Mom Handed Us One Lease, So I Handed My Stepbrother My Bed novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Lights On

Jakob's POV

I moved over.

The mattress was low on the floor and not wide, and I put my back against the wall to give her the room.

She stood at the edge of it in the gray dawn with her braid half out and her shoes still on.

She had sat on a roof all night with my quilt around her and a ruined evening in her hands.

She looked as tired as I had ever seen anyone look.

She looked at me, and I knew I was the one thing in the apartment she had decided about.

"Sit up," she said.

I sat up.

She put one sneaker on my knee.

"Take it off."

I untied the lace.

My hands were not steady, and I was a man who could set a stone lintel by eye.

I slid the shoe off her foot and set it on the floor, and then I did the same with the other.

Her feet were small and cold inside her socks.

I held one in both hands until it warmed.

"Jakob."

"Yes," I said.

"Turn the light on."

I looked at the window, where the day was coming up thin and gray.

"It's early," I said.

"I know what it is. I want the lights on. I want to see you."

I reached up to the pull chain on the ceiling fixture and tugged it.

The bare bulb came on and lit the whole room.

She stood there in the open yellow glare, and she did not turn away from it.

I had been rough with her on the floor, and I had been rough at the mirror, because she wanted it and so did I.

I knew that this morning I could not be.

I had no idea what I would be instead.

She took the hem of her sweater and pulled it up over her head.

Her braid caught, and I reached out and freed it.

Her skin was gooseflesh in the cold room, brown and soft and marked red where the lawn chair webbing had pressed her.

I put both hands on her ribs.

They went all the way around.

My thumbs met at her breastbone and my fingertips met at her spine, and I could feel her heart going through the bone.

"Look at me," she said.

"I'm looking."

"You're looking at my ribs," she said.

"They're good ribs."

She laughed, a cracked, wet laugh, and her eyes filled.

I kissed her.

I did it slowly, with her mouth open under mine, and it tasted of the cold and of salt.

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