23. Theo
THEO
Six months later
I wake at six-twelve with summer light already in the room and Maddox's arm heavy across my hips.
Blackridge in July is a pale yellow thing.
The sun comes up over the lake before six and it slides across the hardwood of our bedroom floor turning the duvet the color of honey by the time my body notices it's morning.
Our bedroom faces east. That was on purpose.
We walked into this apartment in February with a realtor we barely spoke to, and Maddox looked at the east window and looked at me and said, “you'll want the sun in the morning,” like a man who had already decided which side of the bed he'd be sleeping on, and I didn't argue because he was right.
He's on his stomach. Face mashed into my pillow because he stole it in the night. Hair a disaster. His arm is across me and his hand is loose in the hollow between my hip bone and the elastic of my boxers, and the hand twitches in his sleep like he's chasing something in a dream.
I lift the hand. I slide out from under it.
He mutters. He doesn't wake.
I go brush my teeth first. That's the thing nobody tells you about after you get the fairy-tale.
You still brush your teeth first. I come back and I stand at the edge of our bed and I look at him.
He's twenty-nine in October. His hair is just beginning to show some gray threads at the temples.
The bruise on his shoulder from Thursday's game is green now, pushing yellow.
Two years at four point two. Modified no-trade.
A dog on the other side of the bedroom door who will start whining in eleven minutes if we don't get up.
A bed I helped pick out with him at a warehouse in March, arguing about headboard height like people who planned to use the headboard.
I pull the duvet down to his hips.
The tattoo on his ribs, a compass, shitty, clearly done by a friend in college, rises and falls with his breath.
I slide my mouth down his spine.
He makes a sound into the pillow, low, before his brain catches up. His hips shift. His skin is warm from sleep and the sun is coming in sideways across his back in a bar and I lick a line along his spine just to the edge of the bar and he mumbles Theo into cotton without opening his eyes.
“Shh.”
“Mm...”
My mouth finds the jut of his hip bone.
“Back to sleep.”
“That is not what's about to happen.”
“Back to sleep, Maddox.”
His laugh is a chest sound, muffled. He rolls onto his back. The duvet slides. He is already half hard, the morning shape of him that I have known for six months and that I still look at with disbelief that this gets to be a thing I have.
I look up at him.
His eyes are still closed. His mouth is doing the thing it does. The small tight tuck at the corner that means he's pretending to sleep because he likes the part where I do this while he's faking it.
“Baby,” he says. Eyes closed.
“Shut up.”
His mouth twitches.
“Bossy.”
“Shut up, Maddox. I'm doing something.”
“Yes, you are.”
I put my mouth on him.
He doesn't open his eyes. Two minutes. Three.
He lies on his back with one hand over his face and the other hand in my hair, loose, not directing, and he lets me take my time.
That's a thing that has changed. January Maddox would have had my hair in a fist by now and his hips set.
July Maddox lets my mouth do what my mouth wants to do and trusts me to get him there because I have, every morning for six months that I could get away with it—which has been a lot of mornings.
I take him deep. I take him slow. I flatten my tongue and I come off the head and I look up to see if he's looking.
He's looking.
His eyes have opened. His hand in my hair has gone from loose to less loose. His jaw has set. He's watching me with the look I have learned to read, half affection and half intent, a man who was planning to let me run this and is about to revise.
“Kid.”
“Mm.”
His thumb brushes my temple.
“Come up here.”
“I want...”
“Come up here, Theo.”
I come up.
He hauls me into his chest. He's warm. He kisses me once, hard, and then his hand slides down my back to the elastic of my boxers and inside.
“Better.”
“I was doing a thing.”
“You were. Now we're doing a thing.”
His hand is big. His hand is not rushed.
We learned about each other in a panic in the winter, and we have been learning about each other without a panic since the spring, and his hand knows what I like now, which is long and close and him breathing into my ear while he does it.
His mouth is on my neck. His hand is on me.
His other hand is spread flat across my lower back holding me against him while he works me, and I come fast and loud in our apartment in Blackridge with his hand on me and his mouth at my ear, and he murmurs good and I've got you and that's it, and he comes a minute later with my hand on him and my face tucked under his jaw, and we lie there sticky and stupid in the honey-colored light.
