19. Theo #2
The car ride home is forty minutes of nothing.
He doesn't speak. I don't speak. I watch the streetlights slide over the dashboard and try to slow my breathing down.
I count them in sets of four, four in, four out, four in, four out, like the team trainer taught us to manage stress, because apparently the breath work for third-period deficits and the breath work for your father finding you post-fuck is the same breath work.
I think about Maddox's face going red from the cut.
I think about his hand loading and not throwing.
I think about wait for me. I think about his blood on his own quarter-zip, soaking into the team logo.
I try not to think about the word he almost said in the office and stopped.
The boy I—I am not going to hit you.
The boy I… what?
I know what. I have known what for a week. I'm just not ready to name it tonight.
Paul pulls into the driveway. A patrol car is already parked at the curb, lights off. Private security. Callahan's work, probably. A man gets out when we pull in. Polo shirt. Clipboard. He nods at Paul.
“Mr. Laurent.”
“He's home. He stays home.”
“Yes, sir.”
Paul unlocks the front door. Gestures me through. I go through because I don't have the energy to make a scene on the lawn and because Maddox said go home, go to your room, lock the door, and wait.
The house smells the same as it always does. Like Paul's cedar shoe polish and the coffee he makes too strong. I haven't been here since the evening Diane told me we'll figure it out.
Paul drops his keys in the bowl. It's the loudest sound he's made since Callahan walked in.
The metal-on-metal lands in the quiet of the house like a verdict.
He doesn't turn the lights on in the living room.
He doesn't turn on anything. He walks to the kitchen.
He knows his own house blindfolded and he expects me to follow.
“Kitchen.”
“I want to go to my room.”
“Kitchen. Now.”
I go to the kitchen.
He makes himself a drink. Whiskey. Two fingers.
He doesn't offer me water. He stands at the island with his drink and he looks at me until the ice in the glass clicks twice.
I stand across from him with the island between us because if the island weren't between us, I don't know what my body would do.
The kitchen light is the overhead, the unforgiving one that makes the skin under his eyes look grey.
He's rolled his sleeves. There's a smear of his own blood on the cuff of his dress shirt where he wiped his mouth in the car.
He sees me notice and he doesn't roll it under.
He just stands there with the bloody cuff and the drink and he looks at me like I'm a stranger he has been housing.
“You know what he was doing.”
“Dad—”
“No. Listen to me. Listen to me.”
I listen.
“He started this, whatever this is, at me. You understand? From day one. He announced it in a locker room. He announced it in front of his teammates. He picked you out because you were mine and he knew it would hurt me. This was never about you, Theo. This was a man waging a grievance and he used you as the weapon. Whatever he told you. Whatever he did to you...”
My hand comes up.
“Stop.”
“Whatever he did to you, he was doing it to me. You understand that, right? You're a smart kid. You understand.”
My throat hurts.
“Dad.”
“It's not personal. It was never personal. For him.”
I look at him. I feel very calm.
“It was personal.”
“Theo…”
“It was personal, Dad. It is personal. I know what it started as. He told me himself. And I know what it is now. It's not what it started as.”
Paul sets his glass down with a soft thunk.
“He told you.”
“Yes.”
“And you believed him?”
I don't blink.
“Yes.”
Paul's hand goes to his forehead. He presses. He closes his eyes. He looks, for one second, like a man who has just realized something he is not going to survive.
“He's going to throw you away, Theo. In a week. In a month. He'll get bored. He'll get traded. He'll find another kid in another city whose father he wants to hurt. And you will be the kid on the shelf that he forgot the name of. That's who he is.”
My fists open and close at my sides.
“That's not who he is.”
“You don't know him.”
“I know him, Dad.”
Paul's mouth goes thin.
“Go to your room.”
I go.
My door shuts. My lock turns. My back hits the door and I slide down it, and I put my face in my hands and breathe.
The boy I…
I say it out loud to my empty room because I have to let it out of my body. I say it to the dark. I say it to the corner of my bed where I masturbated the first week about a man I now know inside my body.
“I'm in love with him.”
The sentence lands in the room and the room doesn't break.
I say it again.
“I'm in love with him. I'm in love with Maddox Creed.”
My chest does a thing. My eyes do a thing.
I bring my knees up to my face and I put my forehead on them and I make a sound I have never made in this house.
It's half a laugh and half a sob and all of it is relief because I have been carrying this sentence in my chest for a week and I didn't know until I set it down how much weight it had.
It's on the floor now. The floor didn't break.
The ceiling didn't break. I'm the thing breaking, and it isn't even bad.
It's the good kind of breaking, the kind where a thing that was holding itself closed finally lets itself open.
I'm twenty years old. My father has a private security guard on my lawn.
My team has fired the man I love. I have no plan.
I have no car. I have a phone that Paul will confiscate the second he thinks of it, and he will think of it, because he is not an idiot, he is just heartbroken.
My hands are shaking. My mouth tastes like the coppery aftertaste of hyperventilating.
My skin smells like the office and Maddox and a little like my father's aftershave from the car, which is the worst of the three.
And Maddox said wait for me.
I wipe my face. I pick my phone up off the floor where I dropped it. I open the message thread.
I'll wait. I love you. I'm not saying it yet because the first time I say it I want it to be to your face. But I love you. Wait for me too.
I don't send it. I save it as a draft.
I put the phone under my pillow. I lie down in the dark, fully dressed, with my hand on the phone under the pillow like I can feel him through it, and I stare at the ceiling and I make the words happen again in my own head, until they fits there, until they belong.
I'm in love with him.
The ceiling doesn't fall.
The house doesn't fall.
I still do. I fall hard, and I fall quiet, and I fall the whole way.