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I don’t look. I’m facing the counter, and I keep facing the counter, and I watch the boy with curls finish his sentence. I nod at the end of it like I heard it. But I don’t hear a word of it. The air has gone thin. My skin goes tight and hot, then cold, starting at the back of my neck and running all the way down my arms to my fingers. My heart does the thing it’s always done when he comes around, where it stops being a heart and turns into a fist knocking on the inside of my ribs.

Kylie’s across the room on her toes with her arms around Nash’s neck. She catches my eye over his shoulder and mouths I SWEAR with enormous apologetic eyes, and then Nash says something into her ear and she forgets she’s sorry.

I should leave.

I can put my drink down, get my coat, and be back in my room with the chain on in twelve minutes. I said an hour. It’s been an hour. Nobody would think anything of it, least of all him. That’s the cruel elegance of it. Leaving would look like nothing at all.

And it would mean everything.

If I leave now, I’m the tree. I’m the thing that can’t survive up here. And the whole argument I made to myself on my bed earlier, the one about thousands of people and not one of them rearranging their lives, the one that felt so true it made my hands shake, turns out to have been a story I told myself to get through a door.

This is a house full of people. Kylie is here. Kenzie is here. A boy from my class thinks I’m smart. This is not the east stairwell, and Rafe has no say in this room.

I stay.

I don’t look at him once.

That doesn’t mean I don’t know where he is.

I’ve always been able to find Rafferty without using my eyes. It’s the way the people around him stand. It’s a pressure. A weight on one side of me that tells me which way is down.

He’s in the kitchen doorway. He has a cup. He’s talking to Koda, then to a blonde with a high ponytail who laughs too much at whatever he says, then to Koda again. I know all of this without turning my head.

I move from the counter to the window, because Kenzie’s friends are by the window. I feel it when he looks. It’s fast. It’s nothing. A few seconds, and then it’s gone, back to the girl, back to Koda.

I move from the window to the hallway, where there’s a line for the bathroom that I don’t need. Four seconds. I feel it again.

I keep my eyes on the framed poster across from me, a print of a sailboat so ugly that it can only have been hung ironically. I count the masts, and I don’t turn my head.

It’s the oldest game we have. I just never used to be the one winning it.

For four years, he decided when I looked at him. Look at me. Don’t look at me. Tonight, I’m the one deciding, and what I’ve decided is that he doesn’t exist. He can look all he wants. He can stand in that doorway until the sun comes up. I’m not giving him a single second of my soul.

By eleven, Kylie is half on Nash’s lap on the arm of the couch in the front room, and Nash’s hand keeps disappearing up the back of her sweater. She’s stopped checking on me, which I take as a compliment. Paige has had more than a few drinks and is dancing in the middle of the front room with a guy none of us know, her hands in the air, her eyes closed. Bianca’s on the stairs with her people. The boy from class has gone to find his friends.

I’m alone, more or less, standing in a hallway with a warm drink, in a house where I know four people, with Rafferty Waleska twenty feet away.

And nothing happens.

I’m braced for it. My whole body waits for it. And it doesn’t come. The music changes. Someone spills something. Someone yells for someone named Brandon.

See? I tell myself. See?

Different mountain. Different weather. My hour came and went a while ago, and I’m still here, and I’m okay.

So when Kylie comes up for air and drags me down the hall to the kitchen for a refill, I go.

The kitchen is small and every flat surface is covered in bottles. Kylie takes my cup, pours something pink into it from a jug that may once have been lemonade, and hands it back. Kenzie wedges in on my other side and starts laughing about something a guy named Theo said. I don’t know Theo, but Kylie does, so she laughs. Nash is behind Kylie with his hand on her hip, looking at nothing. He’s also big, scary, and intimidating, but he has a soft spot for Kylie, which I think is sweet.

I fold my arms with the cup tucked in the crook of one elbow and listen to Kenzie and laugh at the right places.

And in the corner of my eye, I see him coming.

He comes down the hall with an empty cup and reaches past all of us for the two-liter on the table, his arm going right past my shoulder, close enough that I feel the heat of it through my sweater.

“Move, Tess,” he says.

Everything in me goes still.