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“Jesus Christ.”

“For what, Rafe.”

I close my eyes.

“For being a dick.”

She looks at me a second longer. Then she puts down the tape gun.

“Okay,” she says. And this time it’s a different okay.

She turns all the way around in her chair, puts her hands on my face, careful of the cut, and kisses me.

I make a sound. Not on purpose. Her thumb’s on my cheekbone, and it’s right on the bruise.

“Sorry,” she says. She doesn’t sound sorry. She moves her thumb anyway.

I pull her up out of the chair. She comes. She walks me backward to the bed, and I let her, and when the backs of my knees hit the mattress, I sit down hard and swear because something in my ribs I didn’t know about says hello.

She stops. “What?”

“Nothing.”

She looks at me. Then she puts her hand flat on my chest and pushes until I’m on my back on her narrow bed, and climbs over me.

“Don’t move,” she says.

“I can move.”

“Maybe don’t fight an entire hockey team before you come over.”

“It wasn’t the entire team.”

“That’s your defense?”

She kisses the bruise on my cheek. Then the corner of my mouth. Then my jaw, and the side of my neck, and the place on my collarbone where a stick got me in the first, which I didn’t know was a mark until she put her mouth on it.

“You feel bad for me,” I say.

“I absolutely do not.” She leans up and looks into my eyes. “I never feel bad for people who know exactly what they’re doing.”

I grab her face and smile.

She takes my hands off her when I try to sit up, puts them back down on the mattress by my head, holds them there. She looks back at me like I said don’t move. And I don’t. I let her. I lie there on my back in her bed with my knuckles throbbing and my ribs complaining and let her have all of it, every bit, at whatever speed she wants, and I don’t care about Berwyn or June or a scout or anything at all.

She tells me to stop getting blood on her sheets. I tell her it’s her fault for kissing the cut. She tells me to shut up. I do.

She knows what she’s doing to me now. She knows it better than I do. She laughs right against my mouth when she makes me lose it, and I don’t even mind.

Afterward, she’s lying on her side next to me in the dark with her hand flat on my chest, careful of my ribs.

“Is that bad?” she says.

“What?”

“For the scouts. The fight.”

I look at the ceiling.