Page 54

"From me."

"From everything."

"From me," I say again. "Say it."

He turns around. His face is shut up tight, the closed restaurant, but his eyes are wrong. Red at the edges. He hasn't slept. Maybe since Friday.

"It was a mistake," he says.

I knew he was going to say it. I've known since Friday night, since the side door slammed. I've been practicing what I'd say back for two days, in the shower, on the plane, lying awake staring at my sad ceiling.

None of it comes out. What comes out is:

"I don't do pretend it didn't happen."

He blinks.

"I did that already," I say. "I did it for years. I did it in juniors with a guy on my team who kissed me on a bus and then called me a fag in the room the next morning so everybody would laugh. I did it with a guy in Rimouski who made me swear I'd never tell anybody, and I didn't, and he married a girl from his church last summer, and I found out on Facebook." My voice is shaking. I hate that. I keep going anyway. "I'm not doing it again. Not with you. You don't get to kiss me like that and then run away and ask Beth for a single."

"Rémy—"

"If it was a mistake, fine. Say it to my face. Look at me and say it was a mistake and you didn't mean it and you'll never do it again. Say it and I'll believe you and I'll ask Moretti for a new roommate myself. I'll go room with Kowal. I'll let him hang tutus on me every night."

He doesn't say it.

He stands there by the window, with the lake behind him going gray, and he doesn't say anything at all.

"Say it," I tell him. Quieter now.

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because it's not true."

The room's so quiet I can hear the ice machine down the hall.

He sits down on the edge of his bed, like his legs won't hold him. He puts his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

"I don't know what I am," he says into his hands. "I'm thirty-five years old. I was married for twelve years. I never—I never let myself think about it. Not once. I thought if I didn't think about it, it wasn't real. Then you walked into the room singing, and I haven't been able to think about anything else since."

I don't move. I'm afraid if I move, he'll stop talking.

"I don't know what I am," he says again. "I don't know what this is. I don't know how to do any of it."

I sit down on my bed, facing him. Our knees are almost touching in the gap between. Mon Dieu, I think. Don't mess this up.

"You don't have to know tonight," I say.

He lifts his head.

"You don't have to have a word for it. You don't have to tell anybody. You don't have to know anything." I swallow. "You just have to not pretend it didn't happen."

He looks at me. His eyes move over my face the way they did in the stairwell, slow, like he's reading it.

"I've never done this," he says. "With a man. I've never—any of it."

"I know."