Page 44 of Gave Proof Through the Night

Somewhere further in, I hear that laugh, the quick surprised bark, echoing in a way that makes it impossible to tell which direction it came from.

It is stiflingly hot in here. The heat genuinely unbearable now, the kind that makes your shirt stick and your brain go slightly stupid. Body heat trapped in glass and no airflow whatsoever, and within a minute sweat is a waterfall down the back of my neck. I pull the jersey over my head in one motion, momentarily blind inside the fabric, and when I emerge I catch a flash of her, real this time, I’d bet everything on it, disappearing around a mirrored corner with one look thrown back over her shoulder that is pure, deliberate invitation.

I tuck the jersey into the waistband of my pants without thinking about it and go after her.

The corridor narrows. My reflections multiply and warp, tall, short, sideways.

I hear her laugh again, closer now, and I follow it around a bend where the mirrors angle inward like a funnel. Another turn. Another wrong mirror, this one making me look about four feet tall, which, no thank you.

And then she’s just there.

I don’t slow down enough to think about it, I just close the last few feet, and she’s got nowhere left to go. I catch her before she can slip away again, her back meeting the warm surface of a mirror with a small, surprised exhale and she’s laughing, breathless, chest rising fast, and I’m breathing just as hard, and I genuinely cannot tell anymore how much of that is the chase and how much of it is her, close enough now that I can see the last blue tint of Bomb Pop still on her bottom lip.

And the part I'm not going to examine too closely is just how little space is left between us, her chest rising against the KISS ME shirt, my hand braced on the mirror frame beside her head, trapping her against the glass with my arm, both of us lit up gold and red and blue by whatever cheap carnival lighting somebody rigged into this plywood box.

“Hey, Dangerous,” I say.

"Hey, Zesty.” And the way she says it, the way the word falls from her lips, stirs something inside me.

“Why the chase?” I ask, and it comes out quieter than I mean it to, my hand still braced against the mirror behind her, neither of us moving to close the last eight inches, both of us clearly aware of exactly how little space is left. “You could’ve just said hi.”

She shrugs, and it’s not quite as careless as she wants it to look. “I’m used to running.” She says it light, easy, like it’s nothing, but something moves behind her eyes when she says it.

“You’ve been giving me a run for my money all morning.”

“I’m just very hard to catch.” She tilts her head. Her eyes flick down to my undershirt clinging to my chest for exactly one second before coming back up, and if I wasn’t already sweltering, I would be now. She inclines her chin at my gold medal. “You seem out of breath, though. For an Olympian.”

“It’s hot in here.”

She licks her lips. I can’t tell if it’s deliberate or not. But her voice comes out breathy when she says, “It certainly is.”

There’s a current running between us that I don’t have a hockey term for. It’s not new. It’s been building since Cinco de Mayo, since the watch, since every accidental run-in, and I’m acutely aware of every single point where we’re almost touching and the few points where we already are.

A beat passes where neither of us says anything. The box fan hums somewhere. My pulse is doing something loud and unhelpful. Forty reflections of us stand frozen in the glass around us, and I’ve never in my life felt anything like this, ridiculous and electric, short-circuiting every rational thought I own. I’ve dated. I’ve had feelings before. I have never once had a woman make my knees forget how knees work.

“Is it working?” I ask.

She blinks. “Is what working?”

I nod at her shirt. She looks down at herself, like she forgot what she put on this morning, block letters stretched across her chest. KISS ME, IT’S MY BIRTHDAY. When she looks back up there’s a flush climbing her neck that has nothing to do with the heat in this trailer.

“The shirt,” I say. “Get any kisses today?”

Something flickers across her face, quick, gone almost before I catch it, and I have one ugly, involuntary thought about every man on that parade route who might have read those words on her chest and gotten ideas. I picture, for one entirely unreasonable half second, every guy at this festival reading that shirt as an invitation, some guy in cargo shorts leaning in too close, thinking he’s got a free pass, and something primitive roars through my blood so fast and so completely unearned that my jaw goes tight and I have to actively unclench my hand from the mirror frame.

Cálmate. I have no claim on this woman. None. That does not seem to be slowing down the jealousy currently setting up permanent residence in my chest.

A beat. Long enough that I can hear the tinny carnival music leaking through the plywood walls, long enough that neither of us moves, long enough that some other version of me in some other mirror is probably already leaning in.

“Oh.” She says it soft, almost surprised at herself. “Not yet.”

Her eyes come up to mine, dark and steady, daring me, and something about the way she says it, not yet, like the day isn’t over, like there’s still time, undoes something in my chest that’s been wound tight since she brushed her fingertips along my wrist weeks ago.

“You tell me. Are you volunteering?” she asks, and my whole world tilts sideways.

Her lips part, that blue stain from the Bomb Pop inviting, and it’s all I can do to control my instincts. Yes, I’m volunteering. I want to be the only one volunteering. I stand in tribute.

I lean in slow, giving her every chance in the world to step back, to laugh it off, to make some crack about my nickname or my sweaty undershirt, or any of the eleven thousand things she could say to put distance between us, and she doesn’t. She goes still, watching me the whole way, and I press my mouth to her cheek instead of where I really want to, soft and unhurried, and I feel her breath catch against my lips.