I open my eyes and nearly melt with relief. I’m in the only place I want to be, standing awkwardly in the corner by Marshall’s desk and feeling like I’ve come home.
I hear him first, sense the magnetic tension as he approaches. But when he steps into the room, he moves right past me, padding across the carpet with a towel around his waist.
He’ll see me in a second. He has to. His head is down, though. His eyes are on the floor, and the awkward moment when he doesn’t look up just gets longer.
I stay where I am. He thinks he’s alone, and maybe I’ve spent the last few weeks invading every corner of his life, but it’s different now. He’s let me see too much of him, offered more than I have any right to. He’s not a stranger anymore.
At his dresser, he yanks open the top drawer. He’s about to take the towel off, and once, I was in bed with him. I held him down in the dark, but this moment is not the same. It’s private. Voyeuristic. When he gets out a pair of boxers, I back away, sliding furtively into the closet.
It’s worse, standing in the dark like a contract killer or a movie monster. I keep my hands flat against the wall, like I might ambush whoever steps inside.
Marshall doesn’t come near me, though. I can hear him out in his room, rustling around, getting ready for bed. Then he turns out the light.
In the safety of my hiding place, I stand against the wall, staring into the dark.
Out in the bedroom, his breathing has the cadence of someone wide awake, too careful.
He told me that he loved me. He has to see his grave mistake by now. Has to know that I am ice inside. I lean back and close my eyes.
After a while, his breathing loses its regimented sound. It evens out, and when it does, even the air seems softer, like the world has stopped standing guard.
I let myself relax. I don’t move until the pain in my feet gets bad enough that it tingles all the way up my shins. Then I steel myself and tiptoe out of the closet.
In the dark, Marshall is a low shape under the blanket, silhouetted against the wall.
I sit by the head of his bed with my elbows on the mattress, watching him, watching his pale, fluttering eyelids and his mouth.
After a long time, I lie on the carpet beside his bed and pull my knees up. I fold my hands under my head and close my eyes until the sound of him breathing is the only true thing.
“Waverly.”
I roll over, already resigned to my room and my bed and my frantic, shrieking alarm clock.
I’m not in my room, though. I’m still on the floor and Marshall is out of bed, crouching next to me and shaking me by the shoulder. “Hey, Waverly. What are you doing?”
I feel dazed, too stupefied to think clearly. I want to be tucked against his chest, warm and safe and far away from the grinding monotony of daylight. I turn my face into the floor and can almost feel it.
“Here,” he says with his hand on my arm. “Sit up, sit up.”
When I do it, though, nothing is fine or better. Nothing is okay. I’m still chilly and untouchable. Still me.
Marshall has me by the wrist, guiding me carefully into bed and climbing in after me so he’s pressed against my back.
“Don’t do that,” he says into my hair. “Don’t lie on the floor when you could be up here with me.”
His body is warm. Inarguable. It feels better than any moment in any given day. I pull away and roll over. I don’t deserve to be comforted.
“What?” he whispers. “What are you doing?”
I adjust my head on the pillow, trying to see his face in the dark. “Are you mad at me?”
He’s lying on his back now, dimly illuminated by the light from the window. His silhouette looks up for a second, staring at the ceiling. Then he swallows and fumbles for my hand. “No.”
“You should be, though.” I squeeze my eyes shut tight for a second before I say it.
I mean for what I said, for how I acted behind the bleachers, but it doesn’t really matter. I could apologize for every facet and fiber of my being, and it would still be just as true.
He doesn’t say anything, just rolls over and pulls me against his chest, pulls me right where I want to be.
“I broke up with Heather,” he whispers against the top of my head.
His breath on my scalp makes my heart leap and stutter. “Why?”
“Because I don’t like her that way. And I like you. I don’t want to be with anyone else.”
For a long time, I just lie there in his bed. Safe. Perfectly still. “You wouldn’t kiss me tonight.”
He laughs a small, helpless laugh. It isn’t really a laugh at all. “I didn’t want to do it and still be pretending I was there for her. It was—it seemed gross. Or like…not the way I feel.”
The weight of his voice is unbearable, so heavy I can feel it like a change in gravity, the force of it pressing on my body. My ribcage tightens and suddenly, every strange and wordless thing inside me is welling up.
He pulls me closer, squeezing tight. “Are you crying?”
I close my eyes, swallow down the lump in my throat. “No.”
And because I’m in control of it—because I have stopped—it’s not a lie.
He tried to give me something honest, something true. He said love, but there’s a part of me that still insists in cool, clinical tones that he can’t possibly mean it, and even if he did, I’m not mechanically designed to take it. My motherboard is only wired for analysis and calculation, no place to plug it in.
“I’m not good at being loved,” I whisper. My voice is barely audible. “I’m good at being self-sufficient.”
I’m touching his bare chest and his stomach now, tracing shapes with my finger.
“That feels good,” he whispers back, and I don’t know how to make him see.
He sighs as I draw the shape of my own private geography. My list of confessions:
Frigid
Insensitive
Narcissistic
Egocentric
Fine. I know he doesn’t understand—can’t read my secrets on his skin—but he pets my hair anyway. He pulls me closer, close enough that I can almost convince myself this is the only thing that exists.
“I wish you could put your hand on my heart and feel it,” he whispers. “I wish you knew exactly how much I’m not going to hurt you.”
I picture it—surgical, gory, distinctly unromantic—and stop tracing. Science Waverly, reaching into a gaping chest, lifting a bloody heart in one latex-gloved hand and fighting the urge to squeeze. I have never once worried about how much something will hurt.
He’s drowsy now, sinking into sleep. His body softens, forming to my contours, filling in the jagged mountain range that constitutes my outline. He is molding himself around me, making a space for me that didn’t exist before.
In the past, I’ve always thought that people’s edges either lined up or didn’t. Some days, I didn’t even have to work that hard to overlook the fact that no one ever lined up with me.
I assumed it was a matter of time. One day I’d meet someone who counteracted my chemical structure. We would compete for supremacy, collide until one of us was forced to yield, or else go forth together, suspended in eternal stalemate.
But my model is inaccurate. The poets are wrong.
The opposite of ice isn’t fire.
It’s water.