I stare down at my plate, a piece of half-eaten pizza there. Zoe is right, and I…Ihateit. I hate that she’s right. I hate that I’m so scared and I hate that I didn’t trust him or myself. I hate that I treated myself like an obligation, that I let old wounds and old shame force him out of that room with me. I hate that I didn’t try harder for my freedom. Not the freedom I’ve been working for, with the money and school and my job, but the freedom I felt with him, the freedom of being myself.
Also I hate that I ate so many pieces of pizza.
“Greer,” Kit says quietly, and I look over at her. She and Alex, they don’t look much alike other than the jet-black hair, but now that I know them both, I can see so clearly how they’re family. I can see, like me and my siblings, all the subtle, unassuming ways they resemble and relate to each other. The way they both pronounce theiro’s, short and flat. Kit’s messiness and Alex’sfastidiousness.
“Yeah?”
“It doesn’t matter to me, either way. I love you no matter what. But—but if you did want to call him, he’d answer. Sometimes he can’t always, depending on where he is and what he’s doing, but he always calls back, no matter where he is in the world. He always, always calls back.”
She stands then, gathering up her plate and mine, walking into the kitchen and starting to rinse dishes. The bathroom door opens and Zoe emerges, joining Kit and opening the dishwasher. They work silently beside each other, doing this small actof care for me.
Waiting, now, for me to figure thingsout on my own.
* * * *
It’s three days before I call him.
On Sunday morning I call Ava and ask her to come home. Doug comes with her, bringing a box of Cheerios and his gaming console, his eyes shifting and uncomfortable when he takes in my bruises. But he says how sorry he is that I’m hurt and he promises to keep the games on mute. While Ava unpacks the small bag she’d had at Doug’s, I tell her I’ll be moving out next month, and I gently suggest that she make Doug pay rent when he inevitably moves in.
She drives me over to Mom and Dad’s for Sunday night dinner, letting me stop off first to buy a bouquet of flowers for Mom. Mom cries and hugs me too hard, and Dad points at my fading black eye and says, “You should see the other guy, right?” and he hugs me too, gentle but long, pressing a kiss to the top of my head before he lets me go and heads out to the grill, probably reassembling his Everything’s Fine Face over a hot flame. I apologize to Humphrey and Felipe, and later I call Cary at his house, giving him the update on my health he’s been asking me for for a week, leaving me voice mails and sending me text messages every morning. He asks whether “that boyfriend of yours” is taking care of me, and I don’t even bother trying to pass the test this time. I only tell him that Alex isn’t in town anymore, and when I hang up I stare at the ceiling of my bedroom for a pathetically long time, wishing it was the night skyover the ocean.
On Monday I go to work, which Dennise clearly does not approve of at first, but maybe she sees something in my face when I stand in her office, my tablet held to my chest and my jaw clenched tight, because she takes me with her on patient visits all morning, her steps a little slower as we walk beside each other, her glances toward the chairs in the hospital rooms pointed and directive. I sit and take my notes, but at noon my head is dully throbbing, and I tell her so, my face hot and my hands clenched around the tablet. “Get some rest,” she says, handing me a manila folder. “You’re handling that case Wednesday morning.” She gives me a superhero smile beforeshe walks away.
But on Tuesday morning, I find an email in my inbox that makes me press my hands to my face in happiness, a laugh caught in my chest that I don’t want to let out, not yet. I take a quick, haphazard shower, nearly forgetting the bag I have to put around my cast, scrubbing too hastily over my stubbly leg, the one with all the stitches. I put on terrible, comfortable sick-day clothes: an old sports bra that doesn’t have a clasp, difficult to manage with my wrist, a faded navy tank top, a pair of baggy cropped jeans that I roll up almost to my knees so they don’t scrape against my cut, and my ugliest, most beat-up pair of sneakers, the ones I still have an expensive pair of orthotics in. I drive all the way to the city; I park two blocks from Boneshaker’s just so I can walk a little in the noisy morning air. I order coffee with lots of milk, sit at my favorite table, open my laptop again, and stare at the email. I hold my phone in the palm of my hand for a long time.
He doesn’t say hello when he answers.
He says, “Greer.” That low-smooth voice, a single word that sounds like a whole dictionary of relief. I swallow, reopen my eyes from their closing at hearing him say my name.
“Hi. I wasn’t sure you’d answer.” I wince with an unpleasant thought. “Is it very late where you are?Or…very early?”
There’s a long pause. Briefly, I hear voices in the background—a woman’s laugh that I try not to let pierce me to my very core—but then there’s silence before he speaks. “It’s—neither, really.”
“Right, okay. Well, that’s good.”
“Are you doing okay? You’re…well?”
The part of me that’s still in that hospital bed—the part of me that’ll probably always, a little, be in that hospital bed—winces in fear and frustration, the same fear and frustration that I’d used to drive him from my room a week ago.
But that’s not the part of me I want to listen to anymore.
“I’m doing okay. A little sore. Still feel tired in the mornings.” For a second, I think about the mornings I woke up with Alex—how alive I’d felt in my own skin. How I’d wanted him to touch me, to see if he could feel it too. How he’d always seemed to know that, running his hands over the curve of my hip, the soft skin of my inner arm, the ridge of a spine that had always felt temperamental, separate from me. Under his hands, though, it’d felt perfect. Strong and sturdyand beautiful.
I worry I might cry.
“I’m glad,” he says, and it’s so—bland. It’s nothing like before. It’s not the Alex who’d ask twenty questions about even the smallest, most insignificant detail. He’s protecting himself from me. Small, quiet, invisible Greer. Look how strong I am. Look what I’mcapable of now.
It’s the worst feelingI’ve ever had.
I clear my throat, turn my head toward the wall my table is up against, hoping no one can see the way my eyesare welling up.
“I wanted to tell you,” I say, stopping to clear my throat again, to get the tears out of my voice. “Hiltunen is going to support the exception request. He’s written—” I pause, thinking back over the attachment in that email.Greer showed exceptional dedication to her work, a tireless commitment to getting the most out of the experience.“A very generous letter of support. So I think I’ll make it. Tomy graduation.”
“Ah, Greer,” he says on a sigh—neither surprise nor relief. “I knew you would. You’ve got such a good eye.”
“You can’t know how grateful I am.” As soon as I say it, I know it’s the wrong thing. I am grateful; of course I’m grateful. But I’ve made it sound like a transaction, as though the days we spent together were nothing but this project.
He’s going to say it again—he’s going to say that he’sglad. I think if he does, whatever frayed strand of thread that’s holding my heart together will rend for good. Alex will be lost to me. He’ll go back to being the man I avoid seeing, my best friend’s brother, who makes me feel terrified—full of that swirling, uncontainable energy I only ever knew how to live out in my imagination, until I’dbeen with him.
