Page 19

“That’s a timeframe.”

She sits up, grinning, and shoves her feet into her shoes. “You’re so romantic, Kennebeck.”

“You came over for twenty minutes.”

“And I got what I came for.” She hooks a finger through my belt loop, pulls, and kisses me quick. “Walk me out.”

I walk her down. We take the elevator, and she talks the whole way, about her roommate who’s dating a guy in the marching band. I don’t say much. In the lobby, she pushes the front door open with her hip and turns around in the doorway.

“This weekend?” she says.

“Maybe.”

“I’m keeping the sweatshirt.”

“I figured.”

She laughs and lets the door swing shut behind her, and I watch her go down the walk under the lamps before I turn around and head back up.

I take the stairs two at a time. By the second landing, my quads are burning from this morning’s skate, and I come around the corner to the third fast enough that I almost go straight into someone sitting on the step.

It’s the angry girl. Blondie. She’s hunched forward with one hand over her face and her phone in the other, the screen lit, and while I stand there, her shoulders move once, then again. She’s crying.

Fuck.

I don’t move, because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. The stairwell is narrow, and she’s sitting in the middle of it. A moment later, she notices my shoes. Her hand comes down. Her eyes are red, her cheeks are wet, and she looks up at me for a second without saying anything.

Then she starts laughing. It’s the kind where she’s still crying at the same time and can’t pick one. She drags the sleeve of her sweatshirt across her face.

“What?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

“What’s funny?”

Another laugh gets out of her. “You.”

“Me.”

“Of course it’s you.”

I don’t know what that means. She scoots sideways on the step and waves at the gap she’s made, maybe eight inches between her shoulder and the wall.

“Go.”

“I’m trying to.”

She looks at the gap, then up at me. “Jesus Christ. How fucking big are you?” She gets to her feet and flattens herself against the railing with her phone pressed to her chest. “There, your Majesty.”

I go past her close enough that her sleeve brushes my arm, and she leans away from it. I’m on the landing with my hand on the door when she says, “Asshole.”

I push through the door and let it swing shut.

Rafe is back when I get to the room, flat on his back with one arm behind his head and his phone held over his face. There’s a dirt bike video playing with the sound off, some guy trying to clear an above-ground pool. Rafe’s hockey stick is leaning against the wall by his bed with a fresh crack running up the shaft that wasn’t there before this morning’s skate.

He doesn’t look over when I come in. He sniffs. “It smells like vanilla in here.”

“It’s a candle.”