Page 27 of XOXO, Yours

I’ve been told I don’t know how to hide what I’m feeling. That it’s all right there on my face. I’m glad she’s looking at the ceiling right now.

“That’s a hell of a thing to have to learn at what? Seven?”

“Six.”

Six.

I think about myself at six. My biggest problem was that Henry wouldn’t let me ride on the tractor.

“What about them?” I tip my chin at the photo. “You leave them first too?”

She looks at the picture and smiles wistfully. “I tried,” she says. “About a month after Cora got there. I packed my backpack and walked out the front door in the middle of the night. Cora followed me down the street in her nightgown with her shoes on the wrong feet. Hope sat on my backpack in the front yard and refused to get off.” The corner of her mouth lifts. “So I went back inside. They’re the only thing I never managed to leave.”

My chest goes tight and hot, and my eyes sting.

Because I get it now. The one night. The no flowers, no phone calls. The rules she laid out in that parking lot like she was reading me my rights.

She’s leaving first.

And the stupid thing, the really stupid thing, is that lying here with her pinky hooked through mine, all I can think is that I would follow her down the street with my boots on the wrong feet too.

chapter

eight

Jules

I can feel him looking at me.

Not a quick glance. A long, steady look, the kind that has weight to it. I turn my head on the pillow, and he's watching me with this achingly soft expression, like I just handed him something that matters.

Which, apparently, I did. I don't know why. It's the middle of the night, a man I met six hours ago has his pinky hooked through mine, and I'm narrating my placement history like it's a true-crime podcast.

"Don't," I say.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever that face is. Don't."

"It's just my face."

That's the whole problem, though. Everything he feels plays out in vivid color. No locks, no curtains. And right now, what he's feeling looks a whole lot like tenderness.

I pull my pinky free and sit up, tucking the sheet under my arms. My quilt pools around my waist. I need something to do with my hands and my mouth that isn't him.

"What time is it?"

He reaches across me to the nightstand, a whole warm wall of chest, and checks his phone. "Three thirty-eight."

"Not three-forty?"

"It's three thirty-eight."

"You count everything."

"Only the stuff I like."

He says it easily, like it's nothing. Like it doesn't land somewhere in my body like a live mine that will detonate at a later date.