The toast sat between them on the counter, going cold, and Aliyah watched Jaehyun's thumb press a dent into the crust of his slice without eating it. The clock on his stove said 7:42. Her mother's one hour had already lost twelve minutes to the walk from his building to the car, to him circling the block twice for a spot that wasn't there, to the two of them not talking while the engine idled at the curb outside her place.

"That's my building," she said, though he could see it. "Third floor. The one with the dead plant on the sill."

He nodded, both hands on the wheel at ten and two like he was taking a road test. The porch light behind her was on, and she could feel it on the back of her neck like a hand.

"Jaehyun."

"Yeah."

"You have to let me out of the car."

He didn't. He put it in park and left the engine running and turned toward her, and the seatbelt across his chest pulled tight when he reached over her lap. His forearm grazed her thigh. His hand found the buckle, and the whole car smelled like his soap and like the toast and like the sex still on both of them.

The buckle clicked. He didn't let go of it.

His eyes came off the buckle and went to her mouth and stayed there. Not a glance. A decision. Aliyah's bag was on her lap and she had both hands wrapped around the strap of it, and she felt her knuckles go white around the nylon while the engine hummed and the porch light buzzed overhead.

"Drive," she said.

"I'm parked."

"You know what I meant."

He looked at her a second longer than the moment could hold. Then he let go of the buckle and sat back and put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb, and Aliyah exhaled through her nose and looked out the window at her own building sliding past — the dead plant, the lit window, her mother's shadow crossing behind the curtain.

They drove four blocks without a word. The road noise filled everything. A bus groaned past them and the car rocked in its wake and Jaehyun's jaw was set in a way she hadn't seen before, not the flat bored face he wore in the chem lecture hall, something underneath it, and his hands moved on the wheel in small precise corrections, too careful, like he was keeping them busy on purpose.

"You're going the long way," she said.

"Traffic."

"There's no traffic. It's seven in the evening on a Sunday."

His mouth twitched. "Then I'm going the long way."

She turned her head and looked at him properly for the first time since the kitchen. The streetlights slid across his face one after another, lighting up his cheekbone and then his jaw and then gone. He'd put his hoodie back on but the collar of his tee was still damp at the neck from the shower, and she could see the edge of a mark she'd left on him above his collarbone, a small red half-moon where her teeth had been, and the sight of it made her stomach do something complicated that she couldn't name and didn't want to.

"My mom is going to ask me where I was," she said.

"What are you going to tell her?"

"I don't know yet." She picked at a loose thread on her bag strap. "She's a nurse. She works nights. She's seen every lie a person can tell, she can smell one from the parking lot."

"So don't lie."

"Easy for you to say. Your mom isn't holding a year of grounding over your head like a guillotine."

He was quiet for a second. Then: "My mom would be more upset that I didn't tell her I was in a car with a girl than she would be about the girl."

It was so unexpectedly true and so dryly delivered that Aliyah laughed — a short, cracked sound that surprised her — and Jaehyun's mouth pulled to the side, just barely, and the air in the car changed. It got easier to breathe. She realized she'd been holding her bag against her chest like a shield this whole time and she made herself lower it to her lap.

"Was the seatbelt thing a test," she said, "or am I failing it right now."

He glanced at her. "What?"

"You clicked my seatbelt for me. Like I was five. And then you just — sat there."

"You were shaking," he said, simply. "I didn't know if you could do it."

Aliyah went hot from her collarbone to her hairline. She looked out the window so he wouldn't see the color in her face and caught the reflection of them both in the glass, the two of them in this small dark box moving through the city, and her own eyes looked wide and stupid and she hated it.

"I could do it," she said.

"Okay."

"I'm not — I'm not fragile."

"I know what you're not." He turned the wheel and the car swung around the corner onto her street, and the porch light was there again, closer now. He pulled to the curb and put it in park and this time he didn't reach for anything.

Aliyah sat with her hand on the door handle and didn't pull it. The engine ticked. Somewhere up the block a dog was barking at nothing.

"It wasn't a test," he said. "For the record. It wasn't a test."

"Okay."

"It's just — I don't know how to do this part." He said it flat, like he was reporting a grade he didn't like. "The part after. I've never had a part after."

"Me neither," she said, and the honesty of it sat between them, and then she pulled the handle and the door swung open and the night air hit her legs and she was so sore she had to hold the frame to stand.

She turned back, crouched a little at the open door. "Thank you. For the toast. And the water. And — the other thing."

