Page 12 of Across His Line

I think about who all of that is for.

Hiding made sense when he didn’t know I was here. Every week I stayed invisible was another week I didn’t have to deal with him. It was strategy. It had a purpose. But he knows now. He saw me on Tuesday. Whatever I was protecting by staying in this room isn’t mine to protect anymore, and if I keep living like this, keep crouching, timing, and checking, then I’m not hiding from him, I’m just obeying him from a distance.

There are thousands of people at this school. Not one of them is rearranging their life around Rafferty Waleska. Not one, except me.

“One hour,” I say.

Kylie screams a short, high sound, and throws herself sideways across my bed, and then she’s up and hugging me so hard my ponytail comes loose, and I’m laughing. I don’t know anyone who gets this happy about something I said yes to.

I wear jeans and a black sweater and my coat, the same one I’ve had since sophomore year, because it’s October and already chilly in New England. Kylie wears a skirt and no tights and tells me the cold never bothered her anyway.

It’s a ten-minute walk. Kenzie and Bianca meet us at the bottom of the stairs, and Paige catches up halfway there, and the five of us walk two streets off campus in a loose, loud line, arguing about whether candy corn is good. Nobody brings up Rafe. Not once. Not on the stairs, not on the walk, not on the porch. I’m so grateful I could get used to this.

The house is old and narrow and lit up in every window, and the porch is full of people in coats, holding their drinks close to their chests and breathing out clouds. Inside, it’s so warm it hits you in the face. There’s music I don’t know, and a crush of bodies in the front room, and a kitchen at the end of a long hallway where all the bottles have migrated, the way they do.

Bianca finds people she knows within about a minute. Kenzie, too. Paige looks like she’s annoyed but holds onto Kenzie and Kylie anyway. Bianca brings me a cup with whatever she mixed together.

“Sprite, juice, and vodka,” she says, sipping from hers.

I take a sip and nod. “This is good.”

After about twenty minutes, we’re finally past the uncomfortable point. We talk and laugh and make friends with a few people I’ve never seen before. It’s nice.

A boy with curly hair and a Woodbury Rowing jacket squints at me by the counter for a full ten seconds and then says, “Wait. You’re the sunk costs girl.”

I nod, and it turns out he sits four rows behind me in micro, and he’s been trying to figure out all week why the firm doesn’t just close. I explain it to him with a bottle cap and a coaster. He gets it on the second try and looks at me like I’ve performed a card trick. He asks if I want to get coffee before the midterm. I tell him I’d love to help him study, which is not the same thing, and he hears that it isn’t, and he laughs instead of getting weird about it, which makes me like him.

Kenzie drags me into a conversation about the worst professor on campus, and I do an impression of my chem TA that I didn’t know I was going to do until I’m doing it, and three people I’ve never met laugh so hard one of them has to put her drink down because she knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Kylie stares at me from across the room with her mouth open.

Later, she grabs my arm in the hallway and says, “Who are you?”

“Hey,” I tease. “I can be fun.”

She raises her eyebrows at me. “New shell?”

I laugh against her.

“I’m so happy you came.”

Me, too, and I don’t get to say it because Paige walks over with some guy on her phone.

“See?” she says, pushing the phone in front of me and Kylie. “I’m not alone. I’m with my girls.”

“Who is that?” Kylie asks.

“My brother,” Paige says with an eye roll. She glares down at the phone. “I’m hanging up now. Bye.”

She ends the call and looks up at Kylie. “He’s so annoying.”

At ten-forty, the front door opens and lets the cold in. The room immediately changes. The hairs on my arm stand up, and it’s not from the cold. It’s the heads that turn a few degrees, the girls that stop talking and start to giggle, and the people near the door step back without deciding to.

I know that shift.

Nash comes in first, in a collared shirt with the top button undone and a look on his face. Kylie lets out a sound and crosses the room like it’s on fire. Behind him, Koda, already pulling his jacket off, already laughing at something. Paige turns around and walks into the kitchen so smoothly you’d think she’d been heading there all along.

And then Rafe.