Page 150 of On His Mind

I can’t imagine it. The picture won’t hold. Every time I try to set him down inside it, he goes transparent at the edges and slides right off, and what I’m left with is a lawn full of families and a girl in a gown standing on her own, checking her phone.

The second time I sneak in, I’m lying in his arms in the dark when the ceiling above us erupts.

Somebody’s out of bed and running the length of the room up there, and there’s a crash, and then two of them laughing so hard the floor shakes.

“Lucy stays over sometimes,” Percy murmurs into my hair.

“Oh.” I keep my voice level, listening to the two of them upstairs. I try to ignore the way my palms start to sweat about the fact that Lucy is up there right now. “So it’s serious, then.”

“I don’t know.” His fingers travel slowly up and down my arm.

I whisper, “Melly doesn’t come home a lot of nights now.”

“Yeah,” he says, barely above a breath.

We lie there while the noise upstairs works itself out and goes quiet, and I stare into the dark of a room I’m not allowed to be in, and I think about who’s above me — Benson and Lucy; Blue and Melly.

“I’m happy for our friends,” I say to the ceiling. “I really am.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “But I’d like to be happy too.”

His hand stops on my arm. “You’re not happy?”

That question lands in the middle of my chest.

I pull away from him and sit up. He turns his head to watch me go.

“How could you possibly think this makes me happy?”

“Penelope—” He pushes up onto an elbow.

“Do you know how much sleep I’ve lost?” It’s coming now, and I can’t get in front of it. “Not just this month. Not just this year.Since I met you.Do you have any idea how much of myself I’ve handed over and how little I’ve gotten back? You give me scraps, Percy. You give me the last twenty minutes of the day when there’s nobody left awake to see, and I take them, and I say thank you, and I hate myself in the car on the way home.”

“What? That’s not—”

“Blue is dancing with my roommate in front of the entire house. Benson is on his knees at every moment possible.” My eyes have gone hot. “And I stand nine feet away from you in your own kitchen and hold my cup out like a stranger. I watched you fill Mara’s to the top and give me half.”

“I did that so nobody would—”

“I know why you did it.” That’s the worst part. I always know why. He’s never once given me a reason I couldn’t understand and forgive. “That’s not the point I’m making.”

He sits all the way up. In the dark I can see the shape of his shoulders, the way his hands have gone open and useless in his lap.

“Tell me what to do,” he says.

“I’ve told you what to do. I told you in August. I told you on the porch at Halloween. I told you nine days ago in my bed when I said I want more, and you saidshit, and then you got dressed and left.” My voice cracks straight down the middle. “You’ve had years, Percy. Not weeks.Years.”

He looks at me.

“Don’t tell me one day, Percy. Give me a date—”

“I don’t know how to do this.” He says it quietly, and he says it like a man handing over the last true thing in his pockets, and the terrible part — the part that finishes me — is that I believe him completely.

That’s what breaks it. Not cruelty. Not a lie. If he were lying, I could fight him. If he were choosing this, I could argue him out of it. But he’s telling me the truth. He does not know how. Nobody ever taught him. I know he loves me, that’s never been the question.

I stand up.

“Don’t go.” It comes out of him fast and low and frightened, a voice I’ve never heard him use. “Penelope. Please.”

My heart is going so hard it hurts, and every last cell in my body is telling me to sit back down, to give him the minute, to hear him out, because I have never once managed to walk away from this boy and something in me still thinks tonight might be the night he finds the words.