you can fight.”
“I won’t allow it anymore,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear and crossing her arms stubbornly. “You’re just going to have to stay in my room.”
“Because that’s relaxing,” he replied with gentle sarcasm. “I barely shut my eyes last night. Trust me, I’ll get more sleep on your roof.”
“No,” she said, sticking to her guns, even though she was getting warm and jittery at the thought of him in her room again. “You either come inside or you don’t spend the night here at all.”
Lucas looked up at her. “We’ll figure something out when I get back. Okay?”
Helen reluctantly agreed and went into the house to see her dad. Through a wide yawn, he tried to ask her how her weekend had gone but after working double shifts for two days straight he could barely keep his eyes open. Helen sent him to bed, promising to fix breakfast in the morning. Jerry was snoring away before she’d even brushed her teeth. She finished up in the bathroom and put on a pair of boxer shorts and a baggy V-neck tee, thinking that Lucas would appreciate her attempt to cover up, and then went to the linen closet to find an air mattress she was pretty sure her dad had gotten for his birthday a few years ago.
At the bottom of the closet she found the unused kit herding dust bunnies around its corners and brought it back into her bedroom. She sat down on the floor, opened the box, and took out the different components. As she tried to find any part of the instructions that was written in English, she heard a tap. She smiled involuntarily, and waved for Lucas to come through her unlatched window, marveling at how lovely he looked as he soared in her window, quite certain that she looked nothing like that when she flew.
“Is that spine cracker for me?” he whispered with a smile as he pointed at the air mattress.
“Hey, if you don’t like it, I’m all for you sleeping in my bed,” Helen whispered back, making a show of closing up the kit.
“No, it’s perfect,” he said, stopping her by grabbing her hands and pulling her into his arms. He held on to her like he hadn’t seen her in forty days, instead of forty minutes, and then he grinned and rubbed his face against her cheek.
“You need a shave!” she said, squirming away from his scratchy chin. He chuckled sadistically and turned his attention to the air mattress.
“I was going to sleep on the couch downstairs,” he said uncertainly, still deciding if that would be better.
“My dad . . .”
“Wouldn’t be able to get down the stairs fast enough to catch me.”
“And what if you didn’t hear him and didn’t get out in time? I’d never be able to explain it,” Helen countered.
“Better that than the alternative,” he said, gathering up the mattress. “Look, I’m fine on the roof, Helen. I’m really not comfortable sleeping in here with you. I think it would be a mistake.”
No matter how guilty it made her feel to make Lucas sleep on the roof, she could tell that she wasn’t going to win this one. They dragged the air mattress up to the widow’s walk and eventually figured out how it was supposed to inflate, but Lucas had to read the instructions in Spanish because the English ones were nearly incomprehensible. Hilariously so.
“Insert mouth to the purpose inflation,” Helen whispered, quoting one of the stranger lines of the English instructions as she fixed up the newly filled mattress with sheets.
“Expel lung into inflator tube,” Lucas whispered back. He stuffed a pillow into a fresh case. “That sounds like it would hurt.”
Trying to silence their giggle fit only made it harder to stop. They both crumpled up on top of the mattress, stifling their laughs. Every now and again they would get control over themselves—only to snort and stuff their hands back over their faces as soon as they made eye contact. It went on way past the time when their throats started stinging with the tension of holding in the sound. Finally, they got it all out and just lay there on their backs, breathing heavily with the exhaustion of a damn good laugh. Helen felt Lucas take her hand and shake his head at the night sky.
“What am I doing?” he whispered to himself, digging his other hand into his hair.
“What? We’re not allowed to laugh together now?” she whispered,