I sat down on the couch, in an actual seat this time.
Felix came over and took the space beside me.
We didn’t touch. Not much. A knee, here and there. An elbow. Nothing that would earn us anything more than a line in a fan forum about “close teammates.”
But every time someone made a joke, every time I told a story, every time the frequency of the room hit that perfect pitch , the one I lived for , I could feel him there. Not as the closed door at the far side of it.
As the person I’d opened mine for.
The trade rumor was dead. The line numbers were up. The team was laughing.
And for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t performing for the room with one eye on the door.
I was just here.
With him.
Being exactly myself.
And that, it turned out, was enough.
Chapter Twenty
Charlie
Henry insisted it was just dinner.
He always did. The invitations never said anything more complicated thancome over, seven o’clock, wear socks you don’t mind losing to the dog, which was generous of him, considering we didn’t have a dog. The point was: casual. Ordinary. Nothing to see here.
The thing about Henry’s “ordinary” dinners, though, was that they were never actually ordinary.
The table was already set when I got home. The wine was breathing. Something in the oven smelled like it had started planning for tonight sometime yesterday. Henry moved around the kitchen with the unhurried precision he brought to everything , chopping, stirring, tasting, completely in control and apparently unaffected by the way my heart still did too much every time I walked in on this version of my life.
“Need help?” I asked.
He handed me a bowl without looking up. “You can put this on the table,” he said. “And you can not touch anything that looks complicated.”
“Rude,” I said. “Accurate, but rude.”
He smiled. Just a little. The kind of smile that, a few years ago, would have cost him effort and now showed up on his face like it belonged there.
“Timer’s at twelve,” he said. “They’ll be here in ten.”
“Of course you know that.”
“I invited them,” he said. “I checked traffic.”
I leaned in and kissed his temple.
“Show,off,” I said.
Shay arrived first, which I had predicted with a level of confidence that would have offended him if I’d said it out loud. He came in with too much energy and a bottle of wine he’d clearly grabbed on the way here.
“I brought this,” he said, holding it up. “It might be good, or it might be terrible, but I liked the label.”
“On brand,” I said.
Henry took the bottle, read the label, and said, “It’s good.”
