Chapter 16
SPRING ON THE SLOPE
I.
The slope looks different without the ice.
Not dramatic-different — it's still a hill, still the same cracked pavement with the drain at the bottom that catches meltwater in the spring.
I walk past it every day. To the dépanneur for milk.
To the corner to get air while Ethan does his physio exercises, the ones he still won't do if I'm watching.
Past the bus stop. Past the place where the sidewalk cracks and the weeds come through every April.
I walk past this slope automatically, without looking — my feet know the cracks.
Today I'm looking.
The ice is gone. The trees along the curb are doing the early-spring thing — bare but swelling at the tips, the particular tension of a branch deciding whether to commit.
The air has shifted from the flat Montreal grey to something with yellow in it, actual shadows, actual warmth if you stand in the right spot and believe hard enough.
Ethan is next to me. Walking — fully, both legs, no crutches.
The crutches retired last week with a ceremony that consisted of him leaning them against the wall, saying "good riddance," and Bagel sniffing them once as if closing a case file.
The cane is still here, though — black, medical, held in his right hand because his physiotherapist has opinions about outdoor sidewalks in March and because I have worse opinions when he ignores her.
He walks with a catch now — a quarter-beat hesitation on his left side, the hip remembering what it went through.
The physio says it'll fade. He says it doesn't bother him.
He's lying, but I've learned which lies to let him keep.
Our arms are touching. Forearms, not hands — we do this thing where our hands are in our pockets and our elbows are close and the contact is accidental-on-purpose, the physical equivalent of we're together but we don't need to announce it to the sidewalk.
He stops. Looks at the pavement. At the spot.
"It's smaller," he says.
He's right. In January this slope was a long white tongue of black ice and an angle that ends careers. Now it's just a hill with a city drain and a crack in the asphalt that looks like it's been there since before either of us was born.
"You were bigger then," I say.
He looks at me.
"You were lying on the pavement and you were very large and very inconvenient and I had to kneel in ice and ruin my jeans."
"Those jeans were already—"
"Don't."
A car turns the corner at the top of the slope. A Corolla. Grey. There's a dent in the rear bumper from a parking incident she swears was the other car's fault and refuses to discuss further.
"Oh no," Ethan says.
Sophie parks halfway down the slope. The same spot — maybe the exact one. She climbs out with the energy of someone who has arrived at a location and intends to make it everyone's problem.
"I knew you'd be out here!" She's wearing a jacket too thin for early spring and boots too cute for slush.
"We're just walking home," I say. "We didn't—"
"Marc texted me. Information ecosystem."
Her door is still open. The car is angled on the slope, tires turned to the curb. Same position. Same angle. I watch her eyes go to the pavement — fast, one beat, the flicker that you'd miss if you didn't know her. She looks at the spot where the car slid. Where the sound happened.
Then it's gone. Sophie converts whatever she's feeling into forward momentum as she always has.
Ethan takes a step forward. Just one — toward the car, toward the open door, his body angling toward it the way a body does when it's been trained to move toward situations.
Less because he thinks she needs help than because car on slope is a physical equation and his muscles solve it before his brain consults.
I catch his arm.
"Don't." Squeeze. "You." Tighter. "Dare."
He stops. Sophie looks at us. A look passes across her face — fast, warm, complicated — and then she laughs.
We all laugh. But the laughing has something underneath it, the laughter of three people who were all at the same place when a bad thing happened and are now at the same place and the bad thing is over but their bodies still remember.
"I'm going to start parking at the top," Sophie says. Matter-of-fact. Like a schedule adjustment. "Better for my calves."
She says it light. She means it heavy.
"Yeah?" Ethan says.
"Yeah. I mean, not because of anything. Just — calves." She pulls her collar up. "Also I'm focusing on myself right now, so. No distractions. Including parallel parking on slopes."
One sentence. No detail.
I link my arm through hers. She links back.
"Brunch?" she says. "I found a place that does smoked meat eggs Benedict and the menu has the worst typo I've ever seen."
We walk up the slope. Three of us. Sophie finds every puddle and steps in it — not by accident, by conviction. Ethan keeps up at his pace, the catch in his hip barely visible unless you're watching for it. The slope gets smaller behind us with every step.