"Which other thing."

"Don't make me say it at my mother's curb."

He almost smiled. Almost. It was there in the corner of his mouth and then it was gone and he said, "Text me. When you're done. Whatever happens."

"Why, so you can hear about my execution?"

"So I know you're okay."

Aliyah stood there a beat too long. Then she shut the door, and he waited until she was up the walk and through the front door before he pulled away, and she knew he waited because she watched him through the window, and she knew she watched him because she was still standing at the door with her hand on the deadbolt when her mother's voice came down the hall.

"Aliyah Marie."

—

The next morning she got to campus early and stayed early. She sat in the back of the lecture hall with her hood up and her phone face-down and did not look at the front row where a certain head of black hair was bent over a notebook, and when the professor said something about electron orbitals she wrote it down twice like the repetition would keep her from thinking about anything else.

She skipped the chem building after class. She took the long way to the library. She ate her lunch standing up in the stairwell of the humanities building, which was a thing she had never done in her life, and she kept her phone in her pocket when it buzzed and did not look at it until she was alone in a study room with the door shut.

You alive?

She read it four times. Then she typed barely and put the phone back in her pocket and did not answer the next one, which came an hour later and said that's not an answer.

She didn't know what to say. The truth was that she'd spent the whole night on her bedroom floor with her back against the door while her mother talked at her through it — grounded, indefinitely, until the grade came up, and also a long and terrible conversation about her body and her worth and the things a girl gives away too cheap — and the truth was that some of it had landed and some of it had bounced off and the part that had landed was the part where her mother's voice cracked at the end and said I'm not mad, I'm scared, and Aliyah had sat on the other side of the door with her knees pulled up and cried silently so Maya wouldn't hear it.

And the whole time, underneath all of it, she kept thinking about a hand on a seatbelt buckle and a voice saying so I know you're okay, and she didn't know what to do with that either.

—

By the afternoon she'd stopped answering at all. She figured that was cleaner. He was the class president, he had a hundred people who wanted his attention, he'd get bored of texting a girl who didn't text back and he'd move on and the whole thing would turn into one of those stories you tell at a party when you're thirty.

Except her legs still hurt. And her phone kept buzzing.

She was coming out of the athletic complex at four-thirty because the only quiet bathroom on campus was on the ground floor there and she'd needed a place to sit in a stall and not be perceived, and she was halfway across the lobby with her hood still up when the door to the gym swung open and a knot of guys came out talking loud, and she recognized the shape of one of them before she recognized his face.

Jaehyun had his gym bag on his shoulder and his hair was wet and pushed back off his forehead and there was a towel around his neck, and he was loose-limbed and flushed in a way that made the whole lobby feel warmer, and he was laughing at something one of the guys said — actually laughing, head tipped back — and Aliyah had never seen him laugh like that in her life. She stopped walking. The hood was up. She turned her face to the bulletin board like the flyers for intramural dodgeball were the most fascinating thing on earth.

"Yo, Park, you coming Thursday?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe means yes, you always say maybe and then you show up—"

The voices moved past her toward the doors. She counted to ten. She counted to twenty. She looked up and the lobby was empty and she let out a breath and started walking again, fast, toward the side exit.

A hand closed around her wrist.

"Hood down," Jaehyun said, quiet, right at her ear. "You look like you're casing the place."

She turned and he was there, damp and warm and smelling like chlorine and soap, and his fingers were still around her wrist, and he was looking at her like he'd been looking for her all day and had finally, finally found her.

"Let go," she said, without any force in it.

"You didn't answer me."

"I was busy."

"Busy." His thumb moved once across the inside of her wrist, over the pulse, and her whole arm went electric. "All day."

"Jaehyun—"

He pulled. Not hard. Just enough that she had to take a step to keep her balance, and then another, and then he was walking her backward through a door she hadn't even seen, into a dim corridor that smelled like bleach and rubber mats, and the door swung shut behind them and cut the lobby noise off like a switch.

The locker room. Empty. Rows of metal lockers and a bench down the middle and a long window of frosted glass up high letting in a grey afternoon light, and the floor was still wet in patches from the showers, and the only sound was the drip of a faucet somewhere and her own breathing, too loud.

"I texted you four times," he said.

"I know."

"Four times, Aliyah."

