Chapter 32 #2
Every man has a language for this pain. Mine is incoherent. Sound rips out of me—the noise you make when you’ve discovered an entirely new color of agony—and I cling to the beam with my chest and biceps and will my soul not to leave my body.
I see God for a second, or at least I see a cartoon of Him holding a sign that says, “Buddy.”
I breathe through my teeth. I want to vomit. I want to ascend into a higher plane and leave my balls behind. “Initiate subspace,” I whisper to my junk, and wait for the waves to recede from killing to maiming.
Cold helps. So does swearing. I do both. When the pain eases from white-hot to a deep, punishing throb, I re-set my feet and move like a contrite sinner: slow, careful, with the full knowledge that one wrong move and I’m back in communion with the cedar crossbar of doom.
At the top of the pergola, the broom earns its keep.
I extend it, push snow off the small lip of roof that runs from the porch over toward the dormer.
Sheets of powder slough off like blankets.
Once there’s a bare strip, I belly flop onto it.
The roof is rough under my chest, the shingles grabbing skin.
My ribs complain, my stomach does not understand why it is being exfoliated, and my testicle is still not speaking to me. That’s fair.
I keep the broom in one hand like a ridiculous tightrope pole and shimmy along the strip of roof, inching toward the little ledge in front of the dormer. Below me, the yard looks mean and far. Above me, the sky is bright and unforgiving.
I try not to think about falling. I try to think about Tori’s face. She was furious and exhausted and still, somehow, the center of the only world I want to live in.
She said she went back to get divorced. I should have said something, anything, other than just standing there, speechless. I should have run down the steps, immediately, bare feet and boxer clad and begged for a do-over.
Instead I’m out here auditioning for America’s Dumbest Home Intrusions. Is that a show? We should make that a show.
The ledge is a narrow lip—eight inches, maybe ten—the accumulated snow and ice making everything stupid, cold, and slippery as fuck. I knock off what I can with the broom, slide onto it, press my chest to the line of the dormer, and wedge my toes onto the shingle edges, calves trembling.
The window is right there. Salvation, quartz-cold and smug.
“Please be unlocked,” I breathe, and curl my fingers under the bottom sash.
It doesn’t budge.
I lift harder. Nothing. My breath fogs the glass and drifts back into my face. I drop my forehead against the pane and whisper a string of obscenities that could curdle milk.
I have two choices: negotiate my way back across the roof and down the murder pergola with a bruised ball, or break the window and crawl through.
The first is maybe safer, but also maybe break-my-neck-ier, and humiliating. The second is dangerous in a might-slice-something-open kind of way, and still, humiliating.
I look down again. My feet skitter slightly on the shingles. My stomach drops. Decision made.
I test the corner of the pane with my knuckles—tap, tap. Solid.
I think about all the movies where someone blasts through a window with a jacket wrapped around their fist, then remember that I have exactly one garment on my person and it is currently covering the two parts of my body that are not meant for public display.
Also, if I take it off, I’m not just the idiot breaking into his own house—I’m the idiot breaking into his own house bare-ass naked in twenty-degree weather.
“Okay,” I tell myself. “We’re doing this.”
I hook my thumb in the waistband of my boxers and pause.
There is a version of this story where I maintain a sliver of dignity. This is not that version.
Using my other hand to maintain my balance on the window, I peel the boxers down to my knees, then to my ankles, step out with one foot, and keep the other foot half-caught because the last thing I need is to drop my underwear off this roof and into the frozen yard like I’m stripping for a very specific OnlyFans.
I lift said foot up into some weird yoga pose—please God don’t let me fall—and remove the boxers. I then wrap the fabric around my fist—once, twice—tighten it over the knuckles, and cock my arm.
“Leopold?” a voice calls pleasantly from below.
I freeze, half crouched, bare butt presented to the morning like an offering. I turn my head enough to see the side yard and, standing on her back porch in a robe, slippers, and one of those knit hats with a pom-pom the size of a softball, is Lois Schneider.
“Yes, Mrs. Schneider,” I say, because I was raised with manners even when I’m committing misdemeanor self-entry in the nude.
“I told you, dear, you can call me Lois.”
“I know, Mrs. Schneider.”
She peers up, shading her eyes with a liver-spotted hand. “Do you need help? Should I call someone?”
“No, ma’am. I’m fine.”
“Okay…” she says, unconvinced.
There is a pause long enough for me to hear three sparrows debate my life choices.
Then, “Leopold, why are you naked?”
