27
Apparently, Six Hours Is Enough
Kylie
I wake up in my own bed on Sunday, and something is wrong.
It takes me a second. The ceiling is mine, the string lights are mine, and across the room, Tessa is a lump under her comforter with one foot hanging off the end.
I slept hard, the kind of hard where you don’t move once.
My thighs still ache when I shift, and so does my lower back, and some muscle on the inside of my hip that I didn’t know I had.
My hand is already on the other side of the bed, flat on the sheet, palm down, and the sheet is cold.
I look at my own hand like it belongs to somebody else.
I’ve slept next to Nash Kennebeck exactly once, for about six hours, and I was unconscious for most of them.
And I just woke up in the bed I’ve slept alone in every night since August and reached across it for somebody who has never been in it.
I take my hand back and smash my face into the pillow.
No. Absolutely not. That’s not a thing I get to have after one night.
My phone has nothing from him, but I have two texts from Paige, one from my mom asking if she should mail my winter coat, and a notification that my screen time is up forty percent this week, which is frankly none of my phone’s business.
“Morning,” Tessa says, muffled by her comforter.
I laugh. “Morning, Tess.”
“Are you okay?”
I roll onto my back and laugh again at the ceiling. “I think so.”
I meet Paige at the library at eleven, because I have a reading due Monday I’ve been avoiding since Wednesday, and because Paige is apparently incapable of doing homework unless somebody is physically present to watch her not do it.
We get a table on the second floor by the window, and she opens her laptop and immediately starts texting Koda.
“You said you were going to work.”
“I’m texting about work.” She turns the screen toward me. It says what time are you done, and under it, Koda has sent a GIF of a dog falling off a couch.
I laugh. “I thought you were mad at him about—”
“Don’t,” she says fast. “Just don’t. Let’s work. He’s got practice until twelve-thirty, and then we’re getting food.”
“They practice on Sundays?”
“Every day except Monday. Did you know that? It’s insane. He says it’s a rule. One day off a week, and they have to take it.”
I didn’t know that. I’m sitting there with my highlighter uncapped over a paragraph I’ve read three times, and I realize I have no idea what Nash’s week looks like.
What time he gets up. Whether he eats before he skates or after.
Then I realize I’m in a library thinking about what time Nash Kennebeck eats breakfast, and I uncap a second highlighter for no reason and hold one in each hand.
I get through fourteen pages. Paige gets through four, plus a long debate with herself about whether Koda’s roommate is a bad influence or just from Ohio.
Half an hour later, her phone lights up, and she stands so fast her chair shrieks and three people look over.
“He’s outside. Come with me. Just to the steps. ”
She hauls me down the stairs, shushing me the whole way like she’s the librarian, and out the front doors into the cold. The guys are coming up the path from the athletic building. Koda first with his hair wet and his bag low on one shoulder, and behind him, hood up and hands in his pockets, Nash.
My brain hands me yesterday morning with absolutely no permission from me. His mouth. His hands. The way he said my name into my neck.
I look at the bike rack. I look very hard at the bike rack.
There’s a blue bike with a flat back tire, a red one with a wicker basket and a sticker on the fender that says I brAKE FOR NOTHING, and a lock hanging open at the end with no bike attached to it at all, which I wonder about for a long time.
I count them. Five. I count again. Five.
Then I look up, because I can feel him looking at me.
He’s about forty feet away, still walking, and he isn’t smiling.
He doesn’t wave or lift his chin. He just looks at me across the path like he knows exactly what I was thinking about, which he can’t.
Obviously. I’m only assuming that because it’s the only thing in my head.
“Coming?” Paige calls over her shoulder, already halfway down the steps.
“No. I’ve got that reading.”
“I thought you did it.”
“I’ve got more.”
I go back inside without looking back and climb to the second floor at a completely normal speed. At the table, I pull off my coat, then my scarf, shove my sleeves up to the elbow, sit down, and pick up the yellow highlighter, and the heat is still in my face.
When I get back to Corvin, Tessa is at her desk. I drop onto my bed and work my boots off heel against toe, and she doesn’t look up for a solid minute, and then she turns her chair around. “Is everything okay?”
I laugh, sharper than I mean to, and she hears it.
“You seem tense.”
“I just need a minute, Miss Observant.”
She turns back to her desk. “Sorry.”
I huff at the ceiling and feel like a bitch. The second boot is still on. I leave it. “He’s really intense,” I say.
Tessa turns around again and thinks about it the way she thinks about everything, highlighter held still over the page. “Yeah. I can see that. He walked into our room like he was looking for something.”
