Page 149 of On His Mind

Just shit.

Has it never entered his head? If I put a date on how long we’ve been seeing each other, it’s been a long time. Heck, it’s been years. And it never crossed his mind that there’s an end date stitched into the bottom of us, that I am a senior graduating soon and a whole life coming for me, that this thing we do in the dark has a clock on it he never bothered to look at. He hasno future-tense version of me. There’s only tonight, and the next tonight, and the one after that.

“I want more,” I say, even though I know he can’t give it to me. I know he won’t, but I say it anyway because it’s my truth, and I can’t keep shoving it down to keep him. I have needs too.

His throat moves in the morning light. He doesn’t answer. Instead, he sits up and puts his clothes back on. I lie there and watch the shape of his back while he does it, and I wait for anything at all.

Then he leans across the bed and kisses me.

“I’ll text you.”

I come up onto my elbows and watch him go.

I don’t sleep after he leaves.

I draw. I draw for my project because I need to put in the hours. I want to come up with my best work.

Then Melly comes home in pieces with her best friend Mila in tow, and I feed them both and I listen to everything going on with her.

She’s wrecked over Blue. She doesn’t put it in those words, but it’s written all over her face. I’m gentle with her because Mila seems to be intolerant. I ask the right questions and don’t push. And I hate that it makes me feel better about my situation. Maybe it’s not all bad.

She goes back to Hawthorne to return Blue’s hoodie and doesn’t come home for a long while.

I stay on the couch while Mila naps, and I draw, because it’s the only thing that makes the hours go somewhere.

He texts me two days later.

Percy:Practice at six. Tired. Miss you.

I read it twenty times.

A week or so later, Melly cracks.

The girls are all here. Gianna, Lucy, Mara, Mila, and me. We’re sitting in my living room, and the girls are telling her thingsabout Blue. I can see her face start to pull, and I think what I’m witnessing is pure denial and deep heartbreak. Melly goes into her bedroom, and she cries. We can hear her crying, talking to Mila. The four of us can’t sit around while she’s clearly in pain, so we knock on her bedroom door. She falls apart, saying she doesn’t know what she’s doing, doesn’t know why she cares this much, doesn’t know what’swrongwith her.

And I go very still.

Because I know that from the inside out, down to my bones. She is saying my exact feelings out loud in the middle of five girls. The wanting. The what-is-wrong-with-me. The why-won’t-he-just –– it’s that one, that’s the one that lives right in the back of my mind most nights.

We swarm her. All five of us, at once, folding her into the middle of our bodies. And it’s the group hug that finishes me. Because Melly gets to fall apart in a room full of women who love her, with five sets of hands holding her together. She gets tosay it. She gets to be a girl with a wet face and a broken heart and the whole friend group who knows exactly what’s going on with her and are trying to fix it.

I have to keep mine folded up and stowed. I have to sit in the pile with my arms around her and my own thing screaming in my head, and I have to make my face do sympathy when what I’m actually feeling is envy so sharp it’s hard to breathe around.

That’s what he’s cost me. Not just him. Everybody. He’s made me a stranger in my own friendships.

I sneak into his room twice more that month.

The first time, I take his clothes off in the dark and go down on him in a way I never have before — slower, filthier, my hands and mouth working like I’ve got something to prove.

Because I do. That’s the ugly truth of it. I want him to want me somewhere out in the daylight, and I can’t get him there with words, so I try it with my body. I try to make myselfunforgettable. I try to be so good that the memory follows him into the room with the guys, into practice, into whatever quiet space he does his deciding in, so that when he’s weighing me against that house he’ll feel exactly what it costs to keep me a secret.

He comes with my name in his mouth and his hand fisted in my hair, and afterward he pulls me up against his chest and holds me like I’m precious.

I lie there in the dark listening to his heart slow down and I think to myself,look at what you’ve turned into.Bargaining. Auditioning for a role you already have. Trying to earn what should have been given.

I don’t cry until I’m back in my car.

On the drive home, I try to picture him at my graduation. The lawn, the gowns, my mother in a hat she’ll have agonized over for a month, my father taking eleven identical photographs. And I go to put Percy into it. Standing beside my mother. Shaking my father’s hand. Wearing a shirt with buttons. SayingI’m Percyout loud to two people whose daughter he’s been in love with for years.