I AM BURIED ALIVE UP to my neck in a sleeping bag, every breath a thunderclap, cold puffs of fog curling in and out of my mouth.

“Wow, I’m so tired,” I lie, unprovoked.

Silence. And then:

“. . . Yeah.”

“Time to count sheep, I guess.” I roll in the opposite direction of Wesley, features twisting into Kill me now. I will never be cool.

“Does that ever work for you?”

“Sure.” I’m lying again. Being nervous is turning me into a liar. “I mean, no. Have you never tried it? What do you think about before you go to sleep?”

He falls quiet. I think he’s trying to figure out what I’m really asking. “It’s like sheep, but Maybells. A whole bunch of you, one after the other, skipping through a field.”

I’m too keyed up for my sarcasm sensors to work, so I have no clue if he’s joking. Before I can blurt out any questionable nonsense, he thankfully keeps talking. “What about you? Do you go to your happy place?”

It takes me a second to remember that my happy place isn’t this tent, smelling of nylon, bug spray, and old garage. He’s referring to the coffee shop.

“Yeah, usually.” With the exception of this past week.

For years, shutting the door on the real world and dropping out of a hole in the clouds into my make-believe café has been an automatic transition. It requires full cooperation with abandoning the here and now, vacating my body. Here and now, I’m so aware of my body that there’s no way I’m going to be able to leave it. I’m powerfully aware of Wesley’s, too, how the back of his hand grazes my thigh through our sleeping bags. “Sorry,” he murmurs.

“It’s fine.” Boy, is it. I wish he’d do it again.

The reminder of my café flips a Pavlovian switch: pink shafts of light slant through the plastic skylight, then vanish as they rotate like a lighthouse beacon. I can already smell sugar and flour, hear the notes, lighter than air, twinkling out of a retro jukebox that harbors all my favorite music. I know where my invented customers with their blurred faces will be waiting in stasis, a magic wax museum where everyone comes to life when my hand turns the doorknob to enter. Inner peace is only a heartbeat away, an irresistible invitation.

Resist I do, pink neon shrinking from Wesley’s profile, receding into the night like banished spirits. “Do you really think about a whole bunch of skipping Maybell sheep?” I ask.

“Are you sure you want to know?” His voice is low and dangerous.

Yes.

No.

This is a feast of terrible ideas. Don’t start anything you can’t finish, I tell myself. We live together, a fact that will be true no matter how many regrets I wake up with tomorrow in the glaring light of day. I will not jeopardize my peace, my dream career, for a man. No matter how surprisingly sweet he may have turned out to be under his crispy shell.

“No,” I decide, uncertainly.

Wesley’s silences are even more frustrating in the dark. I can’t read his face to know if he’s disappointed or relieved.

Damn my aversion to thick silences. “Your bedroom is right above mine.”

“I’ve noticed.”

I respond too quickly, almost sitting up. Almost pouncing on him. “How?”

“You close your window at about three in the morning, whenever the temperature starts to drop.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was that loud.” I like fresh air, but he’s absolutely right—I get too cold in the middle of the night and have to shut my window.

“It isn’t. I have trouble sleeping, so I’m usually awake at three anyway. That’s why I can hear it.” He adjusts his position, sleeping bag rustling. “It’s nice, in a way. I don’t feel so . . . by myself.”

“I know what you mean. I’m not sure I’d even want to live in that house by myself, anymore.” I wet my lips. “I mean that I wouldn’t have minded, but having had company, and knowing that having company is better—” I twist the knob on that sentence until it shuts off. I’m rambling nonsensically.

“No, I know what you mean.” We’re repeating ourselves now, and can’t help but laugh. It breaks the tension.

“I stayed in a tent like this when I went to camp as a kid,” he tells me. “I refused to participate in the trust fall and the counselors told my parents I was combative.”

I giggle. “Of course you did.”

“Are you calling me combative?” he says, mock stern.

“You? Noooooo, never. You’ve been a prince from the jump. Trying to get me to sell my half of the estate, eating breakfast at seven because I wake up at eight—and don’t even try to tell me that’s not on purpose—”

“All right, all right,” he cuts in before I can pick up steam. “I’m sorry. It takes me a while to get used to new people. And I didn’t see you coming, so it was even harder. Didn’t get a chance to prepare myself.”

“I think I’m growing on you, though.” I know I sound smug. It’s because I am. I poke his ribs and he convulses. My laugh kicks up an evil notch.

He pokes me back. “It’s like if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it’ll jump out. But if you heat the water slowly, it gets used to it and stays put. You were already boiling when I was thrown into you.”

“My apologies. I can’t help being this hot.”

He doesn’t laugh at my joke. “It’s getting easier to handle. I’m not minding being boiled, nowadays.”

Our next period of silence descends naturally, but if I shone a flashlight over all the dark space that surrounds us, it would illuminate a hundred lingering words. My lips part, trying to summon the right ones. Most of the time, I feel like I live all the way down inside of myself, deep, deep down, so far away from my voice that I hardly hear it and certainly nobody else ever does. I’ve been told before that I blend in, difficult to notice, easy to talk over. But ever since I realized Wesley notices me, it’s like I’ve gone to the surface of myself and stayed there. I’m not used to feeling the world at such close range, having an effect on my environment, present in my own life. I’m run ragged by it. I don’t have the wherewithal to project a more flattering version of myself, stumbling when I aim to be charming and likable. I’m bare-bones Maybell.