Page 136 of On His Mind

“But you know what you feel.” She turns her head to look at me. “Even when you can’t say it. You know.”

“No.” I keep my eyes on the window. “Not really. I’m not like you. You always know what’s going on inside you — you feel it and you name it, right there in the moment. I wasn’t –– I’m not –– I don’t know what I’m feeling while it’s happening to me. I only figure it out after, once it’s over, once I’ve had the time to sit with it.” I finally look at her.

She studies me. “Really.”

I nod.

“So.” She catches her bottom lip in her teeth. “How did summer feel?”

The question knocks the air clean out of me.Summer.It’s almost two months gone, and it already feels like somewhere I got exiled from, a place I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to find my way back into.

“Summer,” I repeat, buying myself a second. “I didn’t know I could be that happy. Didn’t know it was even on the menu, for someone like me.” I swallow hard. “But I know I don’t deserve it.”

My hands find the lip of the counter and hold on. She lays her hand over mine.

“Why wouldn’t you deserve happiness, Percy?”

I turn my hand under hers and let her fingers slot down between mine. The weight of her hand is the only thing keeping me on the floor of my own body.

“Life was hard for me, for a long time.” I keep my eyes on our hands so I can get through it. “Where I come from, wanting was too much. So I got good at not wanting. I got real good at it.”

“Mm,” she says, and her thumb moves slow across the back of my hand.

“And then this summer happened. And now I want things. I want a lot of things.” I have to stop.

“And that scares you,” she says softly.

“Fucking terrifies me, actually.” I let out a breath. “Yeah.”

Her free hand lifts to my face. She pushes the hair back off my forehead and takes a good long look at me.

“This is the longest I’ve ever seen your hair,” she murmurs.

I turn my face into her palm and close my eyes for a second. I let myself have it.

“Come here,” she says.

She keeps hold of my hand and draws me out of the kitchen, and I go wherever she’s taking me — I’d go anywhere shepointed. She sinks down onto the couch and pulls me with her, and then she climbs half into my lap, folds herself up small against my chest, tucks her head in under my jaw. I get my arms around her.

For a while neither of us says anything. Her weight settles into me. Her breathing slows. My hand moves up and down her back on its own, and that sugary candle-smell is everywhere, and the apartment is so still I can hear the hum somewhere in another room.

“Percy.” Her voice is small now, gone soft with the drink and the late hour. “I don’t ever want to miss you again.”

Something in my chest cracks right down the middle.

“Then you won’t,” I say. “You won’t have to. I mean it.”

She tips her head back to look up at me, and I don’t think about it. I lean down and kiss her. It’s slow, barely a press of my mouth to hers, and it’s still the best thing that’s happened to me since this school year started. Her lips are warm and taste faintly of the parfait, of the drink underneath it, and she makes a small sound against me that I already know I’ll be hearing in my head for days.

When we come apart, she stays close, her nose brushing mine.

“Do you want to go to my room?” she asks.

I do. I want it more than I’ve let myself want anything in weeks, and that’s exactly why I can’t. She’s warm and loose against me, and there’s liquor under the sweetness on her mouth, and whatever she’s asking for right now, and I’m not going to be a thing she has to think about in the morning and wince.

“Not tonight,” I say. I say it into her hair so she can feel it isn’t a no about her.

She pulls back to look at me, and something shutters across her face, and I watch her land on the wrong reason for it.