Page 98 of Across His Line

Rafe shows me the bathroom.

It’s bigger than my dorm room. White marble, gray veins running through it. A shower with glass walls and no door and three different heads. A bathtub under the window, deep and white and standing on its own little feet. Towels rolled up in a basket like at a hotel. Everything smells like him, faintly, the cologne and something underneath that’s just clean.

He stands in the doorway. He doesn’t come in.

“Use whatever you need,” he says.

“Thank you.”

He pulls the door shut himself, from the outside, so I don’t have to.

I lock it.

I stand in the middle of the marble with his mother’s clothes in my arms and listen to the lock settle, and I think about my bedroom door at my grandma’s, and the chair under the knob, and the dress form in the corner where my bed used to be. I think about how many nights I lay awake listening for the hall.

Then I take off my sweater.

It hurts to get it over my head. My ribs, my neck, my arms. The seven-dollar sweater comes off inside out, and I look at it in my hands, at the blood on the cuff and the long smear down the front, at the collar stretched into a mouth. I don’t know if I’m keeping it. I fold it anyway and place it nicely on the counter.

The water comes out of the ceiling like rain.

It’s so hot it stings, and I don’t turn it down. I stand under it with my eyes closed and let it hit me. It hurts on my neck, sharp, every drop like a finger pressing. My bitten finger throbs under it and then goes numb. When I breathe in too deep, my side catches, and I hold onto the marble wall until it passes.

I watch the water around my feet. Pink at first. A little. Then not.

The steam carries the smell off me. The weed. The old smoke. Gravy and the couch and Dylan’s hoodie. My grandma’s house. I wash it out of my hair twice with shampoo that smells like cedar and something expensive and probably costs as much as the bus ticket I didn’t buy. I scrub my face where Dylan’s hand was until my skin is pink and I can’t feel the shape of his fingers anymore.

And then I just stand there.

I’m standing naked in Rafferty Waleska’s shower, on Thanksgiving, in his parents’ house at the top of a hill behind iron gates, while somewhere under my feet a woman named Margaret is drinking another glass of wine.

Not too long ago, I couldn’t walk down a hallway if he was in it.

I don’t know what my life is anymore.

I put on his mother’s clothes. The pants are too long. I have to roll them three times at the ankle, and the drawstring pulls them into folds around my hips. The sweater is cream, like mine was, but it isn’t anything like mine. It’s so soft I keep putting my hand on my own arm just to feel it. It comes down over my hands. It smells like roses and somebody else’s closet. The socks are thick and gray and the softest socks I’ve ever worn. I stand on the marble floor in them, and it’s warm under my feet, too. Everything in this house is warm.

I look in the mirror. It’s fogged up. I wipe a stripe across it with my sleeve.

The handprint is fading. My neck is red. It might bruise. The cashmere collar sits right on top of it, and I can feel it every time I swallow.

I take three ibuprofen out of the medicine cabinet, like she said. I swallow them with water from my hand. It hurts going down.

I open the door.

Rafe is on the couch by the window. He isn’t watching TV. It’s off. He isn’t on his phone. He’s just sitting on the edge of the cushion with his elbows on his knees and his wrapped hand hanging between them, staring at the black screen of the TV like there’s something on it.

He doesn’t hear me come out.

I look down at myself. At the rolled-up pants and the sleeves over my hands.

“I think these pants cost more than my laptop,” I say.

I mean it to be funny. I want it to be funny. I want him to give me an inch of attitude and say something rude about my laptop, so it can be normal for one second.

He looks up at me and doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t say anything, and when I see his face, I understand he isn’t okay.

Not at all. Not even a little. In that living room, with three men on him, he was fine. He was terrifying. He was a thing that came through a door. And now he’s sitting on a couch in a black T-shirt in his own bedroom, the adrenaline’s gone, and what’s left is a boy with a split lip and a bandaged hand and his eyes fixed on nothing. He looks worse now than he did with blood on his teeth.