Chapter 26 — TEO #2
“San Marzano tomatoes, pork neck, beef bracciole, sausage. She starts at six in the morning.”
“Six.” She nods. “That’s a serious woman.”
“She is.”
“Good. That’s all that matters.” She looks at me and then at Zay and her face settles into an expression I can’t fully read, warm and knowing and steady. “She know about Isaiah?”
“She does. She met him last month.”
“Good.” Nan picks up her fork. “Everybody knowing is better than anybody guessing.”
She points the fork at Zay. “This one can barely boil an egg.”
“I can boil an egg, Nan.”
“You can boil water. The egg is incidental.”
I watch them. The rhythm of it, the back and forth, the love that doesn’t announce itself because it’s the air in the room.
Nan’s hand landing on the back of Zay’s neck while she gets up for seconds, resting there for a beat, two, then lifting.
Zay’s shoulders dropping half an inch under the weight of it.
The same half-inch I felt under my hand last week when I put my palm on the back of his neck on this couch and his whole body released a tension he didn’t know he was carrying.
In my nonna’s kitchen I knew every sound.
The creak of the pantry door, the way the burner clicks three times before catching, which drawer sticks.
Here the sounds are Nan’s and I am learning them.
The spoon against the pot. The cabinet that swings wider than the others.
The specific way she says his name, like the word itself is a hand on his shoulder.
After dinner, Nan packs the leftovers into Zay’s fridge with a system that involves labeling and stacking and implies she does not trust her grandson to locate food without written guidance. She kisses Zay’s forehead. At the door she puts her hand on my arm and looks up at me.
“You come back,” she says. Not a question.
“Yes, Nan.”
She nods once. Satisfied. She goes.
The apartment settles into its quiet. Zay is standing in the kitchen with his hands on the counter, his back to me, the set of his shoulders not tense but held, the posture of a man arranging his thoughts before he says them.
“I want to tell Gary.”
The words are steady. He turns around and looks at me and his face is clear and decided in a way I haven’t seen since before the pressure of the last month landed on both of us.
“About us.”
“About us.” He folds his arms and leans against the counter. “The shoulder case is closing out. One more follow-up. After that there’s no clinical overlap, no active case, no reason for anyone to frame this as something that happened during treatment. The timing is as clean as it’s going to get.”
“Okay.” I sit on the arm of the couch because my body needs to be somewhere while I process what he’s saying. “What does that look like?”
“I go to Gary. Direct. Before anyone else finds out or puts a version together that isn’t ours. I tell him the relationship started after the clinical work was functionally complete, and I ask him how he wants to handle it going forward.”
“Who needs to know. HR, the medical director, whoever touches the compliance side. Whether there’s a formal recusal or whether another trainer picks up any future treatment. I want Gary to tell me the right way to do this instead of me guessing and getting it wrong.”
He is not asking me whether he should do this.
He is telling me he’s going to. But his thumb is pressing into the crook of his elbow, the same tell I’ve seen in treatment rooms and hallways and the night he stood at this counter running the math on what Coach Bodie saw.
The decision is made. The cost of the decision is still landing.
“If Gary takes it to HR and they decide the timeline doesn’t hold,” he says, and his voice stays level but the thumb presses harder, “my clinical record takes a note I can’t remove.”
“Gary vouched for you,” I say. Not a warning. Just making sure he’s holding that.
“I know. That’s why he hears it from me.”
The sentence sits between us.
“When?” I ask.
“This week. Before the follow-up. So by the time you’re on my table for the last session, it’s already handled.”
“Do you want me there?”
“No.” He says it without hesitation. “This is mine. My boss, my disclosure, my professional risk. You being in the room changes the dynamic.”
“Okay.”
“But I want you to know before I walk in. I want us to have made this decision together even if I’m the one who says the words.”
I get off the arm of the couch and walk to the kitchen. He watches me come. I stop in front of him and put my hands on the counter on either side of him, not touching, just close. His eyes are steady.
“Together,” I say.
“Together.”
His hand comes up and rests on my chest, flat, over the sternum. The same way his hand landed last week after the exhale, after everything we said and heard and held. Warm and steady.
“Your grandmother told me to come back,” I tell him.
“She tells everyone to come back.”
“She told me specifically.”
His mouth moves. Not quite the full smile, but close. The bruises from the last month are still there underneath, visible if you know where to look, but the warmth is pushing through them and the warmth is winning.
“Then come back,” he says.
I lean in and kiss him in his kitchen where his grandmother was standing, in the apartment I walked into because I wanted to, at the end of a shoulder case that stopped being the reason months ago.
We stay like that for a while. His hand on my chest. My hands on the counter. The collards in the fridge and the magnolia petals on the sidewalk and the quiet of an evening that didn’t need to be anything other than exactly what it was.
?