Chapter 2: The Corner
The corner had one working streetlight, and it dropped a brown circle on the cracked sidewalk. Past that circle everything went silver and dead. I had my arms crossed inside my coat, my chin pushed down into the collar, and I was counting my own breaths so I wouldn't be the one to talk first.
The wind came up the hill off the parking garage, cold and smelling of wet asphalt. Somebody two blocks over had a woodstove going. Harry stood at the edge of the light with both hands jammed in the front pocket of his hoodie. No jacket. No gloves. His knuckles were split from something, and the shaking in his shoulders had nothing to do with a hard game. I looked at his shoes instead of his face.
"So what happens now?" he said.
I let the cold answer him. A car went by at the top of the street. Its headlights swung across the porch of the yellow house, then fell away, and the quiet came back thicker than before. My nose was running. I didn't wipe it.
"Nikki."
Nothing.
"Can you at least look at me?"
It cost me something to do it. His curls had gone flat at the temples from sweating in a hot house all night. His eyes were red at the rims, and there was a spot of something pink on the shoulder of his hoodie. Lip gloss, probably. I didn't offer him my scarf. I didn't move the two feet of frozen slush between us either.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Don't."
"I know how it sounds."
"You don't, or you wouldn't keep doing it."
Six, I thought. Six times he'd stood me up and left me holding a table at a restaurant or a ticket to a movie, and every one of those nights he'd had somewhere better to be. Six wasn't canceled by one apology on one cold corner. I tucked my hair back behind my ear, blue at the roots where it was growing out, and said nothing else.
He rocked back on his heels and looked down the empty street like somebody was coming who could fix this for him. Nobody was. The block ran out into dark houses and one dog barking far off. Somebody's recycling bin had been at the curb since Tuesday.
Then he stopped moving. His hands came out of his pocket and hung at his sides, and he looked at me straight, which he almost never did.
"You want the truth?" he said.
"I want you to say one true thing. That's all. One."
It came out of him slow, dragged up from somewhere he kept locked. "You scare the hell out of me."
The branch over the streetlight moved. I stood there with my hands tucked into my armpits and let it land wherever it was going to land.
"Not you," he said. "I mean, not you as a person. You're the only one I'm not scared of." He stopped. Started again. "I'm scared of how much I want you. I have been since junior year. Every time this gets close to real, I find something easier and I take it, and I hate myself in the morning. That's the true thing. That's the whole thing."
My chest did something stupid. My body wanted to take one step forward and I kept both feet planted in the slush at the edge of the curb, because that step was the trap and I knew it by name.
I said, "Why should tomorrow be different?"
"I don't know."
"Then that's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got." He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist and looked at the ground again. "Ask me again tomorrow."
The clock over the bus shelter said eleven forty-three. My toes had gone numb somewhere back on Oak. I wanted my bed and I wanted him to keep standing there saying true things, and both of those could be true at once. That was the problem with me.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Seven. My place. Bring something from the bakery on Ninth, and don't text me at six-forty-five to cancel."
He blinked. "Seven?"
"Seven." I turned around before he could get another word in and I walked. My boots made the only sound on the block, that flat crunch of old salt and frozen slush, and the streetlight buzzed behind me like it was thinking. Ten steps. Twenty. He said my name once, quiet, like he wasn't sure he was allowed. I didn't turn around.
I made the last block alone, past the dark houses and the one porch light somebody had left burning for nobody. My fingers had quit working by the time I got my keys out, and I had to hold them in my fist a second to warm them.
On the step I looked back. I told myself I was checking the street for my car.
He was still under the lamp. Not walking toward the frat, not walking toward me. Just there, hands back in his pocket, watching my block like he was doing math in his head.
I stood on the step until the cold bit through the soles of my boots. Then I went in and locked the door behind me.
In the kitchen I hung my coat on the chair and stood in the dark. The radiator knocked twice. I picked up my phone, opened the alarm, moved it from ten to six, and put it down again, and I stood there in the dark hating myself a little for it when the screen lit up on the counter.
The screen said Hanna. Three texts stacked on top of each other, and a fourth landing while I stood there watching it glow against the counter.
