24
Act Normal
Nash
I get back to my room and can’t sit down.
Rafe is watching me like he thinks I’ve lost my mind, and I don’t care, because I probably have. I sit on my bed and stand up again. I go brush my teeth for no reason, since I already did that, and while I’m in there, I look in the mirror.
My mouth is wrecked. The split from two weeks ago is mostly healed, and there’s something new on top of it, on my lower lip where she bit me, swollen on one side. My hair is doing something insane on the left where her hands were. I take a picture and send it to her with no caption.
Kylie: What is that?
Me: My face.
Kylie: I know it’s your face, Nash.
Kylie: Why am I receiving it?
I sit on the edge of my bed and watch the dots come up and go away twice.
Then a picture comes through. She’s in bed with the lamp off and one light somewhere behind her, her hair everywhere, in a T-shirt with the collar stretched out.
Her mouth is as bad as mine. Worse. Her lower lip is swollen, there’s a mark at the corner, and her whole chin is pink where my face was. I look at it for a long time.
Me: We match.
Kylie: We do not match.
Kylie: You look like you got into a fight.
I put the two pictures side by side and send it.
Me: We match.
Me: Send another one.
Kylie: No.
Me: Why?
Kylie: Because I know what you’re doing.
Me: What am I doing?
Kylie: You know EXACTLY what you’re doing!
Kylie: Send me one then.
Me: No.
Kylie: That’s what I thought.
I look at the picture of her again and lie there in the dark for about two hours, not sleeping.
I knock on her door at seven in the morning. It takes a while, and when she opens it, she has one eye open, in the same stretched-collar T-shirt, and she looks up at me like she wants to hurt me.
“It’s seven in the morning, Nash.”
“Get dressed. We’re getting breakfast.”
She blinks. “Are you insane?”
I don’t say anything. I just look at her. She looks back, and then something happens at the corner of her mouth, and she tries to stop it and can’t.
“Give me five minutes,” she says, and shuts the door in my face.
She takes twelve. I stand in the hallway the whole time. When she comes out, she’s in jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair up, and she heads for the stairs, and I steer her toward the elevator instead.
“Since when do you take the elevator?”
I don’t take it. When it opens, I let her walk in first, and I look at the buttons.
I’ve got two floors. The doors close, and I have her back against the wall with my hand on her jaw before it starts moving.
She makes a sound into my mouth and grabs a fistful of my hoodie, and by the time we stop on one, her hair is out of its clip, and the clip is in my hand.
The doors open on two people from the first floor. Kylie says, “Morning,” and walks out with her chin up, and I follow her with her hair clip in my pocket.
It’s cold out, so I put my arm around her shoulders on the path, and she doesn’t say anything about it. She walks closer. Halfway across the quad, she puts her hand in my hoodie pocket, where the clip is, and leaves it there.
The dining hall is half empty. We take a table by the window.
“Where is everybody?” she says.
“Don’t know.”
“Paige didn’t text me. Did Koda text you?”
“Don’t care.”
She rolls her eyes. “Okay.”
I put my leg between hers under the table, and she stares at me while I do it and takes a drink of coffee. “I know what you’re doing,” she says. “You’re trapping me.”
“You can move.”
“I can’t move.” She kicks my shin, which does nothing. “Your legs are enormous.”
I lean forward on my elbows. “What are you doing later?”
“Going to Theo’s to get my jacket,” she says, taking a bite of eggs. “Because it’s still there. I left it there when I got abducted.”
“Tell Kenzie to grab it.”
“I also want to find out if he asked her out.”
“Kenzie can tell you.”
She narrows her eyes. “That’s not how friendship works, Nash.”
I eat. She’s watching me; I can feel it, and I keep eating, and after about ten seconds, she puts her fork down, props her chin on her hand, and grins.
“Aw. Don’t be jealous that I have friends.” She leans forward. “I thought you didn’t get jealous.”
“It’s different now,” I say.
The grin drops off her face. She sits back, picks up her fork, puts it down again. Her ears have gone red, and she looks out the window at the quad for a second.
“I have class,” she says.
She reaches across the table into the pocket of my hoodie, takes her hair clip back, and walks out with her tray.
I have class too and then practice at three-thirty. That’s every day now except Mondays: Berwyn runs it, the whole staff is on the ice, and it goes ninety minutes to two hours depending on how much he hates what he’s seeing.
Greeley doesn’t look at me. It’s been days of this. He’s on the third line, and I’m on the second. He says good morning to everybody in the room except me, and in drills, he does his reps, and I do mine, and we don’t exist to each other. It should feel like winning. It doesn’t feel like anything.
