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He turns around. “Stop.”
“I’m just saying, you don’t have to—”
“Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
He scrubs both hands down his face and starts again, lower. “Jesus. Tess. You keep handing me ways out. I didn’t ask for a way out. I don’t want one.” He paces the three steps the room allows and comes back. “You planned the whole thing. You know that? How to get to Goodwill without my car. How often you could afford to see me. You planned how to lose me before you ever asked if I was going anywhere.”
I don’t have anything to say to that, because it’s true, and because I can feel my eyes going hot and I’m trying so hard not to let them.
“I went for a walk because you lay there on my chest and told me you could see me every six weeks if you sold enough,” he says, “and I couldn’t fucking breathe in here. That’s all it was. I shouldn’t have gone. I know I shouldn’t have gone, I knew it halfway down the street and I kept going anyway because I’m an idiot. I walked all the way to Corvin. I stood outside my old window and called my dad, which, don’t even ask.” He stops in front of the bed. “I’m not walking out of a room on you again. Not to breathe. Not for anything.”
The first tear goes before I can catch it. I wipe it fast with the heel of my hand.
“Tess,” he says, and all the heat goes out of his voice.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’ve been crying on your bed for an hour because I went to go count Goodwills.”
I laugh. I don’t mean to. It comes out wet and ugly.
“I know you don’t need my money,” he says. “That’s not what I’m saying. I don’t want you thinking that’s what this is. I’ve watched you all summer. I’ve watched you sit on the floor and steam a coat for forty minutes to get two hundred dollars for it. I watched you write that whole guide on a hotel desk at two in the morning while I was passed out in my jersey. You made two and a half grand in June selling other people’s old shit, and sixty-three strangers paid you for what’s in your head. That’s not a hobby, Tess. That’s not something you do until you get a real job. That’s the job.”
I stare at him. Nobody has ever said that to me. I haven’t even said it to myself.
“You want to pay half the rent? Pay half the rent. You want your own account I can’t see? Okay. Open it tomorrow. You want a room for your stuff with a lock on the door, then we find a place with a room with a lock on the door.” He’s pacing again, ticking things off on his fingers like he’s been arguing with me in his head the whole walk, which I realize he probably has. “You hate the city, you leave. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go myself. They trade me somewhere, you get a say. Every time. I don’t care.” He stops. “What I’m not doing is watching you ride two buses to a Goodwill on Route 9 because you decided using my car makes you a problem. I’m not asking you to make yourself small enough to fit in my life. I’m asking you to bring the whole thing.”
“What if you don’t want me there anymore?”
He goes very still.
“I don’t mean now,” I say quickly. “I know now. I mean in a year. If you meet someone, or they trade you, or you just— you get there and your life gets big and I’m in an apartment with your name on the lease in a city where I don’t know a single person, and I have to—”
“Tess.”
“I’m just saying I have to think about what happens if—”
“No. Give me a second.” He holds up a hand, and it’s shaking a little. “Give me a second, because I’m trying really fucking hard not to get pissed at you for asking me that.”
I flinch. I don’t mean to. It’s the oldest thing in my body, and he sees it happen and his whole face changes.
“Not at you,” he says. “Hey. Not at you. Okay? At the fact that you believe that. That you sat up here and think I’d get sick of you like it’s a fucking bus schedule.” He rakes his hand through his wet hair and leaves it standing up. “I don’t know how else to— I’ve been trying to tell you all summer. I drove you to the post office every single day. I gave you my car. I left my toothbrush in your cup on purpose. Did you know that? I have three. I’ve got two more at my parents’ house, I don’t need that one, I left it there so you’d see it every morning.” His voice cracks on morning, and he shoves through it like he’s going into the boards. “I don’t know how else to tell you.”
He looks at me.
“I fucking love you, Tessa.”
The fan keeps going. That’s what I notice first, that the fan keeps turning in the window like nothing happened, pushing the same hot air around the same small room. The light on my printer is blinking orange because it’s out of labels. His shirt is still dark across the shoulders from the walk. There’s a crease at the knee of his shorts from sitting, and a scab on his knuckle from practice, and he’s breathing hard, like he just skated the length of the ice, and he’s looking at me like he’s waiting to get hit.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he says, quieter. “I love you. I don’t want to visit you. I don’t want some schedule for when I’m allowed to see you, like I’m your fucking dentist. I want your boxes in my hallway. I want that printer grinding at midnight when I’m trying to sleep. I want to step on your tape gun in the dark and want to die. I want you stealing my hoodies and telling me my texts sound like ransom notes. I want to wake up to you every single day. I want all of it, Tess. Every day.”
He crouches in front of me, so that for once he’s lower than I am and I have to look down to find his eyes.
“And if you say no,” he says, and stops, and swallows, and makes himself keep going. “If you think about it, and you want to stay, then you stay. I’m not going to make you pay for it. I’m not going to be weird. I’ll still love you. I’ll be on a plane every chance I get, and I’ll hate every minute I’m not here, and I’ll figure it out.” His hand finds my ankle, the one that’s numb, and holds it. “I’m not asking you to need me. I know you don’t. That’s the whole fucking thing. I’m asking you to choose me.”
I have heard I love you before. My mom said it on her way out the door, every time, the way you’d grab a coat off a hook. She said it the last time too. So the words have always sounded to me like someone leaving, like the last thing you hear before the screen door, and I’ve spent my whole life making sure I never needed to hear them from anyone. And now here’s this boy crouched on my floor with his hand around my ankle, saying them like they’re the reason he came back up the stairs.
