I'll think about it.
It's the best answer he's been able to give me in six months. It would've destroyed me in February. In July, it sits in my hand and I look at it and I feel my chest do a small, clean thing that isn't sadness exactly. It's the feeling of a door that used to be locked that is now only closed. You can still walk past it. You can still knock. He might still say no. But the lock is off.
I put the phone face-down on the step.
“Pancake. Inside.”
He pretends he can't hear me.
“Pancake.Treat.”
He can hear me.
Maddox is in the bathroom when I come back up.
I hear the shower before I see the steam. Our bathroom in this apartment is narrow, a tiled rectangle with a wide glass stall we both fit in if we don't insist on a lot of personal space, whichwe don't. He's leaning on the tile with water running down his spine.
He doesn't turn around. He heard me come in.
“How's your dad?”
“He's Paul.”
“Yeah.”
The water hits his shoulder. He tips his head to let it hit his neck.
“He said the pass was nice.”
“The pass was nice, kid.”
My hand flattens over his hip under the water.
“He's going to think about coming in August.”
“Good.”
I peel off the t-shirt. I peel off the boxers. I step into the stall behind him and I put my forehead between his shoulder blades and the water runs over both of us, hotter than I'd set it, his setting, because he likes to melt his own back muscles.
His hand comes back and pulls me closer against him.
“You good?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me.”
“I'm good. Every morning I wake up and I check if I'm still good, and I keep being good, and it's been six months, and it's not fake. I keep thinking it's going to be fake. It isn't.”
“It isn't.”
I press my forehead harder into his back.
“The class in May. I wrote a paper aboutThe Great Gatsbyand I got an A and nobody in my life had any idea what to do about that except you, and you framed the printout. Like a lunatic. You framed a ten-page paper.”
“It's a good paper.”
His hand draws a circle on my back.
