22. Maddox #2
A vehicle slides past at the end of the block and its headlights sweep the cedar hedge. Phoenix's truck, on a lap. He sees me still on the sidewalk and keeps driving. He'll come around again in ninety seconds.
I count in my head. Four in. Four out.
The front door opens all the way.
Theo comes out in the hoodie and jeans with no coat and a duffel in one hand that he clearly packed in about ninety seconds and his phone in the other, the charger trailing from the phone since he didn't unplug it properly.
He stops on the porch between Paul and Diane.
Diane puts a hand on his shoulder. Paul doesn't.
Paul's face.
Paul's face does a thing I will remember for the rest of my life.
It's the face of a father watching his kid walk off a porch and knowing he can stop it and knowing he can't afford to.
It is an apology that hasn't learned its own name yet.
It is old grief rearranging. It's not a face I like.
It's a face I respect, which is worse for him.
Paul opens his mouth.
Diane says, very low, “Wait, Paul.”
He waits.
Theo looks at his father.
“Dad.”
“Theo…”
“I love you. I'm going with him. Those two things are the same sentence. You can fight it or you can understand it. I'm leaving either way.”
Paul closes his eyes.
“I understand it.”
Theo lets out a sound I can hear from the sidewalk.
Diane's hand squeezes his shoulder once and lets go.
Theo comes down the porch steps.
He doesn't run.
He walks. The duffel bumps his leg. The charger drags. He walks to me. The guard steps aside. Paul doesn't move off the porch. Diane stays beside Paul. The distance between the porch and the sidewalk closes in a dozen steps that will live in my body for the rest of my life.
Theo stops six inches from me.
His eyes are wet. His mouth is shaking.
“I sent you eleven texts.”
“I know. I couldn't answer. Paul had the phone and if Paul read I love you in my handwriting it would have gone to Callahan's press people by noon. I couldn't give them that. Not before I gave it to you.”
His throat works. His hands go up and grip the front of my jacket.
“Maddox?”
“Yeah?”
“Say it.”
I put my hands on his face. He's freezing. His skin is like paper in the January air. I put my thumbs under his jaw and I tilt his chin up and I look at him and I say it.
“I love you, Theo.”
He closes his eyes.
“I love you. I love you a way I haven't done before and don't have the vocabulary for.
I love you enough that I sat on Phoenix's kitchen counter this morning and called my agent about you like you were a free-agent center because I didn't have any other language for it yet. I love you. Come to Blackridge. Come to Blackridge and be an idiot with me in a city neither of us has ever lived in. I love you.”
His face crumples. He pushes his forehead against mine. His breath comes out hard and warm in the cold.
“I love you back.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you back, Maddox. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
I kiss him.
I kiss him on the sidewalk in front of his father and his aunt and a twenty-four-year-old security guard.
I kiss him long enough to mean it and short enough that Diane doesn't have to look away for too long.
His mouth is hot. Everything else about him is freezing.
His hands come up into my jacket and they fist at my chest and don't let go.
I pull back half an inch. I put my mouth against his forehead. The hoodie is thin and there's no coat and I can feel him shaking now that the kiss has stopped holding him still. Phoenix swings back around and stops in front of us.
“Get in the truck, kid. You're freezing.”
“Yeah.”
He lets out a half-laugh against my jaw.
I open the truck door. He gets in. I toss the duffel in the seat beside him. I slide his seatbelt across him with my own hands because I don't trust him to do it and I need to be the one who does it.
I shut his door and walk around to the other side. I’m feeling thankful that Phoenix drives an extended cab so there’s not three of us crowded across the front.
I look at Paul.
I tip my head once, quarter inch.
Paul tips his back. A quarter inch. It's everything.
Diane mouths, Be safe.
I get in and shut the door. Phoenix meets my eyes in the mirror before pulling away from the curb and taking us back to his place.
The first block, Theo doesn't talk. He's got his forehead against the window and his hand on my thigh and he's breathing in long shaky pulls. The second block, he looks over at me.
“You're really…? We're really…?”
“Yeah.”
His thumb starts moving on my thigh, small circle.
“Blackridge.”
“Blackridge.”
He breathes out.
“Orrick laughed?”
“He laughed.”
“Because the pass is good, or because the whole thing is insane?”
“Both.”
He lets out one sound that's part laugh and part sob and all relief, and his hand on my thigh goes tight.
“Maddox?”
“Yeah, kid.”
His head tips sideways against the headrest. He's watching me.
“Say it again,” he whispers.
“I love you,” I whisper back.
He swallows. His eyes close.
“Again.”
“I love you, Theo Laurent. All the way to Blackridge. All the way through it. Every mile.”
He leans his head against my shoulder. The city slides past in the blue of a Sunday dusk.
The streetlights come on one by one along the avenue in winter fashion, early, the sky still lit but giving up.
Somewhere behind us is Paul, still on a porch with his sister's hand on his back.
Somewhere forty-eight hours from now, I am going to stand in a Blackridge press conference in a team tie I don't own yet, and Theo is going to sign his first real contract in a room with a notary, and we are going to go find an apartment with two bedrooms we don't use and a kitchen I haven't cooked in and a bed I haven't put together.
“Maddox?”
“Yeah?”
He swallows audibly.
“I packed nothing.”
“Doesn't matter.”
His voice wobbles.
“I packed… I packed the book on the nightstand and a charger and three pairs of boxers and a picture of my mom. I think that's it. I don't have… I don't have my passport. I don't have any of my skates. I don't have—”
“We'll send Diane for the rest.”
“Oh yeah. She'll do it.”
I squeeze his hand.
“I know she will.”
His shoulders drop a quarter inch against mine.
Wait for me, I said.
He waited. I came.