Then again, she wouldn’t want that. For me to be all fucking mopey and despondent on this day. Mom was a bright light, andcarrying on with wounded grieving seems like a disservice to her memory despite how it hit me last year.
I don’t know how to do this day, but luckily I don’t really have to.
Shiloh sits on the couch beside me, his legs crossed and a thick textbook propped up on his lap. Instead of engaging in some kind of melancholy, I’ve simply been watching Godzilla movies while he hums under his breath beside me, swiping his highlighter across lines of text as he reads. He’s a distraction for my uncertain brain today, and I smile as he scowls, jabbing his finger against a particular section and huffing a disgusted sigh.
“Did that sentence offend you?” I ask, watching as he jumps at the sound of my voice.
“I missed this before,” he grumbles, scrawling a careless line of neon yellow over the words in question.
“And it’s important?”
He nods, tapping the highlighter on the spot he just found and tilting his head down toward the page, dismissing me as he goes back to huffing noises under his breath. He’s tracing the lines with his fingertip and mouthing the words out loud as he reads now so he doesn’t miss anything else, and I’m fascinated with the way his plump mouth moves in silence. Midterms are coming up, and though he still helps himself to my apartment as often as he wants to, he’s been bringing textbooks with him these past few days.
“Can I help you study?” I ask, gesturing at the book.
“How?”
“I… don’t know.”
His lips quirk up slightly in a half smile before falling again as he turns back to his textbook, leaving me alone to once again pick up my phone and open the text message with the flowers.
Blue.
Silver.
Soft petals and hard stone.
The things that now mean my mother. I swallow as I touch the image with two fingers, spreading them apart to make it bigger, noting that dirt clings now to the letters that carve her name through the face of the granite. If I were there, I’d clean it, and I’m tempted to reach back out to Oakley’s mom with an offer to pay her to wipe down the headstone for me, but I don’t. I let the image go, watching as it pops back to the full picture of flowers and granite.
“What’s that?” Shiloh asks, startling me.
I glance up to find that he’s shuffled close to my side on the couch, his textbook placed on the floor beside the coffee table. He peers down at the picture, then looks up at me expectantly. “It’s the anniversary of my mom’s death. That’s her headstone. Oakley’s step-mom took flowers there for me this morning.”
“Oh.” He opens his mouth like he wants to say something, or ask a question, but then closes it, offering a shrug instead.
“It’s been six years,” I offer in case that’s what he wanted to know.
“Are you… um… sad?” He stumbles over the words as they tumble uncertainly from his mouth.
“Not really. I don’t know. I should be, I guess, but I’m… I don’t know what I am. I’m not gonna like start sobbing or some shit. It’s just weird knowing she’s been gone for so long.”
“My mom died,” he offers, eyes darting between my face and the phone in my hand. “A while ago.”
I put the phone down on the coffee table and sit back on the couch, scooping him into my arms and pulling him into my side. He doesn’t fight my pull, but there is a tiny moment of hesitation, like after going far enough as to have my dick in his actual mouth, he’s still unsure about touching me for some reason.
Or maybe he’s unsure about me touching him.
I push that thought to the back of my mind as he settles into my side, leaning his head gently on my shoulder.
“Was your mom sick?” I ask, reaching up to brush a lock of hair off his cheek.
“Was your mom?” he asks, deflecting the question entirely and placing it back on me, as he does often.
“Yeah. She had cancer. I was playing major junior in Ontario when she was diagnosed. That was such a shitty year of hockey for me, I never thought I’d recover.” I pause, weighing my own words with a frown. “Not that hockey is what was important. It’s just… hockey made my mom proud. I wasn’t the smartest kid in school, but when she came to watch me play, she got to be as proud of me as the other parents were when their kids got like academic awards and shit. I didn’t want to let her down while she was going through chemo, but I sucked shit that year so hard.”
“I’d imagine she probably understood?” he replies, like it’s a question instead of a statement.
I nod, leaning down to press my lips against his forehead. He jerks slightly, but I feel him melt into me the tiniest bit more, his head a heavier weight on my shoulder now. “She understood, that’s what she always did. She understood everything about me.”
