Page 138

On the third floor, I look at my door, then at him. “Can I sleep at yours?”

Nash looks at my door, and then at me. “Yeah.”

Rafe’s bed is empty and made. Nash turns on the desk lamp instead of the overhead, and I kick my boots off in the middle of the floor and fall face first onto his bed and stay there, listening to him move around behind me. He gets me one of his T-shirts out of the drawer and turns around while I change, which is so funny after everything that I laugh into the shirt while I’m pulling it over my head, and he doesn’t ask what’s funny. He turns the lamp off. The streetlight comes through the gap in the blinds again, that orange stripe across the floor. He gets into bed and lies on his back.

I wait for his arm. He always does the arm, hooks it under my neck and drags me over, and I’ve been ready for it since we walked in. I’m lying there with my cheek on his pillow. His hand is resting on his own stomach, and it stays there.

So I go to him. I scoot across the mattress until I’m tucked against his side, get my head onto his shoulder, pick his hand up off his stomach, and put it on my hip where it goes. It stays exactly where I put it.

I wait for him to say something, and nothing comes. He’s tired, probably. He has practice. He spent all night at a counter holding a water, being nice to people he doesn’t know, because I asked him to come. I close my eyes. I feel so good, so safe and warm and perfectly uncomplicated. Everything’s so easy with him. I think I’ll tell him again in the morning how easy this is and how good he makes me feel, and he’ll probably just say okay.

His hand is still on my hip, exactly where I left it. It hasn’t moved at all. His breathing hasn’t changed yet, either. It’s still the awake kind, slow and even but not deep. I lie there listening and wait for it to go long, the way it does right before he falls asleep, and I’m asleep before it does.

30

Two Coordinates

Nash

She’s out in about four minutes. I can tell because of her hand. It’s been doing a slow thing against my chest, opening and closing a little, and it stops in the middle and just lies there with the fingers half curled. Her head is on my shoulder, and her hair is against my face. One of her feet is jammed between my ankles, freezing, actually freezing, and I don’t move it. My hand is on her hip because she put it there.

She asked me to Theo’s, and I went. She wanted to say hi to that guy, and she said hi to that guy. I asked her to come Saturday, and she’s coming Saturday. She asked to sleep in here, and she’s asleep in here. None of it is complicated. Every one of those is a thing that happened, each one makes sense on its own, and I can line them up in a row.

And then there’s the other thing she said, which also makes sense and fits with none of them. She doesn’t want a boyfriend. Fine. I’m not her boyfriend. That isn’t new information. Coach tells me the second line needs to be wide at the blue line, we’re wide at the blue line. Rafe holds it too long, Rafe releases earlier. Greeley wants me to react, I don’t react. Somebody tells you the thing, you do the thing. So she doesn’t want a boyfriend, and I’m not one. She came to my door Monday night with a condom in her hoodie pocket because she wanted to, and she left after.

But then what the hell is the library? What do you call Wednesday? What about her class schedule, which I could recite right now: Monday-Wednesday lecture at eleven, lab Wednesday afternoon, the Friday one she hates. Nobody told me those. I just have them. What’s standing in a hallway for twelve minutes waiting for her to get dressed for breakfast? What’s the tater tots? What’s standing at a counter for three hours holding a bottle of water around people I don’t know because she wanted to go and wanted me there? What’s Saturday? I asked her to the game twice in my head before I asked her out loud. What’s Sunday night, when she showed up in those ugly fucking pants and we didn’t even do anything? She was on my bed for two hours and nothing happened and I didn’t need anything to happen. I wanted her sitting there. Then she fell asleep on me, and I lay under her with a dead arm for forty minutes because I didn’t want to move her.

What category is that? I don’t fucking know.

I’m lying here in the dark with her hair in my mouth trying to file things, and there’s a pile of shit with nowhere to go. She gave me the label tonight on the path outside the library, and it doesn’t fit the evidence. That’s what’s making me insane. Not that she said it. She’s allowed to say it. She’s allowed to want what she wants, and she said it like she was telling me something nice. She wasn’t even wrong. There’s no conversation I can point at where I said anything different. I just did a bunch of things, and I thought the things were the thing.

She makes a noise in her sleep and pushes her face further into my shoulder, and her hand slides up and settles over my collarbone. She’s so warm. She smells like my shirt and somebody’s cookies. I look at the ceiling for a long time. The clock says 1:14, then 1:40, then 2:03, and I’m still on my back with my jaw aching, and at some point, I realize I’ve been doing the same lap for an hour, like a guy skating circles waiting for a whistle that isn’t coming. I can’t stay in this bed.

Getting out from under her takes about two minutes. Arm first, then shoulder, then I slide down and off the end of the mattress like getting out of a car without opening the door, and I get my hand under her head at the last second, so it doesn’t drop. She makes a sound that isn’t words. Her hand comes across the sheet into the warm spot where I was and stops there, palm down, and her face turns into my pillow. I stand next to the bed in the dark holding my jeans. Asleep, she comes after me. Awake, she tells me what this is. I’d like to know which one counts. I’d like to fucking ask her.

I get dressed in the hall.

I’m going to the machine on five for a water because ours is out, and Koda’s light is on under his door when I come up the stairwell. I can hear voices, and one of them isn’t Koda. Then the other voice goes up about half an octave, and something hits a wall, and I stop. I knock once and open it.

Paige is on Koda’s bed with her back against the wall and her boots still on and her eyeliner halfway down one cheek, and Koda is standing in the middle of the room in a T-shirt and basketball shorts with his hands out like he’s talking somebody off a ledge. There’s a hoodie on the floor by the door. That’s what hit the wall.

They both look at me.

“Nash,” Koda says. “Great. Tell her I’m not an asshole.”

“No,” I say.

“See!” Paige says.

I came for water. Koda’s mini fridge is by the desk, and I go to it. Behind me, Paige says, “He let that girl put her number in his phone.”

“She put it in herself.”

“It’s the same fucking thing, Koda!”

“You’re not listening to what I’m—” He shoves both hands back through his hair. “I didn’t ask her for it.”

“Did you delete it?”