46. Chapter Forty-Six
Percy
I’m at my desk, an essay half-written on the screen, when my phone buzzes against the laptop and my stomach drops through the floor.
It’s late. That’s the first thing I clock — the time in the corner of the screen, later than any good text ever comes.
Then the ceiling creaks over my head, Stanley moving around up in his room, and I hear his phone go off a beat after mine, and I understand.
The group chat. It’s only Stanley, running his mouth into the group chat the way he does when he can’t sleep.
The tension in me lets go, and what’s left behind it is flat. Disappointment’s a strange thing. You don’t know you were hoping until the hope’s already gone.
I finish the paragraph I’m on. I make myself do that much. Then I need a break, and I pick up the phone to see what dumb thing Stanley’s said this time.
Her name is on the screen instead.
And everything stops.
Penelope: My apartment is empty.
I read it once, and I’m already out of the chair.
I don’t know what it means exactly, but I think I do, and thinking I do is enough to get me on my feet. Ivory’s in London this semester. Her apartment’s empty and waiting.
There’s a mirror on the back of the door in this new room, and I catch myself in it on the way out.
My hair’s gotten long over the summer, too long, hanging in my eyes, so I push it back with my fingers and mutter at my own reflection in French, and then I go, because the text came through twenty minutes ago, and twenty minutes is already too long.
The side door’s right here. There’s no creaking past the guys’ rooms upstairs, no way for them to know I’m sneaking out. The night’s gone crisp without my noticing summer end. I’m in a t-shirt, but I don’t go back for a jacket. I head straight for Linden Street.
I don’t text her back. I don’t know how to say I’m coming in a way that isn’t already too much, so I just walk fast.
Her building’s dark when I reach it. Her window is a black square with nothing behind it.
Asleep, maybe. Or not home at all. I stand on the sidewalk with my head tipped back, and I look at that dark window for longer than a sane man would, like if I stare hard enough something will move behind the glass.
“It’s empty,” a voice says at my shoulder.
I turn, and she’s right there, close enough to touch, looking up at the same window.
The streetlight catches the side of her face, and my lungs forget their job.
I’ve thought about her every single day for the past six weeks, and somehow I still wasn’t ready for the actual sight of her.
There isn’t a more beautiful woman anywhere in the world.
“You came,” she whispers.
“You texted.”
She looks at me and whatever’s holding me together pulls a notch tighter. I hold her eyes because I don’t trust myself to do anything else with them.
“Let’s get inside,” she says. It’s not an offer or a question.
I follow her, and that’s when I catch the liquor on her breath, warm and sweet under the cold. That explains the text.
The elevator’s quiet the whole way up. She stands close, and I watch the numbers.
Her apartment smells like a candle, and it undoes me a little, because I know it. I spent years learning that smell.
She drops her keys in the dish by the door and toes off her boots. I crouch and take my shoes off too, lining them up neat against the wall, and she laughs at me — quiet, fond.
“You can leave your shoes at the door now. It’s allowed because it’s just me in here.”
The word allowed sits funny in my chest.
“Yeah,” I say, and I follow her into the kitchen in my socked feet on her cold floor.
She opens the fridge and takes out a container, grabs a spoon from the drawer, sets both on the counter between us. The container is filled with white stuff, layered, and fruit on top.
“Want some?”
“What is it?”
“A fruit parfait.” She says it like I know what it is.
I’ve never had one, so I just look at it. She peels the lid, digs the spoon in, and puts a bite in her mouth.
“So good,” she mumbles around it, eyes half shut.
“Yeah?”
She nods and takes another bite, then holds the spoon out across the counter to me.
I reach to take it, and she doesn’t let go.
Her fingers stay wrapped around the handle, so I close my hand over hers instead, both of us holding the one spoon, and I lean in and take the bite off it with my eyes on her the whole time.
Yogurt, granola, some kind of berry. It’s good. I nod to tell her so, and I don’t let go of her hand.
