Page 30 of Filthy Goalie
I poured the fuel in. I started the generator again. The lights came back. The heater continued its work. The hum returned.
I stood in the office doorway for a long minute and watched the bedroom door and did not go in. I could go in. I could justify it — checking that she was warm, making sure the heater in the bedroom was still running. But I knew what would happen if I went in. She would wake. She would reach for me. I would not be able to stop again.
I went back and sat in the armchair by the window instead.
At three-thirty, I went and sat in the armchair by the window and watched the snow.
The snow was coming harder now. The wind was pushing it sideways. The drifts against the house were getting taller. I could see them accumulating in real time, rising, covering everything that wasn’t actively fighting back.
I waited for whatever happened next. I waited for her to wake up. I waited for the apartment to warm up. I waited for the generator fuel to tell me whether nineteen hours was really all I had. I waited for my body to stop aching like she was still against me.
At four, the wind picked up.
It was the kind of wind that you could hear negotiating with the house. Trying the windows. Testing the roof. Probing for weaknesses.
At five, I understood we had two days left at minimum. The blizzard was coming harder than the forecast. The system was stalling. It was not moving through. It was settling in. It was going to stay.
Part of me — the part that was still capable of thinking like a man instead of like a problem that needed solving — understood that this was the thing I had been unconsciously hoping for. More time. More hours in this apartment with her. More chances to prove that I could stop.
At six, the sun tried to rise but could not quite make it through the clouds. The world stayed dark. The apartment stayed in the small circle of warmth that the heater and the lantern made.
I sat in the armchair and counted the time. I counted the minutes since she had gone to the bedroom. I counted the minutes since I had kissed her. I counted the minutes I could hear her breathing, shallow and even, behind the closed door.
I did not allow myself to move until her breathing told me she was awake. Until I heard the shift in sound that meant sleep was leaving her. Until I could pretend that getting up to make coffee was just something a person did, not something a person did to avoid touching the woman in the next room.
I did not allow myself to think about what was going to happen when the power came back. When her house was warm again. When the blizzard passed and she could leave and the particular closeness I had created could no longer be justified by weather and necessity.
I sat in the armchair and I waited. And I kept the generator running. And I kept the apartment warm.
And I did not go back to the bedroom, even though I had kissed her three feet away from that bed, even though I knew exactly where she was lying, even though my body was telling me every second that I was a fool for stopping. My body was not in charge here. My body had made enough decisions. My body had already destroyed enough.
I stayed on the couch. I stayed in the living room. I stayed exactly where I had put myself, which was the place that was supposed to keep her safe. Even from me. Especially from me.
7
MAPLE
Iwoke up at three in the morning and I could hear him breathing on the couch in the next room.
Not loud. Not obvious. But I had been listening for it all night, the way you listen for the person who has kissed you and then put you to bed and told you that they were not going to finish it, not like this, not in the cold. His breathing had been the only thing keeping me awake. His breathing and the memory of his hand on my back and the specific way he had saidwhen the power comes back, when your house is warm, when I can do this right.Like he was making a promise. Like he was counting down something. Like the only thing keeping him from crossing that line was the practical reality of a freezing apartment and a man who understood that some things required the right conditions.
The apartment was cold.
The bedroom heater was still running, the one he had brought in the mudroom during the storm, the new one that did not smell like burning dust. But the rest of the apartment haddropped below sixty degrees. I could hear the generator working to compensate, its mechanical heartbeat steady and sure. I could hear the wind outside pushing against the windows, testing the seams, looking for a way in. I could hear the propane heater doing its job and the cold doing its better job. The cold was winning.
I got out of bed.
I was wearing the thermal shirt and the three sweaters I had arrived in, because I had not packed for staying overnight, had not packed for any of this, had not planned to be the kind of woman who let a man buy her a generator and then kissed her and then left her in a bed alone in a frozen apartment while he sat on a couch that was too small for him. I had not planned for any of this. But I was here, and he was awake, and something in me — something that sounded like my grandmother’s voice, something that saiddon’t be afraid to want something— had decided that cold and careful was no longer acceptable. That if I was going to have him, I was going to have him all the way. That waiting was its own kind of lie.
I went to the doorway of the living room.
He was awake.
I could not see him clearly in the dark, but I could see the shape of him on the couch, and I could see that he was not asleep. He was sitting up. He was looking at the window. He was listening to the wind. His shoulders were tense. His hands were resting on his thighs like he had been holding himself at the edge of control. Like he had been waiting for something.
I said, quietly, “You’re going to freeze.”
He did not turn around.
