58

Marianna.

An actual, folded-from-actual-paper paper airplane, sitting on the outside sill, nose pressed against the glass like it knocked and is waiting to be let in.

I stare at it for a full four seconds, during which my brain cycles through the following possibilities in rapid succession: wrong window, neighborhood kid, very lost bird, elaborate prank, sleep hallucination, I've finally lost it—

I get out of bed.

The floor has three creaky spots that I've already memorized from six hours of occupancy. I avoid them out of some instinct toward stealth that has no logical basis—Marco could sleep through a structural collapse—and cross to the window in four careful steps.

The paper airplane is a real paper airplane. Folded tight, with a kind of precision that suggests the person who made it did not just randomly crumple paper into a vague triangular shape. This is an engineered paper airplane. The creases are sharp. The wings are symmetric.

I unlatch the window and push it up.

The Wynwood night comes in—warm, heavy, smelling of the jasmine that someone's planted in the courtyard below and the distant bass line from the bar two blocks over and something else underneath it, something dark and familiar that my nervous system recognizes before my brain does.

I look down.

The building is three stories. The courtyard below is lit by a single amber streetlight that turns everything the color of old photographs. There's a small parking area, a scraggly palm tree that's seen better decades, a dumpster.

And Duane.

Standing directly below my window with his hands in his pockets and his face tilted up, wearing dark jeans and a black jacket, looking for all the world like a man who ends up in strangers' courtyards at 2 AM on a regular basis and finds nothing remarkable about this.

I stare at him.

He stares back up at me.

Something happens in the space between us—three floors of Miami night air and amber streetlight—that doesn't have a name in any language I know. My heart does that thing it's been doing lately, that thing I've been trying to diagnose and categorize and file appropriately, the thing that feels like a combination of oh and you and why are you doing this to me specifically.

"You folded that," I say. My voice comes out stupidly normal. Matter-of-fact, like I'm commenting on the weather.

"Obviously," he says. From three stories down his voice is low, carrying just far enough. Not loud. He's not performing this. He's just... talking to me.

"You make paper airplanes."

A pause. "I make a lot of things that would surprise you."

I lean my arms on the windowsill. The paint is chipping under my forearms. Behind me, Marco's snoring continues its steady four-second rhythm, keeping time like the world's least romantic metronome.

And something in my chest does this thing—this completely involuntary, completely stupid, completely me thing—where I think: Romeo and Juliet.

Specifically, I think of every teenage girl's romantic fantasy, the one where the beautiful impossible boy stands in the courtyard below and the window becomes a stage and everything is lit like it was designed by someone who understood that adolescent longing deserves good cinematography.

Then I think: Romeo and Juliet both died at seventeen.

Then I think: Juliet was thirteen. That whole play is a tragedy about a child dying. Why did my brain go there.

Then I think: Because this is the kind of thing that happens in stories, and my life has been feeling alarmingly like a story lately, and I don't know whether that's romantic or a warning.

Duane is still looking up at me with those dark eyes that catch the amber light and hold it.

He's quiet for a moment. Not the uncomfortable kind of quiet—his quiet. The kind that means he's deciding whether to tell the truth.

"You left your charger," he says finally.

I look at him.

He looks back.

We both know that's not why.

"Duane."

"Marianna."

It does something to my nervous system that I would describe clinically as a significant spike in sympathetic arousal and personally as oh no.

"You could have texted," I say.

"You could have answered."

"I was awake."

"I know."

I open my mouth. Close it. He knew I was awake. He drove here at 2 AM and folded a precise paper airplane and threw it at my specific window because he knew I was lying in the dark not sleeping.

I don't ask how he knew. I'm not sure I want to unpack what it means that he did.

"Canada's in four days," I say instead.

"Three."

"You should be sleeping."

"So should you."

The bar two blocks over switches to something slower. The bass line softens. The jasmine in the courtyard does what jasmine does at night, which is absolutely nothing except smell like every good decision you almost made.

"Did you actually bring the charger?" I ask.

He reaches into his jacket pocket. Holds up a phone charger. The exact one I left on his bathroom counter along with the folded hoodie and three weeks of complicated feelings.

I stare at it.

"Three stories," I say.

"I'm aware."

"You're going to throw a phone charger three stories up to a window."

"I have good aim."

"You drive cars for a living."

"I also have good aim."

I should tell him to go home. I should pull the window down and go back to the bed I borrowed from my brother and practice the very healthy skill of not reaching for things that complicate my life. I have a job now. I have half a rent payment. I have a career I'm building from the bottom up in a city that doesn't owe me anything. I have the beginnings of something that belongs to me and nobody else.

I have the very recent memory of what it felt like to have him in the dark, his arm across my waist, his heartbeat against my spine, and I know with the specific clarity of someone who's been burned before that this is exactly how it starts—the small things, the paper airplanes, the 2 AM certainties—before it becomes something you can't put back in the box.

"Come up," I hear myself say.

A beat.

"Marco's asleep," I add, and I mean it as a practical statement and it comes out sounding like permission, which maybe it is, maybe that's the same thing.

Duane looks up at me for one more second. Then he pockets the charger. Moves toward the building entrance, unhurried, like a man who has decided something and doesn't need to announce it.

I pull my head back inside.

Lean against the wall next to the window.

Put my hand over my chest, where my heart is doing the thing.

Romeo and Juliet, my brain says again, helpfully.

"Both dead at seventeen," I whisper back to it.

Marco snores. Four seconds. Four seconds. Four seconds.

I push off the wall and go open the front door.