Page 313 of Across His Line

“Because I want to,” I say.

She looks at me for a long time. Something happens at the corner of her mouth.

“That’s not a reason,” she says.

“It’s the only reason I’ve got.”

We negotiate. It takes too long. She buys the shelves, a table for her photos, a good lamp, and hooks for the wall. I buy the couch because I want an expensive couch. She thinks I’m insane. We split the rent down the middle. I pay the internet because I lost a bet about whether she could pack forty pairs of boots in one box, and she could. She can do anything with a box.

In the car on the way back, she’s quiet, looking out the window with the receipt in her lap.

“You know I’d buy you anything,” I say. “Right? If you ever actually needed something. I wouldn’t even think about it. I wouldn’t even ask what it was for.”

“You would,” she says.

“I just—” I don’t know how to say it. I drive for a while. “I’m not trying to buy you, Tess. I’m just trying to be in it. Your stuff. Your work. All of it. I don’t want to be the guy who pays for it. I want to take care of you.”

She turns from the window and looks at me.

“I can take care of myself,” she says.

I inhale. “Right. Yeah.”

The summer goes fast, and then faster.

I train every morning at the Woodbury rink with whoever’s around. Barnes, mostly, half asleep, and sometimes Kennebeck, who doesn’t say anything and just skates until I want to throw up. The Sentinels strength coach calls every Monday and talks to me on speaker about my hips for forty-five minutes. I eat what the nutrition plan says, most of the time. I work on my first three steps until I see them in my sleep. Some mornings, I’m so tired driving back to Wren that I sit in my car outside the house for ten minutes with the engine off before I can make my legs work.

And then I go upstairs and lie on her floor.

That’s the best part of the day. I didn’t know that would be the best part. I lie on her floor with ice on my knees and watch her work. She doesn’t stop. She films in the afternoons when the light comes in low, a coat on the bed, her hands, her voice going worth it or not in that dry way that makes me laugh every single time even though I’ve heard it four hundred times. She answers emails from strangers. She sells everything she doesn’t need, her desk lamp to some girl in Paige’s lab, a stack of books, the rug. She looks up every Goodwill in the new city and the estate sale company that runs the county, the post office hours, and writes it all down in her notebook in that small handwriting. I lie there and think, I signed a contract with a professional hockey team, and she’s the one in this room with a real fucking job.

She sells two hundred more guides in July. She tells me the number every night.

The grad student writes back and says she’d love to sublet through December. Tessa reads the email out loud, sitting at her desk. Then she types something back, short, and sends it, and closes her laptop.

“What’d you say?” I ask.

“Thank you, but no.” She doesn’t turn around. “I don’t need it.”

I lie there on the floor and look at the back of her head and don’t say anything because if I say anything, I’m going to sound stupid, but I’m happy.

The week before we go, I drive to my parents’ house to get the rest of my stuff. My skates from when I was fifteen that my mom won’t throw away. A box of trophies I don’t want. Some clothes.

My mom hugs me in the kitchen for a long time and tells me Tessa needs to come for dinner before we go, she’s not asking, and I tell her I know, Thursday is already on the calendar. Then she goes upstairs to find me towels I don’t need.

My dad’s in his office. The door’s open. He looks up when I come and stand in it.

“Which apartment did you pick?” he says.

“The third one.”

He takes his glasses off. “That’s twenty-five minutes from the rink.”

“Yeah.”

The old version of this conversation is right there. I can feel it in the room. The one where he tells me the first one makes more sense, and why, in that voice, with his glasses in his hand. I stand here and nod and let him, and it’s done before I even knew there was a question. I can feel my shoulders getting ready for it.

“Why?” he says.