“I built an entire career off of the thing my father loves most. Adjacent. That’s the word for me. I have been professionally adjacent to being loved.”
“So your whole life,” I say, “is one long campaign to get one specific guy to look at you a certain way.”
“Yeah.”
“Mine too, Aspen.”
Neither of us says anything for a while.
“But you got it from the inside,” she says finally. “The pressure. The whole thing aimed straight at you — your name,your dad, every person in a building waiting on you. I only ever got it from the outside. The wanting in. Standing at the glass.” A pause. “I don’t know which one’s worse.”
“It’s the same machine, Linwood,” I say it up at the dark, because I can’t say it at her. “We’re just standing at opposite ends of the thing. One of us is getting fed into the gears. One of us is out in the cold with our face on the glass, wanting in so bad it aches. Same house. Both of us lonely as hell inside a family that’d swear up and down it loved us — and they’d be telling the truth, that’s the kicker. They do love us. They just never once worked out how to make either of us feel it.”
I don’t follow it with anything. There’s nothing to follow it with. The room holds it. A car goes by somewhere outside. The light slides across the ceiling and leaves.
“This is the most anyone’s ever understood me,” she says, eventually, up at the dark. “And it’s you. Somebody I’ve known my whole life and really can’t stand. You’re on my trundle bed, and we’re in a relationship we made up on a Saturday.” A small breath that isn’t quite a laugh. “That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
This is where I’m supposed to make the joke. We’ve done this dance enough times tonight that she’s braced for it — the easy out, the deflection, the thing I reach for.
I don’t reach for it.
I let the quiet go on long enough that she hears the joke not coming.
“That’s not sad, Linwood,” I say. “We see each other now.”
She doesn’t answer.
I don’t say goodnight, and neither does she, and we both lie there in the dark a long time, awake, listening to the other one pretend to be asleep.
It’s still dark when the alarm goes off. I kill it before the second buzz. The house under me is dead silent.
Aspen’s asleep. Actually asleep now — flat out, one hand open on the pillow.
I dress in the dark, and I’m quiet about it. I’ve gotten good, this fall, at being quiet in rooms with her in them. I stop on the way out and look at her a second longer than I’ve got any business looking at her.
I fold her father’s shirt over the back of her vanity chair, the tie laid over the top of it, where she’ll see it. And there’s a notepad on the vanity, one of those little ones with a grocery list half-started in her mother’s hand, and I tear off the back sheet, and I write one line on it and set it on top of the shirt.
I’ll make you another pie.
Then I leave. I shut the door quietly and walk down the stairs. Nobody’s awake in the house, so I leave the front door and call for a ride.
The locker room sounds like summer camp somebody handed a sound system. There’s a tape gun going off in bursts like a stapler with dreams. Rowan’s re-lacing skates while listening to Benson talk about Thanksgiving. Somebody’s playlist is a hate crime. Percy’s half into his pads in the corner.
I come through that door loud. I have been awake since five this morning. I have flown two legs on about ninety minutes of trundle sleep. Four hours ago, I left a girl asleep in a bed in another state with my whole chest cracked open over her, and you could not prove a single second of any of it in a court of law, because the volume is back up to eleven where it belongs and I’m on Blue before the door’s even shut.
“Blueberry! New haircut?”
He looks over at me like he hates the new nickname. “It’s the same haircut,Sterm.”
“It’s a bold haircut. I respect the commitment. Melly let you out of the house like that?”
“Melly likes the haircut.”
“Melly’s being supportive. That’s what love is, brother. You hold onto that girl.”
The room rolls on, loud and stupid, which is the most comforting thing I’ve felt in twenty-four hours.
Benson is across the room at his stall, half-dressed, not chirping. Just watching me. Captain’s eyes. And Percy, who has not said a word and will not, has me marked from the corner the same flat way he tracks a shooter coming in two-on-one like he’s already done the math on which way I’m going to break.