"I know. " She pulled her wrist out of his hand and he let her, and she took a step back and her shoulder hit a locker and it rang out flat and metallic through the whole room. "What do you want me to say? That my mom spent three hours telling me I ruined my life? That I sat on my floor all night? That I don't know what this is and it's making me crazy and I thought if I just — didn't look at you for a day it would go back to normal, and it didn't, and now you're standing here all wet and I can't even—"

He kissed her.

Not gentle. He came in and got a hand in her hair, at the base of her skull under the hood, and tipped her head back and kissed her like he was ending an argument, and Aliyah made a sound into his mouth that she would be embarrassed about later and grabbed two fistfuls of his damp tee and kissed him back.

He broke off. "Four times," he said against her mouth, breathless, and she laughed, and he kissed the laugh off her.

His hands went to her hips and he lifted and walked her back and her feet left the floor and then her ass hit the bench, cold metal through her jeans, and he stepped between her knees and pushed them apart and kissed her again, deeper, one hand sliding up under the back of her hoodie, palm flat and hot on her spine.

"What are we doing," she said, or tried to, and it came out wrong because his mouth was on her throat.

"I don't know." He said it into her skin. "I've been thinking about this since the car."

"The car."

"The seatbelt." His teeth grazed her jaw. "Your face when I clicked it. How bad you wanted me to just—" He didn't finish. He pulled back and looked at her, and his eyes were dark and his chest was moving fast and his hair had fallen over his forehead and he looked, for one second, like a boy who couldn't believe his luck. "Tell me to stop and I stop."

"Don't stop."

His hands went to her waistband. He got her jeans open and dragged them down her thighs and off one ankle, and her underwear with them, and the air in the locker room was cold on her and she didn't care, and he dropped to his knees on the wet tile and put his mouth on her.

Aliyah's head went back against the locker with a clang. Her hand found his wet hair. His tongue was flat and hot and he knew exactly — she didn't know how he knew, she didn't care how he knew — and he licked up through her with a slow drag that made her whole body curl forward over him, and then he did it again, and again, and slid two fingers into her while he sucked at her clit, and the wet sound of it echoed off the lockers and she heard herself moan and clamped her own hand over her mouth.

He pulled his mouth away. "Don't."

"There's people—"

"It's empty. It's just us." His fingers curled inside her and her hips jerked. "I want to hear it."

She took her hand away. He put his mouth back and she let it out, low and shaking, and the sound of it in that tiled room was the filthiest thing she'd ever heard and she didn't stop.

"Jaehyun—" Her thighs were trembling on either side of his head. "Jaehyun, I'm gonna—"

He pulled back. She nearly cried.

"Not yet," he said, and got to his feet, and his mouth was wet and his chin was wet and she had never wanted anything the way she wanted him right then. He got his shorts open and pushed them down and his cock came free, thick and flushed and already leaking, and Aliyah reached for it and got her hand around it and he hissed through his teeth.

"Condom," she said.

"In the bag. Locker." He was already moving, one hand out to the row of lockers, yanking his bag off the bench and digging through it, and a foil square came out and he tore it with his teeth and rolled it on and then he was back between her knees and lifting her and she got her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and he pushed into her.

She felt every inch of it. The stretch of him opening her, the slow deep slide, her body giving way around him until he was all the way in and her heels were dug into the back of his thighs and her forehead was pressed into his shoulder and she was making a sound that wasn't a word.

"Okay?" His voice was wrecked.

"Yeah. Yeah. Move. "

He moved. Slow at first, a long pull out and a deep push back in, and the bench creaked under them and her back was against the lockers and the metal was cold through her hoodie and she didn't care, and then she got her hands on his shoulders and pushed, and he went back a step and she slid off the bench and turned around and bent over it and looked back at him.

"Like this," she said. "I want to—"

He didn't make her finish. He got a hand on her hip and pushed back into her from behind and she gasped and her fingers scrabbled at the bench, and this angle — this angle — he was hitting something that made her eyes water.

"Fuck," he said, low, and his other hand came down on her ass and the crack of it rang off the walls and she yelped and pushed back against him. "Yeah? That what you wanted?"

"Harder."

He gave it to her harder. The slap of skin on skin filled the room, and the bench was scraping the floor, and Aliyah braced her hands on the metal and pushed back to meet him and he got a fist in her hoodie and pulled her upright, her back to his chest, his mouth at her ear.

"You didn't answer me all day," he said, ragged, driving into her. "Four times. I sat there like an idiot checking my phone."

"I'm sorry—"

"Don't be sorry." His hand came up and closed around her throat, not tight, a question, and she tipped her head back against his shoulder and gave him her neck and he squeezed. "Just don't do it again."

