Made myself small in the one place I’d always felt safe being seen.
I told myself there’d be time for it later.
There’s always time for it later.
Until there isn’t.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FOURTEEN YEARS OLD
• • •
I knew by fourteen.
Not because anything happened.
Because nothing did.
And I was starting to understand what that meant.
• • •
It wasn’t a realization so much as a settling in the pit of my stomach. Like something that had been slightly out of focus for years finally sharpened without warning. I didn’t have a moment. No dramatic before and after.
Just — one ordinary Tuesday, lying on my bedroom floor with Cassian asleep beside me, I looked at the side of his face in the dark and thought —
You’re so beautiful.
And then I looked away.
And didn’t think about it again until I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
And then it was all I could think about.
He was different this year too.
Harder to reach in the specific way that had nothing to do with distance. He could be right next to me — shoulder to shoulder, our usual — and something in him would be somewhere else entirely. A door closed behind his eyes that he wouldn’t open for me.
And I’d learned not to knock on it.
Instead I’d just stay. Keep the window open at night. Make sure he knew the option was there.
That was the year he started arriving later.
Tap tap at midnight sometimes. One in the morning. I’d be half asleep and hear it and be at the window before I was fully conscious, the way you respond to something your body has decided is important regardless of what your brain is doing.
I never asked why later.
I never asked why at all.
I just made myself available whenever he needed me.
• • •
There was one night in October.
We were on the floor, backs against my bed, some movie playing that neither of us were watching. His knee was touching mine. It had been for an hour. Neither of us had moved.
