49. Chapter Forty-Nine #2
We swarm her. All five of us, at once, folding her into the middle of our bodies.
And it’s the group hug that finishes me.
Because Melly gets to fall apart in a room full of women who love her, with five sets of hands holding her together.
She gets to say it. She gets to be a girl with a wet face and a broken heart and the whole friend group who knows exactly what’s going on with her and are trying to fix it.
I have to keep mine folded up and stowed. I have to sit in the pile with my arms around her and my own thing screaming in my head, and I have to make my face do sympathy when what I’m actually feeling is envy so sharp it’s hard to breathe around.
That’s what he’s cost me. Not just him. Everybody. He’s made me a stranger in my own friendships.
I sneak into his room twice more that month.
The first time, I take his clothes off in the dark and go down on him in a way I never have before — slower, filthier, my hands and mouth working like I’ve got something to prove.
Because I do. That’s the ugly truth of it.
I want him to want me somewhere out in the daylight, and I can’t get him there with words, so I try it with my body.
I try to make myself unforgettable. I try to be so good that the memory follows him into the room with the guys, into practice, into whatever quiet space he does his deciding in, so that when he’s weighing me against that house he’ll feel exactly what it costs to keep me a secret.
He comes with my name in his mouth and his hand fisted in my hair, and afterward he pulls me up against his chest and holds me like I’m precious.
I lie there in the dark listening to his heart slow down and I think to myself, look at what you’ve turned into. Bargaining. Auditioning for a role you already have. Trying to earn what should have been given.
I don’t cry until I’m back in my car.
On the drive home, I try to picture him at my graduation.
The lawn, the gowns, my mother in a hat she’ll have agonized over for a month, my father taking eleven identical photographs.
And I go to put Percy into it. Standing beside my mother.
Shaking my father’s hand. Wearing a shirt with buttons.
Saying I’m Percy out loud to two people whose daughter he’s been in love with for years.
I can’t imagine it. The picture won’t hold. Every time I try to set him down inside it, he goes transparent at the edges and slides right off, and what I’m left with is a lawn full of families and a girl in a gown standing on her own, checking her phone.
The second time I sneak in, I’m lying in his arms in the dark when the ceiling above us erupts.
Somebody’s out of bed and running the length of the room up there, and there’s a crash, and then two of them laughing so hard the floor shakes.
“Lucy stays over sometimes,” Percy murmurs into my hair.
“Oh.” I keep my voice level, listening to the two of them upstairs. I try to ignore the way my palms start to sweat about the fact that Lucy is up there right now. “So it’s serious, then.”
“I don’t know.” His fingers travel slowly up and down my arm.
I whisper, “Melly doesn’t come home a lot of nights now.”
“Yeah,” he says, barely above a breath.
We lie there while the noise upstairs works itself out and goes quiet, and I stare into the dark of a room I’m not allowed to be in, and I think about who’s above me — Benson and Lucy; Blue and Melly.
“I’m happy for our friends,” I say to the ceiling. “I really am.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “But I’d like to be happy too.”
His hand stops on my arm. “You’re not happy?”
That question lands in the middle of my chest.
I pull away from him and sit up. He turns his head to watch me go.
“How could you possibly think this makes me happy?”
“Penelope—” He pushes up onto an elbow.
“Do you know how much sleep I’ve lost?” It’s coming now, and I can’t get in front of it.
“Not just this month. Not just this year. Since I met you. Do you have any idea how much of myself I’ve handed over and how little I’ve gotten back?
You give me scraps, Percy. You give me the last twenty minutes of the day when there’s nobody left awake to see, and I take them, and I say thank you, and I hate myself in the car on the way home. ”
“What? That’s not—”
“Blue is dancing with my roommate in front of the entire house. Benson is on his knees at every moment possible.” My eyes have gone hot. “And I stand nine feet away from you in your own kitchen and hold my cup out like a stranger. I watched you fill Mara’s to the top and give me half.”
“I did that so nobody would—”
“I know why you did it.” That’s the worst part. I always know why. He’s never once given me a reason I couldn’t understand and forgive. “That’s not the point I’m making.”
He sits all the way up. In the dark I can see the shape of his shoulders, the way his hands have gone open and useless in his lap.
“Tell me what to do,” he says.
“I’ve told you what to do. I told you in August. I told you on the porch at Halloween. I told you nine days ago in my bed when I said I want more, and you said shit, and then you got dressed and left.” My voice cracks straight down the middle. “You’ve had years, Percy. Not weeks. Years.”
He looks at me.
“Don’t tell me one day, Percy. Give me a date—”