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“You’re doing that thing where you lie with grammar.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you’re freezing.”

Before I can argue, he pulls his sweatshirt over his head.

This is a terrible development.

His T-shirt lifts with it for half a second, and I see a narrow strip of skin at his waist, the carved line of his stomach, the casual unfairness of an athletic body existing without apology. I look away so fast I nearly give myself a moral injury.

He holds the sweatshirt out to me.

“Here.”

“I don’t need⁠—”

“Livia.”

Just my name.

I take it because I am cold and because refusing it would be pretending this is not exactly what I want.

The sweatshirt is warm from him.

That is the first problem.

The second problem is that when I pull it over my head, the world goes dark for half a second, and all I can smell is him. Clean laundry. Cold air. Soap from a locker room shower. Something warmer underneath, like cedar and skin and the inside of a boy’s bedroom if the boy had grown into a man who knew how to keep his hands to himself.

I get my head through the collar and try to look normal.

I don't feel normal.

The sleeves cover my hands. The hem falls almost to my thighs. It should make me look ridiculous.

It probably does.

Creed looks at me anyway.

Not in a way that makes me feel ridiculous.

In a way that makes my face heat up so fast, I want to walk directly off the roof and into traffic, except that would be dramatic and inconvenient for everyone.

“What?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“Nothing.”

“That was not a ‘nothing’ face.”

“I don’t have a ‘nothing’ face?”

“You have several. That was not one.”

His mouth moves again. The almost-smile.

“You look warm,” he says.