“Oh holy fucking fuck, am I lamplighting you again? How do I keep doing this?” He threw up his hands, while she did her best not to roll her eyes and correct him. Gaslighting, she wanted to say. The term was gaslighting. “Look, okay I know you did not exactly say that—you said stay away. So I have stayed away. I have stayed as far away as I can humanly get without slipping into another dimension.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say something snarky back. Something like I wish you would slip into another dimension. It was what she would have told him back then, after all. Yet when she went to, something happened. The words caught in her throat. They got all tangled up in that eye roll he just did and his expression now: like someone trying to scale the sides of a glass building after a sudden rainfall.
And his expression then, in the video when he had carried her. The one that she had refused to believe was concern, but had to now. Everything he was doing just kept bludgeoning that realization in harder, until her insides ached with it. Her mind spun with it. Much longer and she was going to vomit.
“When I said that I wanted you to stay away, I definitely didn’t mean that you should miss lectures to accomplish that. At the very least I didn’t mean that you should try to take down information from those lectures in a stairwell.”
“There’s nowhere else I can go. Bartleby won’t let me take his notes back to my dorm building because they come back smelling like pot.”
“Well, there is this thing called a library. And last time I checked that place was drug free.”
“Ha fucking ha. I can’t do this in the library.”
“Because that’s where nerds go?”
“No because that’s where you go. Like all-the-time-constantly-twenty-four-seven in the library. If I go there I might as well turn up for class.”
“Oh my god, you should turn up for class. You have to turn up for class. I cannot be the reason that you, Tate Sullivan, are barred from studying that you actually want to do. That would be even weirder and more gross than if you tried to take a picture of my naked butt when I was in the med room.”
“Jesus, do you honestly think I would do that?” He paused, long and hard enough that she knew he was figuring it out. His expression shifted from amusement to confusion to something that came very close to horror, in under thirty seconds. “Wait. Did you think that was the reason I was there?”
“It did cross my mind once or twice.”
Or a few thousand times.
“Letty, I was there because—”
“I know why, okay.” She closed her eyes for just a second, remembering that look on his face as he carried her. The concern all over his features, which she still couldn’t quite accept. “But maybe we could just…not go into that. Ever. Just never talk about it.”
“Hey, if you’re willing to talk to me at all we can do it about anything you want.”
She fell silent then, though not through choice. All the oxygen seemed to have left the stairwell, and it took her words with it. The only thing she could do was stand there, staring at him, but even that was a problem. It gave her too much time to take in a million new things about him—like how soft his gaze suddenly was and how serious he seemed. That smirking humor she had come to know so well was gone, replaced by some other weird thing she didn’t recognize.
She would have called it sincerity on anyone else.
But she couldn’t with him. Not now, not ever.
“I think this might be pretty much my limit.”
“Okay, well…that’s fine, too, I guess.”
“All right. So…goodbye then.”
“Yeah. Goodbye,” he said.
But he didn’t stand up.
He just kept on making way too much eye contact.
Heavy, hypnotic eye contact that she had to get away from right now.
“You don’t seem to be going anywhere.”
“Neither are you.”
“Because I need to go up.”
She pointed, and in response he shuffled to the left.
Not that it helped particularly.
“Do you really expect me to squeeze through that tiny amount of space you just opened up? I doubt I could get a toe in there, and am pretty sure you know that.”
“Don’t know anything of the kind. I’m betting you could slip through, no problem.”
“Careful, Tate. That kind of sounded like a compliment.”
“If it’s a compliment, then how come you’re backing away?”
She honestly hadn’t realized she was. It just seemed to be a reflex when it came to him. He started talking, and suddenly she was doing her best to escape. In fact, she was sort of surprised she hadn’t already. The fire escape was barely three feet behind her. He was still sitting on the step, and didn’t seem inclined to move.
Running would have been easy, yet still she stayed.
And talked. God, they were doing a lot of talking. More than they’d ever done, and most of it so lighthearted she couldn’t wrap her head around the words.
They made her want to laugh and puke at the same time.
“I’m not backing away. I’m just naturally leaving in an ordinary manner.”
“Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure you usually leave facing forward.”
“I was just about to turn. You didn’t give me a chance.”
“So…do you need like total silence or…?”
“That would be a start.”
“And maybe I should close my eyes.”