She’s watching my mouth. Her smile goes slow.
“Wanna know something crazy?” she says quietly.
“What?” I lean back against the counter.
She takes her time, blinking slow, spoon paused. “I miss you.”
I shake my head before I’ve decided to. “That’s not crazy.”
“No?”
“No.” I have to look down at the floor to get the rest out. “I miss you too.”
“You do?”
“Of course.” I make myself look up at her. “How could I not miss you, Penelope?” There’s a pressure building behind my ribs now.
“You never texted me,” she says. The softness has gone out of her voice. “You never reached out. Not once.”
“You left.”
She laughs, but there’s nothing funny under it.
“You didn’t come back,” I say.
She goes quiet. “Yeah. I didn’t.”
I scratch at my jaw, hunting for something to do with my hands. “So. How’ve you been?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
The honesty of it lands somewhere tender. A few beats pass before I try again. “You’ve had a few tonight.”
“I have.” She nods down at the empty container. “It was needed.”
“Why’s that?”
She sets the spoon in the sink carefully, like it’s the one thing in this room she gets to control. “It’s better than crying.”
Shit. I drag a hand down my face. There’s no good place to put a sentence like that. It just sits between us, and I can’t find a single word big enough to answer it with.
“Do you even care?” she says, so low I almost lose it under the hum of the fridge. “Do you ever even think about me?”
“Yes.” It comes out rough. “Penelope. I care. You’re — you’re always there. On my mind. You don’t leave.”
“Then what is it?” She won’t turn around. Both hands braced on the edge of the sink, staring out the black window over it. “What is it, Percy?”
I push off the counter and cross to her. I don’t touch her. I just come to stand at her shoulder and look out the same dark glass she’s looking out of, our reflections faint in it.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I think you do.”
I shrug, and my shoulder brushes hers. “I’m not good at this.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “At what?”
“At talking.” The word comes hard. “I don’t know what to say. Most of the time I’ve got nothing, and by the time I’ve found the thing I should’ve said, everyone’s already moved on.”
“But you know what you feel.” She turns her head to look at me. “Even when you can’t say it. You know.”
“No.” I keep my eyes on the window. “Not really. I’m not like you.
You always know what’s going on inside you — you feel it and you name it, right there in the moment.
I wasn’t –– I’m not –– I don’t know what I’m feeling while it’s happening to me.
I only figure it out after, once it’s over, once I’ve had the time to sit with it. ” I finally look at her.
She studies me. “Really.”
I nod.
“So.” She catches her bottom lip in her teeth. “How did summer feel?”
The question knocks the air clean out of me. Summer. It’s almost two months gone, and it already feels like somewhere I got exiled from, a place I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to find my way back into.
“Summer,” I repeat, buying myself a second. “I didn’t know I could be that happy. Didn’t know it was even on the menu, for someone like me.” I swallow hard. “But I know I don’t deserve it.”
My hands find the lip of the counter and hold on. She lays her hand over mine.
“Why wouldn’t you deserve happiness, Percy?”
I turn my hand under hers and let her fingers slot down between mine. The weight of her hand is the only thing keeping me on the floor of my own body.
“Life was hard for me, for a long time.” I keep my eyes on our hands so I can get through it. “Where I come from, wanting was too much. So I got good at not wanting. I got real good at it.”
“Mm,” she says, and her thumb moves slow across the back of my hand.
“And then this summer happened. And now I want things. I want a lot of things.” I have to stop.
“And that scares you,” she says softly.
“Fucking terrifies me, actually.” I let out a breath. “Yeah.”
Her free hand lifts to my face. She pushes the hair back off my forehead and takes a good long look at me.
“This is the longest I’ve ever seen your hair,” she murmurs.
I turn my face into her palm and close my eyes for a second. I let myself have it.
“Come here,” she says.
She keeps hold of my hand and draws me out of the kitchen, and I go wherever she’s taking me — I’d go anywhere she pointed.
