43. Chapter Forty-Three
Percy
But I shared it with Penelope that Friday, and she kissed me hard until I felt dizzy. Then she made a whole dinner about it, and that was enough. That was more than enough. As long as I have her, it’s enough.
The guys clear out the second week of May.
I stand in the driveway and watch as Stanley loads his truck like he’s moving out for good, three duffels, a mini-fridge, a speaker, hugging everybody twice, telling me to air out his room and hold down the fort.
He’s stopped with the Mon Petit Percy nickname.
Now I’m just Pers. He tells me that he’ll see me in August, and how we’re going to make sure as hell to have the best senior year possible.
Benson is already gone with his family. Gianna came around, said bye to all of us, and then went with him.
Rowan left that morning. Blue has gone home.
The goodbyes come easy now, easier every year.
I watched them go and I know they’re coming back in August, all of them are, no question — and that’s still a strange thing to be sure of, that people come back.
Next year’s the last one for Stanley, Benson, and Rowan.
They’ll be seniors. Blue and I will be juniors. We’re supposed to make it count.
I walk back in the house because Penelope is planning to be here within the hour, and she’s staying with me. Not just for a night. We’ll be together for the whole summer. Hawthorne is ours, Linden is ours, and we have all the time in the world to be together.
She shows up a little after noon with a bag over her shoulder and a box of her stuff in her arms — pencils, a couple of books, the good coffee she likes that I never buy.
She stops just inside the door and looks around the empty house, the quiet kitchen, the couch, the stairs, all of it ours now, and she sets the box down on the counter.
“You’re sure I can stay here?” she asks.
“For three months.”
“Three months.” She turns and looks at me, and there’s something huge and careful under how light she’s keeping it. “We don’t have to hide for three months.”
I cross the kitchen, pull her in, and kiss the top of her head. She wraps her arms around me.
“No,” I answer. “We don’t.”
She kisses my mouth, and I still can’t fully believe I get this.
A few weeks into it, I wake up before her. I’m on my back, her half on top of me, the whole day empty ahead of us, the way every day’s been for weeks.
“Are you watching me sleep?” she mumbles.
“Yeah.”
“Stop.” She smiles into my chest, and the light’s on her, gold and soft, her face still loose with sleep.
“You’re kind of heaven-sent, you know that.”
She keeps her eyes closed, but a smile plays on her lips. “Like an angel?” she murmurs.
“Yeah.” I move my hand up into her hair. “Like an angel.”
She stretches and then wraps her arms around me.
“Are you religious?” she huffs.
“God, no,” I answer. “Definitely not.”
“Mm,” she hums.
I run my fingers along her hair. “But if I were,” I say, “I’d think God sent you to me.”
She doesn’t respond right away. Instead, she echoes what I said earlier. “Your angel?”
I chuckle. “Yeah, my angel.”
She laughs, low and pleased. She tucks her head back down under my jaw, and we lie there while the sun climbs the wall.
The radiator’s off for the season. Somewhere outside, a bird’s going.
She traces something absent on my chest with one finger, a shape, a floor plan maybe, she does it in her sleep sometimes, and I hold still and let her. My angel.
I could get up. There’s coffee. There’s the whole day. I don’t get up. I stay in the warm and the light with her drawing nothing on my chest, and I let the first morning of the summer take as long as it wants.
We go to the lake on the first Sunday I’m not working.
It’s a small one, twenty minutes out, the kind nobody goes to, and in the summer with the students gone, it’s dead empty — a couple of families at the far end, a guy fishing off the dock, nobody who knows us, nobody who’d care if they did.
Penelope’s the kind of person who packs a whole bag — food in containers, a blanket, sunscreen she makes me put on because I never would, two books, one of which she knows I won’t read.
We lay the blanket in the grass up from the water, where there’s a little shade coming off a tree, and she sets everything out with the exactness she does everything, the food arranged, the corners of the blanket squared, and I lie back on it and watch her fuss and don’t help because watching her is better.
“You could help,” she says.
“I could.”
She nudges me, but I catch her arm and pull her on top of me.
“What are you doing?” she asks, falling onto me.
“Kissing you,” I answer, wrapping my fingers behind her neck and kissing her mouth.
She pushes off me and says, “Alright. I’m almost done.”
The sun’s high, the water’s flat, and there’s a breeze coming off it.
