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The movie ends. Another one starts on its own. Neither of us reaches for the remote.

And somewhere in the second one, she falls asleep on me. Her head is on my chest, her ear right over my heart, one hand curled in my T-shirt and her feet still tucked under my leg. I feel her go. I feel her breathing slow down and even out against me, and her hand go loose in my shirt, and her whole weight settle.

I don’t move.

My arm’s going numb. I don’t care. I like the weight of her there. I sit with the snow coming down outside and a movie playing that I’m not watching, and I don’t move, because moving would mean she’d stop being there, and I don’t want her to stop being there.

The gate hums at the bottom of the hill a little after nine. Headlights on the drive. My parents are home. I hear the garage. The mudroom door. My mom’s voice saying something to my dad, and then nothing, and then their footsteps going the other way, up the front stairs on the far side of the house. They don’t come into the front room.

Tessa doesn’t wake up.

She wakes up at eleven, when the second movie ends and the screen goes blue and quiet. She lifts her head off my chest and blinks at the tree, confused.

“What time is it?”

“Eleven.”

“Oh my God.” She sits up. She rubs her eyes. She looks at the dark doorway to the hall. “Are your parents home?”

“Two hours ago.”

“Oh my God.”

She starts to get up. She gets her feet out from under my leg, puts them on the floor, and stands, and the blanket slides off her.

“I should go upstairs,” she says.

“Why?”

She looks at me. “To bed?”

And I know what I want.

I’ve known since the reading room. Maybe longer. Since she fell asleep on the couch in my room at Thanksgiving, six feet away, and I sat there all night and didn’t move. Since I lay in my bed last night listening to nothing across the hall.

“Sleep in mine,” I say.

She goes still in the light from the tree.

Her face goes pink. “Rafe.”

“What?”

“Your parents.”

“Are asleep. On the other side of the house.”

She looks at me.

“I want to wake up and have you there,” I say.

She looks at me for a long time.

“Okay,” she says.

We turn off the tree together. She gets the plug behind the stand, and I hold the branches back so she can reach it, and then the room goes dark except for the snow outside the window, and we go up the stairs in the dark without turning on any lights.

At the top, she stops at the guest room.