That made him laugh, low and short, the way boys his age laughed when they didn’t want to be seen enjoying themselves too much. He turned toward the door, then paused with his hand on the knob. “Mr. Hill?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks.”
I nodded once. “Get to class.”
He left, and I sat there a minute after the door closed, looking at the empty patch of linoleum where he’d been standing.
My grandfather used to say you could tell what something needed if you stopped trying to force it into the shape you had already decided on. He said it about wood, mostly, but he meant a lot more than wood when he said it. I thought about that while I packed up.
At the end of the school day, the stack of papers went into my satchel, along with the red pen I had been grading with and the half-empty water bottle I’d forgotten on the windowsill. Outside, the late afternoon had started to thin out into evening, the winter light giving everything a sharper edge. By the time I made it to my car, I already knew I wasn’t going home to call it a night.
I went home just long enough to shower off the school day, change into a clean hoodie and jeans, and stand in my kitchen deciding what to bring. Nova had a way of sayingcome overthat left the details to me, which I liked more than I admitted. It made room for the part of me that had been raised to show up with something in my hands, some answer to a question that hadn’t been spoken out loud yet.
I picked up dinner from the Ethiopian place on Baltimore because she always reached for the extra cabbage before she reached for anything else, and because the first time we had gone there together she had spent fifteen minutes explaining to me why too many people underestimated quiet food. I added the sambusas because she liked to pretend she didn’t want one and then eat half of mine if I didn’t order enough.
The overnight bag sat on the chair by the door while I put my shoes on. I looked at it once, then I picked it up.
I had slept beside her once on a school night and spent the next morning, going to work with the ache of leaving her still in my body, the memory of it catching on me in stupid places like while starting the car, standing in the faculty bathroom washing my hands, or when I swept the Archive floor at the end of the night. I had also spent the day thinking about the exact shape of her curled against me on the sofa the first night we made love, and the way she had mumbled something into my chest before she fully woke. I wasn’t interested in peeling myself away from that again in the middle of the night if I didn’t have to.
Her porch light was on when I got there.
I buzzed twice and let myself in. The house held that evening stillness I had come to know that wasn’t emptiness so much as settled into itself. I set the food on the kitchen counter and the bag by the wall near the door, then started unpacking containers before she came downstairs, because it gave me something to do with my hands while I listened for her.
She came down with her sleeves pushed up and her hair caught back in a way that told me she had been working on something and hadn’t bothered to reset for me. I liked her best that way, traces of the day still on her and no effort wasted on making anything look arranged.
In true Nova fashion, her eyes went to the food first, then to the bag, and then back to me.
“What’s that?” she asked, though from the way her mouth was already moving, I could tell she knew.
I opened one of the containers and let the steam out. “Dinner.”
She walked closer, slow enough to make it clear she wasn’t in a hurry to ask the second question.
“And the other thing?”
I followed her gaze and looked at the overnight bag like I had only just remembered it was there.
“That,” I said, “is me planning ahead.”
She folded her arms and leaned one shoulder against the doorway to the kitchen, amusement already settling into her face. “Planning ahead for what?”
I set plates on the counter before I answered, because I knew her and because I knew myself well enough to want something between my hands when I said it.
“For staying.”
Her eyebrows lifted just slightly. “Sounding mighty sure of yourself, Mr. Hill.”
I looked at her then.
“Your point?” I said. “I don’t want the ache of peeling myself away from you in the middle of the night just so we can wake in separate beds and do this all over again with less sleep than we need.”
She was quiet for exactly one beat. Then she laughed softly.
“That was smooth,” she said.
“It’s true.”
