Page 152 of On His Mind

Every promise he’s given me was real when he made it.One day.I promise.He meant every word, and he’ll mean it again next month, and the month after that, but nothing —nothing— will move.

There’s no version of this where I wait long enough. That’s the thing I finally understand, sitting in a cold car with my hands shaking on the wheel. I keep thinking there’s a door at the end of all this waiting, and there isn’t. There’s just more corridor. More midnights. More halfway.

Leave it. Like that. I want to look at you.

That’s what he said. I stood there half undone in the middle of my kitchen and let him look, and I thought it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to me.

Half on. Half off. Caught in the middle.

That’s how he’s had me the entire time. That’s the only way he knows how to hold anything.

I start the engine. My hands won’t quite steady on the wheel, my face is a mess, and I drive home anyway, through empty one-in-the-morning streets, past the shut-up shops and the one gas station with its lights still burning.

He’ll text me tomorrow. I know he will.

And I know it won’t say anything different.

Chapter 50

Percy

Thedoorclosesbehindher, and I don’t move.

I couldn’t tell you how long I sit there on the edge of the bed in the dark. My pulse has come up into my head somehow, a dull roar that’s shoved the rest of the world out past it, and I keep waiting to hear the side door and it never comes, and after a while I understand it isn’t going to, because she didn’t use it. She went out the front. She stopped being careful. That’s how I know it’s real.

My face is wet before I’ve noticed it’s happening. I sit there with the tears running down and I don’t even lift a hand to them, because I’m too far inside my own head, running it again and again, hunting for the exact place it went wrong. What I did. What I didn’t do. What I could’ve said in that doorway if I were any other kind of man than the one I am.

I knew what she was asking me for. I’ve always known. I just couldn’t do it. Every single time she held a door open for me, I stood on my side of it and couldn’t make my body walk through, and tonight she finally stopped holding it.

There’s a difference between being loved and being chosen. I don’t think I understood that until right now.

She loves me. I have never once doubted that she loves me — it’s the one thing in my whole life I’ve been sure of. But loving me and choosing me turned out to be two different jobs, and she couldn’t keep doing the second one. She couldn’t keep choosing me over her own sleep, her own pride, and her own shot at a happy life out in the daylight where people can see it. In the end, she chose herself.

And the part that guts me, the part I can’t climb over, is that I don’t blame her. Not even a little.

I’d have left me too.

The days after come at me through glass. I’m numb the whole way down. I eat what gets put in front of me — Rowan announced a while back that he’s done cooking for this house, that we’re grown men and can feed our own damn selves, but he’s clocked that I’ve stopped eating, and so a plate keeps landing in front of me anyway, and I keep clearing it. Not because I’m hungry, but because he puts the food down, and I’m not built rude enough to leave it.

The ice doesn’t clear my head the way Josh always swore it would. Josh, who promised me the crease would be the one place in the world that always made sense — and for years, he was right, and now he’s not. I stand in it, and there’s nobody home upstairs. I’ve gone hollow, top to bottom. A zombie doing a decent impression of the goalie who used to live in this body.

The funny thing is that people have walked out on me my whole life. A lot of them. And every single time, I stood thereand watched them go and I never once understood it — what I’d done, what was so broken in me that made me so easy to leave.

Watching Penelope go, I think I finally get it.

I finally understand that there’s something seriously fucking wrong with me. There always has been. It just took the best thing I ever had walking out the front door for me to see it clearly.

At Friday’s game, I face twenty-nine shots and stop all of them and can’t remember most of the game. My body does it without me — the post, the push, the glove hand up where it needs to be — the whole thing running on its own. Fuller catches the back of my neck coming off the ice, his face lit up, saying something I don’t hear. Stanley leaps onto my back in the tunnel with all his weight, howling. I carry him a few steps and set him down and feel none of it.

Her name’s in my phone maybe twenty times a day. My thumb finds it without my permission. Sunday night I get all the way into the thread, the empty box sitting there waiting, and I typei miss you, lowercase, no punctuation, and I look at it. My thumb hovers over send for a long, long time. Then I delete it, one letter at a time, and put the phone down on the desk.

She doesn’t text either.

The first week I’m too far under to notice much of anything, and then somewhere in the second one it lands on me that the silence has two ends to it. I’m not texting her because I’ve got nothing new to hand her. She’s not texting me because she’s finished.

Those aren’t the same thing. It takes me a while to understand that.

By the third week I’m sleeping about three hours a night and I’ve stopped being surprised by it. I know what this room looks like at four in the morning. I know the line the streetlight puts across the floor and where it lands on the wall by five and how long after that the birds start.