33 #2
The dining hall at nine-forty on a Monday is half dead.
Nash gets eggs, potatoes, four pieces of bacon, oatmeal, and a banana.
I get a waffle, coffee, and one of the little cartons of orange juice, and when I sit down, there’s a second orange juice already on my side of the tray, because I always want a second one and apparently he knows that.
He eats a third of my waffle. I take two pieces of his bacon.
He tells me they’ve got video at eleven and lift after, and that Koda got chewed out in the group chat for something.
I tell him my paper isn’t written. He tells me that’s a me problem.
I tell him he’s a me problem. It’s completely normal between us now.
Except I keep looking at him. He’s sitting across from me in a gray hoodie with the sleeves shoved up, eating oatmeal like he doesn’t like it, looking exactly like he looked a week ago.
The girls at the table behind him keep glancing over.
They see a hockey player with a bruise on his cheek.
I know what’s under the hoodie. Not just that there’s a scar, anybody could find out there’s a scar.
I know that he took the shirt off, and I know what his face looked like while he stood there, and nobody else in this building knows that.
“Like what you’re staring at?” he asks slowly.
I sip my orange juice. “A little too much.”
He shakes his head at his oatmeal, and his ears go red, and I eat my waffle feeling absolutely fantastic.
I meet the girls at two in the student center, and Paige looks up from her laptop and points at me before I’ve sat down. “Are you and Nash good?”
Something runs through me. “What?”
“You’re glowing,” Kenzie says.
“I’m not.”
“You’re insane,” Bianca says. “Look at her face.”
I roll my eyes, and they all scream. I don’t tell them Nash showed up at my door last night looking like he’d been hit by a bus.
I don’t tell them we fought. I don’t tell them I cried in front of him, which I’m embarrassed about.
I don’t tell them what he did after that, or what I saw, or what I put my hand on.
I could. They’re my friends. Two weeks ago, I’d have been halfway through the whole story before I sat down, because that’s how I think, out loud, at people, with my hands.
He never told me not to. He doesn’t have to.
So I steal Kenzie’s chips and listen to Paige explain that she is not talking to Koda, which she refuses to elaborate on because she doesn’t want to relive it, and I think about something else entirely the whole time.
I have a three o’clock, and I understand nothing that happens in it.
I’ve written the date and one word, and the word is however.
What’s actually in my head is the thing at the front of his hips, and his back moving under my hands while he kissed me.
This is the problem with the shirt coming off.
The shirt was doing a job. The shirt was keeping me a functional student, and now it’s been on my floor, and I know what I know.
My phone buzzes in my bag. I take it out under the desk.
Nash: [Banana emoji]
This from a boy who is supposed to be in a weight room.
Me: We’re speaking again?
Nash: Guess so.
I smile at my phone like an absolute idiot and type Good and look at it sitting there in the box being way too honest for a Monday. I delete it one letter at a time.
Me: Ugly banana.
Nash: It’s a nice banana.
And I have to put my phone face down on my notebook and look at the ceiling for a second.
He comes by at six for his hoodie.
“No,” I say when he asks for it.
“It’s mine.”
“It was yours.” I’m cross-legged on my bed in it with my laptop open. “It’s had a whole life since then. It’s been to two classes and a library.”
“That’s my practice hoodie.”
He stands in the middle of my room with his hands on his hips like a man being robbed.
Then he gives up, sits on the end of my bed, and steals the Doritos off my desk.
He tells me about the lift, something Rafe said to Mathers that made Mathers laugh, which is apparently a big deal. Then he says, “We leave Thursday.”
I look up. “Leave?”
“Road trip. Two games.”
My stomach sinks. “Where?”
“Fairborn. It’s like six hours.”
“Six hours away?”
“It’s a bus,” he says, like that explains anything.
“When do you get back?”
“Sunday. Late.”
There’s a drop in my stomach, which is ridiculous, and I try to keep my face completely normal. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I’ve been alive for eighteen years and spent all but about seven weeks of them not knowing Nash Kennebeck existed.
“What time do you leave?”
He looks at me for a second. “Noon. Thursday.”
“Okay.”
He eats another Dorito and says he has a skate at six-thirty tomorrow, so he should go. At the door, he takes my chin and kisses me, and then he goes down the hall to his own room.
At ten, I’m at the sink with my toothbrush in my mouth. Tessa’s asleep. There’s a ring of light under the bathroom door from the hall, and I’m thinking about nothing, honestly, about my paper and whether I have clean leggings.
Then I’m counting. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
I don’t want him to go.
I spit. No. Absolutely not. It’s four days.
It’s hockey. I have a paper due Friday, a midterm, and a life.
I have friends and plans. I went all this time not knowing him.
I keep reminding myself of that like it’s going to help.
This is getting extremely inconvenient. I rinse my brush, put it in the cup, and turn off the light.
My phone is lighting up the ceiling from my bed.
Nash: Come here.
My whole chest fills with butterflies, and I can’t hide my smile. I don’t even put my hair up. I’m already out the door.