Page 123
“I have thirty-one now.”
“So do those,” I say.
We don’t talk for twenty-five minutes. She eats about a third of the food without looking at it and pushes the rest back toward me. She highlights something. She rolls her eyes at her screen. Somebody prints ninety pages on the machine behind us, and she turns around and glares at them. I get through six problems, which is more than I got through all week.
At some point, she takes her shoes off and puts her feet on my thigh under the table and keeps reading. I don’t know if she’s doing it on purpose. I put my hand on her ankle and rub my thumb over the bone. We stay like that for another forty minutes, my foot hooked around the leg of her chair. Every so often she says something about her reading out loud that isn’t directed at me. Once she reads a whole sentence in an outraged voice, and I smile at her.
She starts packing up.
“What’re you doing later?”
“I’ve got to shower, and then Kenzie’s doing a whole thing with her group project, which I’m not in, but I’m there for emotional support. And tomorrow night I’m busy.”
I look up. “Doing what?”
It’s out before I’ve thought about it, and I hear it, and so does she.
“Kenzie and I have a thing.”
“What thing?”
“A girl thing, Nash,” she says sweetly. “There will be food, and The Bachelor, and Bianca’s bringing something in a crockpot that I hear is really good.”
“Until when?”
“I don’t know.” She’s looking at me strangely now, head tipped. “Late? Eleven, maybe.”
“Text me when you’re done.”
She zips her bag. “Why?”
“Because I want to see you.”
She blinks and doesn’t say anything for a second. Her cheeks go pink the way they do, and she looks down at her bag and back up at me. “Okay. I’ll text you.”
She leans down and kisses the side of my head, fast, like it’s nothing. I grab her hand, and she stops, and I look up at her and pull her back slowly. “Do you remember this morning?”
She looks at my mouth.
“Do you?”
She takes my face in her hand, and I lean into it and kiss her palm.
“Nash,” she teases, leaning down until her nose touches mine. “You were inside me this morning. You can manage waiting.”
I kiss her, and she’s so thrown that she just watches me. I keep my eyes open, looking right at her, until she finally closes hers and kisses me back.
“Okay,” she says. “I need to go.”
She ruffles my hair and laughs at me and walks away, and I chew my thumb and watch her go.
27
Apparently, Six Hours Is Enough
Kylie
I wake up in my own bed on Sunday, and something is wrong. It takes me a second. The ceiling is mine, the string lights are mine, and across the room, Tessa is a lump under her comforter with one foot hanging off the end. I slept hard, the kind of hard where you don’t move once. My thighs still ache when I shift, and so does my lower back, and some muscle on the inside of my hip that I didn’t know I had.
