Page 110

Tessa

The ceiling is very high, too white, with crown molding running all the way around the edge like the trim on a cake. The light coming in is gray and soft and from the wrong side. The blanket on top of me is heavy and dark and smells like somebody else’s laundry soap.

Then my throat. Dry, and raw, and tight when I swallow, like I slept with my mouth open in a cold room. Then my neck, when I turn my head. Then my side.

Then I remember.

I sit up too fast and my ribs catch, and I hold still with my hand flat against them until it passes.

Rafe is at the other end of the couch.

He’s awake. He’s sitting exactly where he was last night, with his feet on the coffee table and his phone in his good hand, the TV still on across the room with the sound off, some morning show with people laughing in a kitchen. He’s in the same black T-shirt. The bruise on his cheekbone has gone dark purple overnight, and his lip is still split and swollen at the corner.

He didn’t move.

I fell asleep with him there. And he’s still there.

I just sit up with the blanket around my shoulders and look at him.

He looks up from his phone. He doesn’t say good morning. His eyes go straight to my neck and stay there.

I put my hand over it before I think about it. Then I take my hand away.

“It looks worse than it feels,” I say. It comes out scratchy. Rough at the bottom, like somebody sanded it.

He doesn’t look convinced.

“I bruise easily.”

He gives me a look.

“I’m serious. I talked for like four hours last night. If it was actually that bad, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

And then I hear what I said.

Four hours. I talked to Rafferty Waleska for four hours. On his couch about shipping weight and cranberry sauce and a man falling off a roof. I don’t think I said that many words to him in four years combined. In four years combined, it was mostly okay.

My face gets hot. I pull the blanket up.

He’s still looking at my neck.

His eyes are dark, and his jaw is set wrong, a little to the side, the way it gets when he’s holding something behind his teeth. He’s angry.

I’m starting to understand him better. I always thought he was complicated. All those colors in his eyes, all those moods I had to learn. But I think maybe, underneath all of it, he’s simple about some things. A thing is wrong or it isn’t. You do it or you don’t. Somebody puts their hands on somebody, and that’s it, there’s nothing else to say about it.

I’ve never been simple about anything in my life. I lie when it’s safer. I stay quiet when I should leave. I love people who hurt me and defend people who don’t defend me back. I wanted to go home so badly I did math about it every night, and then I got there and wanted to leave.

I don’t know what I’m doing because now I’m here, next to him.

I didn’t like you.

It’s been sitting under everything since I woke up. Since before I woke up, maybe.

He means it. He didn’t say it like the stairwell. He said it like a fact he’d had to dig up and hand over, and he didn’t try to make it nicer on the way out. There was nothing underneath it. He just didn’t like me.

And now I’m sitting on his couch.

Last night explained some of why he was the way he was. It doesn’t explain the anger on his face this morning, or what I am to him now.