Me:Heading over now.
Linden Street is six blocks from Hawthorne.
I’ve never been here before. I park in front of her building and look up. I get out and walk to the front door, where she’s already waiting for me.
“Hey,” she says, opening the door for me. “It’s cold.”
“Yeah,” I say, stepping in.
She rushes to the elevator, shivering.
I pull off my hoodie and shove it over her head right when the elevator doors open.
She looks up at me with soft blue eyes. “Thanks.”
I adjust my shirt and look at my hoodie, swallowing her whole.
We step inside the elevator, and I’m nervous as hell for the thirty-second ride. When she opens her apartment door, I walk in and can’t believe what the place looks like.
“Wow,” I say. “This is nice.” I look around. “Really nice.”
“This way,” she says, grabbing a container on the counter. We walk to her bedroom. She closes the door quietly behind me.
“Penelope’s asleep, so we have to be quiet.” She points at the wall, gesturing that it’s her bedroom in the room over.
I nod, looking around at her room. “Okay.”
She goes to her bed and pats the space next to her. She lifts up the container and says, “I baked cookies if you want.”
I walk over and sit next to her. The mattress dips. My knee is six inches from her knee. I can feel the heat of her through the air.
“Cookies?”
She pulls one out and takes a bite. “They are so good.”
I reach for one and take a bite. “Yeah.” I nod. “Thank you.”
I shove the rest of it in my mouth and lie back on her bed because if I keep sitting up, I am going to have to look at her face from six inches away, and I am not equipped for that yet. The bed is made on this side. The sheets are warm. The sheets smell like her, the bed smells like her, the whole room smells like her, and I love it. I close my eyes for half a second. I want to wrap myself in this blanket. I want to take this bed home with me.
We eat our cookies in silence, and I look at the ceiling.
“Are you okay?” she asks, closing the container.
I look up at her. “Yeah.”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
I shrug. “I haven’t been sleeping that much lately.”
She lies on her stomach next to me. “Is that normal?” she asks, pulling her hair behind her shoulders.
“No.”
She lets that sit. She looks down at the bedspread and picks at a thread with one fingernail, and I notice that her hands are doing a small, nervous thing. She isn’t as composed as she pretends to be. Her chest is moving a little fast under the hoodie. Her fingers will not stop moving on the thread.
I look at her face. “The guys said you dropped off my hoodie and shirt the day after Halloween.”
“Yeah,” she whispers. “I didn’t know if it was your only hoodie.”
