Page 33 of Roadrunner

I used to imagine how it would end. Riley’s interest fading by degrees until one day I’d come home to a note left somewhere I couldn’t miss it. A few lines explaining that things had changed, that he was sorry, that it had been fun while it lasted but the time had come for him to move on. I was twenty and still writing endings early. Hard habit, when people leave before dessert.

I’d keep the note. Frame it, maybe, or put it in a box with everything else I’d saved. I’d take it out on the nights I was tempted to call him. It would do its job, and I’d go on being the kind of woman nobody stayed for.

I was weeks from the end of my sophomore year. That day still hadn’t come. Nearly two years in, every kiss still felt like the first one. We ate Sunday dinner with his parents like it was ours by right. The men in the club treated me like family, which is to say they teased me and worried over me in roughly equal measure.

The sex was, if anything, better than it had ever been.

The blinds were half-drawn and my nutrition book was open on the floor.

He took his time with his mouth first, the way he did when he wanted me to stop thinking. I let him continue, praying it wouldn’t end. I came once against his hand before he even got his jeans off.

He found it funny.

I found it inconvenient.

Before I had my wits about me, he was inside me and the joke went away.

He moved like he always moved when it mattered. Careful, then certain. I locked my ankles at his back and said his name against his neck and felt the same stupid clarity I had felt in a church parking lot, only different.

This time I knew the shape of him like I knew my own name.

We made a mess of my textbooks. I tripped on his boot. We were everywhere. Someone’s bass leaked through the floor. He finished with me against the wall and his face in my hair.

We slumped to the floor and stayed there until our sweat cooled and the textbooks on the floor started to look like a dare.

I hadn’t known my life could hold that much. Between Riley’s family and the club, I had many people who loved me. They said it out loud, regularly. More than I’d had in the first eighteen years combined.

Believing it still scared me.

I did it anyway.

I was flat on my back, too spent to do more than stare at the ceiling. “You going, or am I?”

He lifted his hand from where it rested on my hip. “I’ll go.”

“I can.”

“No.” He put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me. “I’ll go.”

It had become a ritual.

One of us making the trip down to the soda machine for root beer, the two of us drinking it in bed until we fell asleep or found the energy to do something else. Sleep usually won.

“Thank you,” I said, without moving.

He came back a few minutes later in cutoff shorts and boots, shirtless, and handed me a cold bottle with a look that said he knew exactly what he was doing to me.

He’d started working out three days a week as a New Year’s resolution. It had done its work. Dressed, he looked like himself. Without the shirt, he looked like a different, more dangerous version of the same man. The kind of dangerous that made me want to put my hands on him immediately.

“You should wear a shirt downstairs, Mister,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because you’re too good-looking to be wandering the halls half-dressed. I don’t need to fight one of my neighbors over you.”

“If someone came on to me, I’d shut it down.”

I’d watched him do it. A kiss, an arm around my shoulder, a hand finding my waist the second another woman looked at him a bit too long. He never said a word about it. He didn’t have to.