Chapter 8 #2
I got back to the apartment around six. Bagel wound himself between my ankles at the door, demanding the kind of full-body attention that only an orange cat considers reasonable.
Ethan was on the couch, scrolling his phone, looking like a person who had not done anything unusual in my absence and was definitely not waiting to hear how it went.
"Fixed?" he said.
"Fixed."
"Good."
That was it. He went back to his phone. I went to the kitchen. Neither of us mentioned his voice, or my mother, or the fact that a line had just been crossed that I hadn't drawn yet because I didn't know where it was.
I fold his laundry. I fold it neatly, which is insane, because he won't notice and nobody is grading me, but I do it anyway.
At one point I realize I've been holding the same T-shirt for thirty seconds, just standing in his hallway breathing it in, and I fold it so fast and so hard that I crease it wrong and have to start over.
By 10 PM, Ethan is asleep. Or pretending to be — I can never fully tell with him, because his version of sleep involves a studied casualness that seems like a performance of its own.
His door is half-open. The hallway light is off.
Bagel is curled at the foot of his bed, and Poutine is somewhere in the apartment doing whatever Poutine does at night, which I suspect involves plotting.
I should also sleep. I've been sleeping in the guest room on a fold-out couch that has a bar across the middle that my spine has developed a personal relationship with.
I should go in there, lie down, and close my eyes and not think about the fact that I'm living in a man's apartment while he recovers from a broken pelvis and we still haven't defined what we are and I've been wearing his old T-shirts to sleep because I didn't pack enough of my own and his T-shirts smell like laundry detergent and something underneath that I'm not going to name.
I go in. I lie down. I turn on my side.
And stop.
The bar isn't there.
Not gone — it can't be gone, the mechanics of a fold-out couch don't allow that — but the angle is different.
I reach underneath me and feel it: a towel.
Folded once, precisely, and laid flat on top of the sheets, right where the metal ridge sits beneath them.
It's not thick, just enough to turn the bar from a thing that digs into you to a thing you can almost forget about.
I lie there in the dark, my hand still on the towel, and I think about timelines.
I was at my mother's apartment for three hours this afternoon.
Ethan was alone. Ethan, who needs both crutches to get to the bathroom, who isn't supposed to bend at the waist, who has hardware in his pelvis that is — as the physiotherapist reminded him twice — still healing.
Ethan got off the couch, crossed the apartment, came into this room, figured out where the bar was with the rubber tip of a crutch, folded a towel into a narrow strip, laid it on top, and got back to the couch before I came home.
And when I walked in the door he said Fixed? and went back to his phone like nothing had happened.
I should say something. Tomorrow morning I should say thank you or you didn't have to or please don't hurt yourself for my comfort, you impossible man. But I know I won't. Because saying something would mean naming what this is, and we're not doing that yet.
I close my eyes. The bar doesn't dig. My spine stretches into the space where the pain used to be, and the absence of it is louder than the pain ever was.
I should sleep. But my mind won't stop. It keeps retracing his path — couch to hallway, hallway to guest room, the careful geometry of a man navigating his own apartment like it's an obstacle course, prodding the mattress until he found the ridge, folding a towel with one hand braced near him, placing it where he could reach without pretending it was easy.
My brain draws the route over and over, and each time it gets to the part where he lowers himself back onto the couch and picks up his phone, my chest pulls tight.
Instead I'm in the kitchen. Because the pasta I made for dinner was terrible — I know this because I ate it and smiled and said "not bad, right?
" and he said "honestly, it's great" and he is lying to my face, lying kindly, and I hate the kindness more than I would hate the truth because the truth would at least be something I could fix.
I'm telling myself now: the pasta was terrible.
And I'm hungry. And the bag of chips behind the rice cooker is calling me with the quiet authority of a snack that has been waiting for exactly this moment.
I open the bag. The crinkle is loud in the dark kitchen — louder than it should be, loud enough that I freeze for a second and glance toward the hallway. Nothing. His door is still half-open. The apartment is quiet.
I eat a chip. Then another. Then five.
I'm sitting on the kitchen floor now. Not because the floor is comfortable — it's cold tile and my tailbone has opinions — but because standing felt like too much effort and the counter felt too formal and the floor doesn't ask anything of me.