Forty minutes in, we’re doing a two-on-two in the corner, and Koda comes off the boards next to me with his stick across his thighs.
“So I heard you carried a girl out of a Scrabble game. Over your shoulder. Paige got a forty-second voice memo about it from Kenzie. I’ve listened to it four times.
Blondie screams something about you being insane, and then there’s this, like, thud—”
I check him. It’s not hard, just a shoulder along the boards the way you’d do it in a game, and his feet come out, and he goes down on his side and slides about four feet.
He gets up laughing so hard he can barely breathe, and then he comes at me, gets an arm around my neck, and we go into the boards together.
Berwyn blows the whistle three times before we stop, and we’re both laughing as we come out of it.
Rafe skates past without slowing down. “Children.”
Berwyn makes us do lines for it. When we’re done, we’re both bent over at the boards with our hands on our knees.
“Doesn’t matter how much they work us,” Koda says, wheezing. “Still got the energy for more.” Then, he grins. “Did you at least get her pants off, or did you just carry her around campus like a trophy?”
I straighten up and look at him, and whatever’s on my face makes him put both hands up and skate away laughing.
Across the ice, Greeley is doing extra work at the far end with one of the assistants, by himself, on faceoffs. Nobody else is out there. He does about forty of them, and then he does forty more.
I knock on her door at eight. I’m going to ask if she wants to get food. That’s the plan. Then the door opens, and the plan leaves my head.
She’s in a blue thing that matches her eyes, with straps, stopping mid-thigh. Her hair is down, there’s something shiny on her lips, and she’s got different earrings in, putting in the second one as she looks up at me.
Everything in my body goes hot. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Her eyes widen. “Hello to you too.”
I look at her legs.
“There’s a party,” she says. “Bianca’s friend has a house. Paige’s coming here at eight-thirty, and then we’re—”
I walk into her room, and she walks backward and lets me.
There’s a girl at the desk, dark hair up in a clip, headphones on, book open. She turns her head when I come in and goes completely still, the way a cat does. She looks at my face, then at the rest of me, and then past me at the open door and the hallway behind it. Her shoulders stay tight.
“That’s my roommate,” Kylie says, but I’m already looking at Kylie again.
The roommate looks at Kylie, puts her headphones back on, and turns her chair a quarter inch toward the wall. I’ve never seen her in my life, and right now she’s the only thing standing between me and my new plan.
I look down at the blue dress. “I’m coming with you,” I say.
Kylie laughs. “You’re funny.”
She told me this morning she was going to Theo’s. Now she’s standing here in this.
“Where is it?” I ask.
“You weren’t invited.”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t even know whose—”
I kiss her. She makes a sound against my mouth, and her hands come up to my chest like she’s going to push me away, and then she grabs a fistful of my shirt and pulls instead.
I walk her backward. It’s four steps; the room isn’t big.
We go down onto her bed, and it creaks, and her earring hits the floor.
She squeals into my mouth when I suck on her bottom lip.
I get one hand under her shoulder and one in her hair, and she hooks her leg over the back of mine.
“Nash,” she whispers. “My roommate.”
I don’t stop.
“Nash.” She’s laughing and kissing me at the same time and pulling me down. “Paige’s going to be here any second. And I haven’t told them anything yet. I need to tell them first before they walk in and see this.”
“Later,” I say, and kiss her again, and she lets me.
Her hands go into my hair, and she kisses me so hard I forget where I am.
Her dress rides up, and it takes everything I have not to touch her in front of her roommate.
I press my hips into hers, and she pushes me back with her knees while she flicks her tongue against mine.
At some point, she gets up, finds her earring on the floor, and goes to the mirror to put it in. She tugs her dress down and huffs at herself. The shiny thing on her lips is gone.
“Okay,” she says, breathing hard. “Fine. Come tonight.” She finally gets the earring in and points at me. “But no more carrying me out of places. Promise me.”
I look at her.
“Nash.”
“I heard you.”
“Promise?”
I don’t want to promise anything. I’m not going to like being at that party, and I’d rather not lie to her about it. But if I pick her up in that dress, the whole world sees her ass, and I’ve already decided that’s only mine to see.
“Promise,” I say.
It’s the easiest promise I’ve ever made. If she were wearing jeans, I wouldn’t have promised shit.
“Good,” she says, and rubs my shoulder on her way past me, and it takes her roommate sitting right there to keep me from pulling her back.
“The promise is only for tonight,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “You’re so annoying.” She puts her hands on her hips. “I need to finish getting ready, and Paige doesn’t know anything yet, so please go back to your room.”
I stand, and she looks up at me, and I like the way she looks at me. I can just tell.
“I’ll knock,” she says, and I walk out.