Page 140 of On His Mind

“No.” The smile he gives me is small and proud and can’t quite hold still. “I’m not.” He leans across the bed and kisses me. “You’ll come?”

“Are you inviting me now?”

He grins. “Guess I am.”

“Then yeah.” I loop my arms around his neck and don’t let go. “I’ll be there. Do you have to leave right now?”

“Yeah.”

I kiss him with my eyes shut, memorizing the shape of it. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”

“Tonight, right?”

I hold his eyes and let a slow shrug answer for me. “Really?”

“I’ll see you tonight, Penelope,” he says, and steps back out of my arms.

“Okay,” I smile. “Tonight.”

For two weeks, it goes like this. He shows up at half past midnight, when the guys are asleep. We’re kissing before we’re talking. He carries me to the bedroom, and we come apart together until we’re both wrecked and breathless, and then we lie tangled in the dark, kissing slow, until the hour turns, and he has to ease back out into the night.

I’m still his secret. He’s still mine.

I’d thought the summer changed something. I really believed it had. But nothing moved underneath. The foundation is exactly where it always was, and we’re still doing this the only way we know how — we’re on glass, careful and quiet.

One night he comes at one in the morning, and I have class first thing and my internship after, and I’m so tired my bones ache with it. I let him hold me anyway. I fall asleep against his chest with his heartbeat under my ear. And I don’t tell him. I don’t tell him how much it’s begun to hurt, being loved only in the last seconds of the day. How I’ve become the thing he gets to after everything else — the appointment at the very bottom of the calendar, squeezed in past midnight where no one will ever see. I don’t tell him that I’m drowning on no sleep, or that some nights I lie awake after he’s gone and wonder what it says about me, that I’ll take him in pieces because I can’t have him whole.

I don’t say any of it. This is the arrangement. I get the midnight version of him, and I keep my mouth shut about the rest.

“I put up an ad for the room,” I say one night, cheek on his chest, my nerves loud in my own ears. “I did a few interviews already.”

His fingers keep moving slowly through my hair. “Is someone moving in?”

“There’s one girl I really liked. I told her it was taken, though.” I don’t tell him the real reason — that I’d been holding the room empty like a held breath, keeping it open for a version of us that keeps not arriving.

He’s quiet for a moment. His hand goes still in my hair.

“Call her back,” he says. “Tell her it’s open.”

I lift my head. “You’re not mad?”

“Why would I be mad?” He looks at me, then looks back up at the ceiling, and his voice goes even and careful. “Season’s starting. I’ll have games every weekend, travel, the whole thing. I was going to tell you tonight.” He pauses. “That I can’t keep coming.”

“Oh,” I say.

I make myself think about how happy that girl, Melly Sorcha, will be when I call her. I hold onto that, because it’s easier than holding onto the way my chest is quietly folding in on itself.

“Okay then,” I say. “I’ll call her.”

He breathes in. “It’d make me feel better. Knowing you weren’t alone in here.”

“I’m not doing it for you,” I tell him.

He grins up at the dark. “I know you’re not, Penelope.”

I lie there and listen to his breathing even out, and I let the truth settle over me. I knew this was coming. I just didn’t think it would arrive this fast.

“So,” I say, keeping it light, “I guess I’ll see you at Hawthorne, then.”