made of glass

three.

The sun is long gone by the time you find yourself following Josh back down to solid ground. It’s an unspoken agreement; you release each other wordlessly and move towards the slide at the same time. Josh turns away at the bottom of the slide and indicates a silent offer of a piggyback ride off the wood chips, then keeps walking after he reaches the grass.

“I can walk,” you remind him as he adjusts his hold on your legs when he reaches the far side of the parking lot, but he just shrugs awkwardly underneath you and keeps walking. Admittedly, it’s not like you weigh enough to actually make it difficult for him to carry you, and it’s not long before he’s turning onto your driveway. Josh lets you down only once he reaches the top of the steps; you slide down his back until your bare toes touch the wood of the front porch before letting go of him.

He turns around to face you and kisses you on the cheek. “Bye, Car.” But he lingers in front of you even once you nod and smile and say goodbye, too. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other once, twice, then says, “Good night,” and kisses you briefly on the lips before heading for his car, parked on the edge of the street outside the house.

You watch him walk away, open your mouth and close it comically a few times, then call out, “It’s late, you know.”

Josh looks at you quizzically; he’s already opened the driver’s door and has one foot inside the car.

Twisting a piece of hair around two fingers, you add, “Maybe you shouldn’t drive. You might be too tired. Or something.” He nods slowly, looking mildly amused. You rush on, “You -- people aren’t supposed to drive when they’re tired, right? It might not be safe.” To clarify, you tack on one final word, posed as a question. “Stay?”

He removes his foot from the interior of his car and follows you inside. You wonder if he saw this coming, if he walked to his car knowing with every step that it would be only a matter of time before you stopped him. He knows you better than anyone, and it’s probably all too easy for him to predict every move that you make. For a moment, he pins you with your back against the door after you shut and lock it, but by the time his lips meet yours, someone upstairs opens a door and shuffles down the hallway to the bathroom and he pulls away from you to glance up. You hold a finger up to your lips and whisper for him to be quiet, tugging him by the elbow into the living room and pulling him down to sit next to you on the couch while you reach for the remote. It’s better here, sitting on the couch with Josh by your side as he grins and fakes a yawn and a huge stretch before slipping an arm over your shoulders, than it was when you were alone, absentmindedly watching reality television and checking your phone every thirty seconds.

You flip through the channels until you find a movie where you recognize the actor on screen but can’t think of his name. Relaxing into Josh, you rest your head on his shoulder until he tilts your chin up so he can kiss you again. You miss a large chunk of the movie due to this and when you stop to regain your ability to breathe, you have no idea what’s happening. You trace invisible lines onto Josh’s shirt and somewhere about halfway into the next movie that airs, you fall asleep like that.

Sleeping straight through the night isn’t something that you do often and you wake up more than once before the sun rises again. The first time that you regain consciousness, your face is pressed into Josh’s shoulder, his arm still around you; he’s snoring quietly (more like breathing loudly, you decide), and you drift into sleep again easily. The second time, you open your eyes to your mother creeping across the room on tiptoe, and she looks at you guiltily before giving you a cheesy thumbs-up and disappearing into the hallway. You listen to her footsteps on the stairs, the light from the TV bathing the room in dim blue.

The next time that you wake up, you don’t open your eyes straight away. Sunlight creeps through your eyelashes and fills the insides of your eyelids with orange, like everything is on fire, and you can hear voices murmuring around you. For a moment, eyes closed, you wonder why you can recognize Josh’s voice among them; then, as you open your eyes and he looks at you from so very close, the events of the previous night come flooding back into your mind.