Page 21 of Across His Line

I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m not going to knock. I don’t knock on girls’ doors at midnight; girls knock on mine. I just want to see. That’s all. I want to stand in front of it and know it’s real. I want to fucking know that she’s in there.

Two months.

I have no idea who he is.

I didn’t think I needed to.

I lift my hand. One knuckle. The one that isn’t split. I put it against the door once. It’s not loud. It’s not hard enough for anyone to call it anything.

Nothing.

No footsteps. No chair. No sheets moving. It’s the same nothing I got at the rink, the same eyes on the same patch of ice. She’s in there.

“I know you’re in there, little Tessa.”

Nothing.

I put my hand flat on the frame beside the door, and I lean in. I keep my voice down, because there are maybe three people left on this floor and none of them need to hear this.

“You can pretend you don’t know me in a kitchen,” I tell the door. “You can pretend all you want. I’ll still be three doors down.”

She doesn’t answer.

I wait. I give her a full minute, and I count it, and I don’t know what I’m waiting for. Her to open it. Her to tell me to fuck off. Her to say anything at all through the wood so I know she heard it, so I know I’m not standing out here talking to nothing.

She doesn’t give me that, either.

I don’t knock again. I don’t touch the handle. I take my hand off her frame, and I walk back the way I came, one door, two, three, and my door sticks. I yank it, and it slams.

I lie on my bed in my jacket with the window open and the cold coming in, and I don’t sleep.

At one-fifteen, something rattles down the hall. Metal on wood. A door catching on a chain.

“Tess? It’s me.”

Kylie, whispering the way drunk people whisper, which is not at all.

The chain slides. The door opens. The door closes.

She had it on. The whole time I was standing out there, she had a chain on the door like I was going to kick it in. I’ve never put a hand on her. Not once. Not in four years.

Kennebeck knocks at one-forty. I hear him say something low, and Kylie laugh, and the chain slide again, and the door close behind him.

I lie there and look at the ceiling.

My father didn’t ask me. He never has.

Tessa Canten didn’t ask me, either. Now she’s here.

5

Pick a Place, Any Place

Tessa

I wake up before the sun does, and across the room, Kylie is asleep in her twin bed with Nash Kennebeck, which is a feat of engineering I don’t fully understand. He takes up most of the space. One arm hangs off the side with his knuckles brushing the floor, and his feet stick out past the end of the mattress, and Kylie is curled into the little space that’s left, still in his jersey, her wig in a heap by her boots. He breathes slow and deep. She makes a small whistling sound through her nose that she would deny under oath.

The chain is on the door. I can see it from here, a thin silver line in the gray.