31 #2
Up close, he looks wrecked. There’s a mark under his eye that wasn’t there yesterday, his hair has gone wavy from drying wrong, and he’s got the thing where you’ve been awake too long and stop blinking as much.
“You’re being weird tonight,” I tell him.
“I played a hockey game.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’ve been up since six.”
“You always wake up at six.”
He doesn’t laugh, but something happens at the corner of his mouth, and it’s enough that I move in and take the cup out of his hand and drink what’s in it. Water. Obviously. “Gross. Where’s the alcohol?”
“I’ve got a skate tomorrow.”
“Right. Every day but Monday.”
“Yeah.”
I give him the cup back. He doesn’t put his hand anywhere, so I do.
I turn around and put my back to the wall next to him with my shoulder against his arm, hook a finger in his pocket, and stand there while the music thumps through the wall.
After a second, his hand comes over and rests on my hip, exactly where I’d expect it, and his thumb moves once.
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” I say.
“Me neither.”
I watch Paige dance with Bianca. I don’t know what Nash is looking at, but it feels like his mind is a million miles away. Paige screams my name from the front room.
“That’s me,” I say, and go.
Aiden from my Monday-Wednesday lecture is here, and he yells “MIDTERM!” at me from four feet away as I pass.
“MIDTERM!” I yell back.
He has a lot of hair and is the kind of drunk where you narrate everything you’re doing while you do it.
We’re in the front room, and he’s telling me he thinks the curve is going to save him, and it’s a stupid conversation, but he’s funny drunk.
He dances. Then somebody comes past us with a full cup, and he puts his hand on my waist to move me out of the way, which is nothing.
Everybody’s doing that in here, there’s no room.
Except when the person’s gone, his hand is still there, and it slides a little toward my back.
He leans in and pulls, like he wants me closer than I am.
I take his wrist and put his hand back on him.
“Nope.”
“My bad.” He puts both hands up. “My bad, my bad.”
“It’s fine.” And it is. He’s just drunk, and two seconds later, he’s back to the curve like nothing happened.
But when I look up over his shoulder, Nash is in the doorway, off the wall, standing straight with his shoulders squared and his cup at his side, a step and a half into the room, with nothing on his face at all.
He’s looking right at Aiden’s hands. It’s not a nice look.
But he doesn’t come over or say anything, and after a second, he steps back against the doorframe and lifts his cup and drinks his water.
I’m still looking at him. He’s still looking at me.
Aiden says, “Right?” about something I didn’t hear.
“Yeah,” I say, and when I look back, Nash is talking to somebody in the hall.
If Nash had marched over and done his thing, I’d have told him to relax and made fun of him for a week. So I don’t know why I’m standing here mad that he didn’t.
At two-fifteen, the house is thinning out. Kenzie has her shoes in her hand, and Paige has announced twice that she’s ready to go. I find Nash by the front door. “Are you coming home with me?”
He looks down at me. “You want me to?”
Which is such a stupid question that I actually laugh. “Obviously.”
He sets his cup on the shelf by the door, and we walk out.
It’s so cold it’s almost funny. Kenzie and Bianca peel off toward the other side of campus, and Paige walks with us for one block, talking the entire time about how she doesn’t care that Koda stayed, and then Bianca doubles back for her, and it’s just us.
He’s got his hands in his pockets. I put my hand in one of them.
“Your hands are freezing,” he says. “You didn’t bring a coat again.”
“No.”
I walk pressed against his arm, and then his arm comes out of his pocket and goes around my shoulders and pulls me into his side, and he doesn’t let go for the rest of the quad.
His door is barely shut before I’ve got his jacket off and he’s got me against it with his hand in my hair and his mouth on my neck. He bites the top of my shoulder hard enough that I make a sound I’d be embarrassed about if there were anybody else to hear it.
“Bed,” I say.
“Yeah.”
He picks me up straight off the floor, one arm under me, four steps, and drops me on the mattress so I bounce, and he’s over me before I stop bouncing.
Whatever’s been in him all night comes out here.
He isn’t rough with me. He’s intense. He’s everywhere at once.
He has my wrists over my head and then he doesn’t.
He has my jeans off in about four seconds, and he keeps stopping to look at my face like he’s checking something.
