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“It was a bad game, Sloane. I told you I didn’t want to think about it. That’s all it was.”
She turns her head and looks at me, and her eyes do the thing, the noticing thing, and for a second I’m sure she’s going to call it — the shoulder, the half a stride, the thing I’m hiding — and I brace for it, half want it, half terrified of it.
She doesn’t.
“Okay,” she says, and turns back to the ceiling.
And that’s the wobble. Right there. Not a fight — we don’t fight, that’s not us, that’s not how either of us breaks. It’s quieter than a fight. It’s her clocking that I held something back and decided not to chase it, the exact thing I do to her, the exact thing we’ve built a whole love out of — the noticing and the not-saying — except tonight for the first time the not-saying doesn’t feel like intimacy.
It feels like distance wearing intimacy’s coat.
I reach over in the dark and find her hand, and she lets me hold it, which she always does, which is the thing that tells me we’re still okay — she didn’t pull the hand back. But her hand’s a little slack in mine, a little somewhere-else, the way mine was somewhere-else inside her ten minutes ago, and I lie there in the dark holding a hand that’s not quite holding back and I think:
I should tell her about the shoulder.
And right behind it, a beat late, the colder thought, the true one:
She knows I’m hiding something. She’s letting me. That’s not her being kind. That’s her practicing for something.
I don’t know what. I push it down. I hold her slack hand and listen to the house settle and tell myself it was just a bad night, a bad game, a wound-up midnight, that tomorrow there’ll be coffee and the chai she likes and the walk to the shop and it’ll be fine, fine, fine until fine is true.
I’m so good at fine until fine is true.
It’s the only thing I’ve ever been better at than hockey.
In the morning it almost works.
She’s up before me — she always is — and there’s coffee, and she’s in my hoodie at the counter with her hands wrapped around the mug, and when I come down she gives me the look, the soft morning one, mostly back to normal, and I think see, fine, and I cross the kitchen and kiss the top of her head and she leans into it.
“You feeling better?” she asks.
“Yeah.” The shoulder’s a dull roar I’ve taken three ibuprofen for already, on the side of the cabinet she can’t see. “Just needed sleep. Bad game, that’s all.”
“You’re playing Friday?”
“Northeastern. Home.” I get coffee. “Big one. We need it after UConn or the seeding’s gone.”
“Then you’ll get it.” She says it simply, like it’s true because she said it, and there’s the faith in it that undoes me, the way she believes in the parts of me she can see. “You’re the best one out there. You told me that’s how it works — you said it about me once, when there was nothing in it for you, so I know it’s true.”
She’s handing me my own line back. The studio line. The one I broke rule seven with.
And I take it, and I drink the coffee, and I love her so much I can’t look straight at it — and underneath the love is the shoulder she doesn’t know is torn and the half a stride she gave a kinder name to and the slack hand from last night and the thing I’m not telling her and the thing I’m starting to be afraid she’s not telling me, all of it, the whole quiet weight of two people who love each other and are each, privately, in the dark, beginning to brace.
“Friday,” I say. “Come. Behind the bench.”
“I’ll bring a book.”
“You’ll bring a book.”
It’s fine. It’s going to be fine.
I’m so good at saying that.
I just keep getting slower at believing it. Half a stride at a time.
Chapter 24
Sloane
