30
Two Coordinates
Nash
She’s out in about four minutes. I can tell because of her hand.
It’s been doing a slow thing against my chest, opening and closing a little, and it stops in the middle and just lies there with the fingers half curled.
Her head is on my shoulder, and her hair is against my face.
One of her feet is jammed between my ankles, freezing, actually freezing, and I don’t move it.
My hand is on her hip because she put it there.
She asked me to Theo’s, and I went. She wanted to say hi to that guy, and she said hi to that guy.
I asked her to come Saturday, and she’s coming Saturday.
She asked to sleep in here, and she’s asleep in here.
None of it is complicated. Every one of those is a thing that happened, each one makes sense on its own, and I can line them up in a row.
And then there’s the other thing she said, which also makes sense and fits with none of them.
She doesn’t want a boyfriend. Fine. I’m not her boyfriend.
That isn’t new information. Coach tells me the second line needs to be wide at the blue line, we’re wide at the blue line.
Rafe holds it too long, Rafe releases earlier.
Greeley wants me to react, I don’t react.
Somebody tells you the thing, you do the thing.
So she doesn’t want a boyfriend, and I’m not one.
She came to my door Monday night with a condom in her hoodie pocket because she wanted to, and she left after.
But then what the hell is the library? What do you call Wednesday?
What about her class schedule, which I could recite right now: Monday-Wednesday lecture at eleven, lab Wednesday afternoon, the Friday one she hates.
Nobody told me those. I just have them. What’s standing in a hallway for twelve minutes waiting for her to get dressed for breakfast?
What’s the tater tots? What’s standing at a counter for three hours holding a bottle of water around people I don’t know because she wanted to go and wanted me there?
What’s Saturday? I asked her to the game twice in my head before I asked her out loud.
What’s Sunday night, when she showed up in those ugly fucking pants and we didn’t even do anything?
She was on my bed for two hours and nothing happened and I didn’t need anything to happen.
I wanted her sitting there. Then she fell asleep on me, and I lay under her with a dead arm for forty minutes because I didn’t want to move her.
What category is that? I don’t fucking know.
I’m lying here in the dark with her hair in my mouth trying to file things, and there’s a pile of shit with nowhere to go.
She gave me the label tonight on the path outside the library, and it doesn’t fit the evidence.
That’s what’s making me insane. Not that she said it.
She’s allowed to say it. She’s allowed to want what she wants, and she said it like she was telling me something nice.
She wasn’t even wrong. There’s no conversation I can point at where I said anything different.
I just did a bunch of things, and I thought the things were the thing.
She makes a noise in her sleep and pushes her face further into my shoulder, and her hand slides up and settles over my collarbone.
She’s so warm. She smells like my shirt and somebody’s cookies.
I look at the ceiling for a long time. The clock says 1:14, then 1:40, then 2:03, and I’m still on my back with my jaw aching, and at some point, I realize I’ve been doing the same lap for an hour, like a guy skating circles waiting for a whistle that isn’t coming. I can’t stay in this bed.
Getting out from under her takes about two minutes.
Arm first, then shoulder, then I slide down and off the end of the mattress like getting out of a car without opening the door, and I get my hand under her head at the last second, so it doesn’t drop.
She makes a sound that isn’t words. Her hand comes across the sheet into the warm spot where I was and stops there, palm down, and her face turns into my pillow.
I stand next to the bed in the dark holding my jeans.
Asleep, she comes after me. Awake, she tells me what this is.
I’d like to know which one counts. I’d like to fucking ask her.
I get dressed in the hall.
I’m going to the machine on five for a water because ours is out, and Koda’s light is on under his door when I come up the stairwell. I can hear voices, and one of them isn’t Koda. Then the other voice goes up about half an octave, and something hits a wall, and I stop. I knock once and open it.
Paige is on Koda’s bed with her back against the wall and her boots still on and her eyeliner halfway down one cheek, and Koda is standing in the middle of the room in a T-shirt and basketball shorts with his hands out like he’s talking somebody off a ledge.
There’s a hoodie on the floor by the door. That’s what hit the wall.
They both look at me.
“Nash,” Koda says. “Great. Tell her I’m not an asshole.”
