It’s huge. The hem hits my mid-thigh under the blanket. The cuffs come past my fingertips. It smells like him in a way nothing else in this bed does — closet and cologne, all at once.
“Thank you,” I murmur into the sleeve.
He gets into bed beside me. The bed dips. He clicks off the lamp. The room goes black and falls silent.
Somewhere downstairs, the music stops. The kitchen goes quiet, and the only sound is the soft clatter of someone moving glasses into the sink one at a time.
I want to cry. I don’t know why. I’m not going to.
Blue isn’t breathing like a person who’s asleep. He’s breathing like a person being careful about how he’s breathing. The inhale is longer than the exhale.
I say into the dark, “Blue?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
A long pause. “Yeah.”
“I’m happy we can be friends.”
He doesn’t answer.
The seconds tick out. He doesn’t sayyeah.He doesn’t confirm that we are friends.He just lets the word sit on the comforter between us, and the not-picking-it-up is louder than any sentence he could have used.
I press my face into the collar of his hoodie.
A minute, maybe two passes. My head’s spinning, and it’s making it hard to sleep.
I ask, “What time are you up tomorrow?”
“Usually six.”
I scoff. “On a Sunday?”
“Every day.”
“That’s psychotic.”
He laughs. The smallest possible laugh. A single soft exhale through his nose. It makes me smile.
“How were your midterms?”
I open my eyes to stop my head from spinning. “Better than I thought.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. How was yours?”
“Good, I think.”
“How were your hockey games?”
A pause.
“Won Thursday. Lost Friday.”
“I know,” I confess. “I watched it.”