I nod. “That’s a good description, actually.”
“And then he found it,” she says.
I know what she means. Me. Which is ridiculous, because he came to our room to see me, so obviously he was looking for me.
“He likes you,” Tessa says.
“He likes fucking me,” I say lightly. It’s true. It’s the truest thing I know about Nash Kennebeck.
Tessa goes back to highlighting. I wait for her to say something else, are you sure or that’s not what it looked like, anything.
She doesn’t. The highlighter squeaks across the page, and then again, and she caps it and uncaps a different color and keeps going, and the thing I said just sits there in the room with us with nobody arguing with it.
Fine. I pull the second boot off and drop it on the floor. It’s fine. I like fucking him too.
At seven, 412 is exactly as crammed as it was the first girls’ night and about ten times better.
Bianca’s crockpot turns out to hold chicken, cheese, and an irresponsible amount of green chiles that she refers to only as the dip.
It’s so good that twenty minutes in, Paige gives up on bowls and eats it straight out of the crockpot with a chip, because bowls were slowing her down.
We put on The Bachelor and talk through it.
Kenzie tells us about her group project and the one guy who hasn’t done a single thing and keeps thumbs-upping the group chat.
Bianca tells us her grandma is dating somebody new.
Her mom had her young, and her grandma had her mom young, which means her grandma is fifty-seven and has a boyfriend named Rick who owns a boat.
Somehow that turns into all of us deciding what we’ll be doing at fifty-seven.
Paige will find somebody younger to keep her young.
Kenzie would rather die than to be dating.
Bianca points out that her mom is single right now, which statistically means Bianca is cursed to get pregnant young, so she refuses to sleep with anyone ever.
She thinks she’s breaking the generational curse.
“I’ll be married,” I say, scraping the side of the crockpot with a chip. “Two kids, a boy and a girl. There’s no way I’m single at fifty-seven.”
“So you’ll stay even if he cheats on you?” Paige says.
“Paige,” Kenzie says.
Paige shrugs. “What? It’s not too soon. She’s not going to cry.” She looks at me. “Are you going to cry?”
“No. But I hope my future husband doesn’t cheat. God. That’s a real thing that could happen, isn’t it?”
“Men are fucking cheaters,” Paige says, flat. “My dad’s a cheater. I don’t trust men at all.”
Kenzie frowns down at her plate.
I blow out a breath. “I’m sorry, Paige.”
She waves a hand. “No. Fuck him. I just hope you’re better than my mom.”
“She stays?”
Paige nods. “Her excuses are disgusting. I can’t even look at her.”
“I’m sorry,” Kenzie says.
“I don’t want to talk about it. It makes me sick.”
So we don’t. Bianca asks Kenzie about her project, and the room fills back up with noise, and I sit there with a chip in my hand and don’t eat it.
It’s easy to say you’d leave. I’ve said it about other people’s boyfriends for years, like it was obvious, like you just stand up and walk out a door.
Then it was mine, and it wasn’t a door. It was his hoodie in my drawer and his mom’s birthday in my phone and a whole future I’d already picked out.
I left. I did. But I know exactly how you’d stay, and exactly how reasonable the excuses would sound at the time.
I look at Paige laughing at something Bianca said with her knees pulled up on the couch.
She’s been holding Koda at arm’s length since the day I met her, even though she lights up every time her phone does. The chip breaks in my fingers.
“Kylie?”
I look up. “Yeah?”
“Fuck, marry, kill.” Paige is grinning at me. “Koda, Nash, Rafe. Go.”
I didn’t even know that’s what we were doing. “What’d you say?”
“I’m killing Rafe, because he gives those vibes. Nash, eh. Koda, marry.”
“You’d fuck Nash?”
She throws her head back and laughs. “Not literally.”
“Okay. I agree about Rafe. I’m definitely killing him.” I open my mouth. “And marry—”
The name is there. It was there before she finished saying the names.
“Just say Nash, bitch!” Paige shrieks. “Don’t even pretend, Kylie. Don’t even.”
“Fine.” I’m smiling and can’t stop. “Marry Nash. Fuck Koda.”
The whole room loses it, and now I’m thinking about marrying Nash, and the picture in my head is not a dress or an aisle or a cake. It’s very specifically the night of. Every girl in this room knows it, and my face goes so hot I have to cover it with both hands.
My phone buzzes on the carpet by my knee.
“Who’re you texting?” Paige asks.
“Nobody.”
Nash: You done?