He listened with his eyes on the water.
When I finished he was quiet for a moment.
Then —
“Does it happen a lot?”
“Sometimes.”
He nodded like that was enough. Like he wasn’t going to push.
“First time was the night your mom died,” I whispered.
I don’t know why I said it.
“The sirens. I didn’t know what was happening next door and I just —”
I stopped.
He looked at me then.
I was so worried about you, I said with my eyes.
Something moved across his face that he didn’t quite manage to put away in time.
Like he could read my mind.
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“I know.”
He squeezed my hand.
• • •
We stayed out there until the light changed.
The sun dropping low, the sky doing that thing it does — all magenta and amber and slightly unreal, like someone turned the saturation up on the whole world.
At some point he leaned back on his hands and looked up at it.
I watched him instead.
The light caught the angles of his face. His jaw. The lowering sun catching gold. His hair longer now, the ends of it almost touching his shoulders.
He turned and caught me looking.
I didn’t look away fast enough.
Neither did he.
• • •
We went inside when it got dark.
My room. The familiar geography of it. My desk, my books, the window he’d climbed through a hundred times.
He sat on my bed. I sat beside him. Closer than necessary.
