Chapter 23
The Death Star
ZOE
Eli’s in the living room, mid-sentence, hands flying as he diagrams a complicated play from yesterday’s game that I don’t quite get.
But here’s the thing. He’s talking about hockey. Showing that he’s proud of his dad.
I’d freeze this in amber if I could.
Jonah steps into the room, both arms over his head, and his shirt rides up just enough to make me intrigued. Very intrigued.
“Mac and cheese for dinner,” I say, because I need a project that distracts Jonah from his thoughts.
Eli perks up. “From scratch?”
“Is there any other kind?”
“Exactly.” He gives me a professorial look.
I shoo him toward the kitchen. “Come on, head chef. You’re on cheese-grating duty.”
Once we’re in the kitchen, I pull out ingredients for dinner, Eli joining me. Jonah drops onto a stool at the island and just watches us.
He doesn’t pretend to be busy. Doesn’t scroll his phone. Just plants his elbows on the counter and watches the two of us like we’re the most interesting show on TV.
Which I hand to Eli along with a grater and a bowl. “So. Walk me through yesterday’s game again. Don’t leave anything out.”
Eli’s face goes serious as he sits on the stool beside Jonah, as he launches into a play-by-play that begins with the warm-up.
“—and Kingston did the thing where he goes around the net twice, which is silly because—”
“Yeah, why does he do that?” I pour milk into a measuring cup.
“He thinks it makes him look fast.” Eli’s now grating like he’s getting paid by the shred. “It doesn’t. Anyway, then Evan Carter—”
“Number twenty-three,” I cut in.
Both of them turn to look at me at the same time. Father and son. Same exact incredulous expression.
“Twenty-two,” Jonah corrects.
Eli keeps going. He gets through the whole first period, with corrections, with footnotes, with several detours into the philosophical question of why the puck does what it does.
I finish the cheese sauce and pour it over the pasta, and Eli sprinkles parmesan on top with gravity. We eat at the island, three stools in a row, our knees almost touching, and Jonah’s hand finds the small of my back when he reaches past me for the pepper.
I do not look at him. I take a very large bite of mac and cheese and chew like my life depends on chewing.
After dinner, the Death Star comes down off the dining room shelf where it’s been mint-in-box, and we drag the whole operation onto the living room rug. Bags of pieces. The instruction book, which is the size of a novel. Eli appoints himself foreman and divides the labor.
“Zoe, you’re on grays. Jonah, you’re on large pieces.” He doesn’t look up. “Your fingers are too big for the small ones, sorry.”
“Fair. I do have big hands,” he says, eyes on me, and my stomach does a rollover.
We work. The rug becomes a jagged plastic surface of pieces. Eli reads the instructions out loud, and at one point, I put a piece in the wrong spot. He lifts my hand, removes it, and replaces it without comment.
Jonah laughs, and when I glance up, he’s staring at me over the top of Eli’s head. His expression is an entire conversation that heats my skin.
I look back down at my pile of gray pieces, my face growing hot.
Eli studies me for a beat, like there’s something he wants to say. Then he opens his mouth and closes it, so I say, “What’s on your mind, Blastman?”
Eli flashes me a look, his eyes shiny. “I don’t want to go in the pool or the lake,” he whispers.
“Mom always said I’d learn to swim ‘next summer.’ Every year, ‘next summer.’ But then she—” His voice breaks.
“And now there’s no more summers with her.
And if I learn now, it means she’s really never coming back. ”
The simple, devastating logic of a grieving child. I blink back my own tears, not wanting to add to his burden.
Jonah swallows so hard his Adam’s apple bobs.
I stand and step over to Eli, kneeling when I say, “Sweetie, I understand that. And it’s okay to not be ready.
We won’t make you go in the pool or the lake until you decide you want to learn how to swim and go.
” I pull him into a hug. Before I know it, Jonah pulls us both into a hug, and we sit there, just like that, until Eli’s ready to let go.
It takes a while for Jonah and I to catch our breaths again, trying to act normally as soon as possible so Eli doesn’t know he just broke our hearts in two.
Then we build until the light through the windows dims and the lamp in the corner becomes our only light. Eli yawns and tries to disguise it as a sneeze, which makes me yawn. Jonah catches both of us and stretches, his whole body cracking. “Bedtime.”
Eli’s face collapses. “One more section. Please.”
I shake my head. “Bedtime. Death Star isn’t going anywhere. It’s a space station.”
“Ugh, good point.” Eli stands, shoulders slumped.
