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Then she pulls back, just far enough to see me, and puts her hands on my face again.

She keeps doing that. Last night, this afternoon, now. Like my face is the thing she’s wanted to get her hands on, and now that she’s allowed, she doesn’t want to stop. Her thumbs on my cheekbones. Down the bridge of my nose. Over my eyebrow. Along the edge of my bottom lip. She watches her own thumb do it with her mouth a little open.

I hold still. I don’t know what else to do with it.

People look at me all the time. They look at the jersey, or my father’s last name, or the car, or whatever they’ve heard. They don’t look at my face like this. Like it’s something they want to read all the way to the end.

She finds my right hand on the comforter, picks it up, and turns it over. She runs her fingertip across my knuckles, over the two pale places where they split in November. She does it twice. Then she presses her mouth to them and puts my hand back down on her own hip.

I leave it exactly where she put it. I can feel the warmth of her through the sweater, the bone of her hip under my palm. I don’t move it an inch.

Her fingers find the hem of my hoodie. They stop there.

“Can I?” she says.

She’s asking me.

Tessa Canten is lying on my bed with her hair all over my pillow, asking me for permission.

I make a noise that’s supposed to be a laugh and comes out as something else.

“Yeah,” I answer.

She pushes it up. Her knuckles drag up my stomach as she does it, not on purpose, and my whole body goes tight. She feels it and stops with the hoodie bunched under my arms and looks up at me. I pull it the rest of the way off, the T-shirt with it, and throw them both off the end of the bed.

She lies there on her side with her head on my pillow and looks at me. My shoulders. My chest. The bruise on my ribs from Palinski’s stick that I forgot was there. She puts her finger on that one.

I flinch.

She says, “Sorry,” and doesn’t take her finger away.

Then she puts her whole hand flat in the middle of my chest right over my heart and leaves it there. It’s going like I’m on a breakaway. She feels it. Her eyes come up to mine, a little wide. And then she moves her hand, an inch, down and to the side, watching my face the whole time. I breathe in through my teeth. She sees it. She stops. And she goes back to where she started and does it again, slower, the same inch.

She’s testing me.

She found something that made me react, and now she’s running it a second time to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. Of course she is. She spent half of last night asking my mother how much it costs to get one customer. Of course she treats me like a fucking research project.

She does it a third time.

“Tess.”

“I’m just checking,” she says.

“Checking what?”

“If it’s every time.”

It’s every time. She watches it happen on my face, and something comes over hers. Not shy. Not scared. Pleased. She’s pleased with herself.

I catch her wrist.

Gently. I just hold it there against my chest with her palm still flat over my heart. She looks up.

“What is it?”

I don’t know how to say it. I say it anyway.

“If we keep going,” I say, “we’re not going to just keep making out.”