49. Chapter Forty-Nine
Penelope
I’m still in the angel costume at three in the morning.
I could have taken it off hours ago. The party finished a while ago, Melly’s still out, and the apartment has gone dark and quiet around me.
So I’m sitting on the edge of my bed in a pair of white wings and the thin white slip that goes underneath them, because I texted him, and now I’m waiting.
The wings have taken a beating tonight. One of them is bent where somebody knocked into me on the dance floor and I didn’t bother to fix it.
I danced until my feet gave out, all six of us in a ring, screaming lyrics at each other — and even though every girl in that house was an angel by the end and it stripped the costume of any meaning it might have had, I’m glad.
I’m glad we went as a matched set. I like the friends that I’ve made.
I liked the photos, all our arms tangled, all of us laughing at once.
I liked being part of a good group of girls.
He texts at ten to four.
Percy: Outside.
He looks wrecked when I open the door. His jacket is zipped to his throat, his face gone pale with a tiredness that only shows up at the very tail end of a long, long day.
And I know without asking that he waited out that entire house.
He sat in his room in the dark and listened for the last door to close, the last laugh to die out, the last set of feet on the stairs — and then he walked here at four in the morning.
“Hi,” he says.
I pull him in out of the cold, and the door shuts behind him, and only then does he actually look at me. His eyes go down at the wings, my halo, my stockings, and something moves through his face that gives me butterflies.
“You kept it on,” he says.
“I wore it for you.”
We ride the elevator up grinning at each other, punch-drunk on no sleep and it turns into a giggle into the hallway and into my apartment.
Inside, the door clicks shut, and he steps into my space. He lifts a hand to the wing that’s bent and touches the edge of it. Then that hand travels to my shoulder, to the thin strap of the slip, and he eases it down.
Halfway. Only halfway.
“Thank you for waiting for me.”
I nod.
He undresses me so slowly it’s almost unbearable. He takes the wings off first and sets them down on the counter. Then the white comes down off my shoulders and catches at my elbows, and he stops. He steps back an inch to look at me.
Half angel. Half just me.
“Leave it,” he says when I go to take the rest off. “Like that. I want to look at you.”
I stand there, caught halfway out of a costume in the middle of my own kitchen, and I let him look, because he looks at me the way he doesn’t look at anything else in this world. Total attention. Every bit of him aimed at me.
“You’re beautiful.” His eyes stare into mine.
It comes out low, almost hoarse. “Do you know that? You walked into my house tonight and I couldn’t—” His jaw works around it.
“I had to stand there and keep my eyes down, because you are the most beautiful thing in the world, and I couldn’t look at you for longer than a second without giving myself away. ”
“Percy—”
“My angel.” He says it into the small space left between us, and his hand comes up to hold my jaw. “Heaven-sent. I meant it back then and I mean it now. That’s what you are to me, Penelope. Heaven-sent.”
My heart clenches.
His eyes move across my face like he’s checking he’s got all of it.
“I love you.”
I cover his hand with mine and hold it against my cheek. “I love you too.”
He kisses me, and I come apart.
This is the exact thing I have been starving for and would sooner die than admit I was starving for. To be looked at. To be named out loud. To be wanted by him — only him, always him — and told so in a voice that doesn’t shake.
He takes his time like nobody’s expecting him anywhere.
He keeps his eyes on mine through all of it, every kiss, every touch, every thrust. We start against the kitchen island.
We end up on the couch. We end up in my bed with the door shut, and he holds my chin turned toward him, his forehead pressed to my temple, his breath at my ear.
“You feel so good, Penelope.”
I lift up to meet him.
“Fuck,” he breathes.
We stay tangled in each other for more than an hour.
He wants to keep going, but the light is starting to come through the window.
I lie on my back with the sheet twisted around my legs and he’s beside me, breathing hard at the ceiling, and I could stay here in this exact minute for the rest of my life.
“It’s morning,” he says. “I need to go.”
“Yeah.” I roll onto my side to see him. “I wish you could stay.”
“One day.” He turns his head and looks at me when he says it. “I promise.”
One day. I take that promise, and I put it somewhere safe, the way I’ve put every other one.
“I don’t think the guys would even mind,” I say softly.
He drags a hand down his face. “Maybe.” His mouth stays open a moment while he catches his breath. “Maybe they would. You don’t know how much shit Benson’s been eating for Lucy.”
