“Eat the sandwich.”
He looks at it like it is one more thing being asked of him tonight. Then he takes it, because his body is smarter than his pride, and because I am watching.
The smile never arrives.
The heat under everything does not leave either.
“Thank you,” he says when he finishes.
“For the sandwich?”
“For being here.”
I look at him across the dim cab. He is still too pale. Still scared. Still bruised in ways that have nothing to do with hockey.
“You do not have to thank me for showing up.”
“I do if I want you to know I noticed.”
The words land low in my body.
I wish this were a different night. I wish his mother were safe, my career were not a smoking crater, and we were just two people in a truck admitting what has been obvious for weeks.
Wanting better timing is another way of hiding.
“Your father called me first,” I say.
Ryan’s eyes stay on mine.
“I know.”
“That means something.”
“Yes.”
“I do not know what.”
“Neither do I.”
Honesty.
Terrible, inconvenient honesty.
He starts the engine again.
The last stretch of highway is quieter. Not empty. Charged. His right hand rests on the gearshift. Mine is on the console, four inches away. I could close the distance. He would let me. I know it in the set of his shoulders, in the way his breathing changes when my fingers flex.
I keep my hand where it is.
This is not the moment to ask his body for comfort.
So I give him something harder.
“My mother used to wait up for me,” I say.
His eyes flicker to me, then back to the road.
“When I was in college. If I drove back late, she would sit in the kitchen with a book and pretend she had not been waiting. She died before I figured out that was love and not anxiety.”
