Brett saidminefor six years. When he said it, the word carried a softness on the front that hid a closing-down on the back, and by year three, I'd learned to flinch when I heard it.
Easton said it on my porch two hours ago, and the word didn't close anything down. It put a man between me and the world for the length of a Saturday evening and asked nothing in return for the standing.
I didn't know, until tonight, that the word could mean that.
Easton breathed out against the top of my head. His hand on mine tightened a quarter of an inch.
I closed my eyes.
The door was deadbolted. The man on the side toward the door had said the wordminein a voice I'd heard for the first time tonight.
I wasn't going to be on the side of the bed away from the door for very much longer.
CHAPTER 18
Easton
It was the first time I'd slept in her room.
The light came in differently than mine did. Mine had the hole in the curtain from the hanger my grandmother snagged years ago. Hers had two layers, a sheer behind a heavier one, and the light came through both into a soft gray-gold that landed across the foot of the bed.
I'd been awake for about an hour.
She was on her side, facing me, with her hand on my chest, where her hand always went. I watched it move with her breath for an hour, give or take, and I never got tired of watching it.
I'd been hosting since October. She came across Maple to stay with me, and we'd done it her way for two months. Last night, I stayed at hers because she asked me to. She said she didn't want to leave her own house. I said I wasn't gonna make her. That was the end of the conversation.
The room was her father's old room. I'd taken the side toward the door without making a thing of it. The lamp on the nightstand was the one he'd read by.
The weight had left my chest sometime after she put her hand on it, and it stayed gone. It stayed gone the night she was at my house after Penny. It stayed gone every night since.
Eighteen months in this town, of it being somewhere I couldn't put my hands on.
It had a place now.
She moved against my hand. She came up slowly, two beats of remembering where she was.
"Hi." Her voice was hoarse with sleep.
"Hey, yourself."
"What time is it?"
"Seven-thirty."
"Mmh."
"You can go back."
"Mmh."
I let her have a minute.
She came up the second time and stayed up. The gray Hartsdale Fire shirt was rumpled across her shoulders, the one I gave her the morning of the bath towel, the same one she slept in at my house and now slept in at her house, too.
She put her feet on the floor.
"You stayed."