I don’t answer. I just watch his chest rise and fall in the gray light.
“Are you afraid of what they’d think of you?” I ask.
He looks over. “I’m not embarrassed by you.”
“That’s not—” I turn my face to the window.
“That’s not what I meant.” I feel my forehead pull tight and I do my best to smooth it out before he sees.
“You told me once that you never really had a steady home. Growing up.” I don’t say foster home because every time it’s come up, he freezes.
So I choose my words carefully, and I make myself say the rest. “So I’m asking if you’re afraid that if you do one thing they don’t approve of, they’ll put you out. ”
I look back at him, nervous about what I’m asking.
His eyes fall shut. “I don’t know.” His voice has gone very quiet. “Maybe.”
“They wouldn’t,” I say, and I mean it. I say it to give him something to stand on. “They love you, Percy.”
The silence stretches so long I think he’s fallen asleep.
“They’re the first family I’ve ever had,” he says finally.
And there it is. That’s the thing underneath everything, the entire cause for all of his actions all this time, and he’s finally admitted it.
“I think I’ve got anxiety about it,” he says. “About what happens if it goes wrong.”
“I think you live too much inside your own head.”
He looks at me, and his face has gone strained and helpless. “I can’t fuck this up, Penelope. I’m sorry.”
I press my lips together to hold the wobble out of my voice. “I’ve been waiting, Percy.”
He exhales and scrubs a hand over his face. “I know.” He reaches for me and kisses me, and there’s something in it that feels like an apology he can’t put into a sentence. “I know. Thank you.”
Thank you.
I take the hand he leaves on my cheek and kiss the palm of it, and I say the thing I’ve been sitting on for weeks.
“I graduate this year.”
He pulls back. His breath catches on the way in, sharp. “Shit.”
Not I know. Not I’ve been thinking about that too.
Just shit.
Has it never entered his head? If I put a date on how long we’ve been seeing each other, it’s been a long time.
Heck, it’s been years. And it never crossed his mind that there’s an end date stitched into the bottom of us, that I am a senior graduating soon and a whole life coming for me, that this thing we do in the dark has a clock on it he never bothered to look at.
He has no future-tense version of me. There’s only tonight, and the next tonight, and the one after that.
“I want more,” I say, even though I know he can’t give it to me. I know he won’t, but I say it anyway because it’s my truth, and I can’t keep shoving it down to keep him. I have needs too.
His throat moves in the morning light. He doesn’t answer. Instead, he sits up and puts his clothes back on. I lie there and watch the shape of his back while he does it, and I wait for anything at all.
Then he leans across the bed and kisses me.
“I’ll text you.”
I come up onto my elbows and watch him go.
I don’t sleep after he leaves.
I draw. I draw for my project because I need to put in the hours. I want to come up with my best work.
Then Melly comes home in pieces with her best friend Mila in tow, and I feed them both and I listen to everything going on with her.
She’s wrecked over Blue. She doesn’t put it in those words, but it’s written all over her face. I’m gentle with her because Mila seems to be intolerant. I ask the right questions and don’t push. And I hate that it makes me feel better about my situation. Maybe it’s not all bad.
She goes back to Hawthorne to return Blue’s hoodie and doesn’t come home for a long while.
I stay on the couch while Mila naps, and I draw, because it’s the only thing that makes the hours go somewhere.
He texts me two days later.
Percy: Practice at six. Tired. Miss you.
I read it twenty times.
A week or so later, Melly cracks.
The girls are all here. Gianna, Lucy, Mara, Mila, and me.
We’re sitting in my living room, and the girls are telling her things about Blue.
I can see her face start to pull, and I think what I’m witnessing is pure denial and deep heartbreak.
Melly goes into her bedroom, and she cries.
We can hear her crying, talking to Mila.
The four of us can’t sit around while she’s clearly in pain, so we knock on her bedroom door.
She falls apart, saying she doesn’t know what she’s doing, doesn’t know why she cares this much, doesn’t know what’s wrong with her.
And I go very still.
Because I know that from the inside out, down to my bones. She is saying my exact feelings out loud in the middle of five girls. The wanting. The what-is-wrong-with-me. The why-won’t-he-just –– it’s that one, that’s the one that lives right in the back of my mind most nights.