“Yeah,” he agrees, gently.
I push up onto one elbow. The room tilts. The headache pulses harder, indignant about being made to participate in movement.
“What time is it?”
“Six-forty.”
I scrunch my face. “Why are you awake?”
“Couldn’t sleep.” He sits up inside the sleeping bag, raking a hand through his flattened hair to wake it up, but it does nothing. “Wanted to beat the traffic. My dad’s wrapping the Whitlock job today, and I told him I’d come in for a few hours tomorrow to make some of the hours back.”
“Oh.”
“I should head out.”
“Now?”
“Should’ve left fifteen minutes ago, honestly.” His mouth pulls into a slow, sheepish grin. “I’ve just been pulling at your toes to try and wake you up.”
The laugh is out of me before I can stop it, muffled into the blanket I drag up over my face. Of course, he has been lying there on the floor of my bedroom, trying to coax me awake by yanking gently on my toes through the covers, because he cannot bring himself to leave without saying goodbye, even though I would understand if he had. That is who he is.
He’s already moving. His duffel is by the door, packed. His boots are paired up next to it, laces tucked inside. I notice that he showered. I didn’t even hear the water run. His hair is darker at the temples, where it isn’t yet dry.
“I’ll walk you out,” I say.
“You don’t have to.”
“Say less.” I fall back against the pillow and look up at this man who has been mine for two years and who is, slowly, day by day, becoming someone distant. I know he feels it too. I’ve felt it for some time.
He crosses the room and brushes my hair off my forehead with the back of one knuckle, and the touch is so featherlight that guilt cracks my chest open. I’m well aware that I must have kicked him out of my bed last night, and I hope I didn’t say anything stupid.
He kisses my forehead. His lips are warm and dry, and they linger for a second longer than they need to. The smell of him is so familiar — soap, the cedar of his deodorant, the faintest trace of his work truck — that I close my eyes against it like the smell itself might somehow undo me.
“I’ll see you later,” he murmurs.
“Text me when you get home.”
He nods. Once. Decisive. Like a man taking an order.
And then he’s gone — duffel in one hand, boots tucked under the other arm, the soft click of the bedroom door behind him so quiet I almost don’t hear it.
I lie there in the warm dent of the mattress and stare up at the ceiling. I should feel something more than I do. He didn’t ask why my best friend ended up in our bed and not him. He didn’t ask the questions I have been bracing for, the questions I keep waiting for him to ask, so I won’t have to be the one to start. He just kissed my forehead and went. And I — selfishly, horribly, ungratefully — let him.
I roll onto my side and pull the blanket up to my chin and close my eyes against the shape of all of it. The headache moves with me, sloshing.
I’m asleep again within minutes.
It’s after nine when I wake up the second time, and the world has tilted into something more forgiving. The light is full now. Mila is just beginning to stir, groaning into her pillow. My hangover is still there, oh, it is absolutely still there, but it has been demoted from siege to occupation. I can negotiate with it. I can move around it.
I shuffle down the hall in last night’s t-shirt and make coffee, because making coffee is the one thing I know how to do unfailingly, even when everything inside my skull is rioting. The smell of it fills the kitchen, dark and bitter and grounding, and I press the heels of my hands against my eye sockets while the machine hisses and gurgles and try to remember how to be a person.
I carry two cups back down the hall.
Mila is sitting up against the headboard when I push the door open with my hip — hair a complete tragedy, last night’s mascara smudged in dark half-moons under her eyes, my borrowed t-shirt slipping down over one bare shoulder. She looks like a girl in a music video about regret, and when she sees the coffee, herwhole face changes. She makes a small, wounded sound. She holds out both hands like a child.
“Oh, my god. I love you. I love you. I love you so much.”
“It’s nice and warm. Don’t spill it.”
