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I’ve never said those words before. I’ve never felt like this before.

“I don’t remember ever feeling this safe,” I say.

His face changes then, and I don’t try to name it. His throat moves when he swallows.

“So, thank you,” I say, looking right at him into his eyes, which are green, all the way green, the clear kind I almost never saw in high school.

He sits up a little off the chair.

“You don’t have to thank me,” he says. His voice is rough.

And I do. That’s why I said it. Not to pay anything back. Because it’s true, and I wanted him to have it.

“I do.”

Neither of us looks away.

We’ve been close for an hour, sitting on the floor with a book between us, but it’s different now that I’ve noticed. I can feel exactly how far it is from my shoulder to his. Maybe two inches. The heat coming off him. The ink on his hand, resting on the rug between us, next to mine. And his eyes go down, for less than a second, to my mouth, and back up.

I see it so clearly that my pulse goes in my throat.

We stay exactly where we are.

The book slides off his knee.

It hits the rug with a soft flat thump, face down, its pages bending under it. He picks it up, smooths the pages carefully, and closes it. He puts it on the stack with the others.

“It’s late,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“We can keep going tomorrow.”

We.

I get up off the floor. My legs are stiff. He gets up after me and turns off the lamp by the window, and I turn off the one by the chair. The room goes dark except for the light from the hall, and we walk back down it together without saying anything to the two open doors.

He stops at his.

“Night, Tess.”

“Goodnight.”

I go into the guest room with the notebook and the three books and sit on the end of the bed with all of it in my lap. I don’t turn on the lamp on the nightstand.

I flip through what we wrote, then I turn to a clean page.

I write it at the top, the thing his mom asked me: What do I want money to do for me?

Under it, I write fast, before I can make it sound better than it is.

Freedom. A door I can lock. Enough saved to leave. My own place. Time—I underline that one. Not asking. Not going back because there’s nowhere else. Grandma—I look at that one for a long time, and then I cross it out. I want different.

I close the notebook.

Across the hall, his door is open. His lamp is on. I can see the end of his bed from here, and the dark window behind it. His shadow moves across the wall once, and then stops moving.

I turn off my lamp and lie down on top of the covers with the notebook on my chest in the dark, and I never want to leave.