His face goes quiet.
"That's different," I say.
The kitchen holds the sentence. Caleb's hand rests beside his mug. Mine beside mine. Not touching. Close.
"I wanted to keep playing," he says.
"I know."
"No, I mean, I really wanted it. Past reason. Past evidence. I kept thinking if I worked hard enough, there would be a version of me that the game wanted back."
The sentence lands in me clean and deep.
There would be a version of me that the game wanted back.
I know something about that.
"There was," I say.
He looks up.
"Not the way you meant," I say. "But there was."
His eyes change behind the glasses.
I have said enough. Maybe too much. The air is full of things we are not naming because naming all of them before breakfast would be inefficient and possibly fatal.
Caleb reaches across the counter.
I meet him halfway.
Our fingers touch between the mugs and the bad toast and the small domestic wreckage of a morning neither of us knows how to manage.
This is the first time I have been present in another person's kitchen without the exit strategy running in the back of my mind.
I notice its absence the way you notice a pain leaving.
Not dramatic. Not complete.
Enough.
CALEB
Nolan is in my apartment on a night that is not a film night.
This fact keeps trying to become an event.
I keep trying to let it become ordinary.
He arrived at 9:12 with a paper bag of takeout from the Korean place three blocks over because, in his words, "your refrigerator is a cry for help." The bag contained japchae, bulgogi, dumplings, and two containers of rice. He had no explanation for how he knew my order except that my mother had apparently told him during a five-minute phone call I did not know happened.
I am still processing this.
"Your mother is efficient," Nolan says.
"My mother has never had a casual conversation in her life."
"She asked if I eat vegetables."
