Page 3

The bathroom off Priya’s room is small and white and, for the next ten minutes, gloriously mine.

I crank the water hot and let it run while I deal with the dress. The zipper at the back gives me a fight it did not give himlast night — his knuckles dragged it down slow, one vertebra at a time, like he had all the time in the world and had decided the single best use of it was taking my dress off by degrees. Then it gives. The black thing pools on the bathmat. I step out of it the same way I did twelve hours ago — except that time there was a vending machine of a man across the room exhaling like I’d knocked the wind out of him. This time there’s just the steam and me. I don’t look at the mirror. I get in.

The water’s almost too hot, and I make it hotter, and I stand under it with my eyes shut and let it hammer the cold out of my shoulders. I came in here to do one thing: scrub last night off my skin, walk back out, and be Margo — bright and handled, the girl who made a fun low-stakes choice at a party and feels nothing in particular about it.

It does the exact opposite of work.

The heat opens my skin up, and every place his mouth went lights back up under the spray like a map I never agreed to keep. What surfaces first is the way he looked at me — not the acts, the look, like I was the answer to a question he was tired of asking himself. And then the rest comes up all at once, the way it’s been threatening to since I got in here: the stretch of him, the first slow careful push, his forehead dropping to mine. Breathe. I’ve got you. Like he’d decided to spend the whole night making sure I could take him and considered it time well spent. The undone sound he made when I finally rolled my hips up and took the last of him — a man who rations his words coming apart without spending a single one.

A shiver goes through me, full-body, under water that’s already gone too cool to take the blame for it.

And I want to. That’s the humiliating truth of it, standing here with my thighs pressed together and my pulse doing something undignified — I want to stand in Priya’s borrowed shower and finish the thought. I don’t. That’s a bridge I refuse to build before nine in the morning, on principle, with my best friend making coffee thirty feet away. You’re being ridiculous, I scold myself and turn the temperature down like that’s ever fixed anything.

My body did not get the memo. My body, the absolute traitor, has already slotted him under best — the way it once slotted good under a name I’d burn out of my own history if they’d let me. And I hate that it works like this. I hate being a girl who needs the connection first and then can’t shake it once she’s got it, who can’t take one clean, uncomplicated thing and leave it uncomplicated.

And here’s where it stops being a bad decision and graduates to a full catastrophe.

I can’t stand him.

That’s not the bright version, smoothed for company. That’s the truth. Theo and I have spent three months driving each other up opposite walls. He looks at my entire personality like it’s a tax he resents paying. I look at him like the wall-with-tattoos he is. The one who decided around October that I was decorative and not much underneath, and made sure I knew it — in that stripped-down four-words-and-a-silence way of his that lands the cruel thing and leaves you to supply the other forty yourself. We don’t get along. We snipe. He lands something cutting, I land something brighter and meaner right back, and we both walk off pleased with ourselves and furious, while Sloane watches us go like a tennis match she didn’t buy tickets to and can’t leave.

And now I know what his hands do. Now I know the exact sound he makes when his control finally snaps. Which means every time he rolls his eyes at me across a Sunday table this year, some animal part of me is going to be sitting right there. With the full, traitorous knowledge of what that mouth gets up to when it stops being a problem and starts being —

I turn the water down again.

That’s the trap nobody puts on the warning label. The friction doesn’t burn off; it just changes address. The same heat that makes us combustible in a kitchen turns out to be the same heat that made last night the best I’ve ever had, and now those two facts have to share one apartment — me — in extremely close quarters. Indefinitely. No lease, no exit.

And under all of it, quieter, is the thing the panic is shouting to cover. It wasn’t that it was good. I’ve had good. It was that I let go.

I went up those stairs with a plan to take one frustrated, faithless, gloriously meaningless thing purely for myself, and instead I handed over the wheel and felt — present. In my own body. No part of me standing off to the side keeping score, monitoring his face, running the room. It was the first time in a year I felt like myself with my clothes off. And the person who handed me that is a boy I can’t be in a kitchen with, who offered me the exit before I’d even thought to ask for it. One night. You don’t have to perform it tomorrow. Gift-wrapped. The clean simple thing.

And then I stayed.

That’s the part I keep snagging on. I’m the girl who leaves before the floor gives out. I manage my way to the door. I have rules — a needlepoint pillow’s worth of them. And last night he said stay, barely a word, not even a question, and I pulled the blanket up over both of us and I stayed. And this morning I crept out like a burglar and left my underwear in his drawer rather than be in the room when he woke up — because being there when he woke up means facing the part where it meant something, and I don’t have a script for the part where it meant something.

The water’s gone from too-hot to just-hot to barely warm.

I should get out. Towel off. Put on the leggings Priya left folded for me. Drink the coffee she hid real beans to make. Sit on the end of her bed and give her the funny version — so, fun fact, I slept with the human warning label, ask me anything — and let her laugh, and let myself laugh, and shelve the rest with all the other things I’ll deal with when there’s time. Which there’s never going to be. That’s the system, and the system works, right up until it doesn’t.

I turn the water off.

The bathroom’s full of steam and quiet and the far-off sound of the house being relentlessly alive downstairs. I stand there dripping a second longer than I need to, one hand still on the tap, and I notice I’m planning. Already. The spring squad calendar. The semester stunt rotation. Whether I’ve got time to redo my whole side of Priya’s closet before the coffee goes cold. My brain has lined up four perfectly harmless things I’m allowed to control and is presenting them to me on a little tray. Because there’s one thing I can’t control sitting square in the middle of my chest — and it has dark hair and a permanent scowl and a way of going still and careful and asking you sure with a countdown coming up through the floor. I see the whole mechanism. Naming it doesn’t make it stop. It never does.

I take the towel off the rack and wrap it around myself, and I don’t look at the mirror, which has cleared just enough now to hand me back.

“It’s fine,” I tell the empty bathroom. Slow. In the voice I save for the true ones.

It comes out bright anyway.

Chapter 2

Theo

The bed’s cold on her side, which is how I know she’s gone before I open my eyes.

I don’t open them for a while. I lie there in the gray and let myself have it — the fact of her, the whole unlikely night of her — before the day gets its hands on it and makes me put it away. Because here’s the truth I’m not going to say out loud to a single living person: I wanted her to still be here. I wanted to open my eyes and find Margo in my bed — hair wrecked, guard down, no room left to perform in. Instead there’s a cold sheet and the smell of her on the pillow, expensive and warm, still here when she isn’t. I lie in it like an idiot who should know better.

I should be relieved.