Page 72 of Across His Line

Nothing.

I wait. I watch the screen. I don’t put the phone down, because I know if I put it down, I’ll miss it. Two minutes. Three.

Tessa: Okay.

I stare at it.

One word. Four letters. It doesn’t say anything. Okay could mean a hundred things. Okay could mean okay, forget it. Okay could mean okay, whatever, stop texting me.

Me: Okay what?

The dots come up.

Tessa: Okay. I’ll ride with you.

I read it three times.

And something in my chest lets go. Something I didn’t know I was holding. It goes all at once, and I sit back in my chair and put the phone face down on the desk and look at the ceiling. I fucking hate this. I hate how good it feels. I hate that my hands aren’t steady.

It’s a fucking car ride. It’s a highway and two hours. It’s logistics. That’s all.

That isn’t why.

I know why. I sit there with my hands on my knees, and I make myself face it.

She said yes.

Not because she was scared. Not because I made her. Not because I was standing in front of her in a stairwell saying verbal confirmation until she gave me what I wanted. I told her she could say no, and I meant it. She sat with it all morning, thought about it, did the math, and said yes anyway.

She chose it.

I’ve gotten a thousand yeses from Tessa Canten. Yes, I understand. Yes, I’ll withdraw. Yes. Every one of them with her eyes on the floor.

This might be the first one I didn’t take.

By three-thirty, Corvin sounds like a building somebody forgot to turn off.

Kennebeck left right after practice, with his duffel over his shoulder and a protein bar in his mouth and said “Later” at the door like he was going to the dining hall. The guy across the hall who plays the same four songs is gone. The floor above us is dead. Every door I pass on my way down the hall with my bags is shut, with that cold, still feeling behind it that rooms get when nobody’s in them.

My room looks like a hotel room after checkout. Kennebeck’s bed stripped. My closet half empty. The window shut for the first time since August.

I have three bags. A duffel. A garment bag with the navy suit in it, because my mother texted me this morning to make sure I was bringing the navy suit. And my backpack, with the accounting book in it.

I carry it all down to the lot behind Corvin and load the car, and then I stand next to it with the keys in my hand and nothing left to do.

I check my phone. She’s at the library. I told her four. It’s three fifty-one.

I put the phone in my pocket and take it back out. She’s still at the library.

Four o’clock comes and goes. The sky over the quad is already going that bruised November blue, and the lights in the lot click on one at a time over my head. Four-oh-eight. Her dot moves. It comes out of the library and starts across the quad.

Four-thirteen.

And I’m standing next to my car with my hands in my pockets and my chest going like it does before a game, and I don’t know why. I’m not angry. I’ve been angry about her for so long that I know exactly what it feels like, and this isn’t it. This is something else. Something with a lot more nerves in it.

I don’t call it anything. I just stand there.

The back door of Corvin opens at four-sixteen, and she comes out.