She couldn't answer. She nodded as much as his hand would let her and he let go and turned her around and lifted her back onto the bench and pushed back in, and she wrapped her legs around him and her arms around his neck and held on.

"Ride me," he said.

So she did. She got her feet on the bench on either side of his hips and he sat back and she came down onto him and took him all the way, and his hands were on her hips and then her ass and then her waist, and she found the rhythm, rolling her hips down onto him, and the friction of her clit against his body made her breath come in pieces.

"That's it," he said. "God. That's it. "

She looked down at him. His head was tipped back and his eyes were half shut and his mouth was open and his throat was working, and he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, and she leaned down and kissed him while she rode him and he groaned into her mouth and his hands tightened on her hips and started guiding her, faster, harder, until she wasn't doing it anymore, he was.

"I'm close," she said against his mouth. "Jaehyun, I'm—"

"Come on me." His voice cracked. "Come on my cock, come on—"

She came. It went through her like a current, her whole body locking and then shaking, her cunt clenching down around him in waves, and she heard herself crying out — high and broken and nothing like her — and he held her through it, both hands on her ass, pulling her down onto him and not letting her get away from it.

"God—" His hips stuttered. "Aliyah—"

He pushed up into her once more, hard, and went still, and she felt his cock pulsing inside her, filling the condom, and his hands on her were shaking, and he made a sound low in his chest that she felt all the way through her.

She slumped forward onto him. Her forehead against his. Both of them breathing like they'd run somewhere.

The faucet dripped. Somewhere down the corridor a door opened and shut.

"Four times," she said, into his mouth, and he laughed — actually laughed, breathless and surprised — and his hand came up and pushed her hair back off her face.

"Shut up," he said, and kissed her forehead, and Aliyah closed her eyes and let him hold her there in the cold grey light of the empty locker room, and thought: oh no.

She stayed like that a while. Long enough that the sweat cooled on her back and the metal of the bench started to bite into the underside of her thighs, long enough that his breathing went from wrecked to even under her ear. His hand moved slow through her hair, root to tip, like he was untangling something without looking at it. The faucet kept up its drip. Somewhere above them a fluorescent tube buzzed and stuttered and buzzed again.

Then her phone went off. Not a buzz — the full ring, loud in all that tile, her mother's ringtone cutting through the room like a smoke alarm.

Aliyah shot upright so fast her head spun. Her jeans were bunched around one ankle and her phone was in them, and she got it out with wet, shaking fingers and looked at the screen and then at Jaehyun, and he was already moving, already pulling himself together with the flat efficiency of a man putting out a fire.

"It's her. It's her, it's the third time she's called—"

"Answer it."

"I can't answer it, I'm —" She gestured at herself, at all of her, and the phone kept ringing, and her mother's name lit up the screen like a warning.

"Then don't." He pulled his shorts up and got the condom off and knotted it and dropped it in the trash by the bench without ceremony. "But you're not doing this on my bench with your pants around your ankle. Get dressed."

She got dressed. It took forever and no time — she couldn't get her left leg through the hole, and her underwear had gone somewhere, and she found it under the bench and it was damp and cold and she put it on anyway because there was nothing else to do, and her hands wouldn't cooperate, and Jaehyun was already in his shirt and his hoodie and had his bag on his shoulder, watching her, not saying a word.

The phone stopped ringing.

"If she calls again I have to answer," Aliyah said. "You don't understand. She's going to call the campus police. She did it to my cousin. She will literally file a missing persons report on a nineteen-year-old."

"Then answer it and tell her the truth."

"The truth."

"That you're on campus. That you're with someone. That you're coming home." He zipped the bag. "Don't give her the whole thing on a phone. Give her enough to stop her dialing."

Aliyah looked at him. His hair was a mess and there was a red mark on his collarbone where her mouth had been and he was giving her advice like he'd done this before, like he knew what it was to be a person somebody worried about.

"Fine," she said. "Fine." She pulled her hood up. "I'll call her from the car."

"What car."

"The bus. Whatever. I'll figure it out."

He stood up straight. "I'm driving you."

"Jaehyun—"

"I'm driving you home." He said it the way he said everything when he'd decided something, flat and final, no room in it for negotiation. "You can't walk to the bus stop. You can barely stand up. I watched you grab the door frame on the way in."

"I'm fine."

