47. Chapter Forty-Seven
Penelope
I think I dreamed him.
That’s the thought I surface with — that Percy came here last night, and that I made the whole thing up.
My eyes don’t want to open. When they do, the light coming through the curtains is a blade, and it finds the exact spot behind my forehead where the headache’s been waiting.
I groan and roll away from it, into the cold half of the bed.
It’s cold. He’s not here. I dreamed him the way I’ve dreamed him a hundred times since summer, and now I’ll get up and shower and the ache of it will fade like all the others.
Then I open my eyes a little wider, and I see the glass of water on the nightstand.
I don’t bring water to my bedroom. I never have.
I stare at it for a long moment, and then I look down at the blanket pulled up over me.
It’s folded back neat across my chest, tucked just so, and I know I don’t sleep like this.
Somebody laid this blanket over me. Somebody set that water where I’d be sure to find it.
Maybe I didn’t make him up.
I reach for my phone to check the time, and his name is already sitting on the screen, waiting for me.
Percy: Tonight?
I look at that one word until it goes soft at the edges.
Then I put the phone face down on my chest and let myself smile up at the ceiling.
I didn’t dream him. He was here. And now it starts coming back to me in pieces.
The parfait. The couch. His voice in the dark, telling me I’d never have to miss him again.
By the time I get out of the shower, the fog’s burned off, and my head belongs to me again, and I remember all of it. Every piece. The morning grogginess had smeared it into something dreamlike, but it happened. He held me on that couch, and he kissed me.
I pick up my phone with wet hands.
Me: Yes.
Then I walk into my bedroom in nothing but a towel and drink down every drop of the water he left me, and I try not to think too hard about what it means that he’s coming tonight.
He texts again at three in the afternoon while I’m at my drafting table.
Percy: Outside.
I’m at the window before my brain has caught up with my feet, and there he is on the sidewalk in the full light of day, hands shoved in his pockets, looking up.
My pulse does something complicated and undignified.
He never comes in daylight. He never comes anywhere someone could see. I’m flying down the stairs to meet him.
“Hi,” I breathe when I pull the door open.
His whole face opens into a smile. “Hey.”
We ride the elevator up in silence, close but not touching, and the silence has a hum inside it. In the apartment, I shut the door and turn the lock, and he walks to the middle of the room like a man who isn’t sure he’s allowed to sit down.
“Why are you here in broad daylight, Percy?”
“Do you remember last night?” he asks, glancing around like the answer might be somewhere in the room.
I take two steps toward him. “I didn’t, at first.” I pause. “But yes. I remember all of it.”
He nods and rests his hands on his hips. “Good. Okay.”
“Okay?” I close the rest of the distance. “What’s going on with you?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t have long. A few hours, maybe.”
“Do the guys track your every movement?” I tease.
“I sit at the table and read. Same spot, every day. I’m easy to notice when I’m not there.” He exhales. “Trust me. They’d notice.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
His eyes drop to my mouth. “What?”
I walk toward him and say it again, slower. “What are you waiting for?”
He wets his lips, looking down at me from all that height, and then he smiles — that rare, real one he doesn’t hand out to just anybody.
“I thought we agreed we miss each other.” I reach for him.
He breathes in like he’s bracing for something.
“I want you to practice something,” I say.
“Practice what?”
I look at his broad shoulders and whisper, “Practice going after what you want.”
“I’m here in broad daylight, aren’t I?” He pushes a piece of hair back off my face gently.
“You are.” I tilt into his hand. “It’s so unlike you.”
He doesn’t answer that. He just looks at me, and there’s a whole conversation happening behind his eyes that never once makes it to his mouth.
I wind my arms around his neck. “What do you want, Percy?”
He takes my face in both hands. Leans down to kiss me — and I turn my head just enough that his lips find nothing but air, and I whisper against his cheek, “Tell me. Talk to me first.”
For a second he goes still. Then, in French, “C’est toi que je veux.”
I search his face to see if he means it. He does. It’s written across every part of him.
“Not in French, Percy.” My voice comes out unsteady. “English. I want to understand.”
“J’ai jamais rien voulu autant que je te veux, toi.” His forehead drops against mine, and his voice sinks to almost nothing. “C’est pour ?a que je suis ici, là, maintenant. J’ai envie de toi tout le temps. Je t’aime.”