"you alive or do i need to come over?"
"nikki"
"your read receipts are on"
"i will walk there in my pajamas"
I typed with one numb thumb. "alive. going to bed."
"did he follow you home?"
"no."
She sent five hearts in a row, which was Hanna for I love you and I am saving the rest of this for tomorrow whether you like it or not. I put the phone face down on the counter, and it buzzed one more time anyway.
Aria, in her own thread. "You don't have to tell us anything tonight. I'm up if you want me."
"Not tonight."
"I love you," she wrote. That was all.
Then Harry.
The typing bubble came up and went away. It came up again. I filled the kettle because I needed my hands doing something, and I stood in the dark while the burner ticked orange under the pot. The kitchen smelled like the lemon soap Aria leaves on the sink when she comes over. When I looked again, the message was there.
"what do you want from the bakery?"
I read it four times. It was the smallest question in the world, and he had gone quiet for two full minutes deciding how to ask it. I typed "you know what I like." I deleted it. I typed "just show up." I deleted that one too.
"Surprise me," I sent.
He hearted it. He didn't say anything else. I waited another minute just to be certain he wouldn't, and then I turned off the kitchen light.
The bed was cold on my side and colder on the other. The radiator knocked twice and quit. I lay on my back with my hair fanned out over the pillow, blue at the roots where it was growing out, and I listened to the street go quiet one house at a time.
I kept thinking about his mouth. Not the words, because I was filing those away to take apart later with Hanna and a plate of fries. The mouth itself. The exact shape of it when he said I'm scared of how much I want you, like the sentence had cost him blood to say out loud on a frozen corner.
My hand went under the blanket before I decided anything. I slid it down over my stomach and across the lanterns and stars inked along my ribs, and let my fingers find me under the elastic. I was already wet, which was its own small insult. I took it slow, two fingers, my palm flat, and I thought about the two feet of slush between us and how every cell in my body had wanted to close it. I came with my free hand pressed over my mouth. Then I lay there and hated him, and hated the radiator, and mostly hated that I was still going to set that alarm.
Six o'clock came hard.
I did the day in pieces. Shower, coffee I abandoned half drunk on the rail, two classes where the professor's voice drifted in and out. A girl beside me in the second one asked to borrow a pen and I gave her one and forgot her face by the stairs. My phone sat in my bag the whole time and I did not check it, which was a lie I was telling myself very sincerely.
At the dining hall, Hanna dropped her tray down across from me and stole a fry before she even sat.
"So. Tonight. Is he actually coming or what?"
"Seven. My place."
She chewed and squinted at me the way she does when she's reading three layers under what I said. "And you believe him."
"I don't believe anything. I put a number on it. That's different."
Aria came around the end of the table with her tea and stayed quiet a while, which was Aria being careful with me. Then she said, "You set the rule. That's the part that matters."
Hanna snorted into her soda. "The part that matters is whether he shows."
I told them I had to study. I didn't study. I sat in the library with an open book and the same page for two hours.
At home the clock over the bus shelter kept grading me. Half past five. Six. I showered a second time and stood in the steam and could not tell you afterward what I'd thought about for any of it. I put on jeans. I took them off. I answered the door at six forty-seven in my dad's old sweater with my hair half up, which was a choice I did not make on purpose.
It was the guy from 3B, asking if I'd signed for his package. I told him no and shut the door. My heart was going like I'd run the nine blocks home, and I stood in the hallway noticing that about myself, which was humiliating.
Six forty-five came and went with no text. That was the hour he always got out of things. That was the exact hour, and I knew it the way you know a scar. I put the phone on the far side of the room with the screen up and made tea I never drank.
Seven.
Seven oh two. The radiator ticked. Downstairs somebody had a game on, and the crowd noise came up through the floorboards like rain on a roof.
Seven oh five.
I put my cup in the sink and turned to look at the street through the window over the counter. I was already building his excuses for him. Something with the team. He forgot. The bakery closed early on a Sunday. I was three seconds from being finished with him for good, and I could feel the exact size of how much I wasn't, so I looked at the street instead of my own hands.
