Page 249

I don’t answer. I go down the steps.

She sees me when I’m halfway to the wall. She doesn’t close the laptop. She just looks up, and then she looks back down at the screen like she wasn’t going to let me interrupt her that easily.

I pick up her coffee and drink half of it in two sips.

“That’s mine.”

I press my lips together because it’s fucking sweet. I look at her as I swallow and set the cup down. “I know.”

I kiss her.

I don’t think about it. I just bend down with my bag still on my shoulder and kiss her on the mouth under the light in front of most of the Woodbury Grizzlies coming down the steps behind me.

It’s quick. It’s easy. She kisses me back and says, “Hi to you, too, Rafferty,” against my mouth, and goes back to her laptop.

Behind me, somebody whistles.

“Waleska,” Orr says. “You’re dating Canten?”

I turn around.

“Yeah,” I say.

Orr’s eyebrows go all the way up into his hat. Layous says damn under his breath. Greeley pulls one earbud out and looks at us for about two seconds and puts it back in and keeps walking.

I look at her concentrated face with the snow coming down.

The first time, Barnes asked me in my parent’s kitchen, and I said yeah before I knew I knew it.

This time, I knew it. Somebody asked, and I heard the question, and I knew exactly what I was saying, and I said it anyway, in front of half the team, without even stopping to think.

Still the answer.

I sit down beside her on the wall.

She’s looking at her laptop.

“Tess.”

“Hmm?”

“I told Orr we’re dating.”

Her fingers stop over the keyboard.

She turns her head slowly. “I heard you.”

I look at the screen.

She keeps looking at me.

Fuck.

Her mouth starts doing something. “Okay.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says.