It’s been so long since we’ve laughed together. It keeps me going, sometimes, thinking about all the fun we had. The way you lit me up inside, every single day.
54.
Joel
Outside, the sky is swollen with early-August storms. I’m standing at my bedroom window, waiting for the sound of the shower cutting off.
This is worse than I ever thought possible.
Above my head, floorboards creak. A new tenant, Danny, has replaced Callie upstairs. He works long hours, is barely around. Occasionally he surfaces to offer pleasantries in passing, before vanishing again like a ghost.
Already, Callie moving in several weeks ago feels like a series of soon-to-be-forgotten memories. Her dad helping us lug boxes down the stairs, lecturing me about security as if I hadn’t already lived here for a decade. Champagne on the sofa together that first night, a gift from her parents. Our favorite foods finally side by side in the fridge. Shared showers, pots of coffee. Watching Murphy chase balls from the back step. My fingers exploring the newness of her things. Her eclectic collection of trinkets and knickknacks, to her an embarrassment but to me intriguing as treasure.
I blame myself entirely. I should never have let myself relax, put off calling Steve. Because maybe if I’d taken some kind of action, none of this would be happening.
55.
Callie
Eventually I make it out of the bathroom, stopping still by the chest of drawers that’s spilling over now with my things. I like that, or at least I did—the not-quite-fitting, the idea that we’ve already outgrown the space since I moved in, that we can’t be contained by the world around us.
“I’m sorry,” Joel says, from where he’s standing by the window like he could happily jump out of it.
Remembering what happened last night makes me want to cry all over again. It’s too painful to think about the tears that seeped around the edges of his eyelids as he slept, how he gulped my name over and over like he was running out of air.
“Joel... this isn’t a sorry thing.”
He hesitates—on the brink, it seems, of flooding the room with feeling. But at the last moment, he steps back. “Can you cancel tonight?”
My mind chases its tail.Tonight. Tonight...?
Eventually I catch up—we’ve arranged dinner at Ben’s, with Esther and Gavin. “Of course.”
“I just don’t think...” But his sentence goes unfinished, so I remain unenlightened as to what he doesn’t think, let alone what he does.
“Joel, please don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Shut me out.”
We just look at each other then, assaulted by sadness and powerless to stop it.
“I mean it when I say I love you,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“Not just you, but everything about you.”
He seems almost dazed with pain as, outside, the sky’s stomach rumbles.
“It was about me, wasn’t it?” I say. “Your dream last night.”
His eyes are quite round now, dark as an owl’s. He regards me wordlessly for maybe a minute, like I’m walking away from him and all he can do is watch me go.
His voice, when it comes, is gentle. “You’re going to be late” is all he says.
56.
