I look around the room. His coffee cup on the counter. My camera bag by the door where it always lands. The plant on the windowsill I bought three weeks ago that he keeps accidentally overwatering — still alive somehow, which feels like a metaphor I’m not going to examine too closely.
Brick arranges himself between us on the couch like he’s moderating a summit.
“Your sister cried,” I say.
“She cries at everything.”
“At me specifically.”
“She’s been waiting for this since the grocery store.” He looks at me. “So have I.”
I look at my coffee.
Okay then.
We sit for a while.
Not talking. Not performing not-talking. Just in it — the city still humming outside, the Cyclones still celebrating something enormous, and us in here in the quiet of a night when something enormous went right.
“I’ve been waiting to leave since I got here,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Not Canyon Bay.” I look at my coffee. “Everywhere. Since I was eight. I’ve been waiting for the thing that makes me pack. The thing that tells me it’s time. I got so good at seeing it coming that I started seeing it before it was there. Every place I’ve ever been I’ve already had one foot out the door before I unpacked.”
He doesn’t say anything.
Doesn’t move.
“And?” he says.
I look at him.
“I don’t want to pack.”
The room goes quiet.
He looks at me.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it? Okay?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Something. That was — I just said a thing.”
“I know.” The corner of his mouth. “I heard you.”
“Jax.”
“Nova.”
“You’re impossible.”