We eat the food she made, and she talks — about her internship, about a stair detail on the mill that’s been fighting her for a week, about Ivory and London and the coat she’s already bought for a country she hasn’t moved to yet.
I don’t say much. I just listen, the way I always listen to her.
After a while, she lies back next to me and puts her head on my chest and goes quiet.
The sun moves. The guy on the dock catches a fish and lets it go.
Her breathing slows, and slows, and then she’s asleep on me in the grass with the light coming through the leaves, and I put my arm around her and lie there and don’t move for an hour.
I’ve never had an hour like it. A whole hour with nowhere to be, no one to watch for, and a beautiful girl asleep on my chest in the sun.
I look at the water, the trees, the back of her head.
A year and a half ago, I couldn’t sleep four hours straight and didn’t own anything I couldn’t fit in a bag.
Now there’s a girl asleep on my chest in the sun, and nowhere either of us has to be.
I keep my hand on the small of her back, and I don’t try to figure out how I got here. I just let it be an hour.
She finally wakes up when the sun shifts off her face, blinking, a crease on her cheek from my shirt.
“How long was I out?”
I grin, not minding it. “A while.”
“You should’ve woken me.”
“No,” I say. “You looked beautiful, Penelope.”
She looks at me for a second, and something soft crosses her face.
“Peaceful.” I lift my brows and sigh. “And I have plans for you tonight.”
“You do?”
“Nothing crazy,” I say. “It includes not sleeping.”
She pinches me, and I don’t flinch. Then she just settles back down against me, her hand finding mine, and we stay until the light goes long and gold, and it’s finally time to fold the blanket and drive home to the house on Hawthorne Street that’s ours.
She teaches me to cook on a Tuesday because she’s decided I can’t live on the restaurant’s mistakes forever.
“One thing,” she says, standing at the Hawthorne stove with a pan. “You’re going to learn to make one thing well, and then you’ll always have it. Everybody should have one thing.”
“I’ve got the juice.”
She doesn’t catch on. She just says, “Juice is not dinner, Percy.” She points the spoon at me. “Come here. Watch.”
I’m a terrible cook. I’m genuinely bad at it, which surprises her.
She tells me that I’m good with my hands at everything else, but put me in front of a hot pan and I go clumsy.
I even cut the onion wrong. She laughs at me, openly, delighted, and I burn the garlic the first time, and we have to start over.
“You’re a Division One athlete,” she says, wiping her eyes. “You have the reflexes of a cat. How are you losing to an onion?”
“The knife is dull.”
“Right. The knife.”
I flick water at her, and she shrieks and threatens me with the spoon, backs me into the counter with it. I catch her wrist, and she’s laughing up at me. The garlic’s about to burn again, and neither of us cares.
This is the best hour of my week. I wouldn’t trade it for the net. That’s the whole reason the rule exists — I get it now, standing here with sauce on my shirt and her laughing at me. This. This is the thing it’s built to keep out. And right now I’d break it without a second thought.
We eat what we made at the kitchen table with the windows open and the summer night coming in.
Dinner isn’t even that good, it’s a little burnt, but it’s the best meal I’ve ever had.
After she washes dishes, I dry. She bumps me with her hip, and I bump her back.
The radio’s on low while we put everything away for the night.
This is what people have. I used to think the houses I got shuffled through were all faking it, that nobody’s kitchen actually looked like this at night. Turns out some of them weren’t faking. Turns out, I wasn’t in the right one yet. She catches me looking at her while she dries the last pan.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.” I take the pan from her. “Nothing.”
She stands tall the way she can’t help but present herself. I pull her into me. “I just love you so much.”
She smiles. “Yeah?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
She kisses me, and I kiss her back because I mean it.
I love her so much it scares me.
August comes fast, the way it always does here, and I start feeling the days go. The light starts going earlier. The mornings come in cooler now, even if the lake’s still holding summer.
There’s a text in the group chat one night — Stanley, asking who’s got the big room this year and asking if the fridge still alive. He mentions how many days are left until he’s back. I put the phone face down on the table. She sees me do it.
“The guys?”
“Yeah. Stanley’s counting down.”
“To coming back.”
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t say anything for a second because coming back means the house fills back up and the whiteboard gets an audience. We go back to hiding whatever this is. We haven’t ever talked about what we are to each other.
“How long?” she asks.
“Couple weeks.”
She nods and goes back to her drawing. I turn back to my book. The days are creeping up on us quickly.