Page 102 of Across His Line

Rafe

“What changed?”

She says it to me across the couch, with the movie light moving over her face, in my mother’s sweater, with the blanket pulled up to her chin.

I look at her, and I don’t say anything.

I knew this was coming at some point. I’ve known it since the grocery store, since the car, since the minute she put her hand on my shoulder an hour ago and said thank you like I’d done something good. Sooner or later, she was going to want to know how the boy from the east stairwell ended up driving across town to pull a man off her.

I just didn’t think it would be tonight. Not with her neck like that.

On the TV, something explodes. Neither of us looks at it.

“That’s a big question,” I say.

She doesn’t say never mind. She doesn’t laugh it off or tell me I don’t have to explain. She just sits there at the other end of the couch with her knees up and looks at me and waits.

I don’t know what to do with my hands. I put the bandaged one on my knee. I take it off.

She keeps waiting.

And I know she’s owed something. I know that much. I just don’t know what it is, or where it starts, and every way I can think to start it makes me look worse.

I could start with my father. It would be easy. The parking lot, the windshield, the two words. Some of it would even be true. But he didn’t make me talk to her the way I did. He didn’t make me follow her, or knock on her door, or call her little Tessa. That was me.

So I don’t start with him.

“I didn’t like you,” I say.

She goes still. She doesn’t flinch. She just goes very still, the way she does, like she was ready for it.

And I hear how it sounds. Tonight. With her neck like that. I keep going anyway, because I don’t have anything else.

“Not because you did anything,” I say. “You didn’t do anything.”

“Then why?”

I look at the TV. A man is running down a hallway. I look at my hand.

“I don’t know,” I say. “You just—you were always there. At the end of that table. You didn’t talk to anybody. You didn’t want anything from anybody.” I stop. “And you looked at me.”

“Everybody looked at you.”

“Not like that.”

“Like what?”

I try to find it. I can’t, really. “Like you were waiting for something,” I say. “Like you knew something I didn’t.”

She doesn’t say anything to that. She just looks at me with the same eyes. The ones that never miss anything. The ones I couldn’t stand.

“It pissed me off,” I say. “I don’t know why. It just did.”

The movie keeps going. Somebody’s yelling on the TV.

“My father noticed you,” I say. “One night. The awards thing, freshman year.”

She turns her head a little. “My academic award?”