Page 13 of My Girl to Ruin

“When I take you,” he says, “it won’t be in a dorm room with a door that doesn’t lock. Two days after I made you cry in my kitchen.” His jaw works. “It’ll be in my bed. And you’ll know exactly what you’re walking into when you get there.”

Heat floods me all over again, low and molten.

“Okay,” I whisper.

“That’s not tonight, Tatum.”

“I know.”

“Say it back to me.”

“Not tonight.” It comes out unsteady. He hears it because something in his expression softens.

He finds my blanket and pulls it over me, and the gentleness of it after everything else closes my throat.

Then, instead of leaving, he sits back down on the edge of the bed.

Neither of us says anything for a while. Somebody’s music thumps through the wall and cuts off. The room turns gold, then gray, as the light drains out of the window.

“What do you do?” he asks eventually. “All day. Walk me through it.”

It’s such an odd question that I laugh. “Why?”

“Because I don’t know.” He says it plainly, no shame in it, looking at the wall instead of at me. “Four years. I know your address. I know your major.” A pause. “I don’t know what your days look like.”

Something about that snags—how would he know my major—but he’s still not looking at me, and I don’t want to be the one who breaks this open.

So I tell him. About the eight a.m. I hate. About the professor who says ipso facto so often the back row keeps a tally. About the carrel on the fourth floor of the library with the broken chair nobody else will sit in, which means it’s always mine. About eating at seven, alone, most nights, and how after a while you stop registering the alone part and just call it dinner.

He doesn’t interrupt. He asks a question here and there, short ones, and every time I answer, he goes quiet again, taking it in like it matters.

When I finally run out, the room is dark.

“You should’ve had somebody,” he says.

“I know.”

He stands. At the door, he stops with his hand on the frame, and I think he’s going to say something more. He doesn’t elaborate.

“Lock this behind me,” he says. “I’ll fix it Saturday.”

Then he’s gone, and I lie there in the dark with my body still humming and my chest aching in an entirely different way. Now, I understand something I’d been careful not to look at directly.

I’m not chasing a memory. I’m falling in love with the man who sat in the dark and asked what my days look like.

Chapter Four

Lachlan

The lock takes eleven minutes.

Old hardware, painted over so many times the strike plate had swollen past the frame. Four coats, maybe five. I chisel it back, chase out the screw holes, seat the new deadbolt, and throw it six times before I’m satisfied it catches clean.

It isn’t good work. Anybody could do it. But it’s the first thing I’ve built with my hands since a courtroom took the shop, and my chest does something complicated that I’d rather not look at directly.

Tatum sits cross-legged on the bed the whole time, a textbook open in her lap that she hasn’t turned a page of.

“You’re staring,” I say without turning around.