Page 318 of Across His Line

“Okay.”

I hold her tighter. I put my mouth against her hair.

“I’m always coming back, Tessa Canten,” I say. “You don’t have to believe it yet. That’s okay. I’ll just keep doing it until you do.”

She doesn’t say anything. I feel her breathe out, long and slow, all the way, like she’s been holding that breath since she was a little kid, and her hand on my chest goes soft.

Then, when she’s almost asleep, she says, “Turn your phone off.”

The email’s still open. September eleventh. My whole life sitting there in my hand, the thing I’ve wanted since I was a kid, everything I signed my own name to.

I turn it off. I don’t even look at it first. I put it face down on the carpet, and the room goes dark except for the streetlight, and her leg goes over mine.

I pull her in. Her arm’s lying across my chest, wrist up, and in the light from the street, I can just make out the four words on the inside of it. They’re so small I had to turn her hand toward a lamp the first time I read them, back in the winter, and she let me, and I didn’t know yet what it meant that she let me. This too shall pass. She told me once she got it at seventeen because she needed proof. That the worst hour of her life would someday just be an hour she used to have. That nothing stays.

I used to hate it. I’d lie next to her at Corvin and think about her at seventeen, alone, paying somebody to write on her that nothing lasts, and it made me want to put my fist through a wall.

I don’t hate it anymore. She’s right. This passes too. The mattress on the floor and the air conditioner dying in the window, the pizza box by the door, and her leg over mine, all of it. September comes, and I’ll be in a hotel getting beat wide by some kid with a mustache, and then maybe there’s another city, and another apartment, and another one after that. None of it’s going to ask either of us for permission.

When this moment ends, I want the next one with her. And the one after that. That’s the only kind of forever I know how to promise her—one moment at a time, choosing the next one together, for as long as she lets me.

Epilogue

Koda

Waleska's car turns the corner at the end of Wren with his whole life packed to the roof of it, and I'm standing on the sidewalk with my hands in my pockets like somebody's dad at a bus stop, thinking, that fucker's going pro.

I'm happy for him. I am. I carried forty pairs of boots down a flight of stairs for that man today, which is either love or brain damage. But I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a part of me standing here watching his taillights and going, that should've been me. I've wanted it since I was a kid and couldn't skate backward. And the worst part is I can't even hate him properly because he earned it. He was the best player I ever shared a sheet of ice with. He's an asshole, a fucking puck-hogger, but he earned it, and now he's gone. Life's fucking weird like that. I'm still here on a curb on Wren Street with a sunburn on the back of my neck.

Kylie cried the entire time. Ugly, honking, into-Nash's-shirt crying, until Kennebeck finally put her in his new truck to go get pancakes because it was the only thing he could think of. Tessa didn't cry at all. She sat in the passenger seat with her sunglasses up in her hair and waved out the window like they were going to the grocery store. I don't get Tessa. Waleska does, and he's clearly obsessed with the girl.

I told Nash I'd catch a ride. He looked at me for one second like he knew. Kylie was still crying, so he didn't say anything. Kylie knows, I think. Or she knows enough. She's nice like that. She pretends.

And now it's just me, and the house, and the girl inside it.

I can see Paige through the front window. She's sitting on the arm of the couch with her phone. Her hair's up in that knot she does. She hasn't looked out once, but she knows I'm here.

She gets up and heads for the stairs.

Every time I walk in somewhere, Paige remembers she has to be somewhere else, and everybody just thinks we can't stand each other. Which. Fair. Some days.

I walk up to the porch.

"You gonna do that every time?" I say through the screen.

She stops with one foot on the bottom stair. She doesn't turn around right away. "Do what?"

"Leave."

Then she turns around, one hand on the banister, and looks at me through the screen. It's a good look. She's been practicing how much she hates me for months. "I live here," she says. "So, I'm going upstairs. That isn't leaving."

"It is when it's me."

She doesn't say anything to that. I open the screen door, but I don't come in. I just stand in the doorway with my hand on the frame, so there's nothing between us but the hallway.

"How long are you planning to keep this up?" I ask.

Paige's face doesn't do anything. Her face never does anything, that's her whole thing. But her knuckles go white on the banister, and that's how I know.