Chapter 6 Hands #2
He looks at me, and this time the smile is real. “You want to talk about it?”
“No,” I say, and mean it.
“Yeah. Me neither.”
We sit, breathing, staring at the dead grass. Eventually, he says, “You think it’s possible to just, like, move on?”
“Not for people like us,” I say, and he nods.
We don’t talk after that. He leaves first, again, and I sit for a while, watching the sun go down, the sky fading from gray to blue to black.
On the way home, I see a news van parked by the old arena, the satellite dish pointing at nothing, the reporter inside probably waiting for a new lead or a better angle.
I drive past, eyes on the road, hands tight on the wheel.
At home, I eat peanut butter straight from the jar, then fall asleep on the couch with the TV on mute.
When I wake up, it’s still dark, and for the first time in weeks, I don’t feel the urge to punch a hole in the wall.
Instead, I text Ash, “Same time tomorrow?”
He replies instantly, “Yeah. You bring the bagels, I’ll bring the self-loathing.”
I laugh, a real one, then close my eyes and let the silence fill the room.
Maybe, just maybe, I can do this.
Maybe we both can.
———
The coffee machine is an antique from my mother, a hulking thing she bought at a Salvation Army in the ‘90s, and I can’t get rid of it because every time I try, I picture her ghost calling to check if I’ve had a “proper breakfast” before she’s even off her morning Peloton.
The heating element is warped, so it hisses and spits like it’s leaking radiator fluid, and if you don’t line the pot up exactly, like, within millimeters, you get a counter full of scalding brown runoff that smells like desperation.
It’s the first thing I do when I wake up, zombie shuffle to the kitchen, jam the filter in, scoop grounds by the handful, slam the switch, wait for the smell to punch me in the brain.
My apartment is still dark except for the city-glow leaking past the blinds, a neon tattoo across the eggshell cabinets and the magnetic poetry on my fridge.
I used to rearrange the magnets every day, some kind of ritual to force a sense of progress, but lately the words just blur together, play, bruised, always, never.
I grip the edge of the counter, knuckles white, and try to focus on the heat radiating off the mug, the way the steam curls around my face, but all I see is Ash, sleep-fucked and blinking at the sunlight, slumped against this exact counter with my shirt on, my favorite black long-sleeve, stretched at the neck from his habit of pulling at the collar when he’s nervous.
I imagine him pawing at his hair, the strands sticking up at angles, eyes still red from last night’s crying jag or whatever, and the vision is so vivid it feels like a hallucination.
I squeeze my eyes shut, force myself to count the sounds in the room, the kettle’s cough, the fridge compressor, the bass rumble of a garbage truck from down the block.
It doesn’t help.
The ghost of Ash is still here, so I grab the loaf of bread and start hacking at it, fingers stupid from lack of sleep, slices jagged and uneven.
I drop two into the toaster, get distracted, and burn both to charcoal. The smell sets off the detector, which wails like a banshee for a solid twenty seconds before I can jab it quiet with a broom.
In the silence that follows, I see the next vision, Ash on my couch, legs up on the coffee table, watching some trash movie and laughing so hard he chokes, one hand bracing his stomach, the other gesturing wildly at the screen.
In the vision, he’s happy, really happy, and that’s the part that fucks with me most.
I don’t remember the last time I saw anyone that happy in my apartment, least of all myself.
By the time I finish choking down the bitter coffee and the marginally edible toast, my phone has racked up three unread messages.
Two are from teammates, one a meme about cats on ice, the other a link to a GoFundMe for Cap’s memorial fund—and the third is a calendar alert, “Dinner with Nia 7PM.”
I’d scheduled it weeks ago, a recurring event, and hadn’t even considered canceling, because that’s how you know things are terminal, when you just let the momentum carry you forward, even if it’s straight off the edge.
———
The rest of the day is a series of small, controlled burns, cardio at the gym, a call with the team counselor where I say “fine” so many times she writes “delusional” in my file, a trip to the mailroom to pick up a package that turns out to be a condolence basket from the league, full of gourmet popcorn and cookies I will never eat.
I leave it on the lobby table for the next poor bastard to deal with.
I spend an hour thinking about Ash. Not just the gym, or the track, or the endless DM banter that’s developed in the last forty-eight hours, but about what it would be like if we just said fuck it and let the universe run its course.
The thought is equal parts electric and nauseating. I can’t decide if I’m more afraid of what it would mean, or how badly I want it.
