the edge of the sink and look at the smudge. I look at my eyes in the mirror, and then I look at the smudge again. My stomach drops.
She has a boyfriend.
That’s the thought that gets me. Just the word. Boyfriend. The full weight of it dropping through my chest, all at once, slow and final, and the heat I’ve had in me since I woke up turns. Just turns. The way milk turns to cheese.
She has a fucking boyfriend.
Chase something. Chase the guy who has had her for two years.
Two fucking years. God, that’s a long time.
I can’t even imagine that. She was eighteen or nineteen when she got with him?
Holy shit. She’s even brought him here. The guy has been inside my house at a classic Hawthorne House party.
He was at her side all night that night, his arm at her hip, his thumb on her lower back, and her lips on his.
I couldn’t even let myself look at the guy because looking at him made me feel things I had no right to feel.
That guy is, somewhere, ninety minutes away in our hometown.
And I spent the last twelve hours dancing with his girlfriend like a fucking asshole.
I gave her my jersey. I gave her my bed.
I gave her my only hoodie. I gave her my t-shirt.
I gave her my pillow. I let her sleep on me all fucking night.
I let her sleep on my chest. I let her hand stay flush against my ribs this morning.
And now there’s a fucking smudge from her face on my neck like some kind of mark to remind me that she was never mine.
I helped a girl cheat. Maybe not physically but emotionally.
I close my eyes.
Aw, I am so fucked.
I open them.
The smudge is still there. It hasn’t gone anywhere.
I am the other guy now.
I think about him. I let myself think about Chase. The way she leaned into his side without thinking. The way he kissed the top of her head when they walked into the kitchen. The way I had thought, the entire time he was in my house, Good. Let him love her. Let her have a good man.
She’s going to hate me. She’s going to fucking hate me and want absolutely nothing to do with me now.
Fuck, I shouldn’t have gotten into the bed last night.
I stand at the sink for a long time. I don’t know how long.
Somebody flushes a toilet downstairs. The pipes thump in the wall.
The house is starting to wake up around me.
I rub at the smudge with my thumb. It doesn’t come off.
I rub harder. The skin goes red. The ink stays.
It’s set into the small lines of my collarbone, and it isn’t going anywhere.
I leave it and walk out of the bathroom.
I stand outside my own bedroom door with my hand on the handle.
The girl that I’ve been running from for years is in there.
It doesn’t feel real. I don’t know how we keep coming back to each other, even after all this time.
My head is too fucked up to handle her. She deserves so much better than what I can offer.
What the fuck have I even offered her? A bunch of almosts.
I should fucking know better by now. I lose all control when I’m around her, so why do I think it’d be different now?
I step back and stare at the door. She’s going to wake up and realize that I’m still the same piece of shit that doesn’t deserve her. But why does that matter? She’s already moved on. She already fucking knows this. She has a fucking boyfriend.
I could punch the wall right now. Instead, I take another step back.
The wall I built brick by fucking brick is back up.
The same exact one I built when we were seventeen.
The girl in my bed has my heart, and it gives her too much power over me.
Without that control, I’ll lose everything.
I’ve seen my mom do it over and over –– and I fucking can’t.
I have too much to lose. I cannot go in there.
I can’t look at her face with her boyfriend in my head and her mustache on my chest and pretend I am the same carefree man I was last night.
I go downstairs.
The kitchen is worse than I thought it would be.
Red cups on every flat surface. The dining room table covered in cups and one half-eaten plate of Rowan’s veggie tray and what looks like a wing somebody peeled off a costume and never picked back up.
The pumpkin lights are sagging across the kitchen archway.
There’s something I don’t want to identify in the corner of the living room.
Stanley is on the couch with a blanket pulled halfway over his head and one bare foot sticking off the cushion.
Percy is at the coffee machine, mumbling in French. Posh, motherfucker. He’s already dressed — sweats and a long-sleeve — and his hair is wet from a shower. He has the small Sunday morning calm of a man who has been awake for an hour and made peace with this mess.
He looks up when I come in. His eyes go to my collarbone first. I see them go.
He doesn’t say anything. He looks back at the coffee machine.
“Coffee’s almost done.” He goes back to it.
Doesn’t ask. Doesn’t even glance up again.
He pulls two mugs down from the cabinet — one for him, one for me — without asking, and I love him for it in a way I don’t have words for.
My head’s a fucking mess. I can’t stop the jabbing thoughts in there, stabbing from every angle, screaming at me that I’m a fucking idiot.
I stand at the island and put my hands flat on the marble.
I don’t sit. There’s no version of my body that knows how to sit right now.
The coffee machine hisses. Percy fills two mugs. He slides one to me across the marble.
“Drink it. You look like shit.”
I take my mug and hope he doesn’t ask. He picks up his own mug and leans against the counter across from me.
He doesn’t sip his. He just holds it in both hands.
He’s not looking at me directly, but he isn’t looking away either.
He’s doing the Percy thing, which is to occupy a room without taking up space in it.
Then there’s a knock at the front door. We both turn our heads.
Percy raises his eyebrows.
I say, “I got it.”