Page 251 of Across His Line

“That is not how that works.”

I kiss her before she can keep talking.

She kisses me back, smiling against my mouth, and when I pull away, her cheeks are pink from the cold or from me. I don’t know which.

She reaches over and fixes the collar of my jacket where it folded under my bag strap.

“What’re you doing on there?” I nod towards the screen.

She closes it slightly.

“Listing out what I could do.”

“Yeah?”

Then she turns her laptop toward me and inhales.

I look at the screen. It’s a document. A long one, and I have no idea what I’m looking at.

Sell on eBay. Start a product-based business. Online marketing. In-person events. Write a book.

And the very last one says: Stay in college.

“The last one?” I ask.

Her eyes read it. “Yeah.” She looks back at me.

She scrolls some more.

“I think I want to test something,” she says.

“What?”

“I don’t know yet.” She looks at the list. “I just know that I can’t sit in the planning phase for too long because I’ll look at all the avenues and get stuck.”

I think about the book on her desk with my father’s pencil all through it. The page she showed me in the car with one word on it, circled twice.

“Then start,” I say.

She looks at me.

“That’s what you’re doing with the list of ideas,” I say. “You’re writing down what you want to test and just start doing it.”

She looks at me for a long second. Then she types something at the bottom of the document in capital letters.

Rafe tells me to just start.

“Helpful,” she says.

I take a sip of her coffee. “Do you always write down what I say?”

She hits me in the arm. I finish her coffee.

We eat in the dining hall by the library, because it’s the only one open until Monday. All five of us at the long table by the window. Me and Tessa on one side. Kylie and Kennebeck on the other. Barnes at the end with three plates because he threw up his breakfast and says his stomach hurts.

“Waleska’s girlfriend,” Barnes says to Tessa, pointing a fork at her. “Pass the salt.”

“I have a name,” she says, and I watch her.