“I told my mom I’m bi,” she says as we wait for a stoplight to change. Her voice is perfectly neutral.

“How’d it go?” I ask as I squeeze both my fists as hard as I can. Please let it have gone well.

She laughs. “Well enough. She asked me why I can’t find someone to marry me if I have double the population to choose from.” She looks over at me and laughs again. “Your face.”

“Is it my What the Fuck face because what the fuck, Sophie?”

She sighs, and even with the heated seats and the vents blasting dry air at us, her breath mists in front of her as she exhales slowly. “Parents.”

I guess I can relate to that. “It’s the building up here on the right.” I point to my three-story walk-up as she turns onto my street. She stops at the curb, putting the car into park.

“End of the line.” She tips her head back against the leather headrest and closes her eyes. The console says it’s 12:11am, the light turning her skin icy blue, but I know that if I ran my tongue up the path her pulse takes, it would be warm.

“What are you going to do tonight?”

She opens her eyes. The intensity she carries with her in the kitchen has bled out during the drive, so when she smiles at me there’s no edge to it. It’s completely sweet, like her.

“I’m going to shower. And then I’m going to go to bed.”

I nod over my shoulder. “I have a shower.”

Her hands grip the steering wheel. “So?”

“You could shower here.”

“And sleep here?”

I shrug. “Sleep,” I say. Or something.

“I thought you didn’t want...”

The thing is, I’ve always wanted her. But I have no right to play games, to ask and then take away, then ask again. But it’s her I want. The person that stood between me and my father’s rage, the person that let me sleep. I don’t want to leave this car tonight without her because I’d leave a little piece of myself with her.

“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” I say. “Sleep. We can just sleep,” I assure her. And it’s true. If all we do is fall into bed beside each other and fall asleep, it will be a gift, infinitely better than being alone. She presses her lips together. It’s too much to wish for, but god she looks disappointed.

With a deep breath, she says, “Where should I park?”

Chapter Thirteen

Sophie

Amy’s towels are softer than I expected. She seems like the kind of person who would never use something as frivolous as fabric softener. But then again, she didn’t seem like the kind of person to have a plant named Esther living on the window ledge in her shower, either.

So maybe Amy contains multitudes.

I wipe the fog off the mirror. Through the closed door, I track her movement around the small apartment by the creak of the wooden floorboards under her weight. She seemed nervous as she showed me around, gathering way too many towels and giving me multiple options for clothes to borrow while she threw my work clothes, which smelled of cooked meat and garlic aioli, into the tiny stacked washer-dryer tucked into the corner of her kitchen.