28
We’re Keeping This Simple
Nash
There’s a hand on my stomach, and I wake up with my fingers already locked around it.
Kylie.
Her palm is flat over my shirt, and for one fucked-up second, I can’t tell where it is or how low.
So I press my thumb into the side of her hand and follow the heel of it without moving anything else, feeling my way across.
Center. She’s in the center. The graft is farther left.
I let the air out through my nose, and behind me, she makes a soft sound and pushes her face harder between my shoulder blades.
I stare at the wall. Her knees are tucked into the backs of mine, her arm is around my waist, and her hand has disappeared completely under mine.
She saw it on Greeley’s driveway. I haven’t thought about that once while I’ve been inside her.
I thought about my shirt, and about how fast I caught her wrist Friday night, and whether she’d try again.
She didn’t. Not Friday, not Saturday morning, not last night. She hasn’t asked about it once.
If she moved six inches to the left, she’d feel it.
Not see it, feel it. My stomach pulls tight under her palm.
The worst of it is down near my hip, where the burn went deepest, and she’d get there first if her hand slid under my shirt from here.
Her fingers would cross normal skin, and then the skin would go smooth and tight and cooler than the rest of me, and in one place there would just be less of me.
I used to check it in the mirror after showers, turning sideways to see if it looked as bad from that angle. It did. So I stopped checking.
She shifts behind me, and her hand moves with her.
I catch it so hard she makes another sleepy sound into my back.
I freeze. She doesn’t wake up. My fingers loosen one at a time.
I could move her hand. It would take nothing.
Pick it up, set it on the mattress between us, and she’d probably sleep straight through it. I leave it where it is.
The room is gray through the blinds. Her black hair tie is sitting on my desk next to the ring the Gatorade left.
I fell asleep on my back with her on my chest, her cheek right over my heart and one leg thrown over mine, my hand on her hip.
Now I’m on my side, and she came across the mattress after me, and I don’t remember threading my fingers through hers.
Apparently I do this shit unconsciously now.
I should probably be more concerned about that.
Instead, I want to turn over. I want her back where she was, on my chest with her leg over me and her face where I can see it when she wakes up.
I start to move, and she breathes deeper against my back, and I stop.
The clock says 7:02. I stay. At 7:09, my left arm starts tingling under the pillow. At 7:14, I can’t feel two of my fingers. By 7:20, my shoulder fucking hurts, and she’s still sleeping through all of it with her hand six inches from the worst part of me and mine wrapped around it. I stay.
At 7:41, her fingers twitch under mine, and she makes a small, cranky sound into my back, and then she goes stiff.
I can feel the exact second she figures out where she is, where her hand is, whose shirt her face is pressed into.
She doesn’t pull away. She just goes very still, like if she stops breathing I won’t notice she’s there.
“Morning,” I say to the desk.
Her forehead presses against my spine. “I don’t know how I got over here.”
My arm is pins and needles, and her hand is still under mine, and neither of us lets go.
“What time is it?” she murmurs.
“Seven-forty.”
“I have class at nine.”
“Okay.”
She stays exactly where she is for another four minutes.
I watch every one of them change on the clock.
Then she slides her hand out from under mine and climbs over me to get out, all elbows and knees and fuzzy socks, catching me in the thigh on the way and saying, “Sorry, sorry,” in a voice that isn’t sorry at all.
On her feet in the middle of my room, in those pants, with her braid half undone and one side of her face creased from my shirt, she looks around like she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to take with her.
She finds the hair tie on my desk and puts it on her wrist.
“Bye,” she says. She gets as far as the door and stops with her hand on the knob. “They’re strawberries.”
Then she’s gone.
I roll onto my back and shake my arm out until the feeling crawls back into my fingers. It hurts like hell. I lie there with my hand open on my stomach, right where hers was, and let it.
Monday is the day off, so there’s no ice, no lift, no Berwyn, and I never know what to do with it. I have class, but it doesn’t fill the day, and I watch the clock the whole time. Twice I catch myself flexing my left hand under the desk, working out the last of the stiffness from this morning.
Rafe comes back after class with his pillow under his arm and throws it on his bed without looking at me. “Koda’s roommate snores,” he says, and that’s all he says. He puts his earbuds in and lies down on the pillow with his shoes on.
