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I nod. I don’t belong in his bedroom with my blood on my sweater and my orientation-fair duffel on his rug. There’s a guest suite. Across the hall. That’s where a girl like me goes in a house like this, if she’s let in at all.

I pick up the clothes. I follow her to the door.

And Rafe steps out of the bathroom, catching his mother’s attention. I look over. He’s changed into a plain black T-shirt, his hair wet and pushed back off his face. He’s washed the blood off his mouth, but his lip is fat and split, and there’s a bruise coming up purple along his cheekbone. His right hand is wrapped in white gauze, badly, like he did it himself in a hurry with the wrong hand.

He looks at his mother. At me, behind her, with the clothes in my arms.

“Where are you taking her?”

“To the guest suite, honey. She’ll have her own bath, and—”

“No.”

His mother stops. “Rafferty—”

“She can use mine.”

His mother looks at him. Then at me. Then back. Her eyebrows go up, just slightly, just a fraction, and something moves behind her face that she keeps there.

“I was only—”

“She’s staying here,” he says.

And then his eyes go to his mother’s face. And I watch him see it. The look she’s giving me. The careful one. The assessing one. The little soft sorry thing underneath it.

“Don’t look at her like that,” he says.

The room goes very quiet.

“I’m not looking at her like anything,” his mother says.

“You are.”

He looks at his mother until she looks away first.

And I stand there holding a stack of cashmere and can’t breathe.

Nobody has ever done that. Not once in my life. Not my mother. Not my grandma. Not anybody. People have stood between me and a lot of things, sometimes, when it was easy. Nobody has ever stood between me and a look. Nobody has ever noticed how somebody was looking at me and decided it wasn’t allowed.

And it’s him. Of all the people on earth. It’s the boy who spent four years teaching an entire school how to look at me.

“She’s staying here,” he says again, quieter. “You deal with Dad. I’m not going back down tonight.”

His mom looks at him for a long moment. Then she looks at me. And I can see the question in her eyes. I can see it as clearly as if she’d said it out loud, standing there in her diamond earrings in her son’s bedroom door.

What is this girl to you?

I don’t know.

I look at Rafe, at his split lip and his badly wrapped hand and his jaw tight, and I have absolutely no idea.

“Fine,” his mother says.

She looks at me once more. Her face does the polite thing again.

“There are clean towels in the cabinet under the sink,” she says. “And ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet. Take three.”

And she goes.