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“From what your suitemates said about you and Ryan, I wouldn’t want to take a blue light to your dorm either,” Ginny cracks.
James’s eyes look black in the moonlight. I watch that muscle tick in his jaw and can’t think of a single thing I can say to fix this. He stands. “I’m going for a run,” he says.
“A run?” asks Ginny. “It’s the middle of the night.”
He says nothing, and won’t even glance at me as he goes, but I feel a small knot of dread in my stomach and I resent its presence. I haven’t done anything wrong, and he wouldn’t have to hear about my ex-boyfriend if he’d just admit we’re together.
He runs for over an hour. I feel the upper windows shake when he closes the front door, and I slip from the room, grateful that our guests are gone and that Ginny falls asleep so quickly.
He’s in the shower already. I sit on the bed and wait. He doesn’t look surprised to find me there when he emerges. But he doesn’t necessarily look happy to find me there either.
“You can’t blame me for that,” I say quietly.
His jaw grinds. “I know. But I just don’t need to hear that shit.”
“You know, you wouldn’t have to hear that shit if we just told them what’s going on.”
He walks to the foot of the bed in nothing but a towel. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No,” he says, dropping the towel. “I just don’t want to talk.”
He pushes me on my back, his movements rougher than normal. He moves over my skin, claiming me again and again with fingers and tongue and teeth, something urgent and desperate driving him.
“I’m close,” I gasp, and then watch, stunned and heavy with anticipation, as he reaches into his nightstand drawer and pulls out a condom.
He opens it and meets my eye for the first time all night.
And he stops.
Freezes. “We can’t,” he says through clenched teeth.
“What the hell, James?” I snap, my disappointment too bitter to conceal. “Why not?”
“It’s just not a good idea,” he says, throwing the condom toward the trash.
“You didn’t need the condom anyway. I’m on the Pill. But why is it a bad idea?”
He closes his eyes and runs a hand over his face. “We only have a few weeks left here,” he sighs. “I think we just shouldn’t … get carried away.”
There are a hundred questions I’d like to ask in response, but I say nothing. I lay there with my stomach roiling, knowing that the answer he just gave provides all the information I really need.
Chapter 41
We don’t discuss it. Things continue on just as they have, superficially. But instead of a quiet joy I have to struggle to conceal, it’s now a sharp pain in my center, a constant sadness and the exhaustion that accompanies pretending it’s not there.
We have the house to ourselves on Thursday morning. We lay together with our bare legs entwined, my head on his chest, him on his side, absentmindedly playing with my hair while we talk. I no longer enjoy this time with him. Instead I spend it acutely aware that it is fleeting, trying to memorize all the things I won’t be able to take with me.
“I’m going to miss this when I get back to school,” I tell him. I’m not sure why I say it. I suppose because I want to hear him agree, to say it back to me. But instead he hesitates, and then changes the subject.
“Brian says you requested tomorrow off,” he says.
I feel ill and I deserve to feel ill. I know where things stand. I shouldn’t be trying to extract words and emotions from him that he doesn’t feel.
“Yeah,” I say. “I did it a while ago. Ryan’s band is playing and someone messed up my schedule last time so I couldn’t go.”
He freezes beneath me. “You’re still going to that?”
