Sable pressed into my left leg. She had been pressing since the parking lot, which meant she’d been reading something I hadn’t been tracking consciously. The fact that she was right about it made it worse.
“Hey.” Dane was on the couch, legs up, lamp on. “How was practice?”
Practice had been fine. But before practice there’d been a media availability that ran long. Before that, a text from Matt with a number in it about Lena’s follow-up, which I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about. Before that, a road trip home from Hartford that took longer than projected because of weatherconditions. These were individually manageable things. I had managed them but now I was overstimulated and antsy.
I put my bag down. The chair was wrong. The TV cabinet was wrong.
I sat down on the floor in the hallway.
Sable circled once and lay down against my side. I put my hand on her and felt her breathe. There was nothing forming, word-wise. Not blocked. Just absent. When I tried to locate them, they weren’t there.
I heard Dane get up off the couch. The slow, careful movements he was still making while his head healed. He came to the hallway, and I felt him look at me, but he didn’t say anything.
He sat down on the floor next to me, back against the wall, close but not touching. He had his water glass from the coffee table, and he set it down between us. He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankle. He didn’t ask what was wrong or say things were okay because, in my head, things werenotokay at all. He didn’t fill the silence. He just sat in it with me, breathed normally, and didn’t move.
After a while, Sable shifted and put her chin on Dane’s knee. He set his hand on her head and left it there.
I don’t know how long we sat on the floor. Long enough for the chair to be in the wrong position and the cabinet to be shifted too far over to stop registering as a threat.
“The chair and the cabinet,” I said.
“Courtney moved them. I’ll put them back tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I breathed out. “I don’t always know when it’s coming,” I said.
“I know.”
“Usually Sable gets there first.”
He smiled at me. “Actually, she was on it in the parking lot,” he said. “I saw it on the camera.”
“You have a camera?”
“Yeah.”
He’d looked at the security feed, seen her alerting, and said nothing and done nothing except sit down on the floor next to me. First he’d read the situation and second he hadn’t immediately asked me what was wrong.
“You didn’t come to the door,” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve done some reading on things,” he said, then nudged my arm with his. “Felt like me being at the door might be one more thing.”
It would have been. He was right. “Thank you,” I said.
“Anytime.” He picked up his water glass and set it down again. “Couch?”
I considered the couch. The chair was still wrong. But the couch was where it always was.
“Couch,” I said.
He got up slowly and offered me his hand. I took it. We went to the couch, and he put his arm around me, and I leaned into his side, and Sable rearranged herself across our feet.
The TV stand was still in the wrong place.
But I closed my eyes and buried my face in his shirt, and breathed, and the knots unraveled one by one.
