“Is that right?”
“I have high ambitions,” she says with dignity. “In low places, preferably.”
With a huff of laughter, I pull her in and hold her to me. My life before I met her feels like it belonged to someone else. Now I don’t know how I survived it. The solitude, the impermanence.
Every season a different team, a different city, but every rental apartment the same. Sterile and bland and none of it mine. Meal prep containers lined up in the fridge. Lights out by ten, up at four. The gym, the ice, the tape sessions, the film reviews. A life reduced to its most efficient form.
No softness anywhere. No color. No candles on the dinner table or plants on the windowsill or a dog at my feet or a beautiful woman to hold and kiss and talk to at the end of the day.
No one to cook for. No one falling asleep on my shoulder. No one making me cinnamon muffins I can’t stop eating.
I used to think that needing nothing was the same as being strong.
I understand now that it was just fear. Fear of building something, of having something, because then it could be taken away.
Fear of this: the happiness of having my wife in my arms and the terror that one day she’ll be gone.
Her fingers trace a slow absent pattern on my back through my shirt. I press my lips to the top of her head and stare at the storage room wall and feel the words rising up through my throat before I can stop them, before I can think better of them, before I can run them through whatever filter I usually run everything through.
I say, “Come with me to Denver.”
Chapter 46
Damn Newlyweds
SLADE
Iknow instantly I’ve said the wrong thing.
Lila freezes. Those brown doe eyes going full deer-in-headlights.
“Just an idea,” I say, panicking. “Forget it.”
Fifteen years of playing it cool under pressure and I fold the moment it actually matters.
“Wait.” She takes a breath. “We should talk about this. Just maybe not… here.” She gestures around the storage room.
“Yeah. Right, of course.”
She puts a hand on my chest and offers me a smile. “How’s my lipstick?”
“On my dick.”
I say it without thinking twice. She bursts out laughing and I feel something in my chest relax. No need to panic.
We’re still good.
This marriage is already beyond my wildest dreams, and I’ll enjoy it for as long as it lasts. No attachment, nosuffering.
Except I’m already attached and have been for a long time.
And the suffering has already started.
It started with Boone Hutchins’s stupid fucking “I give it a year, maybe less” bullseye and it’s only increased now with her giving me a stricken look and a “let’s talk about it later” after I propose she move with me to Denver.
I may not be the most emotionally aware guy on the planet, but even I know that’s a bad fucking sign.
I try to put it out of my mind as I take her hand and lead her back down the hallway.
