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“Then let the baby leave.”

His arms tighten around my waist. “No.”

I try not to smile. I really do. “You’re very confusing.”

He pulls me closer. “How?”

“You spend half your life acting like everybody annoys you, and then I try to go three doors down, and you physically restrain me.”

“You’re not everybody.”

I look at his face for a second, at the complete lack of awareness that he’s just said something ridiculously sweet while holding me hostage in a room that’s approximately thirty-seven degrees. Then I kiss him.

This is the part of Nash I think I’m starting to understand best. He doesn’t ask me to stay very often. He makes room for me before I get there. He buys enough food for two. He reaches for me in his sleep. He listens to stories he already heard the night before. He keeps my charger plugged into the wall beside his bed because I complained about my phone dying once. And when I threaten to leave because his room is freezing, he puts both arms around me. I love that about him. I think I love a lot of things about him.

By Wednesday, Friday’s close enough to be real, and he’s worse. Not at me; he’s never once been short with me about any of it. But he’s carrying it around. He snaps at Koda about something stupid at lunch and apologizes about an hour later in his own way, which is buying Koda a Gatorade and putting it in front of him without comment.

We’re walking back from the dining hall when I say, “You still have to go Friday, right? Like, be in the building.”

“I’ll be in the building.” He kicks a rock off the path. “Suit. Whole thing.”

“Where do you sit when you’re suspended?”

“Upstairs, probably. Press level, or they put you in the last row behind the bench.”

“Can I sit with you?”

He stops walking. “You’ve got a ticket. You can sit anywhere.”

“I didn’t ask if I had a ticket.”

He looks down at me for a second. “Yeah,” he says. “You can sit with me.”

When we get to the third floor, Nash pulls me into his room. I don’t even stop at mine. His mouth is on mine the second the door closes, and we make it to his bed, and I lose track of whatever we were talking about before this started. Something about Rafe. Something about laundry. It’s gone now, burned off somewhere around the twentieth minute of his mouth on mine.

I plant my knees on either side of his hips, and his huge, rough, ridiculous hands spread wide on my thighs. He pulls his shirt off over his head without breaking the kiss, without looking at me first to see if I’m examining his scar, the same careless way he does it now when he’s getting into bed, like it’s nothing, like it was always nothing, and every single time I watch him do it, I have to pretend it doesn’t mean something to me.

I kiss his mouth until I’m stupid with it. Then his jaw, and the soft place under it where he’s warmest and smells like his body wash and the rink that never fully washes out of him. When I get to his neck, his fingers dig into my leg, and he breathes in slowly through his nose.

It’s been ten days of him like this, ten days of skin, and it hasn’t gotten old. It’s gotten worse, honestly. I move down him slowly, because I can, because he’s letting me, because there’s so much of him and I want every inch. His hand comes up into my hair and stays there, loose, just holding on. I kiss the middle of his chest and feel his heart going hard under my mouth. Lower. His stomach pulls tight the second my lips touch it, every muscle jumping at once, and I smile against him, because I did that.

My mouth is at his ribs, and the edge of the scar is right there.

For ten days, I’ve been going around it. Not on purpose. My hands just learned the shape of where not to go.

Tonight I don’t go around.

I kiss it once, low on his left side where the skin changes, and it’s different under my lips. It’s smoother, tighter, cooler than the rest of him, even though the rest of him is so hot. His hand stops in my hair. He doesn’t flinch, and he doesn’t pull my head up. Everything in him goes still at once, his hand and his stomach and his breathing, all of it.

I look up. He’s staring at the ceiling. His throat moves around a swallow, and he doesn’t look down, and he doesn’t stop me.

So I put my mouth on it again. I don’t ask if it’s okay. I don’t ask what it is. I’ve been not-asking for weeks now, and I’ve gotten weirdly good at it, which is hilarious, considering I’m the girl who once went through her boyfriend’s Venmo history to find out where he really went on a Saturday. I kiss it a second time and a third, further down where it goes deepest toward his hip, and run the pad of my thumb along the edge of the graft, where the shiny skin meets the rest of him.

And he lets me. His hand comes back to life in my hair, barely, just his fingers.

We’re still like that, my mouth on his side and his hand in my hair and the lamp on and the room dead quiet, when he finally breathes out. I’m starting to think this is good, him letting me.

“My dad did it,” he says quietly.