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“That’s why,” I tell him on the stairs, holding it up. “That’s exactly why.”

“Seventy-eight’s a C.”

“It’s a C plus, and it’s your fault.”

He looks pleased with himself all the way across the quad.

He does it twice more before spring. Never on a normal day. Always the days I’ve told him I need to concentrate, which I eventually figure out is the point. The rest of the time he’s back by the door, and I sit by the windows, and sometimes when the professor turns to write on the board I look over and he’s already looking at me. He doesn’t look away when I catch him. He never has.

Hockey has a hold on him most days.

Every other week, his bag shows up in the hallway outside his door, packed and zipped and enormous. Nash’s next to it, and people step over them on the way to the bathroom. The bus leaves from the rink lot at seven on Friday morning. He kisses me at six-forty with his hair wet, and then he’s gone until Sunday.

While he’s gone, my phone becomes a slideshow. His shoes. The bus. Koda asleep against a bus window with his mouth open. A hotel ceiling in Vermont. A gas station hot dog. A blurry picture of snow. When the games stream, Kylie and I watch on her laptop with the volume too high, and she yells at the referees like she’s been watching hockey her whole life, which she hasn’t, and I watch number five and nothing else. When they don’t stream, I refresh the stats page. I get very good at reading a box score.

He texts after from the bus every time. Won. Or lost. Yeah.

Sunday nights he comes back exhausted. Sometimes it’s midnight, sometimes it’s two, and I hear the bus brakes from the lot behind Corvin if my window’s open, and then the stairwell door, and then one knuckle on my door, knocking once. He comes in smelling like the inside of a bus and drops his clothes on my floor and gets into my bed diagonally, so his feet hang off one corner, and he’s asleep before I’ve finished telling him about my week.

At some point in February, I copy the season schedule into the back of my planner. Home weekends, road weekends. I don’t need to ask him anymore when he’s leaving. I already know when he’ll be back.

Kylie figures out the system before I do.

The nights Rafe’s on campus, he ends up in my room, and the nights he’s in my room, Kylie ends up in Nash’s. We don’t ever have a conversation about it. It just happens. One Monday I come back from the library and there’s a chart on our whiteboard in her handwriting, with the days of the week down the side and two columns. One says THEM. One says US. Tuesday and Wednesday have arrows.

“What is that?”

“It’s a custody schedule,” Kylie says from her bed while painting her toenails. “For the rooms. We accidentally made one. I’m just writing it down.”

“We don’t need a—”

“Tessa. Nash and I have had more privacy in the last three weeks than in the entire first semester. I’m not complaining. I’m thanking you.” She blows on her toes. “Also we’re open when they’re away, so we can officially have girl time since my little hermit crab is in her bigger shell.”

She smiles big, so I smile back.

We don’t erase the chart until March.

It’s funny how fast a thing like this stops being new. I learn the left side of my bed frame squeaks and the right side doesn’t, and he learns to stay on the right. He knows where I keep the condoms, which is the second drawer of my desk, under the box of label refills, so that anybody looking for tape gets tape. We know Nash knocks twice before he comes into his own room now, a habit nobody asked him to start. We know the RA on our floor does rounds at eleven on Fridays. I learn to put my hand over his mouth. He learns to put his over mine. Some mornings I wake up in his bed instead of mine and can’t remember, for a second, which ceiling I’m looking at, and then I go back to sleep.

We fight about stupid things because now there’s room for stupid things.

The first time his voice goes sharp is over the window. I opened it because my room gets hot from the radiator, and he comes back from the shower and it’s nine degrees outside and he says Tess, what the fuck, short and loud, and my shoulders go up around my ears before I can stop them. My whole body gets ready. I don’t even know for what.

He shuts the window.

“It’s freezing, baby,” he says, which I realize isn’t the voice I thought it was.

He gets into bed with his wet hair on my pillow and complains about the coffee for another two minutes. My shoulders come back down on their own, somewhere in the middle of the hazelnut.

By the end of the month, we’ve had the window fight four times. The coffee fight twice. A long, serious argument in a dining hall about whether it’s rude to text k, which it is, and which he does on purpose for a week afterward. He leaves a wet towel on my bed and I throw it at his head without looking up from my laptop. My packages take over half his floor one weekend and he steps over them like a man crossing a creek on rocks, swearing quietly every time. My body stops getting ready. I don’t notice exactly when. One day the towel hits him in the face and he just says ow and that’s the whole fight.

I tell him about the aid package on a Wednesday night in the middle of March on his floor with a roll of tape in my hand.

I’m packing nine orders. He’s on his bed with a bag of ice on his knee, watching film from the last game on his laptop with the sound off, rewinding the same six seconds over and over. Nash is at Kylie’s. It’s Wednesday on the chart, so I’m technically supposed to be in my own room.

“I got my aid package,” I say. To the box.

The film stops, and then he says, “When?”