Page 82

Anna was the one to show me how to do it. She’d come over every day for a week, still in her work clothes, arms up to the elbows in soil as she helped me set it up so I could grow my own vegetables and herbs to cook with.

I’d mourned the little garden when I left for Berkshire, but my dad tended to it as if it was his second child.

It’s too chilly in the evening to sit outside, so I take her back into the kitchen to check the food, then upstairs through the secondary living room, the library, and then—

“My bedroom.” The words are rough in my throat. Paloma pushes the door open farther to one of my two childhood bedrooms.

This one is more me than the one at my mother’s house. My bed is tidy, blue and gray flannel bedding tucked tightly with a white sheet just folded overtop. Two or three hockey trophies serve as bookends for the overflowing tomes of poetry and literature study littering the bookshelves.

“This is . . . quite the collection,” Paloma says teasingly, hands touching the spines of my books carefully before her chin turns over her shoulder. “You’ve always loved poetry?”

I nod, hands shoved in my pockets so I don’t reach for her.

The sight of Paloma in my room, golden lamplight dancing over her skin, her hands on my books—it makes something wild rouse within me. Something on the edge of feral. Terrifying enough that I ache for space, room to breathe without the scent of her in my nose.

“Stay here,” I command lightly. “I’m going to bring the food up and we can eat in here.”

I’ve said the right thing by the way she relaxes and slumps onto the end of my bed. I want to stretch her out across it, desperate to kiss her hard—harder than usual. To explore more of her. To beg her to show me how to make her feel good.

Instead, I nearly take the hinges off the door with the way my shoulder hits the frame as I stumble out into the hall.

By the time I return to my room with our plates, Paloma is laying against the pillows on the headboard, one of my books open under her fingers as she reads.

I can imagine coming home to this sight for years. And that thought is exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.

“Which one did you grab?”

“Dog Songs by Mary Oliver.” She giggles. “I’m reading to Seven.”

Seven is asleep on her thighs, one of her hands on his head. I sit below her, putting her plate on the bedside table and mine on the floor beside me.

“Read to me.”

She does, her words low and soft as she reads “Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night.”

“‘Tell me you love me,’ he says. ‘Tell me again.’” She paces over the poem perfectly, making my heart pound louder, harder in my ears. “Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over he gets to ask. I get to tell.”

My affection for her fills the room until there is barely space to breathe. We eat and I let her give her opinion over each poem as she turns through them, listening more than speaking.

No one but her could make me feel this way in the aftermath of my spiral, to still make this feel romantic and intimate. She’s the only one who would do exactly this with me, that would make sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom with poetry and an old record spinning feel like a special occasion.

Only her.

Hours later, she helps me take the plates down and clean them. Our arms brush each other periodically, gooseflesh littering my skin beneath my flannel. I want to kiss her again. I almost do—

But my dad enters the kitchen just before I can work up the nerve, the moment fading like smoke in the air.

Chapter 38

THEN: Freshman Year, November

Paloma

Bennett’s dad looks so much like him, it’s almost unsettling. Both much too tall and well built, the beard and slight lines around his eyes and mouth are all that separate the man in the crisp suit from his son.

“I just need to grab a few things from my room. Can you wait here for me?” Bennett asks.

I nod despite the fear clogging my throat.