Page 86 of On His Mind

“Two hours,” he says. “Text me when you’re close.”

The call ends, and the air rushes back into my lungs all at once, and there’s a lightness in my chest I haven’t felt since spring.

Chapter 27

Percy

Twohours.

I stand at the top of the stairs and look down. The TV is going, Stanley is talking to it, Rowan is running water in the kitchen, a chair scraping, somebody laughing. I stand there and listen to all of it, wondering when the house is going to sleep.

They have to go to bed soon. But it’s not like I can force them, so I walk back to my room and strip the bed. I remake it, which I’ve never done in the middle of the night in my life. Then I look at the room and see it the way she’ll see it — a bed, a milk crate I use for a nightstand, a lamp with no shade, a desk, a broken top drawer. Nobody’s ever been in here. Nobody. And it’s nothing to me, it’s just a room with my stuff in it. But now there’s a spike of panic as I look at it, at how little there is, at what she’ll think of it.

There’s nothing to fix. I fix the bed anyway. The pillow. My clothes in the drawers just in case. I take the puck out of my bag and hold it. I put it back in.

Downstairs, Stanley is still going.

I sit at my desk and listen to the house. Benson goes first. I hear his door at 12:20, and the relief is immense.

The TV cuts off a while after. Then Rowan. I feel the door under mine shut. Two down. Shortly after, I hear Blue walk into his bedroom. The house drops a level of sound the way it does, settling, and I stand in the middle of my room tracking it, breathing shallow, waiting on the last one. Because it’s always Stanley last.

He’s on the stairs — I know his feet, I know everyone’s feet — and he stops on the landing, and there’s a long second where he doesn’t move. My stomach goes straight through the floor, because if he knocks, if he wants to talk, if he’s in one of his one-in-the-morning moods where he needs an audience, it’s over, all of it.

I hear his door, but I don’t trust it. I give it ten minutes. I listen to the house go all the way quiet, every board, the fridge kicking on, the wind, and nobody up, nobody awake, the whole place asleep around me.

My phone lights up.

Penelope: Here. Down the block.

I go down through my own dark house, sneaking like it’s high school all over again. I stay quiet, skipping the creaks, and then I’m reaching for the front door. I open it slowly, making sure that the house is completely asleep. It is.

Her car’s half a block down under a dead streetlight. She gets out when she sees me. And even in the dark, I can see she’s been crying. The question comes up in me hot and immediate. Was it him. Did Theo do this. What happened tonight. It’s right there. But I don’t ask. I keep the question locked in my mouth becauseif the answer is him, I don’t know what I’ll do with it, and if it’s something else, I’ve got no right to ask, and either way, asking is not my place.

“Hey,” she says, quietly.

“Hey. You have to be quiet going in.”

She nods.

I take her back the way I came, and the house is a minefield now, every board a risk, and I’ve got the whole map of it in me.

At the front door, I put my hand at the small of her back to steer her in ahead of me, and it’s the first time I’ve really touched her — not a jacket over her shoulders, not catching her before she falls, but my hand flat against her, guiding. Her warmth goes up my arm like a live wire. I feel her breathe under my hand. I move her past the third stair, my fingers pressing left so she skips it, and up, slow, one at a time, the house dead silent, Stanley’s door six feet away, and I don’t breathe until we’re in my room and the door is shut behind us.

And then we’re in my room, and it’s different. She’s not the girl from the freezing hallway who told me about light with her hand flat on a wall. Something’s happened — it’s all over her, whatever it is, close to the surface, filling the small room — and I’m raw too, from the lot, from two hours of listening for silence, and there’s no cover in here for either of us. No music. No party through the floor. No book, no drawing, no tea. Just a shut door, a dark room, and the two of us in it.

She didn’t bring anything. There’s no bag, no sketchbook, nothing in her hands — and I don’t have anything either, and there’s no movie to put on because I can’t afford any streaming platforms. It lands on me all at once that there’s nothing to do. Every single time we’ve ever been in a room, it’s had a thing in the middle of it — a drawing, a screen, a shift, a walk — something to look at instead of each other, and there’s nothing here.

I stand by the desk. She stands by the bed. Neither of us moves.

“You can sit,” I say, and my voice comes out wrong. She sits on the edge of the bed, and I sit in the desk chair, and there’s four feet of dark room between us and nothing in it.

We don’t say anything. We just sit there in the dark. The house is dead asleep around us. The whiteboard is twenty feet down the stairs with all the rules written on it about why she can’t be here.

Her eyes look around the room for a second, landing on the paperback on my nightstand.

“Is that the book you’re reading?” she asks softly.

“Yeah.”