Page 171

He looks at me for a second. It isn’t no, and it isn’t yes, and I don’t have a real answer for him.

He leans back in his chair.

“No pressure,” he says. “We’ll probably do this again before Christmas. Come if you want.” He pulls his phone out. “You on Instagram? I think I follow you.”

He does. I don’t post. I barely open it.

“I’ll message you on there,” he says, and puts it away. “No big deal.”

“Okay,” I say.

I feel myself let go a little. He isn’t pushing. He asked, and I didn’t know, and he just let it go easily. He isn’t anything I need to brace for. He’s just a loud boy with chocolate on his cheek asking if I want to hang out with him.

I didn’t know it was this simple.

Over by the truck, Emma’s standing next to Rafe while he puts his skates in his bag. She’s saying something. He’s answering in one-word pieces, not looking up. After a minute, she says something else, and he says something short, and she goes back up the hill toward the farmhouse with her hands in her pockets.

“Seattle’s beautiful,” Lucas says, looking at the fire. “But it’s nothing like here.”

“Do you miss being home?” I ask, not skipping a beat because I hear it in his voice.

“Hell yeah. I wish I’d gone to Woodbury so I could play with him.” He nods at Rafe by the truck. “How is he down there? Different?”

I don’t answer. I don’t know how.

“He seems different,” Lucas says. “Scared the shit out of me, seeing you get out of his car.” He laughs and shakes his head. “He was a fucking dick to you in school. I swear to God, I thought he hated you.”

“He did,” I say.

Lucas looks at me. He has chocolate on his cheek, right at the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t know it’s there. He doesn’t say anything else about it. He just nods, like that’s the only answer that makes sense, and looks back at the fire.

“Tess,” Rafe says from behind me. “Let’s go.”

I turn around.

He’s standing a few feet behind my chair with his bag over his shoulder and his skates hanging off it by the laces. His hat’s off. His hair is flat and damp from it. And his face is—

I don’t know. It isn’t angry. It isn’t anything. It’s just closed. He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at Lucas for about a second and a half, and then he isn’t.

I look at the two of them. Lucas in his folding chair, sticky, grinning, already turning to say something to the guy next to him. Rafe behind me with his bag on his shoulder and nothing on his face at all.

Lucas fills every silence before it starts. He’ll talk to the fire if nobody else is listening. Rafe can sit inside one for ten minutes and make you wonder if he’s forgotten you’re in the room. They’ve been best friends since they were seven, apparently. I don’t know what they have in common. I stand up and try to figure it out.

“Bye, Tessa,” Lucas says. “I’ll message you.”

I feel awkward when he says it. Then I mutter, “Bye. Thanks for having me.”

“Any time.” He smiles at me.

Rafe doesn’t say anything to him. He doesn’t say anything at all to anyone. He turns around and walks up the slope toward the car with his bag, and I follow him.

A few people look up from the fire as we go. Brianna. The guy from the gas-station story. Emma, from the farmhouse porch, with a cup in her hands. Not everybody. Just enough for the hair on the back of my neck to stand up.

Rafe gets to the car first. He puts his bag in the trunk, and then he goes around to the passenger side and opens my door and stands there holding it.

He still doesn’t look at me. Not at my face. He looks at the door at the top of it where his hand is. He isn’t mad at me. I can tell that much. He’s too careful with the door to be mad at me. But something’s off. Something changed between the s’mores and the truck, and I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know if it’s about me.

I get in. He closes the door. And then he walks around the front of the car, through the headlights, with his hands in his pockets and his breath going up white, and I watch him through the windshield the whole way.