He looks up into my eyes, and I stare straight back. From this angle, there’s an innocent look to him. Like I can almost imagine him, in this room, as a boy, reading Harry Potter or whatever and kicking a soccer ball against the door. Except for the few pictures of him in his house, I don’t know much about him as a kid. Whether he was just the same, only smaller, or whether he was one of those boys that gets chubby and then hits a growth spurt and turns into a bean pole. 

“What?” he asks, as if he can see me thinking.

“I wish I knew you then,” I tell him. 

“When?”

“When we were younger.”

“I don’t,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because I like that there’s still so much I don’t know about you. And still so much you don’t know about me. It’s like reading a novel instead of a biography. We get to start in the middle and figure out the rest.”

I smile. “I like that.”

“I like you.”