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“I love you, too,” I say.

Rafe’s face does something I’ve never seen it do, crumples and lights up at the same time, and he laughs, a short broken sound, and drops his forehead against my knee.

“Yeah?” he says into my leg.

“Yeah.” I’m crying properly now, and I don’t even care. “I love you. I think I’ve loved you since before I would let myself. I think I was just waiting to see when you’d leave me.”

“No,” he says, and lifts his head, and he’s crying too, his eyes red and wet, and he wipes his face on my knee. “Fuck. Stop, Tess.”

I laugh between my tears, and more fall out. He grabs my face, coming up on the bed. He holds my face in both hands.

“I still need you to think about it,” he says. “I mean it. Think about it. Take however long. I’ll be right here the whole time while you’re thinking.”

Then he kisses me, and I’m not anywhere else.

That’s the strangest part. On the sixth, with the duffel by the door, he was right here on top of me, and I was a hundred miles away, already walking through the empty rooms of a September I’d invented. Now I’m here. I’m in it. I can feel the damp cotton of his shirt under my hands before I pull it over his head, and the salt on his neck from the walk, and the scab on his knuckle when I kiss it. I’m not memorizing any of it. I’m not filing it away for later, the way you’d photograph a room before you have to leave it. I’m just touching him because he’s here, and he’s going to keep being here, and I’m letting myself believe it for the length of a breath and then another and then another.

He’s slow with me, and then he isn’t, and then he’s laughing into my mouth because I give him a love bite on his chest. He swears at me, and then he’s slow again. He keeps saying it, like now that it’s out he can’t stop. I love you. Against my collarbone, into my hair, in a rough, disbelieving way, like he’s making up for all the times he hasn’t said it.

“You love me,” he says once, grinning down at me, hair falling in his eyes. “You love me so bad you made a spreadsheet about it.”

“Shut up.”

“You color-coded it.”

“I swear to God, Rafe—”

He kisses me before I can finish, and he’s still smiling into it, and I stop being able to think about spreadsheets or buses or what I’m going to do. I hold on to him, and this time it isn’t because I’m afraid of what happens when I let go. When he makes me orgasm, it’s eyes that set me off. They’re green, bright, and watching. He says my whole name, like it’s something he’s been holding in his mouth all summer, and then he collapses half on top of me, heavy and hot and shaking a little. I lie there under him with the fan turning and my hand in his hair and I don’t think about him leaving me anymore.

He rolls onto his back with one arm under his head and the other around me. I’m on his chest with my ear over his heart, which is still going too fast, and he’s talking. He’s already talking about it like it’s real. The report date in late August. The affiliate’s rink, which he says is a dump, but a good dump. An apartment because the team has a guy who helps the young players find places, and he’s going to call him in the morning.

“We’ll need two bedrooms,” he says.

“Why?” I lift my head. “Who’s visiting?”

He looks at me like I’m slow. “Nobody. It’s for your business.” He waves vaguely at the room, at the stacks of folded inventory against the wall, at the bins under the desk, at the printer. “You need a real room. Shelves. A table for the photos with the good lamp. I’m not having your stuff stacked in the kitchen, and my gear is not touching your packages, because you’ll kill me, and you’ll be right to.”

I put my head back down on his chest because I don’t trust my face.

He’s been planning too. All this time, while I was building the version where he goes and I stay, he was building one where I have a room. He walked down Wren Street in ninety degrees, counting Goodwills. He imagined my inventory on shelves in a city I’ve never seen, and he made room for it without me asking.

He keeps talking. Parking. Whether the building lets you have a dog because he wants a dog, and I tell him absolutely not, and he says we’ll see. And while he talks, I start thinking about what it would be like to stay. I could keep the sublet or take one of the rooms off the board. I could take the bus. I could buy the bike. I could grow the business right here, keep making the videos on this floor, keep selling the guide, take classes in the spring if I ever actually want them. Kylie would drag me to things. Paige would sit with me inside of them. I’d fly out every six weeks, and I’d miss him in a way I can’t even think about directly, and I would be okay. I’d be more than okay. I’d have a good life. I’d have a life I built.

I turn it over and over, and it holds.

But lying here with his heart going under my ear, I realize that it’s not what I want.

“Okay,” I say.

He stops talking about dogs. “Okay what?”

“I’ll come.”

He doesn’t move for a second. Then he pushes up on his elbow and looks down at me, and his face is completely open, more open than I’ve ever seen it, like a kid who doesn’t believe he’s been picked.

“Don’t fuck with me, Tess.”

“I’m not.”