Page 19
“I’m not going to say it means nothing.” He says it quietly, evenly, looking right at me, and there’s no wall up on his face at all, which is so much worse than the wall. “Everything else on your list, I’ll agree to and I’ll keep. But I don’t lie. Not about the big stuff. My whole life blew up because a man I trusted spent years saying things he knew weren’t true, and I decided a long time ago I’d rather be a lot of ugly things than be that. So I’ll keep your secret, and I’ll end it when you say, and I won’t sleep over. But I’m not going to sit across a table and tell you it means nothing when I don’t know that it doesn’t. That’s the one I can’t do.”
The gym-quiet comes back — the still-warm thing behind my ribs, except now it isn’t warm, now it’s terrifying. I built a box strong enough to hold a thing that means nothing, and he just calmly refused to install the lid.
“So what does that make this?” I manage. Not bright. My voice goes out from under me, once, before I can catch it, and I let it, because I’m too tired to do anything else.
“Undecided.” He shrugs, one shoulder, and picks up his coffee. “I’m good with undecided. I’m not good with a lie.”
And here’s the awful part, the part I’ll lie in bed and stare at the blue window over: it’s the most reassuring thing anyone’s said to me in a year, and I hate it. I hate it so much. Reassurance was not on the agenda. Reassurance is not manageable. He looked straight at my beautiful fortress and declined to pretend with me — which is the one thing every single person in my life has always, always been willing to do, and I didn’t know how starved I was for someone who wouldn’t until he wouldn’t.
“Fine,” I say, and pick up my own coffee, black, the one he got me without asking. “Five terms. The sixth stays open.”
“Open,” he agrees.
“This is still a disaster.”
“Total disaster.” And there it is — the rumor of the smile, the one I’ve decided I imagine. “You want to fix a stunt or build a story tonight?”
“Story. I already fixed the stunt.” I flip the legal pad to a clean page, and my hand’s almost steady. “Move the trigger, not the flyer. Some idiot told me that.”
“Sounds like a genius.”
“Sounds like he’s late for something.” I click my pen. “Coward or caretaker, Mercer. Let’s build.”
I don’t even notice I’ve called him by his name until it’s already out — warm and easy, the wrong name, the old armor that doesn’t fit right anymore. And I hear myself do it, and I don’t take it back, and that scares me more than anything else that’s been said in this room.
He notices too. He doesn’t say anything.
He just opens the project, and we build.
And it’s the strangest hour of my week. Him walking me through how a choice has to change what comes after, or the reader stops believing you. Me pushing on whether our secret-keeper even knows they’re lying to themselves. The two of us arguing the honesty of a person who doesn’t exist like it matters more than sleep. He builds a branch. I break it. He builds it better. Somewhere in the second hour I stop noticing we’re supposed to hate each other, and I catch him not noticing either. And neither of us says one word about the real thing — that this, the arguing and the building and the black coffee and the open sixth term glowing on the table, is the best I’ve felt all week. Not one second of it happened in that chair.
I drive home at one in the morning feeling handled, and clear, and completely in control of a situation I’ve just, out loud, in a voice I can’t take back, agreed might mean something.
I know exactly what I’ve done.
That’s the part that keeps me up. I always know exactly what I’ve done, and I do it anyway, and then I lie awake being honest with the ceiling because the ceiling’s the only one I’ll say it to.
Chapter 6
Theo
Two weeks in, the arrangement works. Which is how I know something’s wrong.
Things that work don’t sit in my chest like this.
Here’s the ledger, because I keep one — literally, a spreadsheet, but also the kind you carry. Five terms, all holding. Nobody knows: not Beau, not the team, not Sloane, who watches me the way she watches weather but hasn’t said a word. It’s physical. It ends with the class. No sleepovers. And the sixth, the one I wouldn’t sign, sits open between us like a door neither of us walks through and neither of us shuts.
We meet to work the project. That’s the cover, and it’s also true — we work more than either of us admits, the coward-or-caretaker story taking shape in her sharp hands and my ugly build. And then, most nights, we stop working.
Two weeks of it now. Library study rooms after her practice and my film sessions. Her car in a lot on the far side of campus. My room on the rare night the house empties out. We’ve gotten good at it — arriving separate, leaving separate, the group chat where she’s cordial and distant and I’m whatever I am to people who think we can’t stand each other. Sloane knows. I’m almost sure Sloane knows. But Sloane keeps things, so Sloane says nothing, and the secret holds.
The secret’s the easy part.
The hard part is that I look forward to it. Not the sex — or not only the sex. The whole hour before it. And I don’t have a term for that, so I don’t reach for one.
And the box I kept her in for three months is gone. That’s the other thing that won’t sit right. I had her sorted the first week of October — cheerleader, daddy’s money, decorative, easy to set down — and she keeps stepping out of it. Last Sunday I watched her talk a freshman flyer off a ledge over the phone, low and steady and kind, when she didn’t know anyone was listening, no audience to be bright for. She reads people the way I do, except she does something with it instead of just standing in the gap. She argues our project like the grade is oxygen. She’s the sharpest person in every room she walks into and she spends all of it making sure nobody else feels dumb. None of that is the girl I boxed up in October, and I don’t have anywhere safe to put the girl who’s actually here. That’s the real problem. Not the sex. The having-been-wrong.
It’s the first of the month, so before any of the good part, there’s the other thing.
