Page 295 of Across His Line

I sit there with my hand over my mouth.

I didn’t know I could feel this way towards someone. I didn’t know how much effort goes into another person. I turn around and look at him. I would do anything for him, and it scares me.

I close my laptop and don’t fall asleep for a long time.

When I wake up on the sixth, his duffel is by the door.

It’s the black one with the Sentinels crest stitched on the side, the one that came in a box with his name printed on the packing slip, and he must have packed it after I fell asleep because last night it was still folded flat on the floor of my closet. Now it stands upright against the door, zipped all the way around, the strap looped over the handle so he can lift it on his way out without having to stop. The fan in the window turns the hot air over and over without making it any cooler. Gray light comes in under the slant of the ceiling, and I lie very still, the way I used to lie still in other rooms, in other years, listening for what kind of morning it was going to be.

It’s a week. I know it’s a week. He has told me the date so many times it’s become a joke between us, and he wrote it on the calendar taped to the side of my blue desk in his awful leaning handwriting, 13 with a circle around it and a lopsided heart he drew only because he knew it would make me roll my eyes, which it did. His car keys are sitting next to the calendar because he’s leaving the car with me because he said there was no point in it baking in some lot for seven days when I could be using it for post office runs. His charger is coiled on the floor by the bed. His hoodie is on the back of my desk chair, inside out, the way he takes everything off. There is a version of this morning where all of that adds up to something solid, and I can see it clearly. A normal person would look at that bag and feel a small, ordinary sadness and then get up and make the coffee.

My mom never packed a bag when she left. She would go out for cigarettes or to see a friend across town, and the leaving was so ordinary that it didn’t look like leaving until it had been three days, then five, and I had started dividing the cereal into portions and practicing what I would say if anyone at school asked. When she came back, she came back like she had been gone an afternoon. She’d drop her purse on the counter and ask why the dishes were piled up, and I would wash them, because it was easier than asking where she had been, and because some part of me already understood that asking would not make the next time any less likely. I was the one who learned to pack. A backpack with a broken zipper, a trash bag when there wasn’t time, filled in ten minutes while some adult waited in a doorway with their keys in their hand. I learned what fit and what didn’t. I learned not to unpack all the way anywhere.

So I know what a packed bag looks like from the inside. I just have never been in this particular situation before.

Beside me, Rafe breathes slow and heavy into my pillow with one arm thrown over my stomach. I stay where I am and do the reasonable thing, which is to list everything I have going on this week. I have Paige. I have forty-one open listings and a guide that is selling to strangers. I have more than I had a year ago, more than I ever thought I’d be allowed to have, and I am proud of it in a quiet way I don’t say out loud. But the sublet ends in August. I have been meaning to look at apartments and I haven’t, and when I try to picture September, the picture won’t hold still. And I have seen the way the Sentinels people talk to him, the way their eyes follow him around a room as if they’re already doing the math on him. He told me that if they offered him a contract, he was going to sign it. It’s the thing he’s wanted his whole life. I said good. I meant it. I still mean it.

He shifts, makes a low sound in his throat, and his arm tightens.

“Morning, little Tess.” His voice is wrecked with sleep, the words rubbed down to almost nothing. He props himself up and hangs over me, his hair flattened on one side and sticking straight up on the other, a crease from the pillowcase pressed into his cheek.

I smile before I’ve decided to, and I reach up and hold his face in both hands. I let my thumbs go over the bones of it, the bridge of his nose. I’ve had this face over me every morning for weeks now. I didn’t notice when it became the first thing I expected to see.

“You’re up early,” he says.

“It’s hot.”

“It’s always hot. This room is a crockpot.” He turns his head and kisses the inside of my wrist. “You’re going to miss me so bad.”

“I’m going to have the whole bed.”

“You hate the whole bed. You crawl on top of me in your sleep like I’m a life raft.” He kisses my wrist again, my palm, the tips of my fingers, unhurried, as if there’s nowhere he has to be. “I’m going to miss you,” he says into my hand, quieter, not a tease anymore.

Then he kisses me properly, slow and sleepy, and I let him. I want him. That is the confusing part. I want him so much it makes my hands shake a little when I pull him down, that I love the weight of him and the heat of his skin and the familiar way he settles over me like he’s come home after a long day. He is gentle this morning in a way he isn’t always, careful with me, his mouth at my temple and my jaw, and he talks the way he does when he’s half awake, the words coming out of him without any guard on them. It’s going to be hard going a week without you, baby. He says it against my neck and laughs a little at himself, like it’s embarrassing how much he means it. I hold onto his back. I hold on harder than I mean to, and he feels it and lifts his head and looks down at me with his eyes soft and amused.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s just a week.”

He means it to help. It’s the kindest thing anyone could say, and it’s true, and I nod and pull his mouth back down to mine so he won’t keep looking at my face.

I try to stay where he is. I try to keep my mind inside the room, inside my body, inside the slow drag of him and the sweat gathering where our stomachs meet and the fan ticking against its frame. But every time I close my eyes, I can see the bag. I can see it against the door with its strap looped over the handle, and I can see past it to August, to an empty room with my boxes stacked in it, to some apartment in some city I have never been to where his hoodie will hang on the back of a different chair. I can see him getting good there, getting happy there, his life widening out the way it’s supposed to, and I can see myself here, getting smaller, doing what I’ve always done, which is adjust.

“I already can’t wait to come back,” he whispers, and his voice breaks a little on the end of it, and then he’s finishing, his face pressed into my neck, my name in his mouth.

I stroke his hair and keep my eyes on the ceiling. My body is warm and loose and nowhere near where his went. I don’t mind it.

After a minute, he lifts his head. “Did you—”

“I’m good.” I touch his cheek, the pillow crease almost gone now. “I just wanted you.”

He studies me for a second, sleepy and pleased and only a little uncertain, and I can see him decide to believe me because he has no reason not to. He kisses my forehead and rolls away, and the cooler air comes in where he was. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just tired.”

“I’ll let you sleep in the car on the way to the airport.”

“I’m driving you to the airport.”

“I’ll drive, Tess.” He grins over his shoulder and pads into the bathroom, naked and unbothered, scratching the back of his head.