Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

MARA

Wednesday came and it was raining.

Not the polite kind of rain that minds its own business. The kind that came sideways off the bay and soaked through your jacket before you made it half a block. I got home from the pharmacy damp and irritated and found my mother had already left for her evening shift, a note on the counter that said leftovers in the fridge, don't wait up.

I changed into dry clothes — leggings, an old sweatshirt from a college visit two years ago, the comfortable kind I'd never normally wear in front of anyone — and I had exactly four minutes to regret that choice before Cole knocked.

I opened the door. He was wet. Not a little wet. His hair was dark with it and his jacket had given up entirely and he was standing on my porch looking like he'd walked through the rain rather than around it, which I suspected was exactly what he'd done.

"You didn't drive?" I said.

"It's six blocks."

"In November."

"I like the rain."

I stepped back to let him in. He shrugged off his jacket and I hung it over the bathroom door and came back to find him in my kitchen, already at the table, hair damp and curling slightly at the edges in a way I was not going to comment on.

"Tea?" I said.

"Please."

I put the kettle on and sat down across from him. He'd pulled out his textbook but he wasn't looking at it. He was looking at me, in that direct way he had, the one that didn't apologize for itself.

"What," I said.

"Nothing." He looked down at the book. "You look different."

"I just got off work."

"I know. You look—" He stopped. "Comfortable. It's different."

I pulled my notebook toward me. "Chapter eleven. Passive transport. Tell me what you know."

"Osmosis moves water across a membrane from low concentration to high."

"From low solute to high solute. Get the language right."

"Same thing."

"Not on a test it isn't."

He almost smiled. "Okay. Low solute to high solute."

"Active transport."

"Requires energy. Moves against the gradient."

"Good. Sodium-potassium pump — how many ions, which direction."

He leaned back, thinking. "Three sodium out, two potassium in. Runs on ATP."

"Every time, without checking your notes?"

"Every time." He met my eyes. "You made me say it out loud fourteen times on Wednesday."

"It worked."

"Yeah," he said quietly. "It did."

The kettle clicked. I got up and made the tea, and when I turned around he was still watching me with that steady attention of his that I was running out of ways to ignore.

I set his mug down and sat. "What."

"You do that a lot. Ask me what, like you're not sure you want the answer."

"Maybe I'm not."

"Are you?"

The rain hit the kitchen window hard. I wrapped my hands around my mug and looked at him across the table and thought about all the sensible things I could say right now.

"Cole."

"Yeah."

"You're still a tutoring client."

"I know what I am."

"I'm just saying."

"Mara." His voice was low. "I know what I am. The question is what you want me to be."

The kitchen felt smaller than usual. Or he felt closer, though neither of us had moved. I was aware of the rain and the light and the specific silence of a house with no one else in it.

"That's not a fair question," I said.

"I know." He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, and looked at me with those steady dark eyes. "Answer it anyway."

My heart was doing something inconvenient. I kept my face still through the long practice of keeping my face still. "We have a quiz to prep for."

"We have time."

"Cole—"

"I think about you," he said simply. "Not about this—" he gestured between the textbooks "—about you. The way you fixed my calc mistake and didn't say anything. The way you talk to my mom — your mom, sorry — the way you talk to your mom like she's funny even when she's embarrassing you." He stopped. "I notice things about you and I'm done pretending I don't."

I stared at him.

"Say something," he said.

"I don't know what to say."

"Anything."

"I think about you too." It came out quieter than I meant it to. "I didn't want to."

Something moved across his face. "Yeah?"

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm not making it weird."

"You're smiling."

"A little."

I looked down at my mug. My pulse was going faster than I'd like. "This complicates things."

"Everything's already complicated."

"More complicated then."

"Mara." He reached across the table and his fingers touched the back of my hand, light, not grabbing, just there. "Look at me."

I looked at him.

He was close. Closer than the table should have allowed, or maybe I'd stopped noticing the distance between us. His thumb moved once across my knuckles, slow, and I forgot what I'd been about to say.

"I'm not asking for anything you don't want to give," he said quietly. "I just need you to stop pretending this is nothing. Because it's not nothing. Not for me."

The rain was loud against the window. My hand was warm under his.

"It's not nothing for me either," I said.

He exhaled slowly, like he'd been holding something. His fingers curled gently around mine on the table, and we sat there in my kitchen with the rain coming down and the tea going cold and the textbooks open to pages neither of us was reading.

"Chapter eleven," I said eventually.

"Yeah." His hand didn't move.

"We should actually study."

"We will." He looked at me across the small space between us. "In a minute."

I didn't argue.