Headlights swung up the hill and stopped at the curb below my porch. A car door opened. I heard him take the steps two at a time, and then three quick knocks, and then his voice through the wood, steadier than it had any right to be.
"Can I come in?"
I didn't answer right away. I stood with one hand flat on the door and listened to him breathe out there in the cold.
Then I turned the deadbolt and pulled it open.
He was on the mat with his hood up and a white bakery box balanced on both palms like a cake he was afraid of dropping. Flour on the lid. The string had been knotted by hand.
"Are you going to let me in," he said, "or am I eating this on the porch?"
"You're letting the heat out."
He came in. I made him take his shoes off, and he did it without arguing, which told me he had thought about this on the walk over. The box went on the counter. His hair was damp at the front from the mist that had started up outside.
"Guava," he said, when I opened it. "And the one with the cream. And two of the ones with the sugar on top, because I couldn't remember."
I looked in the box longer than the box deserved. He'd gotten the guava ones. Not a guess. He'd been in that bakery with me in September and I'd said, out loud, that these were the only reason to live on Ninth Street.
"You didn't text at six forty-five," I said.
"No."
"Why not?"
He thought about it honestly, which was new. "Because I wrote eighteen and deleted eighteen."
The kettle ticked behind me. I put two mugs out and didn't ask him if he wanted tea. He took the one I handed him and stood in my kitchen with his back to the counter and his elbows tucked in, a big guy making himself small.
"What did you tell her," I said.
"Last night. After you left." He turned the mug a quarter turn. "The truth. That I was using her to not think about you, and that wasn't fair to either of us. She cried. I sat there."
"Good."
"Yeah." He drank. "That's all you get."
I leaned against the fridge with my own cup and let the radiator knock twice through the quiet. My sweater sleeves were too long. I had both thumbs in them.
He set the mug down on the counter without looking and took the step between us. Not fast. He stopped close enough that I could smell the cold on his hoodie and the soap under it. His hand came up to my jaw, warm from the cup, and his thumb moved once along my cheekbone.
"Ask me again," he said.
"Ask you what?"
"The true thing."
"You already said it."
"Say it back."
I put the mug down behind me, which took both hands, which meant my face was open when I turned around. He kissed me before my heels came back down. Slow at first, careful, the way you kiss someone you think might bolt, and then I curled my fingers into the front of his hoodie and dragged him down and it stopped being careful.
He backed me into the counter and lifted me onto it, and the cold granite came through my jeans and made me hiss into his mouth. His hands went under my sweater, both of them, up the sides of me, and his palms were rough from the gym and the cold and they dragged over the lanterns inked along my ribs like he was reading them by feel.
"I've got you," he said against my throat. "Tell me if I don't."
"You've got me."
He pulled the sweater off over my head and got my bra open with one hand at my back, which was annoying, and then his mouth was on my collarbone and moving down. He took a nipple in his mouth and sucked hard enough that I grabbed the back of his head. My legs came around his hips on their own. I could feel him through his jeans, hard, and I ground down against the seam of him just to hear the noise he made in his throat.
"Bedroom," I said. "Now, or I change my mind."
He carried me. Down the hallway, past the coat chair, and he set me on my feet by the bed and got my jeans and my underwear off in one motion, straight down to my ankles. I stepped out. He knelt.
I have thought about that part since. His face between my thighs, his tongue flat and slow, his hands pinning my hips to the mattress because I was already shaking. He worked me like he had all night and nothing else. I fisted the sheet and came with my calves hooked over his shoulders and my head pressed back into the pillow, and he didn't stop until I pushed his forehead away with the flat of my hand.
"Come here," I said.
He stood up and got the rest of his clothes off. I watched him do it. Shoulders, the stupid perfect stomach, the line of dark hair, and then his cock, thick and dark and already slick at the tip where he'd been pressed against me. He rolled the condom on and came down over me on both arms and I pulled his mouth to mine and opened my legs.
He went in slow, all the way, and stopped breathing for a second.
"Okay?" he said.
"Move."
