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That ends their game, so Rafe stands and stretches until his back cracks. He unplugs his phone charger and wraps it around his hand, picks his pillow up off his bed, tucks it under his arm, grabs his hoodie off the chair, and goes to the door. “Night.”

Nash lifts his chin. “Night.”

The door shuts behind him. Nash switches to a real hockey game with the sound so low it’s just a hum and leans back against the wall beside me, his shoulder against mine and his leg against mine. He tells me why a guy got a penalty. I look at him, and then he looks back at the TV. I look at his hands folded in his lap. I keep waiting for something to happen, and nothing does, and then I wait to feel weird about that, and I don’t.

The game ends. Red loses. He turns off the TV, and the room goes dark except for the streetlight through the gap in his blinds, one orange stripe across the floor and up the side of the desk.

“You tired?”

“Yeah.”

He pulls the covers back, and I crawl under them to the wall side, because that’s the side I had Friday. He gets in after me, and the mattress dips and rolls me into him, and neither of us fixes it. He smells like his body wash. My face is an inch from his throat, and I can feel him breathing. His jaw is right there, so I kiss the edge of it, and then his mouth. He kisses me back, and my whole body wakes up. It’s slow at first, so slow I don’t notice his hand moving up the back of my shirt until it’s warm against my spine. I get my fingers behind his neck and pull him closer. He rolls half on top of me, his knee pushes between mine, my body is already humming. A sound I don’t recognize comes out of me low in my throat, and I yawn.

Right into his mouth. A huge, jaw-cracking, eyes-watering yawn, and there’s nothing I can do about it once it starts.

Nash pulls back. I slap a hand over my face. And he laughs, really laughs, out loud, with his forehead dropping onto my shoulder and his whole body shaking on top of me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile that big.

“Go to sleep,” he mumbles into my shirt.

“No.”

“You just yawned in my mouth.”

“That’s because you’re boring.”

He lifts his head and looks at me in the orange stripe of light, still smiling a little at the corner, and I’ve seen him do a lot of things in the last week, but I don’t think I’ve seen that. Then he rolls onto his back, hooks his arm under my neck, and drags me across the mattress into his side. My cheek ends up on his chest, and his hand ends up on my hip, over the strawberries.

“Nash—”

“Sleep,” he says.

I listen to his heart and wait for him to try something. His hand doesn’t go anywhere. His thumb moves back and forth over my hipbone, slower and slower, and then it stops, and his breathing goes long and even under my ear. I lie there with my eyes open. I came here to hook up. I said hopefully, out loud, to my friends. And I’m lying on his chest while he falls asleep, and nothing happens. I let myself relax, and only then realize I’ve been tense this whole time, and I follow his breathing down.

I wake up because he moves. It’s still dark, and the stripe is still on the floor. The mattress shifts, there’s a rustle, a long breath out, and then it’s still again, and his arm isn’t under me anymore. I open my eyes. He’s rolled onto his side, facing the room, and all I can see is the back of his shirt and the shape of his shoulder and his hair against the pillow. There’s cold air where he was, and I don’t like it. I scoot across the mattress until my knees fit behind his and my forehead rests between his shoulder blades, and I put my arm over his waist.

His hand finds mine in the dark on the first try, like he knew exactly where it would be, and pulls it against his stomach and holds it there and goes still again. My palm is flat against him over his shirt, right in the middle, where it’s warm. I close my eyes.

28

We’re Keeping This Simple

Nash

There’s a hand on my stomach, and I wake up with my fingers already locked around it.

Kylie.

Her palm is flat over my shirt, and for one fucked-up second, I can’t tell where it is or how low. So I press my thumb into the side of her hand and follow the heel of it without moving anything else, feeling my way across. Center. She’s in the center. The graft is farther left. I let the air out through my nose, and behind me, she makes a soft sound and pushes her face harder between my shoulder blades.

I stare at the wall. Her knees are tucked into the backs of mine, her arm is around my waist, and her hand has disappeared completely under mine. She saw it on Greeley’s driveway. I haven’t thought about that once while I’ve been inside her. I thought about my shirt, and about how fast I caught her wrist Friday night, and whether she’d try again. She didn’t. Not Friday, not Saturday morning, not last night. She hasn’t asked about it once.

If she moved six inches to the left, she’d feel it. Not see it, feel it. My stomach pulls tight under her palm. The worst of it is down near my hip, where the burn went deepest, and she’d get there first if her hand slid under my shirt from here. Her fingers would cross normal skin, and then the skin would go smooth and tight and cooler than the rest of me, and in one place there would just be less of me. I used to check it in the mirror after showers, turning sideways to see if it looked as bad from that angle. It did. So I stopped checking.

She shifts behind me, and her hand moves with her. I catch it so hard she makes another sleepy sound into my back. I freeze. She doesn’t wake up. My fingers loosen one at a time. I could move her hand. It would take nothing. Pick it up, set it on the mattress between us, and she’d probably sleep straight through it. I leave it where it is.

The room is gray through the blinds. Her black hair tie is sitting on my desk next to the ring the Gatorade left. I fell asleep on my back with her on my chest, her cheek right over my heart and one leg thrown over mine, my hand on her hip. Now I’m on my side, and she came across the mattress after me, and I don’t remember threading my fingers through hers. Apparently I do this shit unconsciously now. I should probably be more concerned about that. Instead, I want to turn over. I want her back where she was, on my chest with her leg over me and her face where I can see it when she wakes up. I start to move, and she breathes deeper against my back, and I stop.

The clock says 7:02. I stay. At 7:09, my left arm starts tingling under the pillow. At 7:14, I can’t feel two of my fingers. By 7:20, my shoulder fucking hurts, and she’s still sleeping through all of it with her hand six inches from the worst part of me and mine wrapped around it. I stay.