The dog starts whining on the other side of the door at six thirty-four.
Right on schedule.
His name is Pancake.
He is forty-two pounds of brindle rescue mutt with one blue eye and one brown eye and ears that do not match each other.
He came home with us in April, from the shelter three blocks from the practice rink, after Maddox spent two weeks pretending we weren't looking at rescue websites and I spent two weeks pretending I wasn't catching him at it.
The shelter lady put Pancake on the floor in front of Maddox, and Pancake walked straight into Maddox's lap and sat on both of his feet and looked up at him with the blue eye, and that was the end of Maddox Creed the bachelor and the beginning of Maddox Creed the man who carries a mid-sized dog up the three flights to our apartment because Pancake is lazy in the afternoons and will not take the stairs without moral support.
I open the bedroom door in boxers and a t-shirt and Pancake loses his mind.
Tail first. Then body. Then a full run across the hardwood with his nails clicking and a small controlled leap onto the end of our bed where Maddox is now sitting up against the headboard in sweats.
“Hi, bud. Hi. Hi. Okay. Hi.”
Pancake steps on Maddox's sternum with all four feet because he has no understanding of geometry, and Maddox makes a small oof and collects him under one arm and rubs his ears.
I pour the coffee.
I have been pouring the coffee first for a while now.
It used to be that Maddox made it and I drank it and we treated that as a normal division of labor, but in April I learned he takes his with a little less milk than I had been giving him, and in May I learned I like the beans from the place on Gleason Street more than the ones he'd been buying, and by June we had a kitchen that was ours instead of his, and the coffee schedule had shifted.
The apartment is small. Two bedrooms we don't both use; the second one is an office and a guest room and a place I write the papers for the two online classes I started in May.
The kitchen looks out at a maple tree. The maple is in full leaf.
A bird I've learned is a cedar waxwing is on the railing of our tiny balcony.
Pancake sees the bird and his whole body goes electric and he forgets Maddox and flies off the bed and crashes into the sliding-door glass, where he stops, puts his nose to it, and watches the bird like it's the only job he's ever been given.
Maddox comes up behind me at the counter. He puts his hand on the back of my neck. He kisses the top of my head.
“Hi, baby.”
“Hi.”
He yawns against my hair.
“Dog shit his brains out yet.”
“Pending.”
“Romantic.”
I hand him his mug. He takes it. He puts his free arm around me.
His chin goes on my shoulder while I slice an apple, and we stand there at the counter in the pale yellow July morning, in the apartment we rented two days after we flew here from Frosthaven, and I feel my ribs do the thing they do every morning now, which is sit lower in my chest than they used to.
I let Pancake out into the yard.
The “yard” is the ten feet of grass between our building and the alley that the landlord called “a private green space” in the Craigslist ad.
It is not private. It has four dogs in rotation and one raccoon that lives in a tree and a kid next door who we've taught to give Pancake one treat per visit.
It is exactly the right size for a dog who was raised in a shelter kennel.
Pancake charges into it and immediately does the pending thing and then starts sniffing the fence line with the intensity of a detective.
I sit on the back step in my boxers and watch him.
My phone buzzes.
It's Paul. It's a text. It says, Saw the highlight. Nice pass Thursday. Dad.
I look at it.
I look at the tree.
I look back at the phone.
I type: Thanks. How's the knee?
Three dots. Old.
Three dots. Better some days.
I type: Come out in August. Diane wants to. Come with her.
The three dots pulse through three cycles. They stop. They start again. They stop. My coffee gets cold on the step beside me. Pancake rolls in something.
I'll think about it.
It's the best answer he's been able to give me in six months.
It would've destroyed me in February. In July, it sits in my hand and I look at it and I feel my chest do a small, clean thing that isn't sadness exactly.
It's the feeling of a door that used to be locked that is now only closed.
You can still walk past it. You can still knock.
He might still say no. But the lock is off.
I put the phone face-down on the step.
“Pancake. Inside.”
He pretends he can't hear me.
“Pancake. Treat.”
He can hear me.
Maddox is in the bathroom when I come back up.