Page 156 of On His Mind

I nod. It’s all I can manage. There’s no room in my throat for anything more.

“Then be with her,” Stanley says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the whole world. Because to him it is. Because it always was, for all of them. “That’s it. That’s the entire thing, man. Call her right now.”

“No,” I get out.

“What happened?” Rowan asks.

I stare at the water glass and think about what happened, and the truth is nothing happened, nothing you could point to, no big fight, no crazy differences. We were perfect together.

“She wanted more,” I say.

“So give her more,” Stanley says.

I shake my head. “I don’t know how to, man.”

It comes out smaller than I mean it to, and it lands wrong on the table, and I watch it confuse them — because to four guys who fall in love and justdoit, out loud, in daylight, it isn’t a real sentence.

“What do you mean, you don’t know how?” Rowan says, after a moment.

“Yeah.” Stanley’s frowning now, actually frowning. “What’s the real deal here, Pers?”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “You guys are serious. You actually want to talk about all this.”

They nod. All four of them. Not one of them reaches for a joke.

So I take a sip of the water Rowan set down, because my mouth’s gone to dust, and I decide — for the first time in my whole life, at this table, with these four idiots watching me like I’m something worth waiting on — to just tell them. All of it. The stuff I’ve never said out loud to a living soul. Not Penelope. Not Josh. Nobody.

“She’s better off without me,” I start, and my voice isn’t steady. “Before I get in any deeper and do real damage to her. Because I don’t know a single thing about — love. Relationships. Any of it. I don’t have it in me. Never had it. I’m not capable of it.”

Nobody says anything. Rowan lowers himself back into his chair.

“I was in foster care.” The words feel enormous coming out, years of them backed up behind, and I make myself keep going, because I know if I stop now I’ll never start again. “I never knew my mom.” I grab the water with both hands. “Dad’s aroundsomewhere. French Canadian. He’s a junkie, if he’s even still alive, I don’t know. He used to yell at me in French so that nobody would know what he was saying.”

I look up.

Shit.

Here I am doing the same fucking thing: talking in French so nobody can understand me.

I run a hand down my face and inhale.

Rowan’s got his forearms on the table, and he isn’t moving. Benson’s jaw is doing something. Stanley’s face is wide open, and I’ve never once seen him look like that.

“That’s why it comes out in French.” My thumb goes along the wet ring the glass left. “When it’s — when I can’t. I’m not good with words.”

Nobody says anything. Nobody’s shifting in their chair, either.

“I didn’t grow up on hockey.” That one gets a reaction — Stanley’s eyebrows going. “I didn’t skate till I was fourteen. One of the homes I was in, the guy, Josh — I wouldn’t talk. Not to him, not to his wife, not at school. So he put me in the net.” I shrug. “You don’t have to talk in the net. He said if I got good enough somebody might pay for college one day, and he was right, so.”

I pause.

“That’s the only reason I’m here at Camden.”

Blue wipes his mouth, glancing at the table, deep in thought.

“So I never—” I have to go around it. “This. I didn’t know that this was real. I thought it was something people said.”

I stare at the table, and they wait me out.