Page 213 of Across His Line

It isn’t like yesterday. Yesterday, he was the one who knew things, and I was the one learning them, and he spent every second making sure I was all right. This morning I know some things, too. Not much. Enough. Enough to know what makes his breath stop, and what makes his hand tighten on my hip, and what makes him say my name like he’s annoyed about it.

And I like it. I like it so much it’s embarrassing. I like that I can do that to him. I like watching him try to hold onto his composure and lose it a little at a time because of me.

When he laughs because I do something with my mouth on his ribs that makes him jump, I laugh too, and we end up laughing so hard I have to put my face in his neck. And then neither of us is laughing anymore.

I lie on my stomach with my chin on his chest, looking at him.

He has his eyes closed and one hand on the back of my head, moving through my hair.

“Merry Christmas,” I say, observing his face.

He opens one eye.

“Merry Christmas, Tess.”

There’s a knock on the door.

Once. Light. Not trying the handle.

“If you two are awake,” Mrs. Waleska says through it, cheerful, “the cinnamon rolls are done.”

And her footsteps go away down the hall.

I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I lie there with my chin on Rafe’s chest and my whole body gone cold and then hot.

You two.

“She knows,” Rafe says. Not upset. Not anything. He hasn’t even opened his other eye.

“Knows what?”

He gives me a look.

“Oh my God,” I say, and put my face down on his chest.

I feel him laugh through his ribs under my face.

“She has eyes, Tess.”

“I’m never going downstairs. Tell her I died.”

“She made cinnamon rolls.”

I lift my face. “How many?”

I race out of bed, put my clothes on, and watch him put on his. We smile at each other as we walk out of his room. I walk ahead of him, but he purposely blocks the hallway so that I can’t pass. We race down the stairs, and my heart is soaring. It feels like I mean something to him when he looks at me like that.

My eyes meet his at the bottom of the stairs.

Green all the way.

He knows exactly what he’s doing, and I know exactly what it’s going to cost me. I smile and trot ahead of him.

There are presents under the tree with my name on them.

I stop in the doorway of the front room with a cinnamon roll in my hand and look at them. Five. Not a pile. Five, wrapped in different paper, tucked in among the others at the front, under the potato hockey player, with white tags tied on with ribbon. Tessa, in Mrs. Waleska’s slanted handwriting. Tessa, in square block capitals that I know because we went to high school together. And I am such a creep of little details that I could tell his handwriting in a line up.

I didn’t think there would be anything for me at all. I really didn’t. I came down the stairs ready to sit on the end of the couch, hold my coffee, watch them open their things, and be glad for them, and not need anything. I’m good at that. I’ve had a lot of practice.