Page 23
The lobby keeps moving around us. A delivery guy comes in with a pizza box and reads a name off his phone at the desk. Two girls pass behind me arguing about a quiz neither of them studied for. The asshole from the stairs comes back down with an empty laundry bag over one shoulder, looks at us for exactly one second, and heads straight for the basement door without breaking stride. Good. At least one person on this campus can mind his own business.
Evan glances at the couch. “Can we sit?”
“I’m fine.”
“Kylie.”
“You came here, so say what you came to say.”
His mouth presses flat. He used to do that when we fought in high school, when he had something to say that would only make me angrier. He’d hold it in, and I could see him doing it, and I found it annoyingly considerate. Now all I want to know is what he’s holding in.
He wipes his palms down the front of his jeans. “I’m sorry. I mean it.”
“I know what the words mean.”
His jaw ticks. “Okay.”
The silence stretches until I can hear someone hitting the vending machine. He looks around the lobby, then back at me. “Can we please go somewhere that isn’t here?”
I almost say no. Then two guys walk in and look between us, and I nod. “Outside.”
The air is cool. It moves through my sweatshirt and raises goosebumps on my arms, and I don’t unfold them to rub the skin. The sun is almost down. People are crossing the lawn between buildings with backpacks and iced coffees, and somebody laughs so loud I can still hear it after they’re halfway down the sidewalk. I walk toward the side of the building without deciding to, and Evan follows, and when we’re far enough from the entrance that nobody coming in or out can hear, I stop and turn around.
He doesn’t come as close as he normally would. Normally he’d be right there, close enough to hook a finger in my back pocket. He stays a full step back.
“You said there was more to explain.”
He looks at the ground, and my stomach braces. “Kylie, I don’t know how to say this without making it sound worse.”
Don’t cry.
“No, I mean—” He blows out a breath. “I’m trying not to say it wrong.”
Do not fucking cry.
He looks up at me, and there was a time that look would have softened me. Not because he was working me, but because it’s Evan, and we’ve had hundreds of fights, and almost all of them ended with one of us realizing we were being ridiculous. I know what he looks like when he’s actually nervous, and he looks like that now. He keeps swallowing.
“I knew her before that night.”
The words sit on top of me and don’t go anywhere.
“How long?”
“Not long.”
“Days?”
“A couple weeks.”
I try to line it up. Two weeks ago, I was still home, on my bedroom floor surrounded by storage bins, writing labels in Sharpie: Desk. Shoes. Winter? I don’t know where he was, or what he said he was doing, or which nights he called and which he didn’t. The days keep sliding around, and every one I try to grab has a question mark on it now.
“How?”
“We met through people.”
“What people?”
He says a name I sort of recognize, a guy he knows, somebody I met once, maybe twice, at somebody’s house.
