Chapter 17: Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen

MARA

December came in cold and certain, the way it always did in the city, cutting through jackets and good intentions alike.

The semester was winding down. Finals in every class, college applications either sent or in their last stages, the particular exhaustion of a school year that had asked a lot and wasn't done asking. I moved through it the way I moved through most hard stretches — head down, one thing at a time, crossing items off lists with the focused satisfaction of someone who'd learned early that the list was the thing standing between you and the feeling of being underwater.

The difference this year was Cole.

Not in an obvious way. He didn't rewrite my schedule or change my habits. I still ate at my corner table and worked my pharmacy shifts and spent Saturday mornings doing homework at the kitchen table while my mother watched her shows. But there was a thread now running through the week that hadn't been there before, something I could feel even when we weren't together, a kind of low warmth that didn't ask anything from me and didn't go away.

He texted in the mornings. Not long texts. Usually something small — a photo of the fog on the bay, a question about calc that he absolutely could have figured out himself, once just the word tuesday because we'd made plans for Tuesday and apparently he was thinking about it. I'd look at my phone before my first class and feel something settle in me that carried through the day.

Jess noticed this in the way Jess noticed everything, which was completely and without commenting on it directly.

"You've stopped doing the thing," she said one morning at my locker.

"What thing."

"The thing where you look like you're braced for something bad." She pulled a book from her own locker. "You just look like a person now."

"I've always looked like a person."

"You know what I mean."

I did know what she meant. I chose not to examine it too closely because examining it felt like counting it, and counting good things had always made me feel like I was daring them to disappear.

Tuesday was the winter formal planning meeting that Dex had roped Cole into, which meant Cole was busy until seven and texted me at six-fifty-eight saying done. coming over? and I texted back my mom made extra and that was enough, that was the whole conversation, and twenty minutes later he was at my kitchen table eating my mother's rice and beans and telling her about the decorating argument he'd had with the spirit committee over the color scheme.

"They wanted gold," he said. "Everything gold. The tablecloths, the balloons, the backdrop."

"What's wrong with gold," my mother said, refilling his glass.

"Nothing if you're trying to re-create a chain restaurant."

She laughed. I looked at the two of them across the table and felt the warmth of it so acutely it almost hurt, the specific ache of something being good, of wanting to hold it still.

After dinner Cole helped clear the table without being asked, which made my mother look at me with an expression I pretended not to see. We sat in the living room because the kitchen felt too much like a session still, too much like before, and I showed him my calc problem set because he'd asked and he sat beside me on the couch and worked through two of the problems with the focused competence he applied to everything once he'd decided to care about it.

"You're actually good at this," I said.

"I'm good at patterns."

"Calc is more than patterns."

"Everything is patterns." He tapped the problem with his pen. "You just have to find the right one."

I looked at the problem. He was right, which was irritating in the specific way that people are irritating when they're right about something you've been overcomplicating. I fixed the approach and worked through to the answer and he watched me do it with the patient attention he had when he was learning something, which was different from the attention he had when he was just watching me, though I had become aware that both existed and occupied different rooms in my chest.

"The formal is next Friday," he said, after a while.

I kept my eyes on the page. "I know."

"Dex is going with Jess."

I looked up. "What?"

"They've been texting for two weeks apparently." He looked entirely too calm about this. "Dex told me today. I assumed you knew."

"Jess has not said a single word to me about this."

"She probably didn't want the commentary."

"I don't give commentary."

He looked at me with one eyebrow slightly raised.

"I give considered observations," I said.

"Right." He turned toward me on the couch. "Come with me. To the formal."

I looked at him. "Cole—"

"It's one night. You own a dress. I've seen it in the hallway closet, the dark green one."

"You've been looking in my closet?"

"The door was open. Come with me."

I put my pen down. "The last school event I attended was a junior year assembly that ended with a fire drill and Brianna Castro telling everyone I'd set it off."

"Did you?"

"Obviously not."

"Come anyway." He held my gaze. "I want to be there with you. Not across the room from you, not almost — actually with you. In the same place, at the same time, not pretending it's something other than what it is."

The living room was quiet. My mother's television murmured distantly through the wall.

"What is it," I said. "What we are."

He looked at me steadily. "You know what it is."

"I want to hear you say it."

He reached over and tucked a strand of hair back from my face and held my gaze with that certainty he had, the kind that wasn't performed, the kind that lived underneath everything else about him.

"You're mine," he said quietly. "And I'm yours. That's what it is."

The word landed somewhere deep and stayed there.

"The green dress is at the dry cleaner," I said.

He smiled. The full one. "I'll pick you up at seven."