At noon, my phone buzzes with a picture of strawberries.
Kylie: For the record.
Me: I know what a strawberry is.
Kylie: Sure you do.
I look at that for a while and don’t answer.
I put the phone in my pocket and go to lunch.
The fruit is in a big metal bowl by the silverware like always, bananas going brown on one side and oranges nobody takes.
I grab an apple on the way past, because that’s what I grab when I want something sweet.
I take a bite, and set it on my tray and sit down.
Then I take out my phone and take a selfie of the next bite and send it to her.
Me: This is an apple.
I put the phone face down and eat my chicken. It buzzes before I’m through the first piece.
Kylie: Huge day for you.
Kylie: Discovering fruit.
Kylie: So proud.
I eat the apple last, the whole thing down to the core, and then sit turning the stem between my fingers until Koda texts to ask if I’m coming to shoot.
The shooting room is in the basement of the athletic building, at the end of the hallway past the equipment room, behind a door somebody wrote NO SKATES on in Sharpie.
It’s maybe thirty feet deep. The floor is synthetic ice, white plastic panels locked together like a puzzle, scuffed gray in the middle where everybody stands.
There’s a regulation net at the far end against a sheet of plywood that’s black with puck marks, thousands of them, some gouged deep enough to show the layers of wood.
A shooter tutor hangs off the crossbar, the vinyl sheet with four holes cut in the corners, and one of the bottom holes has been hit so many times its edge is chewed.
There’s a passing rebounder along the left wall, two green rails that kick the puck back at you, and two black marks on the ceiling tiles above the net.
Mathers is already there at the top of the room with a bucket at his feet, shooting from the same spot over and over. Every one goes bar-down on the glove side, and the ping of the post and then the plywood is the only sound in the room. He looks up when the door bangs.
“Didn’t know anybody else came in here on Mondays,” Koda says.
Mathers pulls another puck off the pile with his blade.
“Missed any open nets lately?”
Mathers doesn’t answer. He doesn’t leave either. He just slides his bucket over a couple of feet to make room.
We grab sticks off the rack by the door.
Mine is a lefty with the tape half off the blade, and I retape it sitting on the floor while Koda dumps a second bucket out in the middle of the tiles.
For a while, it’s just shooting. Rafe goes top corner, top corner, top corner.
Koda misses the net entirely twice, then tries a between-the-legs thing that goes straight into the wall behind him, bounces off the rebounder, and rolls directly back into the bucket, and he throws both arms up like he meant it.
I work the rebounder, pass and catch, the puck coming back off the green rail a hair faster each time I lean into it.
On synthetic, the puck drags, so you have to put more into everything, and by the twentieth one, my forearms are burning in the good way, and I’ve stopped thinking about anything but the puck.
Then Rafe starts carrying. He scoops a puck off the pile and works it through the middle of the room, around the empty bucket like it’s a defenseman, around Koda, who isn’t even trying to stop him, and I step in off the rail and take it off his blade.
He stops dead. “What the fuck?”
“You were holding it.”
“We’re not playing anything.”
“You were still holding it.”
He takes it back with a hard little chop on my stick and goes again, and this time I don’t step in.
I watch. He gets to the bucket. Koda drifts toward the rail, open, stick on the tiles, the way he’d be on the half wall.
And Rafe pulls the puck back and goes around the bucket anyway, one more move, then another, then shoots.
From the second Koda got open to the second Rafe shot: one, two, three, maybe more.
In a game, three seconds is the whole play.
It’s a D-man closing from the weak side, a stick in your hands, and the puck going the other way.
“That’s what you do in games,” I say.
Rafe fishes another puck out of the net. “Score?”
“Hold it too long.”
“Exactly what I fucking said,” Koda says, loud, like he’s been waiting three weeks for somebody else to say it, which he probably has.
“If I’ve got possession, why the fuck would I give it up?” Rafe says.
“Because Barnes is open.”
“Barnes,” he snickers.
Mathers snorts into his water bottle.
“You pull the first guy,” I say. “That’s good. You’re the best on the team at pulling the first guy. Then you try to beat the second one too, instead of moving it, and by then the lane you made is gone.”
“I make that play.”
“Sometimes.”
“No. Nearly every time.”