Page 32 of Melt the Ice

“I will give you all the money in my bank account if you’ll stop knocking,” I croak, dragging my feet toward the incessant knocking.

I barely get the lock flipped before the door is pushed open.

Abby stands at the front of an army of my best friends, all of them. Their arms are loaded with grocery bags, takeout containers, and enough bottled water to float a canoe. My hand finds the back of my neck, realizing they showed up for me. They showed up, and I didn’t even have to ask.

“I don’t want your money,” Abby says, pushing past me. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”

I groan as my head falls forward. Slap after slap against my shoulder, my teammates push past me, yet I can’t bring myself to look a single one of them in the eye. I don’t even know what time it is. Is it still today or is it tomorrow? Has it been a week?

“I thought I told you I was good,” I say as I walk up behind Wilder, who’s helping Reed load food into my fridge.

He snorts, looking at me over his shoulder. “You did, but try telling them that,” he says, jutting his chin at Hannah and Abby, who are scooping copious amounts of food on a plate. “I dropped the flowers off, but didn’t see her. Do you want me to go get her?”

The thought sounds enticing, but I shake my head. I don’t want her to feel guilty, like she has to talk to me because I lost my mom. I want her to be here for me because she wants to be, and if the armada shows up at her door, she’d show up because they told her to.

And wanting her to want me right now feels pathetic enough without involving a search party of professional athletes.

I shake my head, extending my arm to take the plate Hannah’s holding out to me. “No, I’m okay. Thanks for doing that.” He pauses, looking me over. He notices too much, but I can only hope he stays here. The man is a sucker for love, and I know, given the chance, he’ll try to play matchmaker.

“Thanks, Han,” I say as I wrap my arm around his wife’s shoulders. She looks up at me, eyes filled with tears, no doubt reliving losing her own asshole of a parent. I should be crying with her, but I don’t have it in me. Not to mention, I’m still tipsy and jonesing for another drink.

I set my plate on the island and walk back over to where I’d crashed out on the couch earlier. “Nope!” Abby says, putting extra emphasis on the P. “Water, flat or sparkling. But I will bench you so quick if you pick up that bottle.”

She snaps her fingers before flattening her hand, asking me to hand it over. I narrow my eyes like she’s taking all the wind from my sails. She isn’t, that's the problem. She cares, they all do. And the warmth that brings to my chest, I hate that I love it. I hate that it makes the edge of wanting to drink myself to sleep a little duller.

I hand her the bottle, falling onto the couch where they immediately close in, settling around me like a human shield. No one talks, no one asks for anything, we just eat in the thick, heavy silence. But their presence says everything.

I can feel them watching, waiting for me to break, to scream, something. But all I feel is this heavy, slow-burning resentment sitting in my chest like soggy ash. It’s not grief, not yet. Grief would require closeness, and she shut that door long ago. Twenty years of nothing. Twenty years of pretending I didn’t exist. And now, I’ll never get another chance. But it’s not even that, it’s the fact that I’ve wasted so much time begging for scraps when I should have been walking in the strength of what her silence made me.

I’m so much more than what I let her silence tell me I am. My gaze drifts to the bottle Abby confiscated. The light looks as if it’s highlighting the curve of it, like it knows exactly the power it holds over me right now. Just one sip and everything would go quiet again. The resentment, the guilt, the memories I don’t want to remember but can’t stop replaying. One sip and I wouldn’t have to deal with this today.

My fingers twitch. I could get up, no one would be fast enough to stop me before I swipe it and run to my room. They’d try, no doubt. One reach, one twist, and the cap would be off, and I could stop feeling agai–

A hand lands on my knee, soft and steady. I look over to see Hannah, her soft hazel eyes are the closest to my own out of us all. Her hand is a grounding presence that tells me she knows exactly where my head's at, even if I haven’t said a word.

“You’re allowed to not miss her, you know,” she murmurs, voice barely above a whisper.

My shoulders drop, tension draining from me in a slow, painful wave. Those words, words I didn’t know I needed to hear, they’re permission, and no one else thought to say it. Probably because no one else here, other than Wilson, has shitty parents. It's a thought that would never cross their minds.

I stare down at my hands as they tremble against my plate. “You’re grieving what you didn’t get, Lucas,” she says. “Not what you lost.” Her hand squeezes my thigh.

I hate how right that is. My eyes drift to the bottle again, not out of want, but out of reflex. It’s there, and it’s an out. One I don’t usually take, one that’s all too tempting to get lost in, though.

“You don’t need that,” Wilder says quietly, nodding toward it without judgment.

I swallow hard. “Yeah,” I mumble. “I know.”

The thing is, I really do. I know it won’t fix twenty years of silence. It won’t erase the voicemails I never got. It won’t rewrite the birthdays that I lit and blew candles out all by myself. It won’t give me the mother she chose not to be. It’ll only make the resentment louder once it wears off.

I lean back against the couch, the weight of the day pressing into my spine, and for the first time all day, I let myself breathe. Slow, deep, without running from it. “Thanks,” I say as I meet each of their eyes. “It means a lot that you’re here.”

Reed stands, walking across the room before he sits on the coffee table in front of me. “We don’t fight alone, Monroe.”

Sammy stands and moves to his side, reaching out and placing his hand on my shoulder. “We’ve got you, man.”

I smile up at them, tears springing to my eyes for the first time, not out of heartbreak, but of gratitude. Thankful that they knew better than to leave me alone, grateful for the group of misfits that have turned into family these past few years.

“Thanks,” I say again.