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It comes out fast before he can say anything else. He looks past me at the street. It’s past one in the morning. It’s cold enough that the parked cars have frost on their windshields. It’s a mile back to campus.

Then he looks at Nash and Kylie and Koda coming down the steps behind me, all of us walking together.

He doesn’t say anything.

We walk.

It’s a mile back, and the cold gets into everything. The five of us start out together and then, the way groups do, come apart. Kylie climbs onto Nash’s back half a block in, and he carries her like it’s nothing, and they drift ahead, her laughing into his neck. Koda gets a phone call and drops back, then speeds up, saying “no” and “I didn’t” and “you’re the one who left”.

And somehow, I’m walking next to Rafe.

Not with him. Next to him. Two feet of sidewalk between us. Neither of us chose it. It just happened, the way the group came apart, and neither of us moved to fix it.

I don’t think we’ve ever done this. Walked somewhere at the same time, going the same way, without one of us following the other.

We don’t talk for a whole block. His shoes are loud on the sidewalk. Mine aren’t. The streetlights go by, one, then dark, then another.

“How was your dinner?” I ask quietly, afraid to overstep a line. I regret it as soon as I hear myself. I don’t know why I ask it. It just comes out of me.

He doesn’t look at me. “Fine.”

“You looked pissed. Yesterday. On the steps.”

Now he looks at me. “You always think I’m pissed.”

“You usually are.”

We walk. A car goes past with its bass up and fades out.

“It was hockey,” he says.

I look at him.

He’s looking straight ahead, at Nash and Kylie half a block up, at nothing. “An NHL scout,” he says. “The guy who runs their draft.”

I don’t really know what that means. I know what the NHL is. I know what a draft is, sort of, from the way Kylie talks about it. But I don’t know what it means for him.

“Is that good?”

He’s quiet for a second.

“Could be.”

Two words. That’s all. But I hear something in his voice I’ve never heard from him. I’ve heard him angry. I’ve heard him bored and cruel and cold and, once, in a stairwell, almost soft. I’ve never heard this.

He wants it. Really wants it. And I didn’t know it was possible for him. I thought he had everything. I thought there was nothing in the world that Rafferty Waleska didn’t already own or couldn’t buy. I watched him get into that car yesterday with nothing in his hands, and I thought, he looks like he’s being taken somewhere, but I never once thought there might be somewhere he wanted to go.

“Then I hope it’s good,” I say. I mean it. There’s nothing on it. No edge. No sarcasm. I just mean it, and it’s out before I can make it into something else.

He turns his head and looks at me, under a streetlight, and his face goes open. Just for a second. Like somebody pulled a sheet off of it. Then it closes.

“Don’t,” he says.

“Don’t––” I hesitate. “What?”

He doesn’t answer. He just keeps walking.

I follow, two feet of sidewalk between us, my heart flipping in my chest.