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“You said you needed to think.”

“I thought.”

“For twenty minutes.”

“I’m a fast thinker,” I say.

He kisses me so hard my head goes back into the pillow, and he’s laughing, and saying yeah? against my mouth again and again, and I keep saying yeah back until it stops sounding like a word.

Later, after he’s fallen asleep sprawled across most of the bed with his feet hanging off the end, I get up. The floor is warm under my feet. I go to the blue desk and open the laptop, and the light from the screen comes up gray on the wall, and there it my spreadsheet. FALL. Housing, Income, School, Transportation, Savings, Travel. Once every six weeks is realistic.

I don’t delete it. I look at it for a long time, the whole small careful life I built in one night out of bus routes and a sixty-dollar bike, and I leave it exactly where it is.

Then I click the little plus sign at the bottom and open a new sheet. I name it MOVE. I make the columns. Apartment. Inventory. Shelves. Rent (half). Then I sit with my fingers on the keys for a minute, listening to him breathe behind me.

I save it. And I climb back into bed and he pulls me in closer.

44

This Too Shall Pass

Rafe

I wake up before her because this room is hot. The fan’s back in the window. I taped the cord to the sill after I knocked it off the first time, and it’s crooked now, blowing a little toward the ceiling.

Tessa’s asleep on her stomach with her face mashed into my pillow. She has one leg hooked over me like she’s making sure I don’t go anywhere in the night. I lie there for a while and don’t move.

Her laptop’s open on the blue desk. She fell asleep working again. I remember her climbing into bed at one-something. The screen’s still on, and from the bed I can see the spreadsheet she has open, because it’s huge and she zooms everything in to two hundred percent like she’s ninety. MOVE, across the tab at the bottom. Apartment. Inventory. Shelves. Rent, and then (half) in parentheses, like she was scared I’d forget. And then, at the end, the last column, by itself.

EXIT FUND.

There’s a number under it. I don’t read it. I make myself look somewhere else before I see what it is, at the maple out the window, at her hair on my pillow.

The first thing I feel is hot. It comes up my neck fast before I can do anything about it. What the fuck does she need an exit for? I haven’t done anything. I told her I loved her on her floor. I told her she could have a room with six locks on it. And she’s lying here with her foot on my leg putting money away for the day she has to get away from me.

And then I think about standing in the hallway in the dark with my shirt stuck to me, and her door shut for the first time all summer. I knocked once because I didn’t know what else to do. And I think about her face when it opened. How she tried to fix it. How she’d wiped everything off it and folded her hands in her lap, and said come in in this voice that was almost normal, and how I’d seen through it anyway. Every single thing she’d tried to hide because she’d been crying.

So yeah. Okay. She needs an exit fund.

I lie there and let that sit on my chest for a minute. It’s not that I’m okay with it. It’s that I want it full. I want her to have so much money in that column that she could leave me on a Tuesday for no reason, get on a plane to anywhere, and never have to call me for a single thing. I don’t want her here because she can’t afford to go. I’ve had enough people in my life stay put because of how much money I have. I don’t want that. I want her so free it’s stupid, and I want her to look at all of it, every door, every single one open, and pick mine anyway.

I don’t touch the laptop. I get up carefully, so she doesn’t wake. I go downstairs, make coffee in the kitchen she shares with people I barely know, and when I come back up, she’s sitting up in bed with her hair in her face, squinting at me.

“Good morning,” she says.

I hand her the mug. “Morning. Your screen was on.”

She goes still. She looks at the desk. She looks at me.

“I didn’t open it,” I say. “I didn’t read the number. I just saw the column.”

“Rafe—”

“Put more in it.”

She stares at me over the mug. “What?”

“The exit thing. Put more in it.” I sit down on the edge of the bed. “I’m serious. I don’t want you sticking around because you can’t afford a plane ticket, Tess. That’s not— I don’t want that. I want you able to go anywhere, anytime, and I want you to wake up next to me every morning because you want to.” I take a sip of my own coffee so I don’t have to look at her face. “That’s the deal. That’s the only one I want.”