Page 66 of Knocked Up

"Yes."

"Something is different. I asked you in November and you told me nothing was happening. It was a lie and I let you have it. I am not asking again. I am telling you." He tapped my pad with the flat of his hand. "Whatever it is, it is working. Do not let anybody take it off you."

Then he went to talk to somebody about a defenseman's ankle, which is where that man goes when he has said too much.

We won it four to one. Thirty-one saves, two of them work. The rest was standing in the right place, which is the whole job and nobody believes it.

I've played eleven years and for most of them the game was the whole building. I went out and I was worth what the number said at the end. Then I went back to an apartment with nothing in it and lay in the dark being worth that number until morning.

That night I got in my truck at eleven-ten with wet hair. I drove east on Thirty-Eighth and south on Federal. There was a light on over a stove in a house with eleven dog beds in it. There was a woman in it who is never asleep at that hour. I sat in that lot a second before I went in.

Auggie has decided something is happening and has begun to work on it.

"So you're living there."

"I'm in the guest room."

"Right. So at the fundraiser the woman from the foundation asked whether you had pets. You said, and I want to quote this correctly, we have nine."

"There are nine."

"We!" Auggie said. "And then you looked like a man who had been shot. I'm not doing anything with it." He put both hands up. "When I do, and I will, it will be enormous and you will not see it coming. Also, Violet Ocampo and I have exchanged phone numbers."

"You've what?"

"Good night," Auggie said.

I came in the back at twenty past eleven. The kitchen light was on and the television in the front room was off. The television in that front room is never off. The remote was on the arm of the couch about a foot from where she was sitting with a blanket over her knees.

"Hey," Tessa said. "How was…"

"Fine. Four one."

"Mm." She looked at a magazine that was upside down.

She has not once said she watches. I put a plate together at the counter, because she had not eaten. The soup was on the stove where I had left it before I went to the rink.

I brought it over. The couch in that room is low and I'm not. Handing a person a plate on it means going down on one knee. I went down beside the arm of the couch and held it out. She reached. Neither of us let go of it.

She had her hair down. There is a lamp behind that couch with a shade the color of a paper bag and it does something to a room.

"You're bleeding," she said.

"It's a lip. It's from the second. It's nothing."

"Beckett," she said. "Come here."

So I came here.

She got her thumb under my jaw and turned my face toward the lamp. It is the exact thing she does to a dog. She has never once done it to me.

Her hand stayed there about four seconds longer than the medicine.

"It's nothing," she said.

"That's what I said."

"Your face is hot."