The words pour out of him, fast and sure, more than I’ve maybe ever heard him say in one breath — and I can’t understand a single one of them. It’s the cruelest thing in the world, watching a man who never has his words finally find a whole flood of them, in a language I don’t know.
“Percy.” It’s half a plea now. “I want to know what you’re saying to me.”
He whispers, “Just kiss me.”
“That’s not what you said.”
He shakes his head against mine, and I feel him smiling. “No. It’s not.”
I press one soft peck to his lips and pull back.
“Not like that.” His hand comes up to cradle the back of my neck. “Like the French.”
He leans in and kisses me the way I’ve missed. And I meet him just as hard, because I have missed this. A sound gets away from me. I pull back an inch to look at him, and his pupils have gone wide and dark, and the heat of it drops straight through me.
I kiss him again and press the whole length of myself against him. He’s too tall for it; I go up on my toes and still can’t get close enough. So he solves it without a single word. His hands find the backs of my thighs and lift, and I wrap my legs around him.
“Bedroom?” His mouth is at my jaw.
I nod into his hair, and he carries me through the apartment like I weigh nothing at all.
He lays me down and follows me onto the bed, his weight settling over me, and he kisses me so slow and deep that my hands go clumsy at the hem of his shirt. Then the slowness breaks and we’re both pulling at fabric, at buttons, until there’s nothing left between us but skin.
When he finally moves inside me, I can’t keep quiet, and I don’t try. I hold his face because I need to watch him. He’s staring down at me like I’m the only fixed point in a spinning room, his breath gone ragged, everything he can’t say written plain across his features for once.
“I love you, Penelope,” he says. “I love you so much.”
And there it is. In English. In a voice that doesn’t shake.
“I know,” I whisper, pulling him down to me. “I love you too.”
Afterward, dressing on opposite sides of the bed, I try to make my voice light. “Would it be weird if I came to a game?”
“No.” He looks up, brow creasing. “Why would that be weird?”
I shrug one shoulder. “I just want to know you’re okay with it.”
“Yeah.” He pulls his shirt over his head, and there’s something almost shy in his voice. “I’m not on the bench this year.”
“You’re not?”
“No.” The smile he gives me is small and proud and can’t quite hold still. “I’m not.” He leans across the bed and kisses me. “You’ll come?”
“Are you inviting me now?”
He grins. “Guess I am.”
“Then yeah.” I loop my arms around his neck and don’t let go. “I’ll be there. Do you have to leave right now?”
“Yeah.”
I kiss him with my eyes shut, memorizing the shape of it. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”
“Tonight, right?”
I hold his eyes and let a slow shrug answer for me. “Really?”
“I’ll see you tonight, Penelope,” he says, and steps back out of my arms.
“Okay,” I smile. “Tonight.”
For two weeks, it goes like this. He shows up at half past midnight, when the guys are asleep.
We’re kissing before we’re talking. He carries me to the bedroom, and we come apart together until we’re both wrecked and breathless, and then we lie tangled in the dark, kissing slow, until the hour turns, and he has to ease back out into the night.
I’m still his secret. He’s still mine.
I’d thought the summer changed something. I really believed it had. But nothing moved underneath. The foundation is exactly where it always was, and we’re still doing this the only way we know how — we’re on glass, careful and quiet.
One night he comes at one in the morning, and I have class first thing and my internship after, and I’m so tired my bones ache with it.
I let him hold me anyway. I fall asleep against his chest with his heartbeat under my ear.
And I don’t tell him. I don’t tell him how much it’s begun to hurt, being loved only in the last seconds of the day.
How I’ve become the thing he gets to after everything else — the appointment at the very bottom of the calendar, squeezed in past midnight where no one will ever see.
I don’t tell him that I’m drowning on no sleep, or that some nights I lie awake after he’s gone and wonder what it says about me, that I’ll take him in pieces because I can’t have him whole.
I don’t say any of it. This is the arrangement. I get the midnight version of him, and I keep my mouth shut about the rest.
“I put up an ad for the room,” I say one night, cheek on his chest, my nerves loud in my own ears. “I did a few interviews already.”
His fingers keep moving slowly through my hair. “Is someone moving in?”
“There’s one girl I really liked. I told her it was taken, though.” I don’t tell him the real reason — that I’d been holding the room empty like a held breath, keeping it open for a version of us that keeps not arriving.
He’s quiet for a moment. His hand goes still in my hair.
“Call her back,” he says. “Tell her it’s open.”
I lift my head. “You’re not mad?”