“Do you… want it to be?”
The question knocks me back a half inch. He wasn’t asking about the song. He was asking what the song’s about. We’re both cowards in different languages.
“I want it to be true,” I say. “Happy’s not always how you get there.”
He thinks about that with the same face he uses when he’s reading an offense. Then he nods, once, like he filed it away for later.
We don’t kiss again. That’s the thing about stolen hours—they’re made out of borders. We sit, knees pressed together, counting breaths and being brave only in small shapes. He asks about The Lantern like he didn’t google us already after the demo news—what’s next, when we’ll hear something, whether labels actually answer emails that start“Dear Human, We swear we’re good.”I tell him about Miles’s obsession with compression ratios and the way Drew pretends he doesn’t care and then spends an hour combing his hair before every set. He tells me about a professor who thinks basketball is an elective in “Advanced Jock,” about a kid on the team who’s about to blow up if someone doesn’t teach him what a pass is, about the way his room’s heat makes a sound at night like a dying animal.
We trade sisters stories the way we’ve started to do without planning to: Rosa says I’m dramatic; Lindy sends him photos of her roommate’s cat in seasonal costumes. He shows me one. I wheeze. He looks at me like my laugh is a view.
The clock marches forward. We let it. At nine forty-seven I stand; at nine forty-eight he does. He jams his cap back on, tucks his hoodie tight, inhabits the shape of a man the world thinks it knows. I kill the light. We listen at the door. The hallway’s quiet.
I open it. We step out. He goes first, because I told him once that I’d rather have his back than his face when there’s risk. He didn’t argue. The stairwell swallows us in its concrete throat. We move like we learned how in a week—the cadence of “just two guys walking” that saysdo not look here.
On the landing, he stops one step below me so our eyes line up and whispers, “I hate this part.”
“Me too,” I say. I don’t add: I’d do it every day if it means I get the rest.
He shifts, like he wants to touch my sleeve but can’t risk it. “Text me later when you get home after your work shift.”
“Yes,Dad.”
“Rafe.”
“I will,” I say, because he asked and because I like him asking.
He turns and takes the next flight. I watch his back until it disappears, then count fifteen Mississippis and go the other way. I text Ollie.
Me: Forty-seven minutes, best use of a day.
Three dots appear, vanish, then reappear.
Ollie: See you in the cracks.
I grin like a fool at an empty stairwell and tell myself to get used to living in a place where a sentence like that is enough.
We get good at the dumb, dangerous choreography. The next time it’s a supply closet behind the athletic offices where someone stored three broken folding chairs and two gallons of expired floor cleaner; we stand in the dark and make out like teenagers, and then I get high on his touches and laugh until he has to put a hand over my mouth to shut me up. Another night it’s the back row of a lecture hall showing a documentary about 1970s urban planning; we last eighteen minutes before a grad student shushes us and we decide to learn about highways as penance. Once we almost collide with two teammates in a dorm lobby; I duck into a vending-machine alcove and pretend to be obsessed with trail mix while he says something about “meeting Coach.”
We’re idiots. We’re careful. We’re both.
I write better than I ever have and worse than I can admit. The good stuff shows up with teeth already sharpened; the bad is just me missing him when he leaves. Ollie is a line I keep underlining. He’s also a line I don’t read aloud to anyone but him.
We learn each other in the empty time—favorite dumb movie (Speed 2: Cruise Control—I refuse to respect him for this), favorite meal when he’s sick (grilled cheese with too much butter), the smell he hates (cucumber lotion), the smell he secretly likes (the scent of a new basketball, which he claims is “a normal thing to say, shut up”). He learns my family’s full name for me (Rafael when I’m in trouble, Rafi when my sister wants money), the way I saymijowithout thinking, the shape of the homesickness that sneaks up on me after phone calls with my mamá. I learn the names of his family and connections he never says in public and the silence he wraps around feelings that would get loud if he let them.
We almost get caught three more times and laugh about two of them. The third sits between us like a scold. We kiss anyway, carefully, like we found a switch in a building nobody knows how to power down, and we’re learning not to leave fingerprints.
And through all of it, the stolen minutes and the jokes whispered into each other’s mouths, the weird snacks from vending machines and the way he lowers to meet me like he’s learned the geography of it—underneath, the same steady ache: I want more. I want 10:00 p.m. to be 10:00 a.m. with sunlight and shamelessness. I want him on a couch where we’re allowed to be idiots without a building inspector and a clipboard dropping by.
I want the day when we don’t have to be good at sneaking around.
But you don’t write happy first. You write true. So I write about doors and locks and the way he saysbe carefulwithoutmoving his mouth. I write about forty-seven minutes. I write about the cracks we live in and how the light gets in anyway.
And when he texts meGym at 5:00 a.m., weights till 6, can do 6:10 to 6:50, east stairwell,I answer with a time and a dumb joke and a picture of a cat in a sweater. Then I’m up before the sun, grinning into a hoodie, telling myself there are worse ways to be alive than to be busy and lit up and sneaking out of my own apartment because I picked the wrong kind of beautiful.
We’re not a promise. We’re a practice.
We’re getting good at it.
