“My floor has standards.”
I get out of bed in the t-shirt I slept in and walk him down the hall in my socks. I open the side door. The cold bites straight in.
He stops on the threshold and turns back, and his face is doing nothing in particular and somehow everything at once. He looks at me one second longer than the moment can hold.
“Thanks for the cereal, Linwood.”
“This is not happening again.”
He smiles a small one and steps out into the dark. I shut the door behind him and lean my forehead against it and listen.
Five steps down the path. Then a pause. My breath hitches when I don’t hear him continue. My heart starts to race like he’s going to walk back in here. And then the footsteps start again, and I breathe.
I go back to bed.
The pillow’s still on my floor in the exact shape of him. I don’t pick it up. I’ll deal with it later. I fall back asleep in the shirt I slept in and dream about nothing at all.
I wake to my phone informing me that I have forty unread messages in a group chat I am not, technically, a member of, but that Kirra has at some point in the night added me to.
I open it. It’s Kirra and Bree. There is no third member. They have been discussing me for the past hour. I pull a hoodie over my head and go to the kitchen. They’re at the island. Kirra has coffee. Bree has tea. They both look up at me at the same instant.
“Good morning, Aspen.”
I look at Kirra as she waggles her brows. Bree smiles widely.
“Morning,” I say.
“Aspen Linwood.”
I pour a coffee and add too much milk. They watch me do all of it.
Kirra cracks first. “So, you left that party on the arm of Stanley Ermington.”
I blink.
“You drove home with him.”
I take another sip and shrug. “We’ve been seeing each other and didn’t want to tell anybody at first. It’s been a couple of weeks. It hasn’t been a thing. We didn’t want to make it a thing. Last night Gavin turned up, and Stanley—”
“Wait.” Kirra sets her mug down. “Gavin Gavin?”
“Yes.”
“At the party?”
I nod.
“Holy shit.”
“And so Stanley—” Bree leans halfway across the island.
“And so Stanley, who, again, I have been seeing, came and found me. And I left. With him.”
Bree’s buying it. Bree’s buying it with both hands and her whole heart. She’s nodding.
Kirra isn’t buying it.
Kirra is looking at me over the rim of her mug with the face she gave me freshman year when I told her I wasn’t homesick. She doesn’t say anything, though, and I’m thankful. I finish my coffee and tell them I have work. I take my mug and walk back down the hall to my room. I close the door and sit on the edge of my bed.
