“Cath,” Levi whispered. She felt her chair wobble and knew he was kicking it. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Obviously,” she said. “‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight—’”
“Cather.”
She cleared her throat, still focused on the book. “Shut up, I owe you one. At least one. And also, I’m trying to read here.… When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had just two things on my mind.…”
When Cath glanced up between paragraphs, Levi was grinning. He bent forward to slide out of his coat, then found a new way to rest his legs on her chair and leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes.
* * *
Cath had never read out loud this much before. Fortunately it was a good book, so she sort of forgot after a while that she was reading out loud and that Levi was listening—and the circumstances that got them here. An hour or so passed, maybe even two, before Cath dropped her hands and the book into her lap. The sun had finished setting, and the only light in her room was from her desk lamp.
“You can stop whenever you want,” Levi said.
“I don’t want to stop,” She looked up at him. “I’m just really”—she was blushing, she wasn’t sure why—“thirsty.”
Levi laughed and sat up. “Oh … Yeah. Let me get you something. You want soda? Water? I could be back here in ten with a gingerbread latte.”
She was about to tell him not to bother, but then she remembered how good that gingerbread latte was. “Really?”
“Back in ten,” he said, already standing and putting on his jacket. He stopped in the doorway, and Cath felt tense, remembering how sad he’d looked the last time he stood there.
Levi smiled.
Cath didn’t know what to do, so she sort of nodded and gave him the world’s lamest thumbs-up.
When he was gone, she stood up and stretched. Her back and her shoulders popped. She went to the bathroom. Came back. Stretched again. Checked her phone. Then lay down on her bed.
It smelled like Levi. Like coffee grounds. And some sort of warm, spicy thing that might be cologne. Or soap. Or deodorant. Levi sat on her bed so often, it was all familiar. Sometimes he smelled like cigarette smoke, but not tonight. Sometimes like beer.
She’d left the door unlocked, so when he knocked again, Cath just sat up and told him to come in. She’d meant to get up and sit back down at her desk, but Levi was already handing her the drinks and taking off his coat. His face was flushed from the cold, and when his coat touched her, it was so cold, she jumped.
“Five below,” he said, taking off his hat and riffling his hair until it stuck up again. “Scoot over.”
Cath did, scooting up toward her pillow and leaning against the wall. Levi took his drink and smiled at her. She set the drink carrier on her desk; he’d brought her a big glass of water, too.
“Can I ask you something?” She looked down at her Starbucks cup.
“Of course.”
“Why did you take a literature class if you can’t finish a book?”
He turned to her—they were sitting shoulder to shoulder. “I need six hours of literature to graduate. That’s two classes. I tried to get one out of the way freshman year, but I failed it. I failed … a lot that year.”
“How do you get through any of your classes?” Cath had hours of assigned reading, almost every single night.
“Coping strategies.”
“Such as?”
“I record my lectures and listen to them later. Professors usually cover most of what’s on the test in class. And I find study groups.”
“And you lean on Reagan—”
“Not just Reagan.” He grinned. “I’m really good at quickly identifying the smartest girl in every class.”
Cath frowned at him. “God, Levi, that’s so exploitive.”
“How is it exploitive? I don’t make them wear miniskirts. I don’t call them ‘baby.’ I just say, ‘Hello, smart girl, would you like to talk to me about Great Expectations?’”
“They probably think you like them.”
“I do like them.”
“If it wasn’t exploitive, you’d harass smart boys, too—”
“I do, in a pinch. Do you feel exploited, Cather?” He was still grinning at her over his coffee cup.
“No,” she said, “I know that you don’t like me.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“So, this is old hat for you? Finding a girl to read a whole book to you?”
He shook his head. “No, this is a first.”
“Well, now I feel exploited,” she said, setting her drink down and reaching for the book.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Chapter twelve—”
“I’m serious.” Levi pulled the book down and looked at her. “Thank you.”
Cath held his eyes for a few seconds. Then she nodded and pulled back the book.
* * *
After another fifty pages, Cath was getting sleepy. At some point, Levi had leaned against her, and then she’d leaned back, and it was hard to think about what was happening on that side of her body because she was busy reading.… Though there was almost an entire chapter there where her lips and her eyes were moving, but her brain wasn’t keeping track of anything but how warm he was. How warm her roommate’s boyfriend was.
One of her roommate’s boyfriends. Did that matter? If Reagan had three boyfriends, did that mean this was only one-third wrong?
Just leaning against Levi probably wasn’t wrong. But leaning against him because he was warm and not-exactly-soft … Wrong.
Cath’s voice rasped, and he sat up away from her a little bit. “Want to take a break?” he asked.
She nodded, only partly grateful.
Levi stood up and stretched. The tails of his flannel shirt didn’t quite lift up over the waist of his jeans. Cath stood up, too, and rubbed her eyes.
“You’re tired,” he said. “Let’s stop.”
“We’re not stopping now,” she said. “We’re almost done.”
“We’ve still got a hundred pages—”
“Are you getting bored?”
“No. I just feel like it’s too much, what you’re doing for me. Bordering on exploitive.”
“Pfft,” Cath said. “I’ll be right back. And then we’ll finish. We’re half done, and I want to know what happens. Nobody’s said, ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy’ yet.”
When she came back, Levi was in the hallway, leaning against the door. He must have gone up to the boys’ floor to use the bathroom. “This is weird now that I know you have a key,” she said.
She let him in, and he dropped down onto the bed again and smiled at her. Cath glanced at her desk chair, then felt his hand on her sleeve. He pulled her down next to him on the bed, and their eyes met for a second. Cath looked away as if they hadn’t.
“Look what we sell at Starbucks,” he said, holding an energy bar out to her.
Cath took it. “Blueberry Bliss. Wow. This takes me back two whole months.”