"You're not." He picked her bag up off the floor where she'd dropped it and held it out. "And I'm not putting you on a bus so you can sit next to a stranger and shake for six blocks. Come on."

She took the bag. Her fingers brushed his and she hated how much she noticed it.

"You don't have to do this," she said. "This isn't — I'm not your problem. You don't owe me a ride."

"I know what I owe." He said it low, not looking at her, shouldering the bag and heading for the door. "Come on. Before somebody comes in here."

She followed him. Her legs felt like they belonged to someone else, that loose, weak, over-used feeling, and she had to stop at the door and put a hand on the frame and breathe, and he waited. He didn't say anything about it. He just waited, one hand on the door, looking down the corridor, and when she was ready he pushed it open and the two of them stepped out into the bleach-smelling hall.

The gym lobby light was at the far end. She could see it through the glass, that hard white fluorescence, and beyond it the shape of the front doors and the grey afternoon and the ordinary world she had to walk back into.

He caught her wrist. Not the way he had before — not the grab, the claim. His fingers went around it easy and stayed there, and his thumb found the inside of it, and Aliyah looked down at his hand on her arm and felt the whole corridor tilt.

"Listen to me," he said. "You're going to call her from the car. You're going to tell her you're ten minutes out. And when we get there I'm going to park and I'm going to sit there and wait until you're through that door and that light comes on and I see your face in the window. And then I'm going to leave."

"You don't have to—"

"I'm not asking." He tugged her, gently, toward the lobby. "And Aliyah. When you get inside and she starts in on you — and she will, she's going to start in on you — you don't get to go quiet on me again."

She frowned. "What does that mean."

"It means four times." His jaw worked. "It means I sat in my car after I dropped you off and I told myself it was fine, that you were fine, that you'd text when you were ready. And then I sat in that library all day with my phone in my hand like a kid with a crush, and you didn't answer, and I started thinking about all the reasons a girl doesn't answer, and none of them were good."

"Jaehyun—"

"I'm not saying it to make you feel bad." He stopped walking. His hand was still on her wrist. "I'm saying it because I don't do this. I don't sit in libraries checking my phone. I don't get in fights with my brother over whether I'm going to a party because I've got somewhere else to be. So if we're — whatever this is — then you can't just disappear on me and let me guess. That's the deal. You don't get to hide."

"I wasn't hiding."

He looked at her.

"Okay." The word came out smaller than she meant it to. "I was hiding. A little. I didn't know what to say to you. I still don't know what to say to you. My mom spent the whole night telling me I gave it away too cheap and I sat there and listened to her and the whole time I was thinking about you, and I felt like — I don't know. Like if I looked at you I'd have to figure out which one of us was right."

He didn't say anything. That was the worst part. He just stood there with his hand still loose around her wrist and his jaw working like he was chewing on the words before he let them out, and the corridor light buzzed over their heads, and Aliyah watched him decide.

Then he let go of her wrist.

Not the way you let go of something you're done with. He set her hand down, careful, like it was a glass he didn't want to chip, and then he just — waited. Didn't fill it. Didn't tell her what to feel or who was right. He stood there in his damp hoodie with his bag on his shoulder and let the silence sit there between them like a third person.

Aliyah had spent her whole life filling silences. It was a thing she did without deciding to. If a room got quiet she talked into it, made a joke, made noise, because quiet meant somebody was about to be disappointed and she'd rather get it over with. But he wasn't disappointed. He was just there, in the bleach smell and the hum, and something in her chest unclenched enough that she could breathe all the way down.

So she stepped in.

She got a hand flat on his chest, over the hoodie, and she felt his heart going under her palm — too fast for a man who looked that calm — and she went up on her toes, because he was taller than her by a head and she had to, and she kissed him.

Soft. That was the thing. Not the locker room kiss, not the teeth and the hand in her hair and the argument she'd lost. She kissed him soft, and slow, and she closed her eyes for it, and his bag slid off his shoulder and hit the floor with a thud and he didn't care about the bag. His hands came up and settled on her waist, both of them, and stayed there, and he let her lead.

She could taste the chlorine on his mouth from the pool, faint under it, and the mint of the gum he must have chewed in the car, and under all of it just him, that smell she'd caught on his pillow at six in the morning and hadn't been able to stop thinking about since. She tilted her head and kissed him deeper and he made a low sound in his throat and his fingers tightened on her waist, once, then relaxed again, letting her have it.

When she pulled back her face was hot and her lips were buzzing and he was looking down at her with his eyes a little unfocused, like she'd knocked something loose.

