Jamie
I wake up at five AM in a room that isn't mine. Rhys is asleep beside me. Face turned toward me with one hand open on the pillow between us. Breathing slow and unaware, his hair everywhere, like always. The room smelling like him and the record player silent in the corner.
I've been awake for forty minutes. I know because I've been watching the ceiling and running through every method I have for shutting things down — redirect, suppress, find the box, close the box — and none of it is working.
That has never happened before.
The thing in my chest just sits there. Immovable. Like it put down roots while I was sleeping, against my will. Like it's been there for months and I just didn't look at it long enough to see how deep it went and now its weighing me down rapidly, too fast, I’m sinking and I can’t stop. I press my hand flat to my sternum. It doesn't move.
I know exactly when it happened.
The way he saidyou're allowed more than onelike the answer was obvious and he was waiting for me to find it.
Him.
The way I pressed my lips to his hair. Without deciding to. Just did it. Like he was already the thing I reached for without thinking. That's the part. I've been lying here since trying to find the version of this that isn't catastrophic and I keephitting the same wall.
I'm falling in love with Rhys Callahan.
I let the thought exist for one second. Then I sit up. My shoulders hurt. Not real pain. The phantom ache between my shoulder blades that never fully goes away. I've had it so long I forget it's there until a morning like this when everything else is stripped back and there it is.
I was fourteen. Hockey camp. Three weeks upstate. My father shook my hand at the car before I got on the bus — not a hug, never a hug, a handshake like business associates — and told me to come back better.
There was a boy there. That's all it was. A boy. Fifteen. Left wing for a school three towns over. We skated on the same line for a week and I was aware of him and I managed it fine at first. Said nothing. Showed nothing. Did everything right.
Except one night after dinner he found me alone behind the equipment shed and kissed me. And I let him. For maybe thirty seconds I let him and it was the first time anything had ever felt like relief and then I heard footsteps and pulled back and that was it. Except someone saw.
Word moved fast the way it does in closed places. By morning it had been turned into something louder and cruder than it was, the kind of story that travels fast because it has sharp edges, and by afternoon it reached a phone and a call home.
My father's voice went very quiet. That was always the sign. Not the yelling — he rarely yelled. The quiet. The specific quiet of a man deciding how best to fix something broken.
I'm hearing things, he said.
It wasn't true, I told him.
I don't care what it was, he said.I care what it looked like.
He drove up that night.
Four hours.
Didn't speak the whole drive back.
When we got home he sent my mother upstairs. I heard her footsteps on the landing and then nothing. I stood in the kitchen and waited and I knew — the way you know before it happens — exactly what was coming.
He put me on the ice. Ten at night. Just us. He lined up pucks at center and stood at the boards with his stick and told me to skate. I skated. When I slowed down the stick came across my shoulders.
Again.
When I fell he grabbed my jersey and put me back on my feet.
Again.
When I cried — and I did cry, I was fourteen and I had just had my first kiss and I was scared and I cried — he got on the ice and got very close to my face and said:You do not get to be this. Do you understand me. You do not get to be this.
I saidyes.
He stepped back.Again, he repeated.
