Page 92 of Breakaway
The water runs. Both of us breathing. His hand stays on my hip. My hand stays where it is, loosening, holding us both through the last pulses until we are spent and still. His chest rises and falls against mine.
I turn off the shower and towel him off. He lets me. I dry his shoulders, his chest, the ridge of his ribs where my thumb was before. He watches my hands the whole time and says nothing.
The bedroom is dark. The bed is made, clean sheets. A book on the nightstand that is not the book he was reading in Aruba. Mouse's blanket folded at the foot. He pulls me down beside him and presses his face into my shoulder and his body curves into mine.
"Wes?"
"Yeah."
"What time is your flight?"
"Eleven."
"Stay as long as possible."
"I'm not going anywhere tonight."
"Good." His hand goes slack on my chest. His breathing evens. He is asleep in two minutes.
I hold him. Mouse appears in the doorway, considers the situation, and jumps onto the bed and settles at our feet with a purr that fills the dark.
The man asleep on my chest is not fixed but he’s doing the work. It’s showing in the dishes cleaned, groceries stocking the fridge and the reorganized kitchen. He’s not fixed but he’s getting better.
?
Chapter 32: Luca
"Luca. Come on in."
The office is the same office. Green chair, gray couch, the painting I still cannot name in warm colors above the desk. The plant on the windowsill is alive. The soil looks better than it did in February. She took my advice about the watering.
I take the chair. She takes the couch. Notebook on her knee, pen in her hand.
"How's your week been?"
My sixth visit to Gwen’s office and I keep thinking this will get easier but it hasn’t yet.
"Okay. Good, actually. Practice has been solid. We won Tuesday. I had an assist."
"How did that feel?"
"Like an assist. The pass was clean. Fontenot converted." I settle into the chair. The green fabric is familiar now in a way that February's chair was not. "I called my sister, Sina. I told her what’s been going on with me. That I'm seeing you and I'm working on it."
"How has that been sitting with you? Since the call."
I look at the plant. The brown-edged leaf from February is gone. A new one has taken its place, smaller, greener.
"She said I'm allowed to need things." I hear my own voice say the sentence and it sounds different in this room than it sounded in my kitchen. "She said she knows I've been calling and asking about her and how she is since we were kids, and that I'm allowed to need things too."
"What happened when she said that?"
"I felt it. Like she'd said the one sentence I didn't know I was waiting for."
"Had anyone said that to you before?"
"Wes has. In different words. But hearing it from Sina was..." I stop. The sentence is forming and I am letting it form instead of redirecting. "She doesn't know what that meant."
"What does that mean to you?"
