He blinked. “Okay.”
“I’ve been sitting at my desk for an hour trying to write, and I can’t because every sentence I start turns into something that isn’t about the manuscript. I keep deleting and rewriting and deleting again.” I sucked in a breath, closed my eyes tight for just a second, then opened them again. “Benji, the problem isn’t the manuscript. The problem is that I’m in my room trying to write about David and my brain is in the kitchen holding a blanket.”
Benji blinked.
Behind him, Princess Consuela shifted in her carrier with the quiet rustle of a cat adjusting her position to better observe . . . and perhaps eat popcorn while the spectacle unfolded.
“You came to my door to tell me you can’t write because of the blanket,” he said.
“No, I—”
I’d said that too quickly.
I needed to breathe. Ireallyneeded to breathe.
I took a breath.
Benji blinked.
And cocked his head.
“I came to your door because the stove light is on. You said to leave it on, so I left it on, and I don’t want to pretend that was about pizza.”
“It wasn’t about pizza?”
“You know it wasn’t about pizza.”
“It was a little about pizza. The peach one was genuinely good.”
“Benji.”
“Sorry, though not for the moment, for the pizza commentary. I’m hearing that.”
We stood in his doorway, me in the hallway and him a foot inside the foster room, separated by a threshold that felt less like a physical boundary and more like the last in a series of lines I’d painted overtwo years, each one designed to keep exactly this from happening—with anyone—each one thinner than the last.
“Can I come in?” I asked.
He stepped back.
I stepped forward.
The foster room was small and warm and smelled like kitten formula and the scent of Benji’s shampoo, the one that had migrated to my shelf and then to my shower and then into my awareness in a way that meant I could identify it in a room without looking. Princess Consuela watched from her carrier with the flat, appraising stare of a cat who had opinions about this development and was reserving them for later.
Benji sat on the edge of the bed.
I stood in the middle of the room.
I was painfully aware that I’d crossed a threshold without a plan for what came after, which was not how I operated. I operated with plans. I operated with whiteboards and schedules and color-coded systems that made the world manageable. I did not show up in people’s doorways and announce that I couldn’t write because of a blanket.
“Peter,” Benji said. His voice was careful, gentle. “What do you need?”
The question was so simple and so direct and so completely Benji that it cut through every layer ofoverthinking I’d built between the hallway and this room.
What do you need?
NotWhat are you feeling?orWhat are you thinking?
He didn’t ask any of the complicated, layered questions that I would have spent hours constructing answers to.
