Dylan looked at me.
"Later," he said. Quiet. Just for me.
I looked at the TV.
The game was on.
I didn't see any of it.
27
Itexted him first.
I'm coming over.
Read receipt. No response.
I went anyway.
Nathan's building. His floor. His door.
I knocked.
Footsteps. A pause slightly longer than usual. Then the door opened.
Nathan was dressed, which was not what I'd been bracing for, but I was already talking before I'd fully processed that.
"You didn't text me back," I said, stepping past him into his apartment. "Four days, Nathan. I've been on a couch for four days with a grade-three concussion and Dylan doing thetalk to you laterthing which is somehow worse and my mother asking me twice a day to make sure I'm eating and Iameating, by the way. She stocked my entire fridge, but the point is—"
"Wesley—"
"And I missed you. Okay? I've been on a couch for days, and I missed you and you didn't text me back and I just—I really wanted to kiss you and you weren't there and I know that's—"
"Wesley."
"I'm not done—"
"Wesley."
Something in his voice made me stop.
I was in the middle of his living room. I had been gesturing. Leo was sitting on the back of the couch watching me with the expression of a cat who had seen things.
I turned around.
Nathan was still at the door, holding it, his face doing something I couldn't read.
And from the kitchen, because of course, because this was apparently how this was going, two people had emerged carrying tea cups.
They looked just like Nathan.
That was the first thing. Both of them, unmistakably, looked like Nathan.
The man was taller, silver-haired, pale, with blue eyes that were the same shade as Nathan's and a jaw that had the same set to it. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his shoulders square and his chin slightly up.
The woman was smaller, dark-haired. She had a cup of tea in both hands and her head tilted at a slight angle, and her eyes were moving, from me, to Nathan at the door, to the space between us, back to me, like she was assembling a picture.
They were both very still.
