I take my hands back and fold them in my lap because he asked, and I wait, the way I wait.
The waiting is the wrong move and I don’t know why yet.
“You’re concussed,” he says. “You’re sitting in the dark because the light hurts and my brother put you here. And you’re asking about my hands. Even now. Even now you’re managing me. You can’t not. None of you can ever not.”
“I’m not managing you. I’m asking if you’re hurt.”
“That’s the same thing. For you it’s the same thing. It’s always been the same thing.” His hands are going under the cuffs of his gear, fast, the pattern running double-time. “Then tell me the difference. No. You can’t. You’d manage your way right up to the edge of the line and call it space.”
“Then tell me where the line is and I won’t cross it.”
“You can’t see the line. That’s the whole point.” He’s pacing now in the dark, a shape against the gray. “You’re alwaystaking care of it. Two stalls down. The water. The curtains. The crossword with the goalie words. The fish food. You line it all up before I know I need it. And everyone does. Everyone always has. The door checked twice so I don’t have to do it. The bowl in the right blue. The whole house bent around me before anyone had a word for why. And I can’t tell anymore. Je ne peux plus. I can’t tell the difference between being wanted and being handled.”
“Okay. Okay.” The reflex has the words out before I can weigh them. “What do you need. Tell me what you need and I’ll get it.”
“That.” He stops. “That, right there.What do you need.You can’t even hear it. I’m telling you I can’t breathe for how much I’m needed-for, and you ask what I need so you can go get it. There’s no bottom to it. There’s no version of this where you’re not solving me.”
He’s crying now, I think, or close to it. His voice coming apart at the edges.
The sound of it goes into my head like light, every raised word a small bright spike behind the bad eye, and I sit very still and let it land and don’t lift a hand to stop any of it.
“I don’t need you to fix me.” And there it’s. My brain, the brain that reads shooters before they shoot and faces before they know what they’re doing, takes the sentence and strips it clean.
I don’t need you to fix me. I don’t need you to. I don’t need you.
The qualifier falls off the way it always falls off. The truth under a thing rises to the top for me whether I want it or not. What’s left is the reading.
The reading is the one I’ve been bracing for since Seattle. Since before Seattle. Since the start of every room I’ve ever made myself necessary in.
I don’t need you. You were the function. The function is all you were.
I asked him once to take care of me. In a hotel room with the lights off I said the words for the only time in my life. He heard them. For one night the function went both ways.
Tonight he is telling me there is no both ways. There is only the one direction, me toward him.
I want to argue with the read. I have never been wrong about a read. A man does not argue with the one instrument he has trusted his whole life.
There’s no version of me underneath the use for him to want.
I’ve never built one.
“I’ve never needed anyone to fix me,” he says. “I was fine before all of you. Je n’ai pas besoin. I don’t need to be handled one more second. Not by my mother. Not by Matty. Not by you. You’re hurt, Soren. You’re hurt and you’re still doing it and I can’t watch you do it one more time. I can’t be the thing you have to manage.”
“Jules,” I say. “Please. Tell me how to do this right.”
“There’s no right.” He’s wrecked, all the way open, two weeks and a city and a brother and a net pouring out of him at once. “That’s what I’m saying. There’s no doing it right. There’s just doing it less. Do you know what it’s like? To walk into every room of your life and find it already arranged. To never once get to find out if someone would stay if there was nothing left to fix. My mother built a house I could live in and I never got to ask if she’d have built it anyway. Matty broke himself being sorry and I never got to tell him I didn’t need the sorry. And you.” His voice cracks on it. “You. You’re the one I picked. You’re the one I gave the name to. And I can’t tell if you picked me back or if you just found the most complete person you’d ever get to take care of. And I’ll never be able to tell. Because you will never, ever stop doing it long enough for me to find out.”
He just handed me the question I’ve never spoken to anyone.
He doesn’t want me. He wants the absence of me.
The kindest thing I can do is be less here.
So I do the only useful thing I’ve left. I make myself less here.
I push my hair back off my face, once. I stand up. The room tilts and rights itself. The headache flares white behind my eye.
I don’t make a sound.