He did. Slow first, long, the whole length of him pulling out and pressing back in until I was wet enough that it stopped being work and started being exactly what I wanted. Then he found the rhythm he wanted. His hips slapped against me. The headboard tapped the wall in three-beat bursts. I got one hand braced on his chest and the other knotted in the sheet and told him not to stop, and he didn't.
When I came the second time I felt it from my knees up. He watched my face the whole way through it and then he put his mouth on my neck and finished with a low sound that I felt in his chest. He held there. His weight came down on me, warm and heavy, and I let it, which surprised us both.
After, he rolled off and dealt with the condom and came back and got in under the blanket like it was his. I didn't say anything about it. The radiator knocked. Crumbs from nothing.
"You never ate a pastry," he said.
"Later."
He got up anyway. He came back with the box in one hand and the two sugared ones in the other, and he sat on the edge of my bed naked eating one with his knee pulled up, and I ate one lying down with crumbs falling on my own sheets. It was the most domestic thing that had happened in this apartment in a year.
"What time is practice," I said.
"Six."
I looked at the clock. Twelve twenty.
"Set your alarm," I said.
He looked at me for a second, waiting for the rest of it. Whether I meant for him to go now or go from here in the dark in five hours. I didn't give him either. He reached over me to the nightstand for his phone and set the alarm where I could see him do it.
Then he lay back down and pulled me in against his chest with one arm, and the street outside went quiet one house at a time, and I lay there awake with his breath on my hair, listening for the exact hour in the morning when he would decide whether he really meant any of it.
I woke up before the alarm, which is a thing my body does when something's wrong, and the first wrong thing I noticed was the warmth at my back. His arm was heavy across my ribs. His breath moved my hair against my neck in a slow, even pull.
The light through the blinds had gone from black to the color of old dishwater. Six o'clock lived somewhere behind it, and I lay there and waited for the alarm with my eyes open and did not move his arm, which was a choice I made and did not examine.
The alarm went off. His hand came out and killed it without him opening his eyes. Then it went back across me. Practice, I thought. Job, meetings, whatever it was he said on Sundays. Six a.m. and he had silenced it and put his arm back and the whole room settled into that flat grey quiet like nothing had happened at all.
I got up eventually. I put on his shirt from the floor because it was closest. In the kitchen I started the coffee and stood at the counter and watched the sky come up over the parking garage, grey to pink to a thin dirty gold along the roofline.
Eight. He was still there.
The coffee had gone cold in the pot by the time I heard him in the hallway. He came out with my quilt around his shoulders like a robe, bare feet on the cold floor, hair flattened on one side.
"You turned your alarm off," I said.
"I know."
"Your coach."
"Yeah."
He poured himself a cup from the cold pot and drank it standing, not complaining. The radiator knocked. He looked at the window and then at me, and I was leaning on the fridge in a shirt that wasn't mine, and neither of us said anything for a while.
"What time is it?" he said.
"Eight something."
"I've never done that before."
"Done what."
"Not gotten up." He set the cup down. "Not for practice. Not for anything."
I did not tell him that meant nothing. I wanted to, and I didn't.
He came across the kitchen in three steps and put both hands on my waist and turned me against the fridge door. The cold metal bit through the shirt. He kissed me with morning breath, unhurried, and his hand slid down past the hem and found me already warm from sleep.
"Again?" he said into my mouth.
"You're the one with your hand down there."
He lifted me onto the counter this time. The granite was worse in the morning, colder, and I made a sound I wasn't proud of. He got my underwear off one ankle and left the other on, which for some reason was the thing that undid me, the carelessness of it. He pushed my knees apart and stood between them and stroked me slow with two fingers, watching my face the whole time like he was memorizing it.
"Tell me what you want," he said.
"You. On the bed. Now."
He carried me back down the hall with my legs around him and dropped me on the mattress. The quilt came off his shoulders on the way. He got himself ready with one hand and knelt over me and pushed in slow, and I felt every inch of it because I was awake for all of it, no drink, no dark, just him in the morning light and my knee hooked over his hip and the blinds throwing stripes across his back.
