32 #3
She turns around. “This is why we could never actually be anything. Because I can’t touch you.
I can’t touch you there. I can’t ask about it.
I can’t ask what happened to you today, because something happened to you today, Nash.
You showed up at my door looking like somebody died, and you said nothing.
You said I’m fine. You’ve been saying that since Saturday. ”
“I have been—”
“You didn’t come over to me at the party.
You stood in a doorway and nodded at me.
You ate breakfast without me and sent me a question mark like I’m insane.
And then you show up here at nine at night and you’ll do this.
” She points at the bed, at us, at the whole thing.
“You’ll absolutely do this, no problem. And that’s all I get.
So yeah.” She pulls her sleeve down over her hand.
“Maybe just sex really is all this can be.”
I stop.
I thought I was spent before.
It turns out it can get worse.
I was giving her what she wanted. She doesn’t want a boyfriend. She made that clear. And then her eyes fill, and two tears fall at once, fast, and she’s furious about them. She swipes them off with the back of her wrist, hard, and keeps talking.
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not crying.”
I look at her, and I’d give anything to make her stop.
“Wow,” she says, wiping her face again. “Great. Thanks.”
I’m off the bed, halfway to her, and then I stop, because I don’t know what I’m allowed to do.
I don’t know if I’m allowed to put my hands on her when she’s like this.
Sex is fine. Sex is the thing I’m definitely allowed to do.
This isn’t sex. This is her standing in the middle of her room crying with her fist pressed under her eye, and whatever it is a person gets to do here, I’m not sure I have it.
So I reach back, grab the collar of my shirt, pull it over my head, drop it on the floor by her desk, and stand in the middle of her room with my arms at my sides.
She inhales. Her wrist is still up under her eye, and she goes completely quiet, and she looks at my face first. Not at it. At me.
“Nash,” she says, and starts crying harder.
I can’t hear my name like that right now.
I look at the corner of her desk. She saw it once, on Greeley’s driveway, when I was out of my mind.
She respected it when I told her not to.
She’s never once asked. This is different.
This is me standing in a lit room letting her look.
My whole left side is on display. The shine, the tightness, the netting, the part where it caves in, the color it goes in the cold, all of it.
I have never been this naked in front of anybody with my pants still on.
She doesn’t come closer or reach out.
“You wanted to see it,” I say.
“I wanted you to let me.”
That takes something out of my chest sideways.
She wipes her face again, and her voice is a wreck. “Did somebody do that to you?”
My brain shuts down. I don’t know for how long.
“Nash?”
“Yeah,” I say. Then, “No.”
She takes that in. I watch her take it in. “Who?”
My heart is a jackhammer in my chest. My mouth stays shut. The whole day is sitting on me, and I can’t. Not tonight. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Kylie looks at me for a long second. “Okay,” she says.
And she means it. She doesn’t ask again.
She doesn’t go around the side of it, doesn’t say you can tell me, doesn’t do any of the things I’ve watched people do when they find out there’s a door.
She stands there in her room in her T-shirt with her face blotchy, and then she holds her hand out between us, palm up. “Can I?”
I look at her hand. I take her wrist, gently this time, the same wrist, the same hand, and I put it on my side, right on it, low, where it goes deepest. Her palm is warm, so warm. She doesn’t move it around or trace anything.
“That’s not what I meant,” she whispers, and lifts her palm.
She puts both hands flat on my chest instead.
Her eyes are red-rimmed, and so blue. “I don’t want to inspect it, Nash.
” Her thumb moves once over my skin. “I wanted to do this.” She leans in and kisses the middle of my chest, and I stop breathing.
“And this.” Another kiss, lower. Her hands move over my stomach, around my ribs, up my sides, and one of them crosses the top of the scar on the way and keeps going.
She doesn’t stop there. She isn’t looking at it anymore.
She’s looking at me. “I’ve wanted to do this forever,” she says against my skin.
“Forever?”
“Like three weeks.”
I laugh. I actually fucking laugh. She looks up at me, still pissed off, still blotchy. “Don’t laugh. Three weeks is a long time when you’re sexually frustrated.”
I get my hand around the back of her neck. “You weren’t sexually frustrated.”
“Emotionally sexually frustrated.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It is.”
I pull her up to me and kiss her mouth, and she comes into me immediately, both arms around my neck. When her hand slides down my back and around my side, I know where it’s going before it gets there, and my body braces. Her palm passes over it and keeps going, and she grabs my ass.
I pull my mouth off hers.
Kylie smiles. “What?”
I stare at her. “Nothing.” Then I kiss her again.