Page 150 of Puck the Coach's Son
“Yeah?”
He swallows audibly.
“I packed nothing.”
“Doesn't matter.”
His voice wobbles.
“I packed… I packed the book on the nightstand and a charger and three pairs of boxers and a picture of my mom. I think that's it. I don't have… I don't have my passport. I don't have any of my skates. I don't have?—”
“We'll send Diane for the rest.”
“Oh yeah. She'll do it.”
I squeeze his hand.
“I know she will.”
His shoulders drop a quarter inch against mine.
Wait for me,I said.
He waited. I came.
23
THEO
Six months later
I wake at six-twelve with summer light already in the room and Maddox's arm heavy across my hips.
Blackridge in July is a pale yellow thing. The sun comes up over the lake before six and it slides across the hardwood of our bedroom floor turning the duvet the color of honey by the time my body notices it's morning. Our bedroom faces east. That was on purpose. We walked into this apartment in February with a realtor we barely spoke to, and Maddox looked at the east window and looked at me and said,“you'll want the sun in the morning,”like a man who had already decided which side of the bed he'd be sleeping on, and I didn't argue because he was right.
He's on his stomach. Face mashed into my pillow because he stole it in the night. Hair a disaster. His arm is across me and his hand is loose in the hollow between my hip bone and the elastic of my boxers, and the hand twitches in his sleep like he's chasing something in a dream.
I lift the hand. I slide out from under it.
He mutters. He doesn't wake.
I go brush my teeth first. That's the thing nobody tells you about after you get the fairy-tale. You still brush your teeth first. I come back and I stand at the edge of our bed and I look at him. He's twenty-nine in October. His hair is just beginning to show some gray threads at the temples. The bruise on his shoulder from Thursday's game is green now, pushing yellow. Two years at four point two. Modified no-trade. A dog on the other side of the bedroom door who will start whining in eleven minutes if we don't get up. A bed I helped pick out with him at a warehouse in March, arguing about headboard height like people who planned to use the headboard.
I pull the duvet down to his hips.
The tattoo on his ribs, a compass, shitty, clearly done by a friend in college, rises and falls with his breath.
I slide my mouth down his spine.
He makes a sound into the pillow, low, before his brain catches up. His hips shift. His skin is warm from sleep and the sun is coming in sideways across his back in a bar and I lick a line along his spine just to the edge of the bar and he mumblesTheointo cotton without opening his eyes.
“Shh.”
“Mm...”
My mouth finds the jut of his hip bone.
“Back to sleep.”