She sinks down onto the couch and pulls me with her, and then she climbs half into my lap, folds herself up small against my chest, tucks her head in under my jaw. I get my arms around her.
For a while neither of us says anything. Her weight settles into me. Her breathing slows. My hand moves up and down her back on its own, and that sugary candle-smell is everywhere, and the apartment is so still I can hear the hum somewhere in another room.
“Percy.” Her voice is small now, gone soft with the drink and the late hour. “I don’t ever want to miss you again.”
Something in my chest cracks right down the middle.
“Then you won’t,” I say. “You won’t have to. I mean it.”
She tips her head back to look up at me, and I don’t think about it.
I lean down and kiss her. It’s slow, barely a press of my mouth to hers, and it’s still the best thing that’s happened to me since this school year started.
Her lips are warm and taste faintly of the parfait, of the drink underneath it, and she makes a small sound against me that I already know I’ll be hearing in my head for days.
When we come apart, she stays close, her nose brushing mine.
“Do you want to go to my room?” she asks.
I do. I want it more than I’ve let myself want anything in weeks, and that’s exactly why I can’t.
She’s warm and loose against me, and there’s liquor under the sweetness on her mouth, and whatever she’s asking for right now, and I’m not going to be a thing she has to think about in the morning and wince.
“Not tonight,” I say. I say it into her hair so she can feel it isn’t a no about her.
She pulls back to look at me, and something shutters across her face, and I watch her land on the wrong reason for it.
“Is it the guys?” she says. It isn’t really a question. “Is that it. It’s still the guys.”
“Penelope—”
“Because you know Benson’s got a whole thing with his tutor now.” Her chin lifts. “Lucy. It’s all anyone talks about. The rules are already breaking, Percy, they’re breaking without you, so if that’s the reason—”
“I don’t know anything about that.” And I don’t, not really.
I’ve heard Stanley run his mouth about Benson and his tutor, but Stanley runs his mouth about everything, and I stopped listening a long time ago.
I’ve kept my head down and minded my own business.
“That’s Stanley talk. I don’t get into it. ”
“But if it’s true—”
“It’s not about the guys.” And it isn’t. It’s about the fact that she can’t walk a straight line to that room right now, and I won’t say that out loud because she’ll fight me on it, so I just brush the hair off her face. “It’s not about them. Just not tonight.”
She searches me for a second, and then she lets it go. She doesn’t push. She just nods against me and settles back into my chest.
“Can I ask you something?” she says after a while.
“Anything.”
“Is it okay if I come to a Hawthorne House party?” She picks at a thread on my shirt. “Mara won’t shut up about it. She’s very excited.”
I almost laugh. She’s asking permission to walk into my world, like there’s a version of this where I’d ever tell her no.
“You can come to every single one,” I say. “You don’t have to ask me that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Bring Mara. Bring whoever you want.” I tighten my arm around her. “I’ll spend the whole night watching you across the room.”
She smiles against my collarbone. I feel it more than I see it.
After a few quiet minutes, she says, “I kept the apartment empty on purpose.” Her fingers go still on my sleeve.
“Ivory left, and I never once looked for anyone to take her room. I told myself I was just too busy. But I think I kept it empty hoping you’d turn up in it.
Hoping I’d look over one night and you’d just — be here. ”
I don’t have words. I don’t have anything close. So I press my mouth to the top of her head and hold her tighter, and I pray she can feel all the things I can’t figure out how to say.
“I should look for a roommate soon, though,” she says, quieter still. “I can’t keep an empty room forever.”
“Yeah,” I say.
I don’t loosen my hold, and neither of us says a word about the fact that tonight, at least, the room stays empty and I’m the one filling the quiet in it.
She burrows in. I hold her there on the couch, her heartbeat slowing against mine, and for the first time since the summer walked out the door, I’m not aching.
I’m just here with her.
And for once — for once — I let myself know that I’m happy while it’s still happening.