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She goes in. I stand in the hall. I hear her moving around in there, a drawer, the bathroom door, water running.

She comes out with her toothbrush in one hand and her phone charger in the other and the gray T-shirt from the other night over her arm, and she walks past me into my room without saying anything.

I follow her in.

I get into bed first on my side, the side by the window, the one I’ve slept on since I was fourteen. I lie on my back and look at the ceiling and listen to her in my bathroom, brushing her teeth, running the water. She plugs her phone in on the nightstand on the other side.

Then she turns off the bathroom light and gets in on the far edge. There’s a foot of mattress between us, lying on her back like I am, looking at the same ceiling.

And it’s stranger than anything that has ever happened to me. I don’t know why. It just is.

The heat ticks. The snow taps on the window.

“Rafe?” she whispers.

“Yeah.”

“Can I—”

She doesn’t finish.

She moves across the foot of mattress.

I lift my arm.

She comes in under it like she belongs there. Her head on my shoulder. Her hand flat on my chest.

I put my arm down around her, and I lie there and look at the ceiling.

Her hand moves on my chest. I think she’s already falling asleep, and then I feel it again. Her thumb is going back and forth over the inside of her own wrist, the way you’d rub a place that’s sore. Her wrist is lying right over my heart, so every time her thumb goes across it, her knuckles brush my skin.

I’ve seen her do it before. In the reading room, with a book open she wasn’t reading. At dinner last night under the edge of the table while my dad talked. I figured it was a nervous thing, like Barnes cracking his neck before a faceoff.

“You do that a lot,” I say into the dark.

Her thumb stops. “Do what?”

“That. With your wrist.” I find it with my fingers. I know something’s there. A little tattoo. I’ve seen it before, a little line of dark under her sleeve when she reaches for things. An hour ago I had my mouth on half her body and never once looked. “I meant to ask why you have that.”

She doesn’t say anything for long enough that I think she isn’t going to.

“It’s nothing,” she says.

“Is it a tattoo?”

I reach over with my free hand and click on the lamp on my nightstand. The room goes yellow. She squints and groans and turns her face into my shoulder.

“Rafe.”

“One second.”

I take her wrist. I don’t grab it. I learned there’s a difference. I just hold it the way she held my hand earlier, turn it over, and tip it toward the light. Her hand goes loose in mine and lets me. I don’t think about that. I’m too busy looking.

The letters are tiny. I have to bring her wrist up almost to my face to read them.

This too shall pass.

“Why the fuck is it so small?”