“Hetoldyou.”
“Yes.”
“And youbelievedhim?”
I don't blink.
“Yes.”
Paul's hand goes to his forehead. He presses. He closes his eyes. He looks, for one second, like a man who has just realized something he is not going to survive.
“He's going to throw you away, Theo. In a week. In a month. He'll get bored. He'll get traded. He'll find another kid in another city whose father he wants to hurt. And you will be the kid on the shelf that he forgot the name of. That's who he is.”
My fists open and close at my sides.
“That's not who he is.”
“You don't know him.”
“I know him, Dad.”
Paul's mouth goes thin.
“Go to your room.”
I go.
My door shuts. My lock turns. My back hits the door and I slide down it, and I put my face in my hands and breathe.
The boy I…
I say it out loud to my empty room because I have to let it out of my body. I say it to the dark. I say it to the corner of my bed where I masturbated the first week about a man I now know inside my body.
“I'm in love with him.”
The sentence lands in the room and the room doesn't break.
I say it again.
“I'm in love with him. I'm in love with Maddox Creed.”
My chest does a thing. My eyes do a thing. I bring my knees up to my face and I put my forehead on them and I make a sound I have never made in this house. It's half a laugh and half a sob and all of it is relief because I have been carrying this sentencein my chest for a week and I didn't know until I set it down how much weight it had. It's on the floor now. The floor didn't break. The ceiling didn't break. I'm the thing breaking, and it isn't even bad. It's the good kind of breaking, the kind where a thing that was holding itself closed finally lets itself open.
I'm twenty years old. My father has a private security guard on my lawn. My team has fired the man I love. I have no plan. I have no car. I have a phone that Paul will confiscate the second he thinks of it, and he will think of it, because he is not an idiot, he is just heartbroken. My hands are shaking. My mouth tastes like the coppery aftertaste of hyperventilating. My skin smells like the office and Maddox and a little like my father's aftershave from the car, which is the worst of the three.
And Maddox saidwait for me.
I wipe my face. I pick my phone up off the floor where I dropped it. I open the message thread.
I'll wait. I love you. I'm not saying it yet because the first time I say it I want it to be to your face. But I love you. Wait for me too.
I don't send it. I save it as a draft.
I put the phone under my pillow. I lie down in the dark, fully dressed, with my hand on the phone under the pillow like I can feel him through it, and I stare at the ceiling and I make the words happen again in my own head, until they fits there, until they belong.
I'm in love with him.
The ceiling doesn't fall.