“No,” I say.
“See!” Paige says.
I came for water. Koda’s mini fridge is by the desk, and I go to it. Behind me, Paige says, “He let that girl put her number in his phone.”
“She put it in herself.”
“It’s the same fucking thing, Koda!”
“You’re not listening to what I’m—” He shoves both hands back through his hair. “I didn’t ask her for it.”
“Did you delete it?”
“Yes!”
“When?”
“When you started screaming at me.”
There’s one bottle of water in the fridge and about nine energy drinks. I take the water.
“Okay, so that’s actually so funny,” Paige says, her voice gone very bright. “That’s hilarious. Because you can do whatever you want. You know that, right? You can fuck whoever you want, Koda. I don’t care.”
“I don’t want to fuck whoever I want.”
“Then that’s your problem.”
“It is my problem. You’re my problem.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’ve been trying.”
Her boot comes off her foot and across the room, and I catch it about eight inches from the side of his head. It’s a small one with a stupid little heel. Nobody says anything for a second. I put the boot on the desk.
“Practice tomorrow,” I tell Koda.
“I’m aware.”
Paige laughs at the ceiling, and then her face does something else entirely, and she rubs her eye with the back of her wrist and smears the eyeliner worse. “I’m not doing the girlfriend thing,” she says.
Koda goes still. So do I. I’m standing at the fridge with a water in my hand, and I’ve gone completely still.
“I’m not,” she says again. “That’s not—I’m not doing that. So if that’s what you’re—”
“It’s not,” Koda says.
And that shuts her up. Her mouth is still open, and nothing is coming out.
I take a sip from the bottle.
“You would be the worst fucking boyfriend,” she says. “So, what the fuck ever!”
“Yeah,” Koda says. “Whatever.”
I take my water and go without saying anything else to either of them. I shut the door, and out in the hall, I stand there with my jaw so tight my back teeth hurt.
I stop outside my own door. She’s in there, in my bed, in my shirt, on the wall side, which is her side.
If I open the door, I’m getting back in that bed.
I want to. I want to so bad my hands hurt.
It’s not even the sex. The sex is the part I’m allowed to want.
I want to get in there and put my arm under her neck and pull her onto my chest and go to sleep with her weight on me, and that’s the part she doesn’t want.
That’s the whole list of shit she was glad she doesn’t have to do anymore.
Which makes wanting it feel like turmoil.
I stand in the hallway holding a bottle of water and hesitate because of one sentence she said three hours ago.
Then I go in.
The streetlight is still on the floor. She hasn’t moved much.
Her hand is still in the spot where I was, except it isn’t warm anymore, and her face is in my pillow with her mouth open.
I put the water on the desk. I get in on my side, on my back, with my hands on my own stomach, and leave them there.
Thirty seconds later, she rolls over. She comes into me, throws her arm across my stomach, gets her knee up over my thigh, and settles. Her hand lands right on my ribs. Left side. Over the shirt, over the edge of the graft, like it’s nothing.
I look at the ceiling. Her breathing goes long and slow against my neck, and mine doesn’t.
My alarm goes at six-fifteen, and I’m already up.
She wakes at seven-something, in stages. First she’s a lump, then the lump makes a noise, then she sits up with my shirt twisted around her and her hair destroyed and looks around my room.
When she sees me at the desk, she smiles. “Morning, you.”
“Morning.”
She flops back down. “What time is it?”
“Seven-forty.”
“Why?”
She drags herself up eventually. She drinks the water on my desk, the one I brought back from Koda’s, all of it, and then goes through my drawer without asking and pulls on a hoodie over my T-shirt that comes down to the middle of her thighs. “I’m taking this.”
“Okay.”
“I have that lecture, and it’s freezing in there.” She pulls her hair out. “Also, I’m dying. I have to write a response to the reading by five, and I haven’t read it. That’s a me problem.”
She finds her jeans and hops around getting into them, talking the whole time about the paper, about how Bianca’s roommate is allergic to strawberries of all things, which she thinks is a sign, and about Kenzie being weird about Paige.
I don’t tell her about Koda’s room at three in the morning. It’s not mine to tell.