“I’m lying on you like a Labrador.”
“And doing it beautifully.”
He laughs, just once, and I feel it in my chest.
I think about what I want to say, but I’m not sure whether to say it to him or not. The only light is from the streetlamp outside, slanting across the duvet, and his hand finds mine and holds it.
“If I’m not useful, if there’s no plan, I don’t know what I am,” he says after a minute.
“Rowan—”
He cuts me off. “It sounds insane out loud.”
“It doesn’t.”
He’s quiet for a long time. His thumb moves against the back of my hand.
“My ex, Nina,” he says. “When she ended it, she said I was everybody’s safe place and nobody’s actual partner.” His voice has gone flat. “I think she was right.”
I close my fingers around his. “I’m not asking you to be safe. I’m asking you to be here.”
“Okay,” he says, then exhales loudly.
Neither of us sleeps, though we try. I feel him shift twice, then resettle, his breath going shallow each time like his mindkeeps catching on something. After a while, he sighs against my collarbone and says he can’t sleep, and I say I can’t either.
We drag ourselves back out of bed, him still in sweatpants and me still in his T-shirt and nothing else, and shuffle back into the kitchen barefoot. He goes to the pan with the leftover pasta and eats it cold standing at the counter.
“You’re an animal,” I say.
“Hockey player.” He grins. “Same thing.”
That’s when the front door opens.
It opens quickly, like whoever’s coming in has done it a hundred times — because apparently crashing at Rowan’s after a night out is standard operating procedure, which is information I could have used an hour ago — and then I hear Luca’s voice.
“—told you the Uber would be?—”
Then he comes around the corner into the kitchen, with Seb behind him and Theo bringing up the rear. When they see us, all three of them stop at the same time, and then, one after another, they do the math.
Me in Rowan’s T-shirt, barely covering my ass.
Rowan shirtless.
Rowan’s hair.
Myhair.
“Oh,” Luca says.
Seb, very slowly, sets the spare key down on the table.
“We’ll be at June’s,” Seb says, in his usual flat tone.
The three of them turn around in formation and walk back out, and through the door I hear Theo say, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” all the way down the hall before it clicks shut again.
And I lose it completely.
I’m laughing so hard I have to grab the counter — the loud, uncontrollable kind that hurts your stomach. Rowan is laughingwith his head tipped back, and he keeps catching my eye and setting me off again.
