Page 198 of Across His Line

After breakfast, his mom decides we’re watching a movie.

She doesn’t ask. She just announces it, and his dad says he has calls to make, and she says, “It’s Christmas Eve, nobody is taking your calls.” He looks at her over his glasses for a long second and doesn’t argue.

The front room has a couch long enough for six people and a fire going that somebody lit while I was eating. The tree takes up the whole corner by the window, ten feet of it, with the potato hockey player right in the front at my eye level where I hung it. His mom puts on something old, black and white, with a man running through the streets of a small town in the snow, yelling Merry Christmas at a bank. She sits at one end with her feet tucked under her and a blanket over her knees. His father sits next to her with his arm along the back of the couch behind her, not quite around her. Then, about twenty minutes in, around her.

Rafe sits at the other end. I sit next to him. There’s a cushion’s width of leather between us, and his parents three feet away.

And I watch them do nothing. We’re all sitting in front of a fire, watching an old movie on Christmas Eve. His mom mouths along to some of the lines. His dad falls asleep for ten minutes with his head back and his mouth open, and she lets him. Rafe gets up halfway through and comes back with a bowl of popcorn and puts it on the cushion between us without saying anything and eats most of it.

Nobody fights. Nobody leaves. Nobody’s staring at their phone. No one’s crying, or yelling, or asking somebody for something. Nobody’s high. Nobody needs me to be quiet, or useful, or fine. Nobody’s going to be gone tomorrow.

Maybe I’m not so bad after all.

It’s the most boring two hours I’ve ever spent, and I sit through every minute of it with my knees pulled up, very still, so I don’t miss any of it.

When the man on the screen runs home through the snow to his family, and everybody in the movie’s standing around a Christmas tree singing, his mother sniffles at the other end of the couch.

His dad says, without opening his eyes, “Every year,” and she hits him with the blanket.

My phone keeps buzzing in my pocket.

After the movie, I take it out. Merry Christmas Eve from Elsie, with nine emojis. Merry Christmas Eve from Payton, with one.

Grandma: Merry Christmas Eve sweetheart. Thinking of you. Love you so much.

I look at that one for a long time. I send a heart back. I don’t send anything else.

Kylie: Merry Christmas Eve!!! How’s prison with Waleska?

I look up.

Rafe’s across the room at the window with his back to me, picking popcorn kernels out of the bowl and looking out at the snow on the lawn. The light from the tree is on the side of his face.

I type back.

Me: Good. Merry Christmas Eve.

Three dots come up from Kylie.

Kylie: Good???

I put my phone face down on my knee.

At three, I’m in the reading room with the pricing book, in the green chair, with my feet on the footstool where his mother’s feet have worn the dent. I’ve read the same paragraph about anchoring four times. I don’t know what it says.

My phone buzzes.

Rafe: Come upstairs.

I look at it.

And then, immediately, before I can even feel anything about it, the phone buzzes again.

Rafe: If you want.

I put my hand over my mouth.

I’m sitting in his mother’s reading room on Christmas Eve with my feet in her dent, giggling into my hand so hard I have to put the book down. Because I can see it. I can see him, sitting on his bed across the house, typing Come upstairs and sending it and then looking at it and hearing it, and typing the second one so fast his thumbs probably slipped.