Sloane shocked me with her three questions. I wasn’t expecting her to want to spend time with me. What I was expecting was for her to make me work more for her time and attention. It takes me a few seconds to answer her, but long enough to watch the hope slip from her face. Does she really think I don’t want to spend time with her?
“How about I answer all three?” I tell her, making a small smile appear on her face before she turns back to the notes on the floor in front of her. “Even better, I’ll get some groceries delivered and make you supper and spend the rest of the day telling you about therapy?”
I’d give her a play-by-play of every session I’ve had so far if it means getting to spend time with her.
“Sounds good,” I hear her say, softly.
“How do you feel about my dad’s famous lasagna for supper?”
Her head pops up in excitement at that question. “You know how to make it?” she asks.
“Of course.” My dad made sure that all of us could cook. All of us but Summer. That girl should neverbe allowed in a kitchen. Levi, on the other hand, could open his own restaurant if ever his hockey career ends.
“And it’ll taste the same?” she asks, making me smile.
“Promise,” I tell her. It was her favorite growing up, so it should come as no surprise that I learned how to make it pretty fast.
“I can’t believe you know how to make your dad’s lasagna, yet haven’t offered to make it for me, and you’ve been living here for over a month! What else have you been keeping from me?” she asks, laughing in disbelief.
“I think you’re looking at it,” I say with a chin lift to the notes. “You can probably find and learn anything and everything in that pile of notes. I can’t even remember what I wrote on most of them.”
“I’ll put them away for now, but . . .” She pauses, her cheeks reddening, making my head tilt. “Can I keep them? I want to read them all.”
“I wrote them for you, so technically, they are yours,” I say.
“Really?” she asks. At my head nod, she picks them all back up and puts them into the Ziploc bags, then into the duffle bag, and brings them into her room before settling into her spot in the corner of the couch, cuddling under her overly girly blanket.
A smile takes over my face as I look at her. She looks perfectly relaxed and comfortable, not something I ever thought she would be around me again. She has her long hair in a messy braid, her usual no makeup look with a baggy crew neck and leggings topped with a pairof thick fluffy socks. She doesn’t grab her Kindle though. Usually it’s in her hands the minute she sits down in that corner.
Instead, she grabs the TV remote, looks at me, and says, “Netflix?”
I nod, and take out my phone to order everything I need to make a lasagna tonight.
“You good with a documentary?” she asks.
“Always. They’ve become somewhat of an addiction for me.”
Her eyes light up at my response. “Me too!” she says, all giddy. “Cassie thinks I’m nuts and Jade won’t ever watch them with me! I saw one about some kind of drug scandal in Boston, or something like that,” she says, looking for it on Netflix.
“Sounds good,” I tell her, but I don’t think she actually heard me—too engrossed in her search. I would have agreed to walk on a floor of Legos to see her eyes light up like that, or to hear that excitement on her face.
“How was physio this morning?” she asks absentmindedly, still trying to find the documentary she was talking about.
I gulp. I can either tell her the truth, that I wasn’t at physio this morning, or lie. I feel my hands start to sweat and heat hit the back of my neck. “I didn’t go to physio this morning,” I tell her, deciding to go with the truth.
My comment pulls her away from her task to stare at me with a frown of confusion on her face. I wipe my hands down the front of my thighs, before saying, “I was at therapy.”
Her frown deepens, and her head tilts to the left before she says, “I don’t understand . . .”
I need to tell her everything; she needs to know that I’m trying—putting in the work. “I, umm . . . When I was still in the hospital, they told me that I should also be seeing a psychologist. That the injuries, the pain, the scaring, just everything that comes with an injury like this could be too much. That I would probably need help, and that it would be better to be safe than sorry,” I say with a dry laugh, thinking back to how that conversation went in the hospital all those weeks ago. “At first, I thought they were crazy; I didn’t need to talk to anyone. It was just an accident. I’d be back to normal in no time. Even with the nightmares, I thought I was fine. That once I got rid of the crutches and the cane that everything would go back to normal.”
It’s after mentioning the nightmares that I feel the couch shift. Looking up, I see Sloane’s left her favorite corner to come sit next to me. Tentatively, she wraps her hand around my clenched fist, untangling it so she can thread her fingers through mine. The small squeeze she gives my hand is all the encouragement I need to keep going.
Without meeting her gaze, I say, “You can imagine how the conversation went. Safe to say, I never went. But then, my physiotherapist here suggested it. And then he got another one of his patients to talk to me. And then . . .” This is the hardest part, because I know how much I hurt her. “Then I blew a complete gasket at you, and I never really apologized.”
Turning to face her, I take the chance and slide my hand along her jaw to make sure her eyes are on me, that she can see how much I hurt knowing I hurt her. “I’m so damn sorry about what I said—what I did after what happened in my room.” I see tears start to form at my words, but I continue. “The last thing I wanted to do was raise my voice at you, or tell you to leave. I don’t know what happened, I just couldn’t control what was coming out of me.”
Tears start streaming down her face as her hand, not holding mine, comes to hold on to my wrist, holding her face in my hand. For a moment, I think she’s going to push me away, but instead, she holds me closer to her, her eyes not wavering from mine. It’s lost in her green eyes that I find the courage to tell her the truth.
