And Sawyer is dreaming of castles in Scotland, and Charlie is walking into a meeting, and Caleb is taking a nap at his new foster home, his arms wrapped tightly around his stuffed pig.
And the man who was behind me in line that day, who won exactly four dollars on his ticket, then immediately used it to buy another one, which got him nothing, is mowing his lawn, because his life didn’t change at all. And who’s to say if that’s better or worse than what happened to Teddy, what happened to me?
Maybe it all would have gone this way no matter what.
Maybe it was always supposed to turn out like this.
Maybe it was never really about the numbers at all.
Teddy comes sliding into the kitchen in mismatched socks: one looks like a monster, with big teeth and googly eyes, and the other has tiny mustaches all over it.
“Look what I found,” he says, coming up behind me and grabbing me around the waist. He buries his nose in my neck and I shiver, then swivel to face him. He looks down at his feet, wiggling his toes. “They were stuck under my bed.”
“A perfect match,” I say, and without warning he bends to kiss me. In an instant my head is swimming, and my ears are buzzing, and our hands are everywhere. It’s still so new, this thing between us, even though Teddy is not, even though he’s the most familiar thing in the world, and that makes it all so much better because it’s the best of everything, and each time he kisses me—every single time—I get the feeling we might never stop, that we might just decide to live like this, lip to lip and hip to hip, bound together for the rest of our days.
But then he backs me up a few steps, and I bump up against the refrigerator, and we break apart, both smiling like crazy and breathing too fast.
“Hi,” he says, which he does pretty much every time we stop, as if he’s still surprised and delighted to discover that it’s me he was kissing all that time.
I grin back at him. “Hi.”
He leans forward, bracing his hands on the freezer, one on either side of my head, pinning me in place like he’s about to kiss me again, but then he frowns and draws back.
“This thing is really old,” he says, and I blink at him, confused.
“What is?”
“The fridge,” he says, looking around. “And the oven, actually.”
“That’s what you were thinking about just now?”
He laughs. “Sorry, but…”
“What?”
“What if I surprised the next tenants by putting in some new appliances?” he says, suddenly excited. “Wouldn’t it be cool if they just came in and saw it all here?”
“It would be very cool,” I say, and I mean it. Whenever he talks like this, whenever he lights up at the thought of doing something kind, my heart starts to feel too big for my rib cage.
He stoops in front of the oven, opening the rusted door and peering inside. The moment is clearly over, so I grab the brown garbage bag that’s resting beside the sink.
“Don’t throw away anything important,” Teddy says without looking up, and I can hear the laughter in his voice.
“That never gets old,” I say, hefting it onto my shoulder. “Never.”
But as I step out into the hallway, I’m struck again by the memory of that morning, of how close we came to losing the ticket, of the way something so small—a missing slip of paper—could have changed things so dramatically.
Once I’ve sent the bag sailing down to the dumpster below, I take a long look at the brass numerals hanging on the door of the apartment beside the chute: 13. There was a time when I wished none of this had ever happened, when I wished the number thirteen hadn’t been something I was quite so willing to hand over to the man behind the counter that day. But not now. It no longer feels like a trip wire or a land mine or a scar, that number. It’s something else entirely: a memory, a dedication, a good-luck charm.
It’s the thing that got me here.
And here is a pretty good place to be.
When I walk back inside, Teddy is standing in front of the refrigerator, his back to the door and his head bent, so it isn’t until he turns around that I realize something is wrong. His hair is sticking up the way it does when he’s been running a hand through it, and he looks a little pale. It takes me another few seconds to notice the card he’s holding, and as soon as I do my heart falls so hard and so fast I feel like it might have escaped me altogether.
I stare at the refrigerator, which has been pulled out a few inches from the wall, then back at the card, which he’s holding with both hands, then at his ridiculous socks: anywhere but his eyes, which I’m afraid to meet, because I’m afraid to see what’s in them.
It’s been so long since that snowy bus ride, so long since I borrowed Leo’s pen and emptied my heart onto the page. So much has happened since that night. So much has changed. And now I’ve gone and ruined everything, just because of one stupid, careless moment a few months ago, when I made the mistake of writing on a birthday card the three words we still haven’t said aloud to each other. If that’s not enough to scare him off, to give him second thoughts about us, I’m not sure what is.
