32 #2
He puts his hand over his mouth and takes it off again. “I didn’t know it was eating at you this bad.”
I’m too angry to laugh, but that’s funny. That’s fucking rich coming from him. “Because you’re blind.”
“Nash—”
“You call me every week. Every week. You ask if I’m eating.
You ask about my draws. You know which side I get tall on when I’m pissed off.
You knew that from watching one period. And you don’t know this?
You drove five hours. You hugged me in that lobby and put your hand right on it, and you don’t know? ”
He takes a step toward me. I take one back.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Nash. I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Leave.”
He doesn’t move.
“Go home,” I say. “I don’t want to see you.”
“You’re angry.”
“Yeah. I’m fucking angry.”
“So don’t stand in a parking lot and make some decision you’re going to—”
“Go home, Dad. And don’t call.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Try me.”
I walk off. I’ll find my own ride, or I’ll walk. I hear his truck start, and I turn around in time to watch it roll out of the lot, and I watch him drive off.
I walk back to campus. It takes an hour, and it doesn’t fucking help.
The rink is open until nine on Sundays for open ice, with nobody on it but two figure skaters at the far end. I get my gear and go. I skate until my lungs burn and my legs are gone, blue line to blue line, hard stops both ways, for thirty-five minutes. It doesn’t touch it.
So I go down to the weight room. Sunday night, nobody there but a wrestler and the grad assistant on his phone.
I do the sled, six trips with three plates and four with four, pushing until my hands slip off the uprights and my vision goes spotty at the edges, and then med-ball slams against the rubber wall until the grad assistant looks up, and I keep going. It doesn’t touch it.
The bag is in the back corner by the mats, and I put my forearms and shoulders into it without wraps for about four minutes. It doesn’t touch it either.
I shower until the water goes cold, standing with both hands flat on the tile and my head down, and I get dressed and walk back across the quad in the dark. My body is finished. There’s nothing left in my legs at all. And my head is going exactly as fast as it was in that booth.
Rafe’s light is on in our room. I don’t want Rafe. I don’t want Koda. I don’t want to call my mom, who doesn’t know I’m not talking to him yet and will find out when he gets home. I don’t want to say one word out loud about any of it to anybody, ever. I walk past our door.
One.
Two.
Three.
I knock.
It takes too long.
I knock again. When the door opens, Kylie has her hair up, a pen in her hand, and she’s wearing the hoodie she took Friday. Her face when she sees it’s me is not a happy face.
“You,” she says flatly, and stands in the doorway and doesn’t move out of it. “So you can knock on my door, but you can’t eat breakfast with me.”
I don’t have anything for that. I don’t have anything for anything. She looks at me for a second, and something in her changes. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look okay.”
“I’m fine.”
She folds her arms.
“Where’s your roommate?” I say, which isn’t an answer to anything.
“Library. She’s been there all day.” She’s still looking at my face. “Nash. What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s—”
I kiss her. I get my hand around the back of her neck and walk her into her own room with the door still open, and for about one second, she’s stiff, actually mad. I can feel it in her whole body, and then she kicks the door shut and grabs the front of my shirt with both hands and kisses me back.
We don’t talk after that. I get the hoodie off her. She gets mine off and starts on my belt standing up. The pen hits the floor somewhere. I put her on her bed and get my hands on her, and I stop thinking, which is all I’ve been trying to do all day.
For about twenty minutes, there’s nothing in my head except her.
Her mouth, her hands, the sound she makes when I do the thing she likes, her nails in the back of my neck, her voice saying my name.
It’s the first relief I’ve had in nine hours, and I take it with both hands.
I look into her eyes, and she’s completely with me.
She’s the one who pulls me down and says faster, her mouth at my ear the whole time, and if it’s rougher than Saturday, it’s because we’re both doing it.
For a while after, it’s quiet. I’m on my back with my arm over my eyes, and she’s half on top of me with her cheek on my chest and her leg across my thighs, drawing something on my shoulder with one finger, her heart going against my ribs, and I can finally breathe.
Then her hand goes down and slides up under the hem of my shirt.
I catch her wrist and hold it about two inches above the fabric.
She goes completely still on top of me. Then she picks her head up. “Seriously?”
I let go of her wrist. “What.”
“This.” She sits up and kneels on her own bed with her hair falling out of its bun and waves a hand at my chest, the shirt, all of it. “This.”
“Don’t.”
“Why? I’ve seen it, Nash.” Her voice is climbing. “I’ve literally seen it. I was standing right there. So what exactly is the rule?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
I don’t have one. There’s no sentence in me. I’m sitting on her bed five hours after I held my shirt up in a parking lot in the cold, and she wants to put her hand on it, but I can’t.
“You know what? Fine,” she says, and gets off the bed.
“Kylie.”
“No, it’s fine.” She’s finding her leggings with her back to me. “It’s actually great. This is exactly why this works so well, right?”
“What?”