I'm coming.
21
THEO
Iwake up in my clothes on top of the duvet with my phone under the pillow and for three seconds I don't remember, and then I remember.
The remembering is the worst part of my day and it's not even six in the morning.
I lie there with my face pressed into the cotton and I feel the way my jeans have cut a seam into my hip bone from sleeping in them and I feel my mouth gummy and sour from the crying and I feel the phone shape under my pillow like a small cold animal, and then I hear the footsteps in the hallway outside my door and my body comes all the way awake.
Paul. Not walking to the kitchen. Walking to my door.
I sit up. I push my hair off my face. I look at the doorknob. It doesn't turn. He stops outside. He stands there. I can hear him breathing through his nose, the patient-and-not-patient breathing. Thirty seconds. A minute. I don't move.
He knocks. Once. Light. Not the knock of a man trying to come in. The knock of a man telling me he's there.
“Theo.”
I don't answer.
“I'm going to make coffee. I'm going to be in the kitchen. Come down when you're ready.”
I don't answer.
His footsteps go back down the hall. They go down the stairs. They go to the kitchen. I listen to the distance of him opening the cabinet and running water and clicking the machine on, each small domestic sound like a nail driven somewhere in my chest because this is the house I live in and it is making its normal morning sounds and I am a prisoner in it.
I slide my hand under the pillow and pull the phone out.
Battery: four percent.
I plug it in. I sit with my back against the headboard and I stare at the thread with Maddox.
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.
Still a draft.
No new messages from him. No missed call. Nothing.
I hold the phone against my chest and I cry for a minute without noise. I've learned this kind of crying growing up with my father. The crying you do in a house where the other person can hear a floorboard creak two rooms away.
I stay in my room until nine.
I do it on purpose. I make him wait. I don't shower. I don't change. I sit on the floor with my back against the bed and I scroll the hockey news on my phone because my phone is plugged in and I can't help it.
The first headline on the league page isCreed, Huskies Part Ways; Personal Conduct Cited.No photo of Maddox. A stock headshot of Callahan. A two-paragraph item.The Frosthaven Huskies organization announced today that veteran defenseman Maddox Creed will not return to the club. Sources close to the situation cited a personal conduct matter; the teamis expected to waive its remaining contract obligations and pursue a mutual separation. A press conference is scheduled for Monday.
I put the phone face-down on the carpet. I put my forehead on my knees. I count breaths. Four in. Four out. Four in. Four out.
Finally, at nine, I hear him put the coffee machine back on for a second pot and I go, because I am starving, and because he has the car keys, and because I am twenty years old with no money of my own and a guard on my lawn and I cannot stay in the room forever.
He's at the island.
The kitchen is full of light. Sunday-morning light, the kind this house gets in the winter when the trees are bare and the sun comes all the way in across the hardwood. He's in a clean button-down, cuffs rolled. The bloody one from last night is gone. His knuckles are taped. He's made eggs and toast and has a plate waiting at the stool across from his with no fanfare, the plate a silent admission that he knows my body needs to eat even if I'd rather starve to spite him.
He doesn't greet me. He doesn't look up. He waits until I'm in the room.
“Sit.”
