"Soren."
"I've got you. I've got it."
"I know you do." The phrase comes out worn smooth from how many times I've thought it this week. He hears only the warmth in it. The warmth is real. Both things are real at once. That's the whole catastrophe.
"Where do you want me?" he asks.
"Here. Just. Here."
"Like this?"
"Yeah."
He works the knot at the base of my neck. I let him. I'm present and I'm pulling small at the same time. Here in his arms and a long way back behind my own eyes. Watching him take care of me the way my mother took care of me, as Matty tried to take care of me tonight with his forearm and his fear. The whole architecture of people who love me by rearranging the room before I enter it. The doubt isn't the same doubt it was twoweeks ago. Two weeks ago I could name it. Tonight the name is too small. Tonight it sits under my brother's scared eyes, my mother's kitchen, this man's hands, and it's bending. I can feel it bending, the way a bone bends before it gives. I don't know what breaks when it breaks but I know it's going to break something I need.
"Talk to me," he says into my hair. "You went quiet. You don't go quiet with me."
"I'm here."
"That's not the same as not quiet."
He's reading it. Of course he's reading it. He reads everyone. Now he's reading the one thing in the room he can't name because I won't give him the word. I won't give him the word because there isn't one yet that isn't also a knife.
"I'm tired, Soren. It's been a long night in a loud city and my brother put his arm across my throat in front of my mother." All true. Every clause of it. True enough to cover the thing it isn't. "Let me be quiet and here."
"Okay," he says, and pulls me in another inch. Gets it exactly right, how he gets everything right. "Quiet and here. I've got both."
He has both. He has the quiet and the here, the wound and the want, all of it gathered up in two big careful hands. I lie in his arms in a hotel in the city that built me. The sentence I didn't say is still in my chest. Whole and heavy. A thing I chose not to give him and will choose again tomorrow and the day after that until the choosing costs more than the silence. I can feel that day coming the way you feel weather change through glass. My brother put his arm across my throat tonight because he was afraid of what he saw. Afraid is the only thing my family does with the body first. Soren pulled the curtains, squared the bag, held the water out and waited. That's the only thing he does with his hands. I'm lying in his patience, and he's never once beenanything but good to me. I'm not pulling away because I doubt him. I'm pulling away because the doubt is in me. Structural. Load-bearing. Tonight it's taking more weight than it was built for. I don't say the words because saying them would be the crack. Tomorrow there's more hockey. The night the words come isn't tonight.
Chapter 20: Lundy
"Get the lights, I've got the bags," I say.
Jules gets the lights. I take both bags because my hands need to be carrying something and his bag is right there.
"I can carry my own bag, Soren."
"I know. I've got it."
He doesn't fight me on it. That's the first wrong thing. I note it how he notes things, because I've been around him long enough to catch it. Any other night he'd have the strap off my shoulder and his bag back before I cleared the door. Tonight he just lets me have it. Lets the lights come up on the apartment. Stands in his own clean room like he's waiting to be told where to go. Gaspard pours off the windowsill and winds my ankles. I crouch and run a hand down his back, and he leans the whole notch-eared weight of himself into it.
"He's been on me all night," I say. "He likes me now. Don't tell him I said so."
"He likes the warm spot. You're furniture that radiates."
"He missed you."
"He's a cat, Soren."
But Gaspard goes to him anyway. Lands on the table and butts his forehead into Jules’s wrist. Jules cups the cat’s ear in his palm and rubs it how he does, slow and exact. For two seconds I get him back. The apartment smells like his laundry detergent and the basil on the sill, a place someone keeps very carefully. I watch his thumb trace the notch in Gaspard’s ear and I think, stay here. Not to him. To the moment.
It's a good line. It lands flat, no lift under it. The words arrive without the thing that usually rides beneath them, and I take it anyway because I'll take what there is. I go to the kitchen because the kitchen is a place with tasks in it, and I start the cacciatore, his version. The motion loosens the knot the drive home put in my chest.
"You looked good out there tonight," I say. "Like you'd done it before."
"It was garbage time. The game was decided."
"You still looked like that." I turn the burner down. "Your brother was looking for you all night."
