I did not know if he meantI agreeorI give up.
I could not ask. I understood, with a clarity that arrived quietly and without mercy, that I could not ask because either answer would destroy something and I was not equipped to know which one.
So I looked at the water stain.
He looked at the ceiling.
The refrigerator hummed.
I had saidit can't become a bigger thingwith the full conviction of a man who had a system, and he had saidokay, and I lay in the quiet of his apartment with his shoulder two inches from mine and thought about the fact that I had been in this apartment so many times that I knew the dead plant on the windowsill, and the tear in his collar, and the skates by the door that were two seasons old, and the throw blanket that had never been on the couch.
I thought: I already know every room in this house.
I thought: I already know every room in this house and I have been standing in the hallway for two years telling myself I am not inside.
I did not say this.
"You should eat something," I said. "You had nothing after skate."
He made a sound. Not quite a laugh. Almost.
"There's leftover pasta," he said. "From yesterday. Possibly the day before."
"I'll check the date."
"Of course you will."
I got up. I went to the kitchen. The pasta was from two days ago and technically within acceptable range and I heated it without asking because I knew where the bowls were and I knew he took his with more pepper than any reasonable person should want and I stood at his stove in his kitchen with the dead plant in my peripheral vision and the throw blanket on his floor and the sound of him on the couch in the other room and I thought:
This is the bigger thing.
This is already the bigger thing.
I brought two bowls back. Set one on the table in front of him. Sat back down in my forty percent of the couch. He sat up, took the bowl, looked at the pepper.
"You remembered."
"I always remember."
He looked at me, briefly, with something I was not going to name. Then he picked up his fork.
On the television, the game resumed. We watched it. We did not talk about the ceiling, or the okay, or the two inches of air between us that was doing a very poor impression of distance.
We ate the pasta.
I stayed for another hour.
It was a Tuesday.
Chapter Eight
Shay
The thing about being fine was that it required maintenance.
This was not something I had previously understood. I had spent the better part of my adult life being fine in the natural, effortless way , the way you're warm in summer, the way you're loud in a room full of people who want noise, the way you tell a story and feel it land and ride the landing all the way home. Fine had never been work. Fine had just been the weather.
This was different.
