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“Yes,” she says quietly.

And everything changes, but nothing moves. The waiter goes by. Somebody at the table behind us laughs. The Christmas lights hang in their loops across the ceiling. We’re sitting exactly where we were.

I move my foot forward under the table.

I don’t think about it first. It just goes, across the space under the table, until the toe of my boot touches the side of hers.

She jumps. Just a little.

I start to pull back.

And she moves her foot. Not away. Over. Until the whole side of it is resting against mine, through the leather, from the toe to the ankle.

She doesn’t look at me. She picks up her fork and eats a bite of pasta like nothing is happening. Her cheeks are pink.

I leave my foot where it is.

After a while, I put my hand on the table with my palm up in between the breadbasket and the candle. I don’t reach for her. I don’t take anything. I just put it there, open, and look at it because I can’t look at her.

She looks at it for a long time.

Then she puts down her fork and puts her hand in mine.

Her hand is small and lighter than I expected, and her fingers are soft.

I close my hand around hers. I run my thumb over her knuckles. She lets out a breath. She runs her finger along the side of mine along the knuckles, the two pale marks where they split.

“Your hands are massive,” she says.

Something goes through me.

This was a mistake. I knew it. Dinner was a mistake. Because I’m sitting in a booth with Tessa Canten tracing the lines on my hand with one finger, and all I can think about is how much I want this, and how there’s a whole table and a candle and a basket of bread in the way.

“What are you doing after this?” I say.

She stops tracing and looks up at me. And then she laughs into her free hand. Her whole face goes pink this time, the whole thing, and she pulls her hand back out of mine, not all the way, just to the edge of the table, so our fingertips are still touching.

“Rafe,” she says.

“What?”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m seriously asking, yeah.”

She laughs again with her hand over her mouth. And the tension breaks a little, enough that I can breathe around it.

We finish eating. I pay before she can see the check. We walk out into the cold, down under the strings of white lights, past the bank, past the closed-up shops with their windows full of fake snow, and she walks close enough that her arm bumps mine every few steps.

The house is dark when we get back, except for the tree. It’s on in the front room with the white lights and the colored ones tangled together. The potato hockey player in the front, and the star crooked at the top where nobody fixed it. My parents are in bed. The whole house is quiet.

We go up the stairs together. We get to the top to the two doors, and she doesn’t go to hers. She follows me into my room. I stop in the middle of it by the couch. I take my jacket off and put it on the arm. I turn around. She’s at the door. And she closes it.

She does it slow, like she did this afternoon with her hand on the knob until it clicks. And then her hand moves down to the lock, the old brass one that turns with a little key-shaped lever.

She turns it.

It makes a small, quiet sound in the dark room. I hear it all the way through my body.