Page 151 of On His Mind

“We can talk about it,” he says.

“Talk?” It comes out wet and ugly. “It’s a bit late for talking.”

I take a step toward the door. “We’re done.”

“Please don’t—” He’s out of the bed now, on his feet, reaching. “Penelope, please, just—”

And then he stops trying in English.

“Reste. S’il te plaît, reste.” The words come pouring out of him fast and low and desperate, tumbling over each other, more words than he’s said to me in a week. “Je sais pas comment faire, j’ai jamais su, mais je t’aime, tu m’entends? Je t’aime, je t’ai toujours aimée, depuis le début—”

I stand at his bedroom door with my hand on the frame, and I don’t understand a single word he’s saying. Not one. It could bestay. It could beI love you. It could be an apology or a promise or every single thing I have been begging him for. And it is locked away in a language I don’t know, from a mouth that has never once managed to give it to me in a language I do.

That’s us. That’s the entire thing. He has all the words. He’s had them the whole time. And he can only ever get them out in a language I don’t know.

“I can’t understand you, Percy,” I whisper.

He stops dead. His face goes to pieces.

And he doesn’t say another word.

I leave.

I’m too far inside my own head to think it through, so I don’t take the side door — the secret one, my door, the one that exists for girls who aren’t supposed to be here. I go straight down the hall toward the front of the house.

Halfway across the living room, the skin on my neck prickles, and I look up.

Blue Golding is at the top of the stairs, looking right at me.

I go still. I wait for the sound of Percy’s door opening behind me. For footsteps. For my name.

Nothing. He’s not coming. He’s letting me leave.

I breathe in and cross to the bottom of the staircase as Blue comes down the last step.

“You didn’t see me here,” I whisper.

He doesn’t say a word.

“You don’t tell anyone. Blue.Promiseme.”

And I hate myself for it — I hate that even now, with my chest cracked wide open and my throat closing and his door shut behind me, my very first instinct is still to stand here in the dark and protect him.

“I won’t,” Blue says.

I add, “Not even Melly. You can’t tell anyone that I was here.”

He nods.

I look one last time down the hall at Percy’s closed bedroom door. Then I let myself out the front quietly.

I make it to my car before the heaviness in my chest takes me. I get in and shut the door and grip the wheel with both hands and cry until there’s nothing left in me to come out — big, silent, shoulder-wracking sobs in a dark street outside a house full of people who will never know I was in it.

And somewhere in the middle of it, the thing I’ve been outrunning since September finally catches me.

It isn’t that he doesn’t love me. He does. He loves me the way you’d love a lit window from outside in the cold, with his whole entire chest, and I have never doubted it for one second, and that is what has kept me in this for so long.

It’s that I have spent years, waiting for a man to turn into somebody he does not know how to be.