At six, I shower, shave, and put on my best “going out” shirt, the blue one that Nia said brought out my eyes, even though I’m ninety percent sure she’s colorblind.
I take the train to Belltown, ride it standing up, backpack braced against my leg like a shield, and when I get off at Westlake, I walk the rest of the way just to burn off the chemical edge that’s been buzzing under my skin all day.
The restaurant is one of those places that pretends to be a dive but charges twenty bucks for a salad.
The lighting is so dim you have to squint to see the menu, and the music is a mix of indie tracks and ‘70s soul that’s supposed to signal effortless cool but just makes me want to scream.
Nia’s already there when I arrive, phone in hand, tapping out what I assume is a medical drama worthy of an HBO miniseries.
She looks up, smiles, and for a second it almost feels normal.
She’s wearing the dress I like, the one with the geometric cutouts, and her hair is pulled back so tight I can see the veins in her forehead.
“Hey, D,” she says, and I can tell she’s practiced the greeting, that she spent at least two minutes in the mirror before coming here, and I hate myself for noticing.
“Hey,” I say, and sit down across from her.
We do the usual catch-up, How’s work? How’s your sister? Did you see the latest on the shooting? (I did. We both did. We just pretend not to care.)
She tells me about her caseload, how she's been working with a college pitcher whose rotator cuff is shredded, how the clinic keeps booking her double shifts because they're short-staffed.
Physical therapy isn't glamorous, but she's good at it, better than good, actually and I used to love hearing her talk about it.
I nod at all the right moments, but my eyes keep darting to the clock on the wall, the second hand wobbling with every tick, mocking me.
The server comes, takes our order, her, the salmon, me, the steak and I notice she doesn’t order wine, which means she’s either on call tonight or she’s bracing for a conversation she doesn’t want to have sober.
She steeples her fingers, nails perfectly manicured, soft oval tips painted a color I can’t name.
I never used to notice things like that, but lately I’ve become obsessed with hands, with what they say about a person. Hers are careful, precise, like everything else in her life.
I imagine her at the clinic, the precise way she palpates a joint, angles a stretch, reads a body's limits like a scouting report.
I compare them, involuntarily, to Ash’s.
His hands are beat to shit, scars on the knuckles, cuticles chewed, one pinky that’s never set right from a broken bone in college.
The last time we were at the gym, he had black polish on his thumbs, chipped and uneven, like he’d painted them in a moving car.
I can’t stop thinking about how much more interesting they are, how I want to see what they look like when he’s not braced against a barbell or stuffed in a hockey glove.
Nia is talking, and I realize I haven’t heard the last three sentences. “Sorry,” I say. “Long day. The whole new practice routine is kicking my ass.”
She smiles, but there’s a crack in it. “You used to be able to do two-a-days and still meet me at the library for midnight coffee. Is it that bad?”
“It’s not the workouts. It’s the… everything else.” I almost say “the aftermath,” but swallow it.
She waits, patient, and I know she wants me to spill.
I want to tell her about the dreams, the flashes of violence that punch through the surface of my thoughts when I’m not paying attention, but I can’t.
Instead, I pick up the water glass, turn it in my hand.
A table behind us erupts in laughter. I flinch, and she notices.
“You’re still having nightmares,” she says, not a question.
I nod. “They’ll go away, I’m sure.”
Nia stabs her salmon, peels the skin with the fork, eyes narrow. “You know you can talk to me, right?”
I want to, but I don’t. Not because she wouldn’t understand, but because the thing I want to talk about isn’t the shooting, or the funerals, or the fucked-up therapy sessions.
It’s the way I can’t stop replaying every second with Ash, how the memory of his laugh, or his stupid chipped nails, is more addictive than any drug I’ve ever tried.
Instead, I say, “It’s just a phase. I’ll get over it.”
She lets out a sigh, soft, resigned. “You always do this, D. You wall up, and then you try to smash your way through it alone. It’s okay to need help.”
I want to say something cutting, something that will end this conversation, but I bite it back.
I force myself to look at her, really look, and I see the way the light catches the gold flecks in her eyes, the little twitch at the corner of her mouth when she’s about to say something that matters.
But the only thing I can think is, I wonder what Ash would look like in this light.
She puts her fork down. “You want to go back to your place? We could watch a movie or just…not talk for a while.”
I want to say yes. I want to want to say yes.