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He says it like he knows I’m full of shit and isn’t going to do me the favor of spelling out how he knows.

“Don’t do that,” I say, stepping closer without consciously deciding to. “Don’t make it sound like I owe you a schedule. We’re not⁠—”

Not what exactly?

“Dating. I know.” He’s on his feet now. Shorter and smaller than me, but not backing down. “You don’t date, right? You just have a series of one-night stands. And you can do that whenever you want. I went out. That’s what you do, right? You go out.”

“Quinn.”

“What,” he snaps.

We’re too close. I can see his throat work. We’re both being too loud for after one a.m., we are going to wake the whole building.

“New rule, you don’t get to lie to me and then act like I’m the one that did something wrong because I didn’t sit around waiting for you to come back,” he says.

“I was worried.” I try and fail to lower my voice.

“Were you?” He lifts one eyebrow like he knows exactly what I was doing an hour and a half ago. “You’re drunk, did that happen while you were practicing?”

That’s fair. It still pisses me off. “You don’t get to use my life against me because I didn’t stay for extra credit.”

His eyes drop. The fight slides off his face, and something startled replaces it. He takes a step back so fast his calves hit the frame of his bed, gaze ripping up to the wall over my shoulder.

I look down. Right. I hitch the towel tighter. The anger coursing through me has nowhere to go now. “Shit. I wasn’t—I’m going to put clothes on.”

“Please,” he says to the plaster.

I grab sweats and take them into the bathroom because dropping the towel right here and pulling them on feels dangerous. When I come back, he’s in bed facing the wall.

“I wasn’t dead,” he tells the dark. The anger is gone from his voice now, instead there is something else in it that I don’t examine.

“Good.” I climb into my bed. I don’t ask where he was. He doesn’t ask where I really was. The lie sits between us anyway, and so I think about all the things I didn’t say, and I listen to him not sleep until the ceiling finally stops spinning.

TWENTY-FOUR

QUINN

The light filters in through the window as the sun starts to rise, and I still haven’t slept. I’ve turned the problem of my crush over and over all night until I could rationalize it.

Me having a crush on him doesn’t mean he has to treat me as anything but a friend. He doesn’t owe me anything because he’s my first real crush. In fact, I should thank him for showing me that it is possible to get romantic feelings for someone. I thought I was broken.

That part is true.

The other part is that I watched him kiss someone, and then I came home and yelled at him for asking where I was. My rationalization doesn’t cover that. It just sits on top of it, sorta like a lid that doesn’t quite fit a petri dish.

Daniel is a lump on his bed. He snored for a while and then went quiet a few hours ago. I stared at the wall and came up with a rule for myself I could live with: friends. Lessons if he still wants them. I won’t ask him why he left or tell him I saw him kissing someone else. I won’t expect him to want the same thing I want.

And I’ll hold onto the fact that I’m not broken. Even if this might break my heart.

I’m just sharing a room with a person who can go out and touch someone else and then come back to me and be worried I was dead because I wasn’t here, and those two things can exist in him at the same time. They don’t exist in me the same way. That’s not his fault. He never offered me anything more than teaching me foreplay and friendship.

I sit up when the light hits his desk. I’ll be able to thank him some day, when I can say it without sounding like I stayed up all night rewriting the definition of what friendship should be.

Right now, I need to pee and wash my face and be the person who didn’t get gutted in a hallway last night. I move quietly so I don’t wake him. I hope our argument last night doesn’t make him change his mind about kissing me today. Maybe if I act normal, he will too. Then I can kiss him again.

It’s a messed-up thought, I know it is. Give me a break, this is the first time my logical brain can’t help me with a solution.

I brush my teeth and put my glasses on before going back to my desk with a book I’ve been wanting to read. Because acting normal needs to start somewhere, and I would rather be reading when he wakes up than staring at his bed.