Page 30 of Knocked Up

"He said the bell thing? He always says the bell thing."

"How long have you been listening to him talk about you like that?"

He actually thought about it, which was worse than deflecting, because I watched him go and count.

"Nine," he said. "I was nine the first time I remember it being about the position and not about me being a kid. He wasn't wrong tonight. The glove is at my hip. Everything he said was true."

"That is not what makes it all right."

"I didn't say it made it all right."

"You said it like it did."

"I said it because it's the thing I know how to say," he said, and it came out with something behind it. Then I watched him shut it down. Something in me went absolutely to war.

"Eight days ago, you sat on that bench and told me why you didn't ask me to stay."

"Yes."

"I've been running my entire life on the other version. For ten years I've had one sentence, and the sentence is he chose the ice. Men like that always do. I built everything on it. I got through school on it. I ran this building on it. When my mother was dying and I was twenty-two with a twelve-year-old in the back seat of my car, I used that sentence like a floor. It was the whole floor, Beckett."

He didn't move.

"And you took it out from under me in about ninety seconds. You were honest. It was the truth, and it was worse. Because what I have now is a twenty-one-year-old kid at Walt's kitchen table getting handed a prophecy by the one man he'd been trained to believe."

"Tessa."

"And I cannot be angry at you. I've gone looking for it in the shower and in the car and at two in the morning with a light on. It is not there. I need you to understand that is not a gift, because anger was the last structural thing I had."

The oxygen concentrator kicked on in the next room and kicked off again.

"I've been driving here," he said.

"I know."

"Six weeks in this city. Games, off days, the night we flew back from Dallas at two in the morning. I've made a hundred reasons. The dog's back end. The soup. A strike plate." He looked at the floor. "There's no reason. I want to be where you are."

"Beckett."

"You told me it was professional and I said understood. I meant it. I've been failing at it since about four hours after I said it."

"I set that rule."

"I know. I've thought about it every day."

I stood there with a stethoscope around my neck at midnight.

"Say something else," I said.

"Like what?"

"Anything. Talk about the dog. Talk about the weather. If you stop talking right now, I'm going to do something."

And then he did the thing that man always did, which was nothing. He stood absolutely still in the middle of my exam room. He did not look away and let me stand there in it.

"That's not fair," I said.

"No."