Page 138

“You were asleep.”

“You could have woken me up.”

“You were asleep,” he said again, like that settled it. To him, it did.

He reached over and tucked a piece of her hair back behind her ear, the way he had at the edge of the bonfire in October, the very first time he’d ever touched her. His hand stayed there, warm against her jaw. His thumb moved once, slowly, across her cheekbone.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

She looked at him.

At his dark hair pushed flat on one side from the pillow. At the stubble, a day longer than usual. At the chestnut eyes that had been looking at her from across rooms since August, from across a coffee shop, across a hardware store, across a festival and a Thanksgiving table and a crowded square, and were looking at her now from six inches away in her own bed on Christmas morning like there was nothing else in the world worth looking at.

And the words came up in her.

She felt them rise the way you feel a sneeze coming, or tears, something your body has decided before you have. Three words. She had known them for a while. Since the lake, maybe. Since the cabinet door. They had been sitting in her chest, patient, waiting.

She opened her mouth.

And the old fear came up right behind them, fast and cold, the way it always did.

* * *

She had said those words once before.

Eight months into the two years. A Sunday night, on Ryan’s couch, with the TