Page 106 of Knottingley Ever After
“He announced it at considerable volume. We have been politely waiting for you to bring it up.”
“I was hoping you would all spare me this. I am, in fact, almost done the book.”
She holds up her index finger, jogs around the island, reaches my counter and snags the Kindle she had, I will admit, left face-down beside the toaster two hours ago. She flicks the lock screen, holds the device up to me. The cover art with a small percentage in the corner.
Seventy-seven percent.
“I am at a suspenseful part.”
“Spoilers,” I say, mildly, “are a war crime.”
“It would be a spoiler.”
“I was not, in any case, planning to read it. Not because I am not curious. It is just that I am, by literacy-rate standards, an embarrassingly slow reader. Three pages a sitting. I have been working on the same novel for the better part of a season.”
Her face brightens. “Oh, thank God. Sir,same.It takes me days. Sometimes weeks. The fastest I ever read a paperback was three days and it nearly killed me. Most of the time it is a couple chapters on the bus, a couple before bed, a couple in the hot tub when the boys are not stinking it up.”
“Have we got a hot tub I do not know about.”
“Theoretically.”
“Right.”
She sobers, slightly.
“Okay, but the actual reason I have been chewing on this book all week,” she says, glancing at the screen of her Kindle, then up at me, “is the part I am at. Without spoiling the structure, the female lead is trying to talk to one of the male leads, and he has just gone, like, completely closed off. Stone cold, no warning. She does not know it, but he is going through an addiction spiral, and the reason he will not let her in is that he genuinely thinks he is going to disappoint her, and he would rather close the door than let her see what is on the other side of it.”
I do not move.
The wooden spoon is in my hand. The stew is at low heat. The kitchen is, around us, warm and slow and gold-lit, and the woman across the island from me has, without any way of knowing it, just put a finger on the precise wound that has, for four winters, been the most carefully managed object in the small inner courtroom of my chest.
“Mm,” I say, level. “What part of it has you stuck on it.”
“Honestly? I have not even reached the resolution yet. It just — it makes me want to put myself in her shoes. If I were in a relationship with someone, and he was in that hole, and he would not let me in. What would I do. What would I be willing to absorb. What would I be willing to walk away from.”
“Okay.” My voice is steadier than I am, on the inside. “Would you. Date someone in active addiction.”
She frowns. Considers.
“It is not, technically, a choice you exactlymake,right? You do not, with your morning coffee, decide,today I am going to fall in love with an addict.Addiction is something that happens,frequently to people you are already in love with. So I think the more useful framing is —”
She pauses. She picks her words.
“I do not blame people for needing an escape. Life sucks balls. The world is a lot. Some people land somewhere on the bell curve where the available escapes are reading and a hot bath and a cozy movie night, and some people land somewhere on the bell curve where the available escapes are, um, less clean. I do not think one set of people is morally superior to the other. I think people are doing what they can.”
I do not say anything.
She glances at the Kindle, then back up at me. She lifts the device. “Some could say I am, by clinical measure, addicted to reading.”
She turns the device so I can see the cover screen. The percentage in the corner, again. Seventy-seven.
“I read so that when I am not spiral-thinking about how I have to prove the world wrong about Omegas in net,” she says, soft, “I can get lost in stories about women being loved. Cherished. Taken care of in the small unspectacular daily way the women in my actual life have not, recently, been taken care of. I can have an afternoon like this one, with a man cooking his grandfather’s stew, having a real conversation, and read the version of the same afternoon written by someone who has, at the end, written down an ending where the woman gets to keep it.”
She sets the Kindle down on the marble. She crosses the kitchen to the stools opposite me. She hoists herself up onto one with the slow careful pull of a woman whose hip is, very visibly, not happy, and she crosses one leg over the other.
Captain. Steady.
I lower the stove a click. I set the wooden spoon onto the marble rest. I walk to her side of the island.
