Chapter 20 #2
Lucy turns around and smirks at her flustered boyfriend. He walks over to her and drops his head. She pats him on the cheek.
Rowan chuckles. “You’re a disaster, Reeve.”
Melly grabs my arm and laughs into my shoulder. I look down and grin.
“I slept just fine,” Melly says, recovering. “Thank you for asking.”
Benson buries his face in Lucy. “I’m going to die now.”
Stanley points at the table. “Take a seat, lovebirds.” He looks over at Percy and Rowan. “Can you believe Benson and Blue? The audacity.”
I see Melly freeze for a moment. I rub her back as she sits down and don’t comment back. The thing with Stanley is that he’ll only keep going if you feed into it. I’m not getting into it this morning.
I walk to the fridge and make us two glasses of water. Then I sit next to Melly. We drink.
“Fuck,” Stanley says, watching. “You two are parched.”
I put my glass down and hide my laugh. “Fuck off, Stan.”
Melly coughs into her cup. She makes her cheeks big, and then she swallows. My foot finds hers under the table, and she looks at me and smiles.
Rowan slides plates in front of us. Eggs. Toast.
“Eat.”
“Thanks, Row. Lucy.”
“Mhm.”
“No problem.”
Lucy sits with Benson across from us. She tucks herself under his arm, and Benson kisses the top of her head without looking up from his eggs, and it hits me — sudden, sharp, clean — that this is the picture.
This is the picture I’ve been adjacent to for two years and didn’t realize I was waiting to be inside of.
Benson and Lucy on one side of the table.
Me and Melly on the other. The team around us being themselves. Sunday morning. Eggs.
I’m in it now.
I’m in the picture.
My foot presses against Melly’s under the table again.
She doesn’t look at me. She just smiles into her coffee.
We eat.
Stanley resumes operating at his normal volume, which is to say loud, and he tells Melly a story about a freshman on the team that’s been getting his ass handed to him from Coach.
Lucy laughs in the right places. Benson rolls his eyes in the right places.
Rowan finally puts the cereal box down. Percy continues sipping water.
Melly leans into me at one point and rests her head against my shoulder, and the whole table sees it. Stanley’s voice catches on whatever word he was saying, and Lucy’s eyes go bright, and Benson hides a smile behind his coffee cup.
Nobody says anything.
We leave around eleven to get Melly some of her clothes from her apartment.
I drive one-handed because I don’t want my other hand back. She’s holding onto it.
I park outside her building and help her out of the truck because she’s swimming in my sweats and the hem is dragging. She rolls her eyes at me, and I kiss her temple at the curb because I can now.
I walk her up.
Penelope is on the couch reading when we come in.
“Oh, hey,” Penelope says, and then she rearranges her face when she sees me.
“Hi, Pen,” Melly says.
Penelope lifts her eyes over the rim of her glasses for exactly one second, gives me a look that contains an entire welcome and an entire warning in the same expression, and goes back to her book.
We walk into Melly’s bedroom and shut the door. Melly walks straight into her bathroom and shuts the door.
I sit on the edge of her bed and look around.
Her bed’s unmade from yesterday morning, the comforter shoved down to the foot.
There’s a stack of textbooks on her nightstand with a half-empty mug of tea on top.
A small, framed photo of her and Mila in high school.
A candle that smells, faintly, like the way her hair smells.
Her hairbrush. A scrunchie. A receipt. A pen.
I get up and straighten her comforter. I don’t know why. I’m not the kind of person who makes other people’s beds. I’m barely the kind of person who makes my own. But my hands are doing it anyway, smoothing the corners, fluffing the pillow she sleeps on.
I sit back down. The water’s still running in the bathroom, so I look down and start to think.
It hits me sitting on the edge of her bed in her room in her apartment — clean, unannounced, full force.
I’m done for.
I’m completely gone for her.
Not in the first three dates way. Not in the infatuation way.
Not in the way I’ve watched Stanley be gone for three different girls in two years.
This is the bones version. This is the version where my hands are smoothing her comforter without me telling them to.
This is the version where I parked my truck on Linden, and it didn’t feel like visiting; it felt like home.
This is the version where the smell of her shampoo is going to wreck me every time I walk into a drugstore for the rest of my life.
I’m sitting here, in her bedroom, waiting for her to get out of the shower, and the waiting is the part that has me by the throat.
I’m not bored. I’m not restless. I’m not checking my phone.
I’m just here, listening to the water, content in a way I have not been content in any room I have ever sat in.
She has me hook, line, and sinker, and the hook went in clean, and the line paid out fast, and the sinker has just hit the bottom, and I’m down here now in the dark with her, and I’m not coming back up.
My chest tightens.
This.
This is why I never jumped.
This exact feeling, this exact full-body gone-ness — this is what I have spent all these years not allowing to happen.
Because I knew. I knew, somewhere under the we’re just friends and the I’m focused on hockey and the the timing’s bad, I knew that if I let her all the way in, she’d take over my entire life.
I knew there wouldn’t be a corner of me she didn’t touch.
I knew I’d be the kind of man who straightens his girlfriend’s bed while she showers and feels, in the straightening, the same dumb peace he feels on a clean sheet of ice.
I knew I’d be hers.
And I’m scared of it.
I’m sitting on the edge of her bed, and I’m scared.
My hands are a little cold. My chest is tight.
My breath is doing the shallow thing it does before a faceoff.
Because I just spent eighteen hours with her and I’m already this far gone, and we have years in front of us, and the further-gone is only going to get worse, and at some point this love is going to have a hook in me so deep that losing it would gut me, and I know it, and I’m walking toward it anyway.
The water shuts off in the bathroom.
I hear her humming. The shower curtain rings sliding back.
I close my eyes.
I promised her.
I promised her last night I wasn’t going to run anymore, and I meant it then, and I mean it now, and I’m going to mean it the next time the fear comes for me.
I’m not running. I told her I wasn’t, and I’m not.
I’m going to sit on the edge of her bed and feel the fear and not move.
I’m going to let it land. I’m going to let her have all of me.
I’m going to trust her with the keys, and I’m going to be the man who stays.
Because not having her is a version of my life that I cannot imagine anymore. That version is gone. It died. Last night killed it completely.
I want more.
I want all of it.
I want it so much it scares me.
She comes out of the bathroom in a towel.