Page 63 of Knottingley Ever After
I cross the threshold and walk to the cabinet.
Ten seconds of silence. Twenty. The faintest hiss of the moka pot on his side of the stove. The quiet, careful slide of cabinet hinges on mine.
He speaks first.
“You’re up early.”
Low, even, the same voice that used to tell me to check my angles, to drop earlier, to breathe through the long minutes between periods. The same voice I have not heard at conversational range, just for me, since the day before my eighteenth birthday.
I do not answer.
I locate a glass. I find the cold tap. I pull my shaker bottle from the front pocket of my hoodie — because of course I bring it down with me, of course I sleep with it ready, hydration is the only fight I never lose — and I unscrew the lid, and I add the water with the steady, unhurried hands of a woman who is, on the inside, gripping the rim of the countertop hard enough to leave a fingerprint.
From the duffel pocket: my scoop. From the same pocket: the canister. Strawberry whey, the same brand I have used since Iwas sixteen, because routine is its own kind of armor and I have never been in the market for new armor.
I measure. I pour. I twist the lid back on.
And then I shake the bottle with the practiced, controlled violence I have shaken it with on every cold morning of my life, the wire mixer inside rattling like a small angry hornet, and I do all of it without looking at him once.
He watches.
I can feel him watching. The careful, attentive weight of his attention has not changed in five years. He is reading my hands. Reading the brand on the canister. Reading whatever a man like Declan O’Rourke reads in a woman he has not seen since she was eighteen, doing a thing he taught her how to do.
“You still use the same brand,” he says, quietly.
My hand stops mid-shake.
Do not slam it down. Do not slam it down. The whole house is asleep, you absolute child.
I set the bottle on the counter with the deliberate, level care of a woman defusing something. I turn to face him.
And there it is. The face that has filled five years’ worth of cold-room ceiling at four in the morning. The Irish granite jaw. The green eyes that taught me how to read a room. The expression that gives away absolutely nothing, the professional clean of a man who has spent his entire adult life being unreadable on purpose, and the realization that lands in my sternum is not new. I have had it before. I had it last night across the corridor outside the admin office. I have it again now.
He is going to act like nothing happened.
He is going to stand in this kitchen, at five in the morning, in the temporary pack-house of the unbonded Omega he personally signed the paperwork to bring to this country, and he is going to comment on the brand of my protein powder the way you comment on a colleague’s shirt.
As though five years was a long weekend. As though the leaving was a footnote. As though I did not spend the back end of my teenage life relearning the slope of my own walls because he walked out of the room and did not turn around.
“You,” I say, and I am gratified to hear that my voice has come out flat and small and surgical, “do not get to know things about me anymore.”
The kitchen does not move.
He does not flinch. He does not lower his eyes. He does not even, that I can see, breathe.
You bastard. You absolute bastard.
And because my body has, in the past sixteen hours, started doing things without consulting the rest of me, I find I am crossing the kitchen.
Five steps. The cold tile under my socks. The scent of him climbing as the distance closes, cedar and snow and whiskey, the under-cabinet lights catching the silver at his temples I had not, from across the room, let myself see. He is so much taller up close than I have allowed myself to remember. He is, this close, exactly as tall as he was the last time I stood within scenting range of him, which was in the doorway of the rink at home with a duffel of training gear at my feet and a hundred things I would never get to say.
I stop a hand-span off him.
I tip my chin up. His green eyes drop to meet mine.
“Why.”
It comes out as the entire sentence. The whole question I have been carrying since I was eighteen years old, stripped down to one syllable and offered up at five in the morning to a man wearing a jacket the color of nothing.