Bagel appears. Of course he does — Bagel has a sixth sense for unsanctioned food events. He materializes from the hallway like a small orange ghost and parks himself in front of me with an expression that communicates, clearly and without ambiguity: share.
"No," I whisper. "These are mine. You have your own food."
He stares.
"Stop it."
He puts one paw on my knee.
"You're the worst negotiator I've ever met," I whisper, and hold a chip out. He sniffs it. Considers. Pulls back with the expression of a food critic who Has Reviewed This Establishment And Found It Lacking. He doesn't eat it — Bagel's standards are, apparently, higher than mine.
I eat it instead. And another. And another. The bag crinkles every time and I keep cringing at the sound but I can't stop because right now, on this floor, with this cat looking at me like I'm mildly disappointing, is the first time all day I haven't been trying.
"You know what, Bagel?" I say to the cat, who has given up on the chips and is now grooming his paw with theatrical disinterest. "I think the pasta was genuinely the worst thing I've ever made.
I think it might have been worse than the risotto I made for Sophie's birthday that she said was 'interesting' and then ordered pizza.
" I brush a crumb off his ear. "And he said it was great.
He said it was great, Bagel. With a straight face. Who does that?"
Bagel doesn't answer. He blinks slowly, which in cat language either means I trust you or I am bored of you.
"At least you don't need me to pretend," I say, and the sentence comes out quieter than I meant it to, quieter than the chips, quieter than everything, and for a second it sits in the dark kitchen like something I wasn't supposed to hear myself say.
I eat one more chip. I close the bag. I put it back behind the rice cooker.
I stand up. My knees crack — traitors, both of them — and I get a glass of water from the tap. Then I get another glass.
His glass. The one he keeps by the bed in case he wakes up thirsty. He mentioned it once — or maybe he didn't mention it, maybe I just noticed it was always there, always half-full in the morning, and started refilling it without being asked.
I carry the water down the hallway. The apartment is dark except for the street lamp glow coming through the living room window, the same amber stripe that paints everything in here gold and shadow. His door is half-open.
I stop.
I can see the edge of his bed from here.
The shape of him under the blanket — one arm out, the other tucked against his side, the careful arrangement of a body that's protecting something broken.
Bagel has resettled at his feet. The room smells like sleep and the faint clinical edge of the wound dressings he's still changing every morning.
I could walk in. I could put the water on his nightstand and walk out and it would be nothing — a practical gesture, the kind of thing a person does when they're helping someone recover, which is what I'm doing. Nothing more.
But I don't walk in. I stand in the hallway holding a glass of water and I don't walk in because walking in at 2 AM while he's sleeping feels like crossing something I can't uncross, and I'm standing here in his T-shirt with chip crumbs on my fingers and I'm not performing and I'm not ready for him to see that.
I put the water on the small table in the hallway. The one just outside his door. Close enough that he'll find it if he gets up. Far enough that I didn't have to enter the room.
I go back to the guest room. The fold-out bar is muffled by a folded towel. My spine settles into the space he made for it.
In the morning, there's a bag of chips on the kitchen table.
The same brand. The same barbecue flavor. Full, unopened. It wasn't there last night.
I stare at it. He's at the table, eating cereal, scrolling his phone, looking like a person who has not done anything unusual this morning and is definitely not watching me through the reflection on his phone screen.
"Where did this come from?" I say.
"Maman dropped off supplies yesterday," he says. Casual. "It was in the bag."
It's a lie. Maman's supplies are organized — she labels everything, dates everything, does not randomly include a bag of barbecue chips in her health-conscious Tupperware care packages.
He ordered this. Sometime before morning, he opened an app and paid someone to leave a single bag of chips at his door.
I don't know how, and I'm not going to check his phone to find out.
He heard me.
The thought blooms and I push it down immediately, because if he heard me then he heard the chip bag and the whispered conversation with the cat and the thing I said about the pasta and the thing I said about pretending and if he heard all of that then he heard the version of me that isn't for anyone, the one I only use when I'm alone, and that feels like being caught in something I can't take back.
But the chips are there. On the table. The same brand.
"Thanks," I say.
"Don't mention it."
I pick up Bagel. He's tangled around my ankles in his usual morning campaign for attention. I hold him against my chest and he starts purring — the good purr, the one that vibrates your whole ribcage — and I say into his fur, so quietly that no one but a cat could hear it:
"Don't get used to it."
I'm not sure if I'm talking to the cat or to myself.