Page 24

My pulse is going so hard I can feel it in my throat, in my wrists, under the tattoo, and for one second, the stairwell tilts.

I don’t look at his shirt. I keep my bag on my shoulder, where it was. I don’t lean against the wall. I stand in the middle of the landing with both feet flat, and I look at his face. I let my heart do whatever it wants on the inside, because it’s the only part of me he can’t see.

He’s two steps up, leaning on the railing. It puts him even taller than he already is. I’m sure he knows that.

“Business Administration,” he says.

I don’t say anything.

“First year.” He sounds bored. “Corvin Hall.”

That one makes me look up from wherever I was looking, which was his chin.

He sees it. The corner of his mouth doesn’t move, because it never does, but something in his eyes settles, like a man who’s just found the card he was looking for in a deck.

“You can’t afford to live off campus,” he says.

It isn’t a question. It’s a statement, and he’s right. He doesn’t need my financial aid file to know. All he has to do is look at my coat. I’ve had this coat since sophomore year in high school, and I’m wearing the same shoes I wore across a wet field. He’s known how much I’m worth since we were fourteen.

“So I’ll pay,” he says.

My stomach sinks. I wait for the rest of it. The joke. The part where he laughs, except he doesn’t laugh, so the part where his eyes do it instead.

My heart goes still.

“Pick a place,” he says. “One of the apartments on Franklin, or the new ones by the stadium. Whatever you want. I’ll cover the year.”

I stare at him.

He means it. He actually means it. He’s offering to pay my rent the way you’d offer somebody a ride. Like it’s a logistics problem. Like I’m a piece of furniture in the wrong room, and he’s calling the movers.

I should be insulted. I am insulted. It sits in my chest like something hot I swallowed too fast. But I’m reading him. I’m always reading him. And this is different.

In high school, he went for what I couldn’t afford to lose. My job. My grandma. My name in a group chat. The few things I had, held up where I could see them, so I’d know exactly what he could take. That was his entire game.

This isn’t a threat. He isn’t taking anything. He’s offering to pay for the thing he wants, which is me, somewhere else.

I look at his eyes.

They aren’t dark. They’re green. Too green, almost, sharp and bright in the gray stairwell light, and they won’t stay still. They go to my face, and then the window, and then the railing under his hand, and then my face again. He’s angry. He’s always angry. But it’s not the almost-brown that used to come before the worst things, the color I learned to run from. It’s something restless. Something that doesn’t know where to put itself.

He isn’t trying to get rid of me because he hates looking at me. I don’t know what he’s trying to do. But it isn’t that. And somehow, that’s what makes my shoulders come down.

“You don’t have to worry,” I say softly.

Something shifts in his jaw.

“I’ll make sure you never have to see me again,” I say. “I’ve been doing it for two months. I’m good at it.”

He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me, and the green goes a little darker.

“But it only works,” I say, “if you stop following me.”

“I’m not following you.”

He says it fast. The way people deny things they haven’t had time to think about.

“You knocked on my door on Halloween,” I say quietly. “Please don’t do that again.”