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My hand is already on the other side of the bed, flat on the sheet, palm down, and the sheet is cold. I look at my own hand like it belongs to somebody else. I’ve slept next to Nash Kennebeck exactly once, for about six hours, and I was unconscious for most of them. And I just woke up in the bed I’ve slept alone in every night since August and reached across it for somebody who has never been in it. I take my hand back and smash my face into the pillow. No. Absolutely not. That’s not a thing I get to have after one night.

My phone has nothing from him, but I have two texts from Paige, one from my mom asking if she should mail my winter coat, and a notification that my screen time is up forty percent this week, which is frankly none of my phone’s business.

“Morning,” Tessa says, muffled by her comforter.

I laugh. “Morning, Tess.”

“Are you okay?”

I roll onto my back and laugh again at the ceiling. “I think so.”

I meet Paige at the library at eleven, because I have a reading due Monday I’ve been avoiding since Wednesday, and because Paige is apparently incapable of doing homework unless somebody is physically present to watch her not do it. We get a table on the second floor by the window, and she opens her laptop and immediately starts texting Koda.

“You said you were going to work.”

“I’m texting about work.” She turns the screen toward me. It says what time are you done, and under it, Koda has sent a GIF of a dog falling off a couch.

I laugh. “I thought you were mad at him about—”

“Don’t,” she says fast. “Just don’t. Let’s work. He’s got practice until twelve-thirty, and then we’re getting food.”

“They practice on Sundays?”

“Every day except Monday. Did you know that? It’s insane. He says it’s a rule. One day off a week, and they have to take it.”

I didn’t know that. I’m sitting there with my highlighter uncapped over a paragraph I’ve read three times, and I realize I have no idea what Nash’s week looks like. What time he gets up. Whether he eats before he skates or after. Then I realize I’m in a library thinking about what time Nash Kennebeck eats breakfast, and I uncap a second highlighter for no reason and hold one in each hand.

I get through fourteen pages. Paige gets through four, plus a long debate with herself about whether Koda’s roommate is a bad influence or just from Ohio. Half an hour later, her phone lights up, and she stands so fast her chair shrieks and three people look over. “He’s outside. Come with me. Just to the steps.”

She hauls me down the stairs, shushing me the whole way like she’s the librarian, and out the front doors into the cold. The guys are coming up the path from the athletic building. Koda first with his hair wet and his bag low on one shoulder, and behind him, hood up and hands in his pockets, Nash.

My brain hands me yesterday morning with absolutely no permission from me. His mouth. His hands. The way he said my name into my neck.

I look at the bike rack. I look very hard at the bike rack. There’s a blue bike with a flat back tire, a red one with a wicker basket and a sticker on the fender that says I BRAKE FOR NOTHING, and a lock hanging open at the end with no bike attached to it at all, which I wonder about for a long time. I count them. Five. I count again. Five.

Then I look up, because I can feel him looking at me. He’s about forty feet away, still walking, and he isn’t smiling. He doesn’t wave or lift his chin. He just looks at me across the path like he knows exactly what I was thinking about, which he can’t. Obviously. I’m only assuming that because it’s the only thing in my head.

“Coming?” Paige calls over her shoulder, already halfway down the steps.

“No. I’ve got that reading.”

“I thought you did it.”

“I’ve got more.”

I go back inside without looking back and climb to the second floor at a completely normal speed. At the table, I pull off my coat, then my scarf, shove my sleeves up to the elbow, sit down, and pick up the yellow highlighter, and the heat is still in my face.

When I get back to Corvin, Tessa is at her desk. I drop onto my bed and work my boots off heel against toe, and she doesn’t look up for a solid minute, and then she turns her chair around. “Is everything okay?”

I laugh, sharper than I mean to, and she hears it.

“You seem tense.”

“I just need a minute, Miss Observant.”

She turns back to her desk. “Sorry.”

I huff at the ceiling and feel like a bitch. The second boot is still on. I leave it. “He’s really intense,” I say.