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“Yes!”

“When?”

“When you started screaming at me.”

There’s one bottle of water in the fridge and about nine energy drinks. I take the water.

“Okay, so that’s actually so funny,” Paige says, her voice gone very bright. “That’s hilarious. Because you can do whatever you want. You know that, right? You can fuck whoever you want, Koda. I don’t care.”

“I don’t want to fuck whoever I want.”

“Then that’s your problem.”

“It is my problem. You’re my problem.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ve been trying.”

Her boot comes off her foot and across the room, and I catch it about eight inches from the side of his head. It’s a small one with a stupid little heel. Nobody says anything for a second. I put the boot on the desk.

“Practice tomorrow,” I tell Koda.

“I’m aware.”

Paige laughs at the ceiling, and then her face does something else entirely, and she rubs her eye with the back of her wrist and smears the eyeliner worse. “I’m not doing the girlfriend thing,” she says.

Koda goes still. So do I. I’m standing at the fridge with a water in my hand, and I’ve gone completely still.

“I’m not,” she says again. “That’s not—I’m not doing that. So if that’s what you’re—”

“It’s not,” Koda says.

And that shuts her up. Her mouth is still open, and nothing is coming out.

I take a sip from the bottle.

“You would be the worst fucking boyfriend,” she says. “So, what the fuck ever!”

“Yeah,” Koda says. “Whatever.”

I take my water and go without saying anything else to either of them. I shut the door, and out in the hall, I stand there with my jaw so tight my back teeth hurt.

I stop outside my own door. She’s in there, in my bed, in my shirt, on the wall side, which is her side. If I open the door, I’m getting back in that bed. I want to. I want to so bad my hands hurt. It’s not even the sex. The sex is the part I’m allowed to want. I want to get in there and put my arm under her neck and pull her onto my chest and go to sleep with her weight on me, and that’s the part she doesn’t want. That’s the whole list of shit she was glad she doesn’t have to do anymore. Which makes wanting it feel like turmoil. I stand in the hallway holding a bottle of water and hesitate because of one sentence she said three hours ago.

Then I go in.

The streetlight is still on the floor. She hasn’t moved much. Her hand is still in the spot where I was, except it isn’t warm anymore, and her face is in my pillow with her mouth open. I put the water on the desk. I get in on my side, on my back, with my hands on my own stomach, and leave them there.

Thirty seconds later, she rolls over. She comes into me, throws her arm across my stomach, gets her knee up over my thigh, and settles. Her hand lands right on my ribs. Left side. Over the shirt, over the edge of the graft, like it’s nothing.

I look at the ceiling. Her breathing goes long and slow against my neck, and mine doesn’t.

My alarm goes at six-fifteen, and I’m already up.

She wakes at seven-something, in stages. First she’s a lump, then the lump makes a noise, then she sits up with my shirt twisted around her and her hair destroyed and looks around my room.

When she sees me at the desk, she smiles. “Morning, you.”