He went slow the whole way. Long strokes, hips rolling, his mouth on my throat and then my collarbone and then my mouth. I dug my nails into his shoulder blades. He moved a little faster and I told him not to stop and put my hand between us and finished on my own fingers with him still moving inside me. He came a few strokes later with his forehead pressed to mine, breathing hard, and then he stayed there, still inside me, and did not roll off for longer than he ever had before.
"Alright," he said finally, into my ear.
"Get off, you're heavy."
He laughed and rolled. I went and cleaned up and stood in front of the mirror looking at my own face like it belonged to someone I was about to have a serious conversation with. Roots blue, ends purple, one bra strap twisted.
When I came back he was sitting up against my headboard with the baker's box on the bed between us, eating the last sugared one.
"I'm not going," he said.
"To practice."
"To practice." He picked crumbs off the sheet. "Liam will text me. I'll tell him where I am. He'll lose his mind. That's fine."
"You're going to get cut."
"Probably."
"You love soccer."
"I love a lot of things." He wiped his hand on the sheet and looked at me, and it was the most direct thing he had ever done in this room. "I'm not going to sit here for one morning and call it fixed. I know how that sounds. I'm saying I'm still going to be here at noon."
Noon came. I had a Lit seminar at eleven that I skipped, which I had never once done, and I told myself it was because the readings were online anyway. We ordered food. He wore my dad's sweater because his hoodie still smelled like the party, and it was tight across his shoulders and he didn't say a single word about it. We ate on the floor in front of the radiator and argued about whether the one on Ninth is actually the best bakery on the street.
At one point his phone buzzed on the nightstand and he looked at it and put it face down. Then again. Then a third time, and he picked it back up and typed something short and put it down and didn't tell me what he'd written.
"Liam?" I said.
"Liam."
"What does he say?"
"That I'm an idiot." He shrugged. "He's not wrong. He also said somebody saw Kenzie's car at my house."
I stopped chewing.
"Not for me," he said. "I haven't talked to her since Friday. She left a sweater. That's what it is. I just wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from somebody else."
I looked at the crumbs on the sheet and the two of us sitting on the floor of my apartment in mostly no clothes with a bakery box between us like it was a picnic. Six times he'd stood me up. Twenty hours ago he'd been a stranger under a streetlight with somebody else's lip gloss on his shoulder. Now he was in my kitchen telling me about a sweater.
"I don't forgive you yet," I said.
"I know."
"It happens on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sometimes Fridays."
"I know that too."
"And if you cancel on me once, I'm done. Not six times. Once. I mean it."
He set the last sugared pastry down and put his hand flat on the floor between us, palm up, like he was offering me something he couldn't say out loud.
"Once," he said. "You'll be done. Deal."
I put my hand in his, and the radiator knocked twice, and out the window the sun had gotten itself up over the parking garage and was coming in sideways across my floor, and his thumb moved one slow circle on the back of my hand like he was still doing the math.
He stayed past sunrise. He stayed past noon. I watched him pull my quilt up over his knees and I thought, with the light on both of us, that this was the first morning in a year I had not wanted to be somewhere else.
He left at four fifteen, when the light over the parking garage had gone the color of weak tea. I heard the truck before I saw it. Somebody hit the horn twice, low and long, the kind of horn that means I know exactly where you are.
Liam's truck. Dark green, salt crusted along the doors, wipers parked half an inch off the glass.
Harry stood in my kitchen with my dad's sweater on, sleeves bunched at his wrists. He looked at the window like he hadn't heard anything.
"That's Liam," I said.
"I know."
"You're still wearing it."
"I know that too." He pulled the sweater off over his head and dropped it on the chair, careful, folded once. Then he got his hoodie off the floor and put it back on and the whole kitchen smelled like the party again. Warm beer and somebody's perfume.
He stopped at the door with one shoe on.
"Text me when you're free," he said.
"You already know when I'm free." I was leaning on the counter with my arms crossed, in his shirt, which I had not given back. "Tuesdays and Thursdays. Unless you'd rather I text you at six forty-five."
"I'd rather you didn't."
"Then don't make me."
He looked at me a second longer than he needed to. Then he went down the steps and got in the truck and Liam pulled off without a word. I watched the taillights shrink at the top of the hill.
