Chapter 7 Chapters 7

Chapter 7 Chapters 7

The text came at ten forty-seven PM.

“You up? Come to my window.”

Chloe had been doing this since we were thirteen, the window-knock, the late-night summons, the unspoken code that meant I have something I cannot hold inside until morning. In middle school it had been about boys she liked from a distance, songs she'd discovered, fights with her mother that had dissolved into sadness by midnight. In high school it had become about bigger things, but the ritual was the same.

I had always loved it.

I pulled a hoodie over my pyjamas, crossed the narrow strip of yard between our houses in the dark, and climbed the familiar three rungs of the trellis to her bedroom window.

She was waiting. Cross-legged on her bed, phone in her lap, wearing the oversized sweater she saved for nights she was feeling something large. Her face in the lamp light was soft and open and glowing in a way that made something in my chest tighten before she said a single word.

I knew that glow.

I had seen it before, on other boys, in other years. But it had never looked quite like this, this specific brightness, this color.

I climbed through the window and sat at the foot of her bed like I always did.

"Talk," I said, because I was a good best friend and good best friends said talk and meant it.

Chloe pressed her lips together, containing a smile that was too big for containing. Then she gave up and let it out and pulled her knees to her chest and said, "He held my hand."

Two seconds of silence.

"Tell me everything," I said. My voice was warm and present and I was going to be sick.

"Okay so." She took a breath. "After practice yesterday, after you left early, a few of us walked out together and it was cold, right, and I made some stupid comment about forgetting my jacket and he just.." she held up her hand, demonstrating, "he put his hand over mine. Not a big deal. Just like, here, stop complaining about the cold. But he kept it there, Si. The whole walk to the parking lot."

"That's" I started.

"And it wasn't like a flirty, look-at-me thing. It was just easy. Like it was normal." She looked at me with eyes that were asking me to understand the specific weight of that word. "Normal. Like I was already someone he did normal things with."

"That's really nice," I said.

My hands were folded in my lap. I looked at them. They were folded very neatly.

"And then," Chloe said, and her voice dropped to the register she used for things that mattered, "he texted me when he got home."

"What did he say?"

She turned her phone around.

“You should have taken the jacket when I offered it. You were shivering for twenty minutes. — J”

I read it twice.

Six words of concern delivered in a tone that managed to be practical and completely devastating at the same time. Something about the twenty minutes, the fact that he had been counting, that he had been paying that specific kind of attention, pressed against the inside of my ribs like a splinter finding an existing wound.

"He noticed you were cold for twenty minutes," I said.

"I know," Chloe whispered.

"And he's annoyed about it."

"In the best way." She hugged her knees tighter. "He's taking me to Benny's Diner on Thursday. He said" she laughed, disbelieving, delighted, "he said, and I quote, you probably eat sad desk lunch every day, let me fix that. Si. He said let me fix that."

The lamp on her nightstand hummed softly.

Outside, a car passed on the street, its headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling.

He noticed you were shivering. He counted the minutes. He wanted to fix it.

I thought about AP Lit. I thought about a hand over my mouth in a dark corridor, warm, certain, calloused from gripping things hard. I thought about Princess, delivered low and steady like it belonged to him.

Then I thought about how he had looked through me at practice like I was glass.

"You're going to win the dare," I said.

Chloe laughed. "That's what you got from all of that?"

"I'm also saying he sounds" I searched for the right word, the safe word, the word that kept everything exactly where it was supposed to be. "attentive."

"He's so attentive." She fell back against her pillow dramatically, arms wide. "And he's so unbothered about it, that's the thing. Like caring about someone isn't some huge admission. He just does it. And moves on. Like it's normal."

Normal. That word again. Pressing.

"Liam never counted," I said. Quietly. To myself, mostly.

The room went still.

Chloe lifted her head and looked at me.

I hadn't meant to say it out loud. It had come from somewhere below my usual careful monitoring system, from the place where the honest things lived that I didn't allow out.

"What?" Chloe said. Carefully.

"Nothing." I shook my head. "I meanz Liam is different. ."

"Sienna."

"I'm just tired." I pulled my hoodie sleeves over my hands. "Tell me about Thursday. What are you wearing to the diner?"

She held my eyes for a moment too long. Then she let it go because she was kind, because she loved me, because sometimes love looked like choosing not to pull on the thread that would unravel everything.

She sat up and started talking about the diner and the outfit and whether jeans were too casual, and I listened and responded and asked the right questions, and I smiled at the right moments with a smile that I felt in the muscles of my face rather than anywhere deeper.

And the whole time, in the quiet part of me that never fully turned off, something kept repeating a loop, a slow and stupid loop I couldn't close:

He counted the minutes she was cold.

I climbed back out of Chloe's window at midnight and crossed the dark yard and went back to my own room and lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling and said nothing to nobody.

Just me.

Just the ceiling.

Just the very clear, very unwelcome understanding that I was running out of ways to keep lying to myself.