Page 101 of Cut Off
“You can want both things,” she says. “You’re allowed.”
I don’t say anything. I just keep driving.
The exit comes up. I take it. The hotel is one of those long-stay places, and there’s a parking spot near the door, and the rain is doing what rain does in Seattle.
I put the car in park and sit with my hands on the wheel.
“Hey,” Maddie says.
“Yeah.”
“You did it.”
“I drove a car.”
“You drove a car five hundred miles. With me in it. While crying. While listening to my breakup playlist three times. You did it.”
“Three times?”
“It’s a good playlist.”
We look at each other. She’s wearing eyeliner from yesterday, a stained sweatshirt, a pretzel crumb on her chin, and she’s the best person I know.
“Thank you,” I say. “For coming.”
“Shut up.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do. Shut up.”
She gets out of the car and stretches. She looks up at the sky and blinks because a raindrop falls in her eye. I sit with my hands on the wheel and let myself feel all of it at once—the grief and the love and the old dream finally landing under my wheels, and the new dream I’m not yet ready to give a name to—and then I take a breath, and I let it out, and I open the door, and I step into the city.
28
Pep Talk
JONAH
Most guys clear out after the last whistle—strip the gear, hit the showers, start the group text about where to get dinner. These days, I stay. I run drills until my legs burn and my lungs feel like I huffed a can of oven cleaner. I hit the blue line, circle, come back, do it again. Shut off the scoreboard, shut off the world. I tell myself I’m training, but anybody watching would call it what it is: an avoidance of having to think thoughts, which always include Eli and Zoe.
Nothing numbs it. Not the smell of ice, not the slap of my blades, not the lactic fire climbing my thighs. Every lap, every carve, the same movie plays in my head:
Eli, in the backseat, saying “I believe in you.”
Zoe, her hugs, her unwavering support, that smell of hers that still lingers in the house and brings me right back to those moments she was in my arms, and I wanted it to last forever. How she loved my son, and I think she might’ve loved me too.
I’m sure I love her.
And I screwed it all up.
Then back to Eli, knotted up in my arms in a closet, his whole body shaking, face streaked with tears and snot and defiance. Pulled out of my arms.
The fort. God. The way I built it out of desperation and old bedding. The way it saved him that night, and every other night after that.
Every fucking turn, there he is. The weight of him. The ghost of him.
And now he’s in Gwen’s house across town. In a bedroom I’ve never seen. In a space I can’t touch.