"I'm not going to hide," she said.

He blinked.

"From you. From this." She kept her hand on his chest. She needed the anchor. "I don't know what this is. I'm not going to stand here and pretend I do, because I'd be lying and you'd know it and then we'd be back where we started. But I know I'm not doing that again. The not-answering thing. The hood-up thing. The —" she gestured with her free hand, a flail, " — the whole stupid disappearing act. That was me being scared. And I'm still scared, honestly, I'm terrified, my mother is going to have opinions about you that I don't want to hear. But I'm not going to make you sit in a library guessing."

"Guessing is a hobby of mine," he said. "I'm very good at it. I've got a whole system."

"Yeah, well. Retire."

The corner of his mouth went up. Just the one corner. It was the closest thing to a smile she'd gotten out of him all day and she wanted to put it in her pocket and keep it.

"You're still shaking," he said.

"I know." She looked down at her own hand on his chest and it was, a fine tremble she couldn't stop, the leftover of the bench and the cold and the phone ringing and her mother's name on the screen. "It's not you. It's — everything. It's been a long two days."

"I know." He said it back to her, flat, and it landed harder than any soft thing he could have said, because he did know. He'd seen the bench. He'd seen her hand on the door frame. He'd seen the way she'd gone quiet on him, and he hadn't made it about himself, and there was something in that she didn't have a name for yet.

She took her hand off his chest. He picked his bag up off the floor and put it back on his shoulder without a word, and the two of them stood there in the corridor a second longer, and then she said, "Okay. Car."

"Car."

They walked out together. The gym lobby was empty now, the front desk dark, the whole building settling into its evening quiet, and their footsteps made the only sound. Outside the light had gone that grey-orange of a city at dusk, and the air was cold enough that Aliyah pulled her hood up again, and this time she didn't feel like she was hiding in it. She just felt cold.

His car was where he'd left it, tucked into the far corner of the lot under a broken streetlamp, and it was the only one left in that whole row. He unlocked it and opened her door and she got in and the seat was cold through her jeans and she sat on her hands to warm them while he came around and got in the other side.

He didn't start the engine right away.

"Phone," he said.

She got it out. Three missed calls from her mother, and a voicemail, and a text that just said Aliyah. Her name and a period. Her mother could put a whole lecture in a period.

"Call her," Jaehyun said. "I'll drive while you talk."

"She's going to hear it in my voice."

"Hear what?"

"That I've been —" she lowered her own voice, " — you know."

He looked at her. "She's a nurse, Aliyah. She's going to hear it either way. You just spent twenty minutes in a locker room." He put the key in the ignition. "Better she hears it on the phone than sees it on your face in the hallway."

It was such a cold, practical, absolutely correct thing to say that she almost laughed. She pressed her mother's name and put the phone to her ear and Jaehyun started the engine and pulled out of the lot, and the phone rang once, twice, three times, and then her mother picked up and didn't say anything at all.

"Mama," Aliyah said. "I'm sorry. I'm in the car. I'm ten minutes out."

A long pause. Then, in a voice that was doing its best to be steady and not quite managing it: "Where have you been since four o'clock."

Aliyah looked over at Jaehyun. He had both hands on the wheel again, ten and two, watching the road, and his jaw was set, and he didn't look at her and he didn't tell her what to say. He just drove.

"I was at the athletic complex," she said. "And then I was in the parking lot. And then I was in the car." She swallowed. "Mama, I'm not going to lie to you on the phone. I'm coming home. I'll tell you the rest of it to your face, all of it, but I'm not doing it on a phone call in a moving car. That's not fair to either of us."

The silence on the other end went on so long that Aliyah checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped.

"Ten minutes," her mother said at last. "You walk in that door in ten minutes and you sit on that couch and you look at me while you talk."

"Yes ma'am."

"And Aliyah —" her mother's voice caught, the way it had caught the night before, the crack Aliyah had heard through her bedroom door, " — I'm not mad. I'm scared. I've been scared since four o'clock."

"I know, Mama. I'm okay. I'm really okay."

"Ten minutes."

The call ended. Aliyah set the phone face-down on her thigh and let out a breath she'd been holding since the locker room, and the car turned onto the main road and the streetlights started their slow regular sweep across the windshield.

"That was good," Jaehyun said.

"That was terrifying."

"Both can be true." He glanced at her. "You didn't lie to her."

"I did, though. I left out about half of it."