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“I’m okay,” I said through a mouth full of burrito.
“Is that Chef Boyardee out of the can?” Rhys asked suspiciously. I wasn’t sure why eating it out of the can upset him so much. It just saved washing a dish. And it’s not like the stuff tasted better warm. But he always got this pained look on his face, so I’d stopped doing it in front of him.
“Nope, burrito.”
“I bet it’s frozen in the middle,” he said wistfully.
“Yup.”
“You know if you cook it for half the time, then cut it open, then cook it the rest of the way, the middle will—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ve told me, but I don’t care. It’s a hassle.”
“If I was there I’d do it for you,” he said, voice rough.
“I know—I—thanks. Always tastes better when you do it.”
I could hear the pleased smile in Rhys’s sigh. He liked when I let him do things for me. Sometimes when I was doing things wrong, he just took whatever it was out of my hands with a look that said he couldn’t bear to watch me, and did it for me. Like nuking a burrito, or the time I’d tried to regrout the shower tiles. I liked it too. It felt intimate, like we belonged to each other.
“Hey, maybe you could try one of those meal things that Caleb was talking about.”
Caleb had been talking about his friend Huey, who had begun using one of those services that put the ingredients for meals in a box with directions and delivered it to your door.
“I still don’t understand how people who are hungry don’t just take those boxes off people’s stoops and eat what’s inside. Easier than dumpster diving.”
“I hardly think people would take it off our stoop in Sleepy Hollow.”
“No, I know, I was just saying in general. Um, yeah, I wouldn’t ever do one of those.”
“Yeah, I know,” Rhys said, and we lapsed into silence. “I just worry about you. I know it pisses you off, but I do.”
“It doesn’t piss me off, I just . . . All the stuff you worry about is so . . .” Minor. All the shit that Rhys worried about—was I eating out of a can, did I get some vegetables today, was I well rested—it felt so inconsequential compared to the life I’d had before I met him. But I knew that to him, it wasn’t. It was how he showed he cared.
“Okay, baby, I get it. I know you can take care of yourself. I just wish you could see what I see.”
“What do you see?” I asked.
Rhys’s voice on the phone was steady, calm, but he always got this soothing lowness to his voice when he was telling me things that he felt deeply but knew I might not want to hear. Like he was talking to a frightened animal.
“You were so used to things being out of your control for so long that sometimes you forget that now you have the power to make decisions. That you don’t have to be cold because you can turn up the thermostat. That if you hate everything in the fridge you can order food. That if you feel sad or upset, you can say so and I’ll try to help.”
I couldn’t help the noise that escaped me at that last.
“I’m not saying I can make you not sad, Matty. Just that you could tell me because I’d want to know. And I’d want to help if I could. I’d want to try.”
I stared at the half-eaten burrito on my plate, cheese congealed into a grainy slick of oil, some kind of processed chicken in a cold chunk in the middle, tortilla gone hard and curled at the edges. It felt like concrete in my stomach. You could eat something else. That’s what Rhys just said. You could order pizza. Or Thai. You could have cereal.
I made a sound so he’d know I hadn’t hung up, but I didn’t have anything to say.
I could hear the chair or couch Rhys must’ve been sitting on groan under his weight as he settled in to tell me another story about his family. It was one of my favorite things about Rhys. He threw his not insubstantial weight around like a little kid or a big dog, with the certainty that he’d be held. It was a kind of radical trust that I watched like a magic trick, hoping to see how it was done so maybe someday I could replicate it.
After I hung up the phone with Rhys, I choked down the rest of my cold burrito and half watched part of a movie about aliens that infiltrated a spaceship. When it got gory I flicked the TV off. Silence settled over the house, making each sound echo ominously. The electric hum of the light above the sink. The churning of the air conditioner. The flit of a bug hitting the window. The rustling of leaves.