I changed the sheets. Crumbs everywhere. I stood at the washer with the quilt jammed in my arms and the smell of him still in it, and I put it in anyway.
Monday at the dining hall, Hanna dropped her tray across from me and stole a fry before she sat.
"So did he stay the night or not?"
"He stayed."
She froze with the fry halfway to her mouth. "Nikki."
"Sunday night. All of it. He turned his alarm off."
Hanna put the fry down, which was Hanna for this is serious. Aria came around the end of the table with her tea and sat and didn't say anything, which was Aria listening.
Aria said, "Are you okay, though?"
"I don't know what I am."
"That's not a no," Hanna said.
"It's not a yes either."
Aria turned her cup around on the table. "Did he tell Kenzie?"
"He said he did. Friday night, after I left. I'm choosing to believe him." I said it with my mouth full so it would sound like nothing.
Hanna snorted. "You're choosing to believe him and you said it like it was a parking ticket."
"Because it is a parking ticket. This whole thing is a parking ticket I keep paying."
Louis found me on the steps outside the library at two, hood up, hands in his pockets. He hadn't come to take me anywhere this time. He sat down next to me on the cold concrete and stretched his legs out and looked at the quad the way he does when he's about to say something and wants me to think it was his idea.
"You know he missed practice again this morning," he said.
"He told me."
"Did he tell you the coach called him in?"
I turned my head. Louis was picking at the seam of his sleeve.
"What does that mean," I said.
"Means Zayn saw him go in. Twenty minutes. He came out and went straight to the locker room and didn't talk to anybody." He shrugged. "I'm not here as Aria's boyfriend. I'm here as the guy who drove you to that house."
"I know which guy you are."
"Good. Because I'd want to know."
He got up and left me there. I sat on the step until my ass went numb and skipped the class after it.
Tuesday he knocked at six fifty-eight, which is two minutes early and very unlike him. I opened the door and he was on the mat with nothing in his hands. No box. No cup. His right hand was wrapped in tape from the knuckles to the wrist, gray and fraying at the edge.
"What happened."
"Nothing."
"Harry."
"Practice." He came in and toed his shoes off. "Coach hates wrapped hands. Says it means you were doing something stupid with them."
"Were you?"
"Yeah."
He went into the kitchen and stood with his back to me at the counter. The radiator knocked twice. I waited, because the last four days had taught me that he could be made to wait too.
"I'm off the team," he said.
"You're what."
"Suspended for the season. Maybe the rest." He turned around. His face was doing something I hadn't seen on it, the mouth flat, the eyes wide and dry. "Three practices. The bench. Saturday."
"You just stood there and took it?"
"He asked me why." He looked at the ceiling and then at me. "I could have said my knee. I could have said a family thing. He gave me the whole opening."
"And?"
"And I told him the truth. That I'd been a jackass and I didn't have a reason." He laughed once, no air in it. "He said at least one of us was honest today."
I sat down on the arm of the couch because standing had stopped being the right shape for this.
"You love it," I said.
"I love a lot of things." He picked the tape at his knuckles with his other thumb. "That's the thing, Nik. I've been telling myself soccer was the reason I kept moving, and the house was the reason, and this girl was the reason. Take all of it and I'm standing in your kitchen on a Tuesday with nothing to cancel on you."
The streetlight out front came on all at once, the way it does, and threw its orange square across the floor between us.
"So what do you want," I said.
He took a breath that I heard all the way from the door.
"What if I want more than Tuesdays and Thursdays?"
The radiator knocked. Downstairs somebody laughed at something on their TV and shut it off and the whole building went quiet around the question.
I got up off the couch arm and crossed the orange square and stopped in front of him. I took his wrapped hand and turned it over and looked at it, the tape dark where he'd been bleeding under it, and I held it flat against my own palm.
"Then you earn it," I said. "Not the sex. The rest of it. You come when you say, you answer when I ask, and you don't get to call this a favor you're doing me."
His fingers closed around mine.
"That's all I've got," he said. "Fair."
"It's not fair. It's Tuesdays and Thursdays."
He laughed for real that time, low, mostly breath, and pulled me in by the hand he was holding, and I let him, which was a decision and not a slip.