I tell him how I want it, and he gives it to me.
I tell him to slow down, and he slows down so completely that I take it back within a minute, and he laughs into my stomach and calls me a liar.
His shirt stays on, which isn’t new. At some point, I’m on top of him with my hands flat on his chest and his hands on my hips, gripping so hard I’m going to have marks tomorrow, and he’s watching me with his jaw set.
He says my name once, like it’s been sitting in his mouth for hours.
Afterward, I’m face down and sideways across his bed with my hair stuck to my face, breathing like I ran here.
“Okay,” I say into the mattress. “Okay. Wow.”
I don’t know what I was worried about. He’s tired. He played a hockey game. He gets up to deal with the condom and comes back with a water and puts it on the nightstand on my side. I roll over to look at him, and he’s already pulling his sweats on.
I drink the water. He sits on the end of the bed with his elbows on his knees.
I lie there. This is the part where he gets back in.
This is the part where he lies down on his back and puts his arm out and drags me across the mattress by the neck.
He checks his phone and puts it down on the desk.
I pull the blanket over my legs and lie on my side and look at his back.
“That guy’s in my lecture,” I say. “Aiden. The one who talks a lot. He thinks the curve’s going to save him. It isn’t.”
“Probably not.”
He rubs his hand over his face. Then he turns around and looks at me lying in his bed. “You staying?”
I don’t know why my heart sinks all the way through me. It’s a normal question, not a big one.
“Do you want me to?” I ask, because I don’t know what else to say.
“Up to you,” he says.
And I’m suddenly so annoyed I could throw the water bottle at his head.
“I think I’m going to sleep in my room,” I say, and wait.
“Okay,” he says.
So I get up. I find my jeans. I find one sock and spend a while looking for the other one, which is on the bed next to where I was lying, where I could have reached it without standing up.
I put my top on. I check my phone, which has nothing on it.
I fix my hair in the reflection in his window, which is pitch black.
He doesn’t say anything else. He walks me to the door, and at the door, he takes my chin in his hand and kisses me, and it’s a good kiss.
It’s a really good kiss. Then he lets go. “Night.”
“Night.”
The hallway is freezing. One door, two, and then mine. Tessa’s lamp is still on. She’s in bed with her book on her chest and her eyes half open, and she looks up when I come in.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
She doesn’t ask. She goes back to her book while I brush my teeth and take my makeup off with a wipe and then wash my face anyway. When I come out, she’s turned her lamp off, but there’s a bottle of water on the corner of my desk that wasn’t there when I left.
I get into my own bed so mad I can feel my heartbeat in my ears.
At his dad, probably, for making him be on for twenty minutes.
At Paige, who won’t tell me what’s going on with Koda.
At Aiden and his hand. At the game, the cold, the fact that I have a whole paper to write tomorrow.
I fall asleep before I get to the end of the list.
Sunday, I sleep until ten-forty. Tessa’s gone.
My mouth tastes terrible, and there’s a bruise coming up on my hip in the shape of somebody’s thumb.
I lie there and look at it for a second and then pull the blanket back over me.
My phone has three messages in the group chat, all from Bianca.
It’s a picture from Paige of her own ceiling with no caption, sent at 4:02 a.m. And a text from my mom asking if I’ve talked to Evan. Why would you think I would, Mom!
I answer my mom, scroll until my arm goes numb, get up, clip my hair up, put on leggings and the hoodie of his I took on Friday, then I eat a snack.
I open my laptop, look at the paper I have to write, and close it again.
By noon, I’m starving, and on Sundays, the dining hall does the eggs with the potatoes.
Me: Breakfast?
The dots come up right away.
Nash: Already ate.
I look at it and wait for the next one, because there’s always a next one: But I’ll come sit with you, or Go, I’ll meet you after. There isn’t one. My thumbs are already going.
Me: Without me?
I look at it sitting in the box, waiting for me to send it. Without me. That’s pathetic. He’s probably starving. Of course he’d eat without me. Jesus. I delete it one letter at a time, which takes longer, and watch it go.
Me: Rude.
Nash: ?
I sit on the end of my bed with my phone in both hands and look at that question mark for a really long time, and I don’t have a single thing to type back.