29 #2
“Hi,” I say again, to him this time. Then, because his girlfriend is standing right there and it would be insane not to, “Hi.”
“Hi,” she says.
And then there’s nothing. Three years, three Christmases. I know his mother’s middle name and what he sounds like at six in the morning, and I’m standing in front of him, and the only word in my whole head is hi.
“How are you?” I ask.
“Good,” Evan says. “Good. Yeah. You?”
“Good.”
“Cool.”
“Cool.”
His girlfriend drinks from her cup. Somebody gets something out of the fridge behind them.
“There were cookies,” I say. “Down the hall. Somebody made cookies. They’re gone now.”
Brandon says, “They’re gone?”
“They’re gone. I got the last two.” I don’t know what to do with my hand, so I shrug. “They were good.”
Evan rubs the back of his neck again. The song ends, and the next one starts.
I look across the room, and Nash is looking at me.
He’s back at the window with his water. He isn’t looking at Evan.
He’s looking at me, the way you look at a clock when you’re timing something, and when he sees me look, he keeps doing it.
He doesn’t come over. He doesn’t move at all.
I don’t know what he’s asking. I raise my eyebrows at him, and he raises his back.
“Okay,” I say to the three of them. “Well. Good seeing you guys.”
“Yeah,” Evan says. “You, too.”
“Nice to meet you,” his girlfriend says, and then her face does something, because we met in August in the worst way two people have ever met, and she knows it and I know it.
“Yeah,” I say, and walk away.
Kenzie intercepts me halfway across the room and steers me against the wall by the bathroom with a hand on my elbow. “Are you insane? You went over there.”
“He was going to see me.”
She looks at me, and then around the room, and her face changes. “Have you talked to Paige?”
“She said she’s busy.”
“She didn’t text me back at all.” She hesitates like she’s deciding how much to say. “I don’t know much. I think Koda kind of lost his shit.”
“So maybe she’s working it out with him.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Her eyes flick around the room again. “Your ex looked like he was going to shit himself.”
“That was so awkward. I don’t know what I expected.” I laugh. “Anyway. I think I’m gonna go. There’s no Scrabble, and I have class in the morning.”
“Mhm.”
I smile. “Don’t mhm me.”
She hugs me, and over her shoulder I can see the window, and Nash is already coming off the wall.
I find my tray in the kitchen, move the last two sandwiches onto somebody else’s platter, and when I turn around with the empty tray, Nash is at my elbow with his jacket on, and he takes it out of my hands.
“Bye, Theo,” I call. “Brandon.”
They both wave. Somebody yells my name from the couch. Nash gets the door with his shoulder, and in the hallway, his hand lands flat between my shoulder blades to steer me around two girls coming the other way, and it’s gone again before I’ve finished saying sorry to them.
The cold hits me like a door the second we’re outside Halloran, and I curl my fingers and shove them into my pockets.
Nash has the tray under one arm. Campus is mostly empty.
There’s a group of guys yelling happily at each other over by the library, lights on in the top floor of the science building, and a security golf cart rolling past us very slowly without stopping.
“That was so fucking weird,” I finally say.
Nash doesn’t say anything.
“That was the weirdest thirty seconds of my entire life.” I’m laughing in a way I can’t totally control. “How are you. Good. Cool. I said cool. And then I told them about the cookies.”
“Cookies?”
“I know.” I cover my face for a second and take my hands down again because it’s too cold. We walk past the library, where the potato grizzly bear is still on the sidewalk, chalk-smeared at the edges where people have walked through it, and I step over its teeth.
“Three years,” I say. “I knew everything about him. I knew his class schedule. I knew when he worked. I knew what he ate for breakfast every single day, and it was the same thing. I knew when his mom got paid and which of his friends he was annoyed at that week. I could read what mood he was in from across a room. And now I don’t know anything.
Not one thing. I don’t even know if he still works.
And it isn’t sad, that’s the thing. It’s just weird.
All that space in my head was just somebody else. ”
The wind comes across the quad, and I lean into Nash. He’s looking at the path ahead, but I know he’s listening. He’s such a good listener, which is a thing nobody would ever guess about him.
“And it was always we,” I say. “What are we doing tonight. What are we doing this weekend. If he was in a bad mood, I was in a bad mood, because I had to do something about it. If I wanted to leave somewhere and he wanted to stay, it was a whole thing. If we were fighting, I couldn’t just go out and have fun, because the fight came with me.
” I pull him closer by the arm. “And that’s why I like this. ”
“This,” he echoes.
“Us.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Because it’s easy. I can spend my whole day with my friends and do my homework and whatever, and then decide I want you and go knock on your door.
And I can leave after. Or stay, if I want to stay.
I can sleep in my own bed, and nobody’s mad about it.
Nobody wants a report. Nobody needs me to make them feel okay.
You’ve never once asked me to—” I wave my free hand. “Be in charge of you.”
He doesn’t say anything to that either.
“I don’t want a boyfriend again,” I say.
“Honestly. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever. And you don’t want a girlfriend either.
” I say it like it’s obvious, because it is.
I wait for yeah or obviously or God, no, and it doesn’t come.
“You had Jules. Before. And whoever else. You’re not a relationship guy.
Everybody knows you’re not a relationship guy.
That’s why this works so well. We both know what it is. ”
The golf cart goes by again on the other path with its headlights on the grass.
I bump my shoulder into his arm. “I like this a lot. With you, it’s just sex.”
He keeps looking forward and doesn’t say anything, and I look forward too, and we walk to Corvin while I tell him the thing Bianca said about her grandma, and he says, “Mm.”
On the third floor, I look at my door, then at him. “Can I sleep at yours?”
Nash looks at my door, and then at me. “Yeah.”
Rafe’s bed is empty and made. Nash turns on the desk lamp instead of the overhead, and I kick my boots off in the middle of the floor and fall face first onto his bed and stay there, listening to him move around behind me.
He gets me one of his T-shirts out of the drawer and turns around while I change, which is so funny after everything that I laugh into the shirt while I’m pulling it over my head, and he doesn’t ask what’s funny.
He turns the lamp off. The streetlight comes through the gap in the blinds again, that orange stripe across the floor. He gets into bed and lies on his back.
I wait for his arm. He always does the arm, hooks it under my neck and drags me over, and I’ve been ready for it since we walked in. I’m lying there with my cheek on his pillow. His hand is resting on his own stomach, and it stays there.
So I go to him. I scoot across the mattress until I’m tucked against his side, get my head onto his shoulder, pick his hand up off his stomach, and put it on my hip where it goes. It stays exactly where I put it.
I wait for him to say something, and nothing comes.
He’s tired, probably. He has practice. He spent all night at a counter holding a water, being nice to people he doesn’t know, because I asked him to come.
I close my eyes. I feel so good, so safe and warm and perfectly uncomplicated.
Everything’s so easy with him. I think I’ll tell him again in the morning how easy this is and how good he makes me feel, and he’ll probably just say okay.
His hand is still on my hip, exactly where I left it.
It hasn’t moved at all. His breathing hasn’t changed yet, either.
It’s still the awake kind, slow and even but not deep.
I lie there listening and wait for it to go long, the way it does right before he falls asleep, and I’m asleep before it does.