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“You said that?”

“Yeah.”

“To the Sentinels.”

“Yeah.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while. She just looks at me through the screen with the tape gun in her hand.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just––you’ve changed.”

I think about her presence in my life, and there’s so much I could say to that, but I keep it to myself.

On Thursday night, she doesn’t have the laptop. She’s in bed in my hoodie with her hair down, lying on her side with the phone propped on the pillow next to her face.

“You’re not working,” I say.

“It’s eleven.”

“You work at eleven all the time.”

“Not tonight.”

She looks at me through the screen. Long. Slow. And I know that look, too.

“Tess.”

“What?”

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m in a hotel in Buffalo.”

“I know where you are.”

She pulls the zipper of my hoodie down an inch. Just one. Watching me the whole time. And I put my arm over my eyes and swear at the ceiling.

She’s not wearing anything underneath.

I close my eyes and groan.

She takes it all the way off.

“Tess,” I breathe. “I’m not home.”

“Then come back.”

“Sunday.”

She doesn’t stop there. She tells me exactly what she’d be doing if she were here. She tells me to touch myself and let her watch. I do everything she says until I can’t think about the bike, or the rooms, or my dad, or anything at all.

She moans into the pillow.

It isn’t the same. It isn’t her in my bed. But it’s her voice in the dark saying my name, and her face on a pillow.

She falls asleep after.

I don’t hang up. I lie there and listen to her breathe until I fall asleep.