43. Chapter Forty-Three #2
We’re out front on the porch in the open, because we still can for a few more days.
She’s got her feet in my lap, and we’re talking about the fall — just logistics.
When the guys land. Whether I’ll dress opening night.
Her studio schedule, her firm hours, whether she can still come over once Ivory’s in London and the apartment’s hers.
“Actually.” She’s looking out at the street, not at me. Her posture’s perfect the way it always is, but there’s something set in it. “I don’t want to go back to hiding.”
I go still.
“I’ve been thinking about it all week.” Her voice stays level.
“We’ve had this twice now. Christmas. All summer.
I’m not asking you to imagine something, Percy.
We’ve done it. We’re good at it. What we have is real.
” She turns and looks at me. “I don’t want to park two blocks away in September.
I don’t want to hold my breath on your stairs.
I don’t want to be the thing you sneak in and sneak back out before anyone’s up.
” She takes a breath. “I want to be your girlfriend. When the guys come back, I want you to tell them. I want to have you for real this time.”
And there it is, the thing I’ve been not-looking-at all summer, out in the open on the porch in the last of the light.
I want to say yes.
That’s the part that guts me, sitting here.
Everything in me wants it. I want her in the open.
I want to walk into that house with her hand in mine and say her name to my team like it’s the easiest thing in the world.
I want to be the guy who has a girlfriend he loves.
I want to be a normal guy, a guy who gets to keep the thing he loves.
She’s never asked me for anything before, and this is fair of her to ask.
I get it. I want to give it to her more than I’ve wanted anything.
The yes is right there. Behind my teeth.
And I think about the whiteboard. About Rowan, who had a fling last fall and took a week of hell for it, and that was someone he was flirting with.
About Stanley’s stories, the guys who picked a girl over the game and never made it.
About the fact that this house, these guys, this is the first place anybody ever let me stay, and there’s a rule on the wall, and the rule is the price of staying.
If I say yes and it goes wrong, I lose Hawthorne. I lose the net. I lose the first home I’ve ever had.
If I say no, I might lose her.
And I’ve spent my whole life learning how to survive losing things. I’ve never once learned how to keep two of them at the same time.
“I can’t,” I say. It comes out flat. Flatter than I mean it, so flat it sounds like I don’t care, and I watch it hit her that way. I can’t fix what I just said, because if I open my mouth again, I don’t know what falls out.
She doesn’t move.
“The rule.” I hear how small it sounds the second it’s out.
“You don’t— you don’t know what it’s like in there.
What it’d be, if it got out. This is the first place I’ve ever—” The words won’t line up.
“The season’s starting. I’m in the net this year.
Fuller’s already watching me. I can’t have this out there, not now, not with the depth chart, not with—”
“Not now.” She says it quietly. “Okay. Then when?”
“After. When I—”
“After what?”
And I don’t have an answer. There’s no after I can hand her. No date, no plan, no season that ends clean, no moment where it gets safe. Just a wall I can’t get over and a fear that’s as old as a gas station off a highway where I learned that the second you count on a thing to stay, it goes.
I can’t say any of that. So I say nothing.
She pulls her feet out of my lap.
She doesn’t do it sharp. She does it slow, careful, folding herself up and away from me, her knees coming up, her arms going around them, turning to look out at the street like I’m not there. Like she’s already halfway gone.
We sit like that for a long time. The light goes all the way down.
Inside, the tension’s a thing you could touch. She goes up the stairs without a word, and I stand in the kitchen where we cooked, and I hear her moving around up there, and I know what it is before I see it.
“Penelope,” I say, when she comes back down.
She’s got her bag over her shoulder and the box in her arms. The pencils. The good coffee. Her stuff, out of my house, in her hands.
“I’m gonna go,” she says.
“Don’t.” I’m across the room. “You don’t have to go. Stay. We’ll—”
“We’ll what?” Not sharp. Just tired. Her eyes are wet, and she’s not letting them spill, holding it the way she holds everything. “There’s no we, Percy. You just told me.”
“Let me—” I reach for the box, to carry it, to do something with my hands, and she turns her shoulder so I can’t.
“I love you.” It’s the only thing I’ve got, and it’s the wrong thing, and I say it anyway. “You know I love you.”
“I know.” She’s at the door. “That’s what makes it so stupid.”
She looks at me one more time, and there’s no anger in it, which is worse, there’s just a kind of sad certainty, like she finally got the answer to a question she’s been asking all summer and it’s the one she was afraid of.
“Bye, Percy.”
And she goes.
I stand in the kitchen that was ours an hour ago and listen to her car start and pull away. I don’t move. I keep standing there long after the sound is gone, looking at the door, waiting for it to open, knowing it won’t.
I had two good things.
I just found out that I don’t get to keep both.