Chapter 26 #2
My cheeks color as she rolls her gaze over me playfully.
I know I look different than Rhys or Freddy, or most of the guys we’ve played with.
I’ve always been tallest, but the biggest, too.
Muscular, sure—I work out with the team.
I’m heavily conditioned and trained. But it’s muscle with a layer that’s softer than the more cut forward and centers.
Maybe there was a time I would’ve been embarrassed by it, but with the way Paloma looks at me it’s almost impossible not to be proud of it.
“Yeah. But I wasn’t very aggressive with the puck. Not like the other kids. But I liked playing goalie. So I just stayed there.”
“That’s not really an answer,” she mumbles, eyes fluttering.
The way I feel about hockey is different than Rhys or my dad—I’ve always known that. I stayed because it was easy for me. I’m good at it. But it’s not my passion. It’s not what I want to do forever.
I just don’t know how to tell anyone.
Except . . .
“I don’t love hockey,” I admit into the quiet of the room, turning my head toward her. “I just play because I’m good at it. Because my dad loves it, and I feel closer to him and my friends when I play. But it’s not . . .”
“It’s not like poetry is for you,” she finishes for me. “That’s what you love.”
For a moment I’m twelve and embarrassed to ask my mom to get me more poetry books because I’ve finished all the ones Dad got me the week before—knowing the look on my mom’s face means something important, but I can’t read it.
“Yeah,” I breathe, a weight present for the majority of my life finally rolling off my shoulders. “Yeah, it is.”
I was worried she might think the poem I slipped her on our date was too intense. Petrarch is known for only two things, really: the style of sonnet he created, and pining after the same woman for over three hundred of those sonnets.
Makes a little more sense now, I think as I admire Paloma’s profile as she rolls onto her back.
The angle of her jaw, the heavy pout of her full, peachy lips.
Burnished golden strands mixed in the light brown of her hair, like clouds over a brighter color.
Eyes like deep chocolate or the freshest soil around a blooming garden.
“Will you read me one?”
“Now?” My voice drags out the word. “Oh—yeah. Let me find—”
“Do you know any by memory?”
I know a lot from memory. But this feels intense. I’d prefer to have hours to figure out which one would suit her and this space between us best—but my mouth opens before I can think about it.
I recite John Keats’s “Bright Star,” my mouth moving leisurely and practiced across each word like a lullaby only for her ears.
She drifts off, her breath growing deeper, the rise and fall of her chest more drawn out. I don’t take my eyes off her. I don’t sleep.
An hour or two passes before the quiet whimpering starts, her brow furrowing deeply. I wait, hopeful that it might dissipate into nothing and she’ll get more sleep.
But then she cries out sharply, hands shoving the pillow away from her.
Heart in my throat, I cross to her and try to wake her. I call her quietly, trying to avoid directly touching her. At first, she doesn’t rouse, only cries silently, begging with an anguish I haven’t seen before. Her hands grab onto my forearms, nails scouring my skin.
“Paloma,” I call, louder than I mean to, shaking her upper body as I lean over her, trying to keep her from thrashing so violently she falls from the bed.
She wakes up, eyes wide before another terrified noise chokes from her and she tries to scurry backward away from me, smacking her head into the headboard in her haste.
“Shit.” I rear back, slapping the nightstand between our beds to flick on the lamp. My hands hover in the air, heart in my throat at the image of her beneath me, curling slightly into a ball while fat tears make their way down her reddened cheeks.
“Bennett?”
“Hey,” I say, voice calm and gentle. “Just me. I’m here—are you—”
I reach for her and she flinches back, scrambling away from me before sprinting off the bed and into the bathroom with a hard slam of the door.
I feel a bit like throwing up.
I stand before I mean to, stepping up to the bathroom door like I might knock. I can hear muffled, choked sobs from the other side. The sink runs for a long while. Then silence.
She emerges slowly, eyes pointed toward her feet.
It feels wrong, towering over her while she’s so vulnerable. I want to hold her, but I don’t know how.
Her face is soaked with tears and water that she’s splashed herself with, wetting the collar of her T-shirt. She’s still clearly distraught, but more embarrassed now. Paloma tries to pull at the now-tangled knot of her braid, gripping and yanking hard enough that new tears spring forward.
“Let me,” I try softly.
Like a reprimanded child, she sulks as she moves forward.
My hand threads through her hair, pulling gently at the braid she was wearing and loosening the strands. It smells like her—juniper and fresh laundry—and feels soft like silk against my fingers.
The pad of my thumb swipes against the back of her neck, igniting a shiver through her body. But she only leans farther into me. Her body droops more heavily as my palms ghost over her shoulders and slender neck, into the base of her scalp.
Paloma relaxes almost instantly, hiccupped cries the only bit leftover as her eyes blink back open slowly.
“I’m sorry—”
“No,” I murmur, tucking her tighter against me. Like that can stop the waves of self-hatred I can almost feel rolling off her. “Don’t. It’s okay, Paloma. Just breathe.”
She follows my directions easily, as if just the command is enough to settle her.