Above it, in the apartment I still haven't fully emptied, the bookshelf is finally fixed. The brackets he brought that night are holding up the bottom shelf now, quiet and useful and exactly as stubborn as promised.
At the top, I look back. Just once.
It's a hill. Just a hill.
II.
Brunch was loud. Sophie found the typo and made the waiter acknowledge it and Ethan ate proteins he called "excessive" and I sat between them listening to them argue about whether a smoked meat eggs Benedict constitutes a crime against cholesterol, and Sophie laughed so hard at something Ethan said that coffee came out of her nose, and I held a napkin out without looking, how you hold things for people you've known long enough that the gesture is automatic.
The hallway is narrow.
This is a fact I've known for weeks — I've navigated it carrying laundry, carrying soup, carrying the careful distance of a woman who understood that four feet of corridor was not enough space for two people and an unspoken thing.
Four feet. I mapped it the way I map everything — measured the clearance, calculated the angles, determined that if I flattened against the wall when he passed on crutches, we could avoid the kind of contact that would undo me.
The crutches are gone now. The cane is by the door, for outside. The clearance is the same. The calculation is irrelevant.
He comes out of the bedroom — T-shirt, sweats, hair still damp from the shower. I'm coming from the kitchen with water. We meet in the middle of four feet of corridor and neither of us flattens against the wall.
"Hi," he says. His eyes go from my face to my collarbone and back up, and the return trip takes longer than it should, and he knows I noticed, and he doesn't pretend he didn't.
"Hi."
"I was going to get—"
"Get it later."
I don't know who moves first. It doesn't matter. What matters is that his hand is on my waist and my hand is on his jaw and the corridor feels both very small and exactly the right size, and he leans down and kisses me with the slow, deliberate care of a man learning his body's new terms.
This is different from the kitchen floor.
The kitchen floor was collision — nose-bump, wrong angles, crying and laughing.
This is — intention. His mouth on mine with purpose.
His hand sliding from my waist to the small of my back.
The warmth of his palm through my shirt, and underneath, the awareness of proximity, and his fingers tighten slightly as if registering the same thing.
"We could—" he says against my mouth.
"Yes."
His bedroom. The door open, as it's been since that first night. The bed unmade — neither of us makes it anymore, which feels like a revolution and also like laziness and I've stopped determining which.
He sits on the edge. Because sitting is easier, because the hip prefers to negotiate from a seated position, because this is his body now — capable but editorial, willing but with footnotes. I stand in front of him. His hands are on my waist.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I'm not shaking."
"Your hands—"
"That's adrenaline. Different category."
He looks up at me. From here — him sitting, me standing — the geometry is the reverse of everything else. I'm tall. He's looking up. And his face is doing the thing where all the mechanisms are gone and what's left is just him, looking at me without deciding what to show me first.
"We can stop," he says. "Whenever."
I put my hands on his face. Both hands. His jaw under my palms.
"I'm nervous," I say. "Actual nervous. Not performance nervous. I don't have a plan for this."
"Good," he says. "My plans haven't been working either."
I lean down. Kiss him. His hands come up and pull me closer and my shirt comes off because neither of us decided it should but both of us wanted it to, and his eyes on me — moving slowly, not rushing it.
He inhales. The caught breath of someone seeing what they've imagined.
"The scar," he says. His fingers find the small mark on my shoulder — childhood, a swing set, six years old.
"It's nothing."
"It's specific." His thumb traces it. "It's yours."
His shirt comes off next — I pull it, he helps, the motion catches his left side and he goes still for a beat, the kind of stillness that's not pain anymore but memory of pain, the body's way of bookmarking a place it doesn't fully trust yet.
I slow down. We navigate it together. And his torso is here, close, the surgery scar on his left hip pink and raised against the rest of him.
I touch it.
He flinches — not pain, surprise. The surprise of someone else's fingers on the place that's been only his, the place that marks where the old body ended and the new one began.
"Does it—"
"No. Just — new."
I lean down. I kiss the scar. Light. The skin is different there — smoother, tighter. He makes a sound. Low. His hand comes into my hair.