I couldn’t stop thinking about the moment he’d stopped me from playing the game he’d begun. The moment he stopped being able to bear thinking about me with someone else. It made my heart beat fast and my palms sweat. It made the roots of my hair tingle and my teeth itch. It made every surface of my body alive with the effort of holding back my feelings for Will. Of stopping myself from waking him up to ask him what it all meant. Where we stood.
But things weren’t about me right now. It was one hundred percent not the moment to pull focus from Will’s stuff with his family. So I just brought Will’s hand to my lips and kissed it. I got up and took a shower. I sliced bananas into bowls of instant oatmeal because it was the healthiest thing I could think of and that felt like something I could do to show Will how I felt. I made coffee and put it all on the table, and then I sat there waiting for Will to wake up.
When he slouched into the kitchen and flopped down at the table, he stuck his face in his coffee and didn’t look at me right away. After the first cup had kicked in, though, he took a bite of oatmeal and made a face, looking up at me like I’d betrayed him.
“There’s no brown sugar here,” I told him. “But it’s good for you.”
He pouted and pushed the bowl away, then dropped his head on my shoulder and buried his face in my neck, talking into my sweatshirt.
“What?”
His arms came around my waist and he turned his head slightly.
“I hate stuff that’s good for me.”
MY FLIGHT left from Detroit at 9:30 a.m., but Will was staying until the next day so he could try to talk to the parent of one of Nathan and Sarah’s friends about providing some support if Claire needed it.
Will drove me to the airport in silence, flicking through radio stations and finding nothing he wanted to listen to, then flicking it off again.
We were both exhausted. The easy intimacy of the morning had given way to a day made long by necessities. We’d gone grocery shopping for Claire while she met with a psychologist, then I hung out with Nathan and Sarah while Will took Claire to buy new things for the house.
We hadn’t had a moment to talk, but it wasn’t as if I’d know what to say anyway. Things felt… different? Will seemed different. But he was also in the middle of a crisis and away from home, so I reminded myself for the umpteenth time that it was definitely not the moment to address it.
“Thank you,” Will said as he pulled to a stop at the curb. “For coming here. It never really occurred to me that you would, but… it should have. I—hell, I should’ve known you that well by now. Anyway, thanks.”
And he kissed me, leaning over the cup holders and gearshift. Kissed me like it was a thing we did again. Then he was gone, saying he’d see me back home, leaving me standing at the curb staring after his rental car with my head a total mess and my heart a quivering, hopeful thing.
Chapter 15
March
CHARLES WASN’T back from spring break yet when I got to the dorms. I wasn’t used to having the space to myself, but it came in handy because apparently the only thing that I was capable of was pacing. I knew I’d done the right thing by not asking Will a zillion questions about the status of our relationship before I left Michigan. And I wasn’t looking for a marriage proposal or anything, but it was disconcerting as hell not to know where we stood.
I forced myself to go down to the dining hall, where I choked down a bowl of cereal and then sat staring at nothing as I used the vanilla soft-serve machine to make Coke float after Coke float. When my knee started bouncing out of control, I realized I had just majorly over-sugared and over-caffeinated myself at nine o’clock at night, and forced myself to go back to my room, pocketing a few cookies for later.
The hum of the fluorescent light drove me to distraction without the incessant tapping of Charles’ keyboard and finally I grabbed my phone and sent an SOS, knowing I’d be useless until I made some sense of things.
Can you skype for a sec? I sent to Daniel. It’s about Will so you won’t like it but pleaaaase?
Do I have to kill him again? Daniel wrote back almost immediately. Then, Yeah, signing on.
I blew out a deep breath in relief and threw myself onto my bed, flipping open my laptop and opening Skype. Then I waited. Daniel always thought you went online to sign into Skype before he remembered it was an application, so I figured it’d take him a minute.