27 #2
I’m not done. I’m on a floor with dip on my shirt, and I still don’t know Kenzie’s or Bianca’s answers.
“I can see the text reflected in your eyes,” Paige says.
I laugh. “No, you fucking can’t.”
Kenzie leans over my shoulder. “It’s him.”
“Hey!”
“Is that Nash?” Bianca sits up.
“It’s Nash,” Paige says, her smile getting bigger by the second.
“So are you guys together?” Bianca asks. “I mean, you’d marry him.”
“Oh my God.” I point at Bianca, then at Paige. “You two. Stop right now. I’m not marrying him. We’re hooking up. That’s it. We’re fuck buddies.”
“Then fuck Nash and marry Koda,” Paige says.
I shake my head.
“She wants to keep fucking him,” Kenzie says. “That’s why she married him. Long-term access.”
“Is this gang-up-on-Kylie night?”
“Spill, girl,” Paige says.
“I’m fucking him as much as I want,” I say. “There. And yes, he’s texting me because he wants to see me tonight.”
Nobody has a joke ready for that, and it’s the best I’ve felt all day.
“What’d he say?” Paige asks.
“‘You done?’ I told him I’d be here tonight. I have to be careful what I send back, or he’ll just show up at my door.”
Paige blinks. “He’ll what?”
“He’s three doors down.”
“Koda doesn’t even do that.”
“Koda isn’t three doors down,” Kenzie says.
“Okay, okay.” Paige scoots across the cushion. “Text him back Why? And right after that, What do you want to do?”
I laugh. “Why?”
“Because it’s funny.”
Bianca’s nodding. Kenzie is just watching me with her chin on her knees. I type it.
Me: Why?
Me: What do you want to do?
The dots come up almost before it says delivered.
“Oh, he’s waiting,” Bianca says.
Nash: Sleep.
I think I stop breathing for a second. I show them the screen.
Paige’s eyebrows go up. “Sleep?”
Bianca looks from me to the phone and back. “That’s kind of cute.”
“We’re fucking,” I remind them.
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
Paige holds out her hand. “Give me your phone.”
“Absolutely not.”
It buzzes in my hand.
Nash: Why?
Nash: What do you want to do?
I start coughing. I actually choke on my own spit and have to cover my mouth with my wrist and hold the phone out at arm’s length so they can see.
He copied me, word for word, same two texts, same order.
He sat there on his bed, or wherever he is, and typed my exact texts back to me, and I can see his face while he did it. I can’t stop smiling.
“Okay,” Paige says slowly. “That’s interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“Nothing. Koda doesn’t ask me shit like that. Koda sends me dogs falling off furniture.” She leans back, still looking at me, with a weird expression on her face. “Seriously, though. Does Nash know you’re just hooking up?”
“Paige. He had a fuck buddy like two weeks ago.”
Kenzie lifts her chin off her knees. “The Jules girl? Didn’t he stop sleeping with her?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Because we’re sleeping together now.”
Nobody says anything. On the TV, somebody hands a woman a rose, and she cries about it.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” says Kenzie.
“Nothing,” says Bianca.
I type.
Me: Sleep.
Nash: Come here when you’re done.
My stomach drops the way it does on the first hill of a roller coaster, and I don’t do anything with my face. I’m positive I don’t. Every girl in the room sees it anyway.
Paige leans back and folds her arms. “Oh. You’re fucked.”
“Hopefully,” I say, and we all laugh. I scrape the last of the dip out of the crockpot so nobody can see me blushing at it.
I go to my own room first. Tessa is in bed, turned toward the wall with her lamp off and a white-noise app going on her phone.
I do everything quietly. I brush my teeth, take my makeup off with a wipe and then wash my face anyway, because the wipe never gets all of it.
My shirt has a spot of cheese right in the middle of the chest that smells like chiles, so it goes in the hamper.
I put on my strawberry pajama pants, my big gray T-shirt, and fuzzy socks, and braid my hair back wet so it won’t be insane in the morning.
Then I’m standing in the middle of the room in the dark with my phone in my hand, looking at the door.
I could just get in bed. It’s right there, and it’s warm, and it’d be fine. I go to the door instead and open it slowly so it won’t click.
“Take your key,” Tessa says to the wall, without rolling over.
I freeze, then grab it off the desk. “Night, Tess.”
“Night.”
I’m halfway down the hall in my socks before it hits me what I’m doing. I’m going to a guy’s room to sleep. Not to hook up. He said sleep, and I said sleep, and now I’m walking to his room in my pajamas with no makeup and my hair in a wet braid like I’m going to a sleepover.
I knock. It takes a second, and then the lock turns and the door opens.
Nash is in sweats and a T-shirt with a worn-soft collar, holding a controller.
Behind him, the TV shows a hockey game that isn’t real, and Rafe is on the other bed with a controller of his own, not looking away from the screen.
Nash looks at me; the braid, the socks, the strawberries. It takes him a second.
“You,” he says.
“You.”
“You done?”
I nod. “I’m done.”
He steps aside and lets me in, shuts the door, and sits back down on the end of his bed and picks the game up where he left it. I stand there a second. Then I climb onto the bed behind him and sit against the wall with my knees up, because I don’t know where else to go.
“Hi, Rafe.”
Rafe glances at me, then at my pants. “Kylie.”