The bedtime routine is, as always, a negotiation. Two stories. Closet door cracked exactly six inches. Galaxy squishy on the nightstand at a forty-five-degree angle from the lamp. Flash on the pillow. Hallway light on. Bathroom light off. Window cracked one inch for fresh air.
Jonah reads. He’s gotten better at it—he does the voices now, and Eli laughs at the troll without trying to hide that he’s laughing.
I sit on the edge of the bed near Eli’s feet, my hand resting on the comforter, close enough that he can bump it with his foot if he wants.
Halfway through the second story, he does.
He nudges his sock against my fingers, and I curl mine around his foot.
By the end of the chapter, his eyes are gone. His breathing deepens and slows, and Flash slips sideways on the pillow. Jonah closes the book without a sound and sets it on the nightstand. Doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
We just sit, the two of us, watching this kid sleep, and the room is so quiet I hear the furnace click on.
After a long minute, I stand, careful not to creak the bed, and Jonah stands too. We tiptoe out, and Jonah pulls the door closed without a sound. We pause in the hallway.
This is where we usually say goodnight or make a joke to fill the silence. Sex in the house when Eli’s here has been off-limits in an unspoken agreement.
He looks at me. I look at him. The hallway light is yellow and weak but shows the perfect angles of his face.
“Night,” I whisper.
“Night.”
I turn, walk downstairs and across the house to my room, and close the door behind me. Then I stand in the dark with my hand on the doorknob, listening to my own rapid breathing.
I don’t turn on the light. I just walk to my bed and sit on the edge, trying to think about anything other than how Jonah and I just work together. In a ballroom with people. At home with Eli. In a tense car ride home the day Gwen took Eli.
The knock is a whisper.
For a second, I think I’m imagining it. Then it comes again. Three soft taps.
“Come in,” I say, my heart rate skyrocketing.
He opens the door and slips through, closing it behind him. The hallway light bleeds in under the door, just enough to see that he stands with his hand still on the knob, like he hasn’t fully committed yet.
He’s not wearing socks. I don’t know why I notice that.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
He crosses the room in three steps. Maybe four. He stops in front of me, and I tip my head back to look at him. Then he reaches down with both hands and cups my face he’s been thinking of doing this all night, and he kisses me.
Slow. Slow, slow, slow. The kind of kiss that’s been lining up behind every other kiss, the patient one that says so much more.
His thumb traces my cheekbone. His other hand slides into my hair.
He bends, and I rise and the angle finds itself, and I taste him—mint and the faintest ghost of the beer he had with dinner—and I forget every single other thing that’s taking up rent in my head.
Then his shirt is on the floor and so is mine, and I pull him down. The bed dips, then he’s kneeling over me, and I’m sliding back against the pillows. Then it’s warm skin against warm skin and his mouth on my jaw.
He takes his time. That’s the thing I’ll keep coming back to, after.
He could rush. We’ve been a fuse since the countertop incident. But he doesn’t. He kisses my collarbone and the dip below it and the hollow of my throat where my pulse is going wild, and his hand moves down my side, slow, learning the shape of me with his palm.
I undo his belt. He helps. We get rid of the rest of it in a shuffle of fabric and limbs, and then once the condom’s on, we’re skin on skin and the room is all hall-light and shadows. His weight settles over me, and I make a sound I didn’t know I knew how to make.
He breathes against my throat, smiling, and presses his lips there to muffle the next one.
He kisses the curve of my shoulder. He learns me with his mouth in a way that isn’t rushed, that isn’t leading anywhere, but is the point itself. My hands are in his hair and on his back, and I can feel his long muscles shifting under my palms.
His fingers roam down my stomach, then inside me. Patient. Attentive. He watches my face when I gasp, like he’s taking notes, and adjusts what he’s doing in some small, devastating way that makes my breath catch and my eyes squeeze shut.
“Look at me,” he says, low.
I do.
Our eyes lock, and nothing about this is a joke or a deflection.
“Jonah,” I say.
It’s not a sentence. It’s not anything. It’s just his name.
“Yeah,” he says, like I asked him a question.
I want him inside me, so I pull him until he has nowhere else to go.
He hesitates before he slides into me with a slow steadiness that empties my lungs. He stops there, filling me, forehead to mine, both of us breathing each other in, and I can feel his heart against my chest and mine against his. “You’re perfect,” he whispers.
We move together. Quiet. Slow. Every roll of his hips says something. Every press of his mouth to my temple, my jaw, the corner of my mouth, says something else.