Page 44 of Such Sharp Teeth

“Morning,” I say.

He smiles at me, and I wonder if he ever looked at the girl in the photo this way. I was never jealous of Kelly Iwanowski, but that girl in the Polaroid, the thought of him with someone else now, it makes me want to climb the walls.

He scoops coffee beans into a grinder. He gets out a French press. He would have a French press.

“You talk in your sleep,” he says.

“I doubt it,” I say, digging a bagel sandwich out of the bag.

“One’s bacon, one’s sausage. Whatever you want,” he says. “Did you have bad dreams?”

“Bacon. Always bacon,” I say. “I don’t remember. Why?”

“You were breathing heavy. You kept saying no and tossing around. I tried to wake you, but I couldn’t.”

I deconstruct my sandwich to get to the bacon. “Can’t recall.”

He nods, plugging in an electric kettle.

It occurs to me that just because I don’t remember having a nightmare, it doesn’t necessarily mean I haven’t had one. I always sleep alone, so how would I know?

It’s a frightening thought.

“Sorry if I woke you,” I say.

He looks back at me. He’s got this expression, this singular look that is infuriatingly mysterious. There’s no grin, no frown, no arch of the eyebrow, no hint of emotion. But I know there’s something there, behind the steady mouth, the still brows. I can sense his thoughts, but I don’t know what they are.

The need is what scares me.

I need to know.

The only reason it’s gotten this far is because I’ve been 100 percent confident in his feelings for me, but it’s possible for things to change. He said himself he had expectations. What if I didn’t live up to them?

Not the sex. I know the sex was next level. But how he feels now. What if he doesn’t feel the way he thought he would now that it’s happened?

“What are you thinking?” I ask him. The question comes out mean. Accusatory.

He’s not thrown by my tone. “I’m thinking a lot of different things.”

“Care to enlighten me?” I ask. Cooler this time.

He pours the hot water over the coffee grounds. He waits until he’s done to speak so he can look at me.

“I’m thinking about how much I liked you when we were kids,” he says. “I’m thinking about how fucking amazing last night was. I’m thinking about how unreal it is to wake up next to you. You look the same. You are the same. And it’s messing with my head, because I go between feeling like I’m fourteen again and knowing I’m not. Knowing I’m not the same. And also, I’m thinking about how impossibly cool you are.”

“I’m cool?”

“Yeah,” he says. “You know that.”

“No, I know,” I say.

“I liked you back in middle school, high school, but I also wanted to be you. You and Scarlett were so cool. You knew exactly who you were. You had so much confidence. I wondered what it must be like. I aspired to be like that.”

I don’t know what to say. He just says these things. These disarmingly honest things that I don’t know what to do with. I take a deep breath and pick at my bagel.

“That’s how you felt then,” I say, unable to meet his eyes. “How do you feel now?”

I can’t believe I just asked that question. This is the worst.