EVEN THOUGH I WAS EXHAUSTED, I didn’t want to turn off my light.
I wasn’t a girl who scared easily — not at all. But the last time I’d fallen asleep had been against my will. Many hours later, I’d woken up on a dirty wooden floor. It’s not that I thought it would happen again. But I had a lingering smudge of dread in my gut. I couldn’t relax.
So I sat there in my bed, a book abandoned on my lap, just waiting to feel drowsy. Instead, felt only wired and jumpy.
When I heard footsteps on the landing outside my door, all the hair on my neck stood up.
The tap on my door was so gentle, I found my voice. “Yeah?”
“It’s Rafe.”
When I opened the door, he stood there in a T-shirt and flannel pants, a book in his hand. “Hey.” His big brown eyes studied me, as if performing an assessment.
“Hey,” I echoed. I turned to get away from his stare, heading back to the bed and climbing in.
“Did you eat dinner?”
“Yes, Mom.” As long as granola bars count. I shouldn’t be sassing Rafe. He was just trying to be nice.
“Okay,” he said slowly, as if he didn’t think he should believe me. An uncomfortable beat passed, and I was sure he was about to open his mouth and ask me again what happened last night.
I was never going to tell him.
“I did the Urban Studies reading,” he said instead. He walked right over to sit on the edge of the bed. “Move over,” he demanded.
Seriously? “You want to talk about Urban Studies at one in the morning?” I moved over, though.
“Urban renewal is older than I thought,” he said, as if I cared. “The renovation of Paris was in 1853.” He flipped open the book in his hands and read a paragraph.
I yawned. Then I rolled toward the wall to get away from the facts of nineteenth-century urban renewal.
Rafe stretched out on top of the quilt beside me, trapping me under my covers. He rolled, too, putting the book on my hip. “It says here that the streets were widened for military maneuvers. Have you seen Paris?” He gave me a little nudge when I didn’t answer right away.
“Mm-hmm,” I said, suddenly sleepy. It was easy to finally let my guard down now that my neighbor was trying to bore me to death.
“I haven’t been there,” he said quietly. “But now I want to go. Listen to this…”
Rafe’s voice droned on behind me. The warmth of his body seeped through my covers and heated my back. He was like a big sturdy wall between me and the rest of the world. I began to relax, muscle by muscle. I drifted on the sound of his voice.
Sometime later I heard the click of my lamp shutting off, but the solid heat of Rafe’s body did not disappear. At some point I became aware of his slow breathing, and the faint thud of a book dropping to the floor.
I slept on.
