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"I was." I nodded. "Until I wasn't."
"Why didn't you say something?"
I gave him a look. "Like what?"
"Like, I need help. You stormed around the house in silence and then disappeared without a word."
I licked my lips and tried to find some way to explain it to him. "I did ask for help. All the time."
"By your moping and complaining?"
"By my obvious exhaustion," I snapped.
"You can't expect us to read between the lines," he said, matching my energy. "Or understand why after you ran."
"I needed time."
"Then fucking say that. Say something, Sage. Don't leave us in the dark worrying about you. When you did that, you were like him…" TJ took a breath, almost letting the conversation pull him apart like I had.
We both resented Dad. We both knew that any comparison to him was a knife to the chest. TJ wanted me to bleed.
"Don't come around here if you're not ready to talk your shit out," he said in a lower voice. "Don't give Mom or any of us money if you're going to feel some type of way about it. None of us are perfect. I know I fucked up big time, but you coming home and acting all high and mighty doesn't do us any favors."
I shook my head and looked away. He was right, but I didn't know how to not be angry all the time. I didn't know how to tell them how broken I'd become.
"Your pride and how quick you are to push people away are going to make you a lonely person, Sage."
Grounded. I was so grounded, I was underneath the earth, deeply buried with even more shame and guilt than I thought humanly possible. At least I was right about one thing: my family would do that for me all the time.
Chapter Eleven
Sage
TJ's words haunted me for the rest of the week. Drawing wasn’t enough to snap me out of it. I'd recommitted to keeping my distance from everyone at work—every voice became background noise. I greeted people and interacted during meetings on auto-pilot.
I'd always had a good relationship with loneliness. Lonely had been my safe place. In silence, no one expected anything from me. That lack of expectation meant I could be myself. Of course, it got hard, but that was a trade-off I'd been willing to make. Or, at least, I thought it was.
Noah's company in our cubicle started to become my favorite thing about the day. I found myself counting down the minutes until she showed up. I stopped using my over-the-ear headphones, replacing them with earbuds instead, because then I could hear her mumblings better.
Her tendency to talk through everything made my brain calm down, and I found myself responding to her in my head. Those responses eventually leaked out.
She was surprised at first, but she tried to keep her cool because I did. So began our casual conversations. She'd say something with her back turned to me, and I'd answer without even looking at her. Our voices were at whisper volume most of the time, which meant we had to listen closely to each other's responses. It also meant that our arguments sounded less heated and more comical.
"You're playing it safe," I whispered when she said she was trying to figure out how to make a more engaging background.
"I'm quite literally taking all the risks," she insisted as she used her pencil to scratch underneath her compression gloves. I haven't seen her knuckles in weeks. When I asked why she'd been wearing them so much, she told me to mind my business, which, honestly, was a fair response.
"Really? Because I nearly fell asleep trying to do the line art on your pages from yesterday. It's gotten boring," I said.
Noah and I had developed a system. We'd split our Leisah chapters down the middle. We sketched and blocked everything according to the approved storyboards. Then, once we were done, we exchanged pages to have fresh eyes when it came to doing the line work.
"Boring," Noah scoffed. It was a soft sound that made my gaze linger on her lips for a moment. She pressed her tongue to her upper lip when she was annoyed with me. I always found myself smiling when she did that—it was too adorable to not smile about.
"You drew two ducks mating in one of your backgrounds," she reminded me.
"So?"
"It was distracting. I'm not boring. I don't want to distract the reader like you."
