Page 58 of Level Up for Love

Wesley still hasn’t looked up.

“You kept it?” I say.

He swallows. “It’s a good shirt.”

I’m biting the inside of my bottom lip so hard I expect to taste blood at any moment. “Yeah,” I say eventually. “It looks good on you.”

And while it does look good, if I’m being honest, it doesn’t fit him well at all. Instead, it highlights all the ways he’s changed since I last saw him in it. The fabric still stretches across his shoulders, but even more so now; the sleeves, too, are tight around his upper arms, circling muscles his wiry frame didn’t have back in college. And it’s definitely not just the second time he’s worn it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be that shade of faded blue-gray or have those tiny holes near the bottom.

He starts, “You can have it back, I can—”

“It’s fine. Really.”

He holds my gaze for a second too long, then his eyes soften. “See you at the party, then?”

I ignore Mona’s shit-eating grin as I place my hand on the driver’s side door. “Yeah. See you.”

“That boy is into you, Reagan.”

I pause where I’m hunched over my laptop, keying in more ideas for Afterwards, and whip my head over my shoulder to look at Mona, who’s tucked into the corner of her couch, her ankle iced and elevated on the ottoman. She’s got a project of her own splayed out on her lap, and she mutters to herself as she finishes hooking together the last of a series of silver chain links.

She’d felt bad about the whole ordeal yesterday, and I’d been more than happy to accept her offer to help me with the last pieces of my costume for Arthur’s Halloween party tonight. Mona has stabbed several of her cuticles in the process, but now that I can actually visualize the finished product, I think we’ll agree that it was worth all the effort she’s put in.

I’m smiling to myself, imagining the finished costume—but then I remember her words. “He is not,” I protest. “Did Shay tell you that?”

“No,” she says with a laugh. “It just so happens that I have eyes.”

“Oh, shut it.”

“You can’t be serious. You don’t see it?”

Actually, I’ve been trying my best not to think about it for the last twenty-four hours.

He kept the shirt.

He kept the shirt.

A thousand times I’ve imagined how the rest of that night must have played out for him. I wondered how many people in the house had seen him in my clothes before he left—how many of my friends. I pictured how he might have returned to his apartment and joked or bragged to his buddies about coming home in some girl’s clothes. I had always assumed that he just balled them up and threw them away. What else could I think when he’d never reached out to me again? Why would he have kept a constant reminder of me in his closet?

Why the hell had he hung on to the shirt?

And why am I so shaken by it?

Really, it could be nothing. During the few months when Owen and I lived together, I remember pulling holey shirts with unrecognizable logos from the laundry basket and asking him why he still had decades-old tees from things like Freshman Frisbee Friday and Mountain Dewds. He’d look at me, bewildered, and say, “They still fit, don’t they?”

I can’t blame Wesley for holding on to it. It’s a cool shirt, and if he hadn’t disappeared with it, I would have kept it. But it’s not just that I like the design. I have half a dozen shirts from my dad that don’t fit anymore, but I still keep them folded neatly in a corner of my closet.

I wonder what sentimentality drives us both.

Mona goes on. “I mean, look at you two. The D&D sessions, how he watched you dance at the bar, the way he raced to come help me out, the fucking shirt…He looks at you differently, Rea.”

I press my lips together tightly. Sometimes, during quiet moments, like when I’m driving or when I’m half delirious from staying up all night working on Afterwards, I feel like I can still taste the mint and rum of his mouth on mine from that night at Wizardry. I don’t keep secrets from my sister, but…I haven’t told her yet. I’m keeping this one close to my chest until I’m confident I can talk about it without sounding a little breathless.

I audibly swallow, wondering if she can see the truth on my face now. “He’s not weird at the D&D sessions.”

We share a long look, acknowledging how it’s the only one of her examples I’m protesting.

Mona’s eyes sparkle. “Why is it that Sindra is the one who got bit, huh?”