Page 120 of On His Mind

Blue looks up. His eyes pass over me once, reading nothing into me because there’s nothing to read — I’m just a name Gianna said, a girl at a table. If he remembers a night a year ago when somebody spilled a beer down the front of his goalie, it doesn’t show. It probably doesn’t even register. Why would it?

“Hi,” he says, and goes back to his phone.

“Nice to meet you,” I say. My heart’s racing so hard I’m sure the table can hear it. I make it four more minutes of small talk, and then I mention I have somewhere to be. I walk out into the cold with my hands shaking around my cup because I feel guilty, and I hate secrets. I hold my head higher as I walk away.

I don’t tell Percy any of it. I don’t want him to worry.

Percy comes over on Friday, and it’s good, it’s so good. His hands are in my hair and his weight is over me. He’s still careful with me, and in the middle of it, with him breathing my name into my throat, it hits me sideways that I can’t take him anywhere. That I will never sit at a table with him and my friends. That there’s no version of this where I get to just have him in the daylight, walk into a room with my hand in his, be a girl who’s seeing someone and say his name out loud like Ivory says Drew’s.

I push it down. He’s here, he’s warm, he’s mine tonight. I pull him closer and don’t let the thought finish, because I love this — I love having him — and the thought doesn’t have anywhere good to go.

He falls asleep, and I lie awake in his arms and think. I think about how I have him. All of him. He’s opened up in ways I neverthought he would. He laughs, he cuddles, he tells me things, and I would never undo one second of it.

But I’ve started ignoring my roommate who will be gone next semester and whom I will miss deeply. I’ve bailed countless times on the girls I love and want to see. I’ve finally found a friend group, and I let it go on purpose. My life outside this room has gone small and quiet and full of lies, and I did every bit of it myself, to keep the one thing I can’t stand to lose. I’m too far gone to be angry about it. Too in love. It’s a trade I made, and I’d make it again — over and over, for him. I nestle my head against his chest and listen to his heartbeat.

Chapter 41

Percy

WinterBreak,SophomoreYear

I walk into the Hawthorne House from closing the Camerie a little before midnight, cold all the way to the bone, and Penelope’s at the kitchen table in one of my hoodies with her sketchbook open and a pencil going.

“There’s soup,” she says, smiling at me. “It’s probably cold by now.”

The house is dead quiet around her. Everybody drove home for break a week ago — the guys, the whole town — and I stayed, because there’s nowhere for me to go. I picked up every shift at the restaurant I could get. She stayed too. So, it’s just us and two empty places. We’ve been moving between her apartment and this house for a week like we live in both of them.

I walk up to her and kiss her forehead while she hides whatever she’s drawing. Seeing her with the hood up and hair down, I tip her back and kiss her neck.

“Percy,” she calls out, gripping onto my shoulders. “Don’t –– stop.”

“Don’t stop?” I tease. “Okay.”

I bite down on her neck and lick until I reach her ear. She’s slipping off the chair, so I pick her up and sit her on the counter.

She’s wearing a smirk when I pull back.

“What?” I ask, searching her face for an answer.

She wraps her arms around me and murmurs, “You’re so strong.”

I look at her lips. “Yeah?”

She nods.

I pick her up off the counter, and she yelps my name, holding onto me tightly.

“My drawing!”

“It can wait,” I say, walking up the stairs with her.

“I have a deadline,” she says, pulling back to look at me.

“I want you,” I say as I reach the top of the stairs and walk down the hall.

“You have me,” she says, and then she grabs the back of my neck and kisses me.

I kick my bedroom door closed behind us and sit on my bed with her in my lap. Her tongue enters my mouth as I rub her body.