“Months are different in college,” Levi said, “especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they’re like dog months.”
She unwrapped the protein bar and offered him half. He took it and tapped it against hers. “Cheers.”
* * *
It was really late. And too dark in the room to be reading this much. Cath’s voice was rough now, like someone had run a dull knife across it. Like she was recovering from a cold or a crying jag.
At some point Levi had put his left arm around her and pulled her back against his chest—she’d been fidgeting and rubbing her back on the wall, and Levi just reached behind her and pulled her into him.
Then his hand had fallen back down to the bed and stayed there. Except for when he stretched or moved. When he moved, Levi would bring his hand up to Cath’s shoulder to hold her against him while he adjusted.
She could feel his chest rising when he breathed. She could feel his breath on her hair sometimes. When he moved his chin, it bumped into the back of her head. The muscles in Cath’s arms and her back and her neck were starting to ache, just from being held so long at attention.
She lost her place in the book and stopped reading for a moment.
Levi’s chin bumped into her head. “Take a break,” he said in a voice that wasn’t a whisper but was just as soft.
She nodded, and he held her left elbow while he reached his right arm across her to get the glass of water. His body curved around her for a second, then settled back again against the wall. He kept his hand on her elbow.
Cath took a drink, then set down the water. She tried not to squirm, but her back was stiff, and she arched it against him.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded again. And then she felt him slowly moving. “Here…”
Levi slid down the wall onto the bed, resting on his side, then tugged Cath down so she was lying on her back in front of him—his arm beneath her head like a pillow. She relaxed her shoulders and felt warm flannel against the back of her neck.
“Better?” he asked in his superscript voice. He was looking at her face. Giving Cath a chance to say no without having to say it out loud. She didn’t speak. Or nod. Or answer. Instead she looked down and shifted slightly toward him onto her side, leaning the book against his chest.
She started reading again, and felt Levi’s elbow curve around her shoulder.
* * *
Cath didn’t have to read very loud when he was this close. Which was good because her voice was almost gone. (Gone.) God, Levi was warm, and up close, he smelled so much like himself, it made her tear up. Her eyes were tired. She was tired.
When Johnny—one of the main characters—got hurt, Levi took a sharp breath. By that time, Cath’s cheek was on his chest, and she could feel his ribs expanding. She took a deep breath, too—her voice broke a little more, and Levi tightened his grip around her.
She wondered whether there was any blood left in his arm.
She wondered what happened when they got to the end of the story.
She kept reading.
There were too many boys in this book. Too many arms and legs and flushed faces.
She’d expected to laugh when she finally got to the line “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” but she didn’t, because it meant that Johnny was dead, and she thought that maybe Levi was crying. Maybe Cath was crying, too. Her eyes were tired. She was tired.
* * *
“‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.…’”
Cath closed the book and let it fall on Levi’s chest, not sure what happened next. Not sure she was awake, all things considered.
The moment it fell, he pulled her into him. Onto him. With both arms. Her chest pressed against his, and the paperback slid between their stomachs.
Cath’s eyes were half closed, and so were Levi’s—and his lips only looked small from afar, she realized, because of their doll-like pucker. They were perfectly big, really, now that she had a good look at them. Perfectly something.
He nudged his nose against hers, and their mouths fell sleepily together, already soft and open.
When Cath’s eyes closed, her eyelids stuck. She wanted to open them. She wanted to get a better look at Levi’s too-dark eyebrows, she wanted to admire his crazy, vampire hairline—she had a feeling this was never going to happen again and that it might even ruin what was left of her life, so she wanted to open her eyes and bear some witness.
But she was so tired.
And his mouth was so soft.
And nobody had ever kissed Cath like this before. Only Abel had kissed her before, and that was like getting pushed squarely on the mouth and pushing back.
Levi’s kisses were all taking. Like he was drawing something out of her with soft little jabs of his chin.
She brought her fingers up to his hair, and she couldn’t open her eyes.
Eventually, she couldn’t stay awake.
“I’m sorry, Penelope.”
“Don’t waste my time with sorries, Simon. If we stop to apologize and forgive each other every time we step on each other’s toes, we’ll never have time to be friends.”
SIXTEEN
Cath didn’t wake up when the door swung open.
But she jumped when it slammed closed. That’s when she felt Levi sprawled out beneath her, the warm scrape of his chin against her forehead. Then she woke up.
Reagan was standing at the end of Cath’s bed, staring at them. She was still wearing last night’s jeans, and her silvery blue eyeshadow had drifted onto her cheeks.
Cath sat up. And Levi sat up. Groggily. And Cath felt her stomach barreling up into her throat.
Levi reached for Cath’s phone and looked at it. “Shit,” he said. “I’m two hours late for work.” He was up then and putting on his coat. “Fell asleep reading,” he said, half to Reagan, half to the floor.
“Reading,” Reagan said, looking at Cath.
“Later,” Levi said, more to the floor than to either of them.
And then he was gone. And Reagan was still standing at the end of Cath’s bed.
Cath’s eyes were sticky and sore, and suddenly full of tears. “I’m so sorry,” she said, feeling it. Feeling it in her stomach and in every sore muscle between her shoulders. “Oh my God.”
“Don’t,” Reagan said. She was obviously furious.
“I … I’m just so sorry.”
“Don’t. Do not apologize.”
Cath crossed her legs and hunched over, holding her face. “But I knew he was your boyfriend.” Cath was crying now. Even though it would probably just make Reagan more angry.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Reagan said, very nearly shouting. “Not anymore. Not … for a long time, actually. So just, don’t.” Reagan inhaled loudly, then let it out. “I just didn’t expect this to happen,” she said. “And, if it did happen, I didn’t expect it to bother me. I just … it’s Levi. And Levi always likes me best.”