“Not now, Mrs. Schneider!”
“You don’t need to be embarrassed, you know,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I was married to my Harold for sixty-three years. Your testicles are nothing I haven’t seen before.”
I close my eyes, then inhale what dignity I have left and exhale every stupid decision that led to this very moment.
“And I do know how cold it is outside. Why, this one time, my Harold, his testes—”
“Lois?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Can we please stop talking about testicles? I’m trying to focus.”
“Oh yes, of course. Of course. Be careful now, you hear?”
“Working on it,” I mutter, and draw my arm back.
The first hit doesn’t break it—just a crack, a sharp star in the corner. The second shatters the pane with a sound that feels like a slap across my entire nervous system.
Glass gives, a triangle falls inward, and a spray of glittering shards skitters across the loft floor. Cold air knifes out and through me, and a few splinters bite the skin of my wrist where the cotton slips.
I shake out the boxers, wrap them again tighter, and knock away the remaining jagged teeth, clearing a gap large enough for a dumb man—this one, specifically—to crawl through.
I brush the bottom sash, swipe shards off the sill with the edge of my forearm, and get one knee onto the frame.
“Almost there,” I tell no one. The roof squeaks under my other foot. I plant my palms, tuck my head, and wriggle through.
For a second I’m a cartoon of a man birthing himself into his own loft: bare ass in the wind, shoulders scraping old carpet, boxers wrapped around my wrist like I just captured this flag.
Then I’m inside. I sprawl on the frigid floor, cheek against dusty carpet, lungs grabbing at the air like I ran a mile.
The pain in my left testicle thrums. Glass crunches under my palm when I push up. A small ribbon of blood slides across the back of my hand where a shard caught me.
I get to my knees and take inventory: skin scraped, hand nicked, pride annihilated, nut offended but intact.
The loft is empty. Nothing but dust, cobwebs, and now, glass hiding up here. I shuffle to the little half door, unlatch it, and climb down the short set of steps into the hallway.
The alarm panel at the end blinks a cheerful green like this morning never happened. I punch the bypass code for the broken dormer zone, just in case something decides to trip, and shuffle straight to the thermostat. Heat on full blast. My skin prickles as life returns to my feet in hot needles.
In the bathroom, I run warm water over my hands, wash the cut, dab at it with a towel, and catch sight of myself in the mirror once again.
New additions: a smear of blood on my wrist, an impressive scrape on my shoulder, hair that looks even more out of control.
I turn sideways, wince, and check the damage. The left side of my scrotum is already showing the faintest, traitorous bloom of purple.
“Buddy,” I tell it, because we’ve been through a lot. “I’m sorry.”
I shower, not to clean the night off so much as to stand with my head under heat and let the stupidity wash off my skin and out of my muscles.
The water scalds at first, then settles, steam fogging the glass. My body loosens. My brain does not. It keeps replaying the last forty five minutes of morning like a loop I can’t stop: Stephanie on the porch. Tori in the street.
“I did. To get divorced, you dumb idiot.”
I lean my forehead against the tile and breathe.
The truth is simple and humiliating: I didn’t trust her. I made assumptions based on a snippet of a conversation I overheard, drank myself into oblivion, and then, when she showed up at my house and said the one thing I’ve been dying to hear for months, I pulled a Leo and fucked it all up.
I didn’t say “I’m proud of you” or “Are you okay” or “Do you need anything.”
I’d already made assumptions, let her believe a lie because I was angry, and was too far into my trip to Fuckupsville to reroute my internal GPS and fix the situation.
Maybe if I’d been clothed and caffeinated, I would have done better. But I wasn’t.
So I stood there. Slack-jawed. A frozen, buffering buffoon.
I towel off, pull on sweats and a hoodie, and limp—God, I’m limping—into the kitchen.
Coffee. Water. Ibuprofen. I line them up like communion and take all three. The clock on the stove says 6:48.
These forty-eight minutes have been the longest three days of my life.
My phone is on the counter where I abandoned it last night. Ok, fine—yesterday afternoon. I pick it up and stare at the black screen, as if the thing will tell me how to fix any of this. When it wakes, there’s a text from Dexter from after we fled Nico’s:
Dex, 11:32 a.m.: you need me?
There’s also a text from Tori, time-stamped last night, that I didn’t see:
Tori, 11:31 p.m.: Sorry I had to leave early today. Had some stuff to handle. I’ll be by first thing tomorrow morning.
Would you look at that. She called ahead.