He takes it. I let him. The reservoir is black and flat in front of us. The sky is going that deep navy where the first star showsup if you know where to look. Somewhere behind us a car passes on the road and keeps going. A late bird calls from the pines, one short note, not an alarm, the kind you get when a bird has decided the world is safe enough to speak into. Theo's breath is warm through the shoulder of my jacket. He's stopped shaking. He's tucked the top of his head under my jaw like that's where it lives now. Maybe it is.
I'm not going anywhere. I'm not going back to the Boiler. I'm not going home alone tonight. I'm going wherever he needs me to go. If it's my apartment, it's my apartment. If it's a diner at the edge of town where nobody knows either of us, it's a diner. If it's a motel two hours north with the heat on high and a door that locks from the inside, that's where we'll be at midnight.
Phoenix was right about one thing. I'm in too deep. I'm so deep I can't see the top anymore. That used to scare me. Tonight, sitting on a cold bench by a black reservoir with a crying boy tucked under my arm, it doesn't. It's the calmest I've been in a month.
“Okay,” Theo says into my shoulder. “Okay. I can talk now.”
“I'm listening.”
And he starts.
17
THEO
Itell him what Paul said.
Some of it. Not all of it. I can't fit all of it into words yet. It's still a shape in my chest, not a sentence. But the big things come out. The unlocked door.You smell like him. Get out of my kitchen.How he opened my bedroom door after I came back from my run, waking me from a nap, and despite being groggy, I knew, instantly, that he'd spent the time I was gone deciding what to say. He said it. All of it. The part where if I keep seeing Maddox I'm not his son. The part where he's already called the owner. The part where the room I sleep in isn't mine, it's his, it's always been his, and I'm lucky to have a bed in it.
The last thing he said before I ran out of the house was, “I raised you better than this.”
I got halfway down the block before the shake started. I sat on the curb. I tried to call my aunt. I couldn't. I didn't know what to say and I couldn't make my thumb press her name. So I called Maddox instead. Not called. Texted. Because I'm a coward.
I tell him this sitting on the bench. My forehead is on his shoulder. His jacket smells like a bar and something underneath it that's just him. Skin, the shampoo he uses, the warmth of abody that's been a body all day. I breathe it in because that's the part that keeps me stitched together right now.
He doesn't interrupt. He lets me talk. When I run out of sentence, he doesn't ask the next question. He waits. Like he trusts me to find the next one.
“I don't know what to do,” I say finally.
“Okay.” His hand is on the back of my neck. Warm. Still. “You don't have to know tonight.”
My fingers curl into his jacket.
“I can't go back there.”
“No.”
I make myself say it out loud because it matters.
“I mean ever. I don't think I can ever go back there.”
He's quiet. His thumb moves once against the knob at the top of my spine.
“Then you don't,” he says.
He drives slow. One hand on the wheel, one on my thigh. Not sexual. Anchoring. Like he's making sure I'm still in the car. I watch the streetlights pass over his face. The set of his jaw. His eyes going from road to mirror to me and back. He's checking on me without making it a production.
At a red light he glances over.
“You want food?”
I hadn't thought about food. I haven't eaten today. My stomach is a knot, not a hunger, but he's right, I should eat.
My jaw does a thing I can't control.
“I don't know.”
“I'll make you something at the apartment.” The light changes and we go. “You don't have to decide. I'll make it and you can pick at it.”
