"Yeah."
"I put on makeup at 6 AM because I thought if you saw me without it you'd know."
"Know what."
"That this isn't casual for me. That I'm not — I'm not here because of the accident. I'm here because—"
I press my palms against my eyes. The words won't line up.
"Because your cat purrs when I walk in. And your fridge needed labels. And you eat cereal for dinner when no one is watching. Because you saw the version of me I try to hide, and you didn't — you didn't ask me to make it prettier. And I—"
I stop. I wipe my face again. Mascara, tears, whatever. It doesn't matter. The wall is down and the wall isn't going back up and he's sitting three feet away from me on a kitchen floor and his face is doing nothing and I have never seen anything more clearly in my life.
"I thought if you saw the real me you wouldn't want the real me," I say.
The kitchen is quiet. The baseboard heater clicks once and goes still. Somewhere outside, a car starts and drives away, and the sound fades, and then it's just us.
Ethan reaches forward. Not far — he can't reach far, the hip won't let him. His hand lands on the floor between us, palm down, next to Bagel's tail. Not on me. Not pulling me closer. Just — there. Present. An open hand on a cold floor.
I look at his hand.
I put mine next to it. Not on top. Next to. Two hands on a kitchen floor, close enough that the warmth crosses the gap.
Neither of us moves.
Bagel purrs between us, low and steady, the frequency of a small creature who has been waiting for the humans to stop being stupid and is satisfied, at last, with the preliminary results.
The light through the window has shifted. Late afternoon. The particular amber of a Montreal winter day giving up, the sun already behind the buildings, the sky the color of cloth washed too many times.
We're on the floor. There is a garbage bag next to us. There is a cat between our knees.
The apartment is very quiet.
I don't know what happens next.
Neither does he.
But neither of us is getting up.
14
THE REAL CONVERSATION
I.
The baseboard heater clicks once and goes still.
We're on the floor. His hand is next to mine — not on it, next to it — and Bagel is between our knees, purring at the frequency of a creature who has been managing this situation for weeks and considers this progress. The garbage bag is still here. The crutches are where they landed. The apartment smells like yesterday's soup and silence.
Nobody has spoken since the last thing we said, which was everything.
My tailbone is numb. My eyes feel like they've been scrubbed from the inside. The mascara situation on my hands is — I don't look at my hands. I look at the light through the window. Late afternoon. The amber has deepened, that particular winter quality where the sun drops behind the building across the street and the kitchen goes copper, then grey.
He's there. I can feel it — or hear it through the vibration of the cabinet we're both leaning against. His shoulder is four inches from mine. I'm aware of every one of those inches the wayI'm aware of the gap between the edge of a diving board and the water.
"Ethan."
My voice is raw. Screaming at a person and then crying with them strips your vocal cords down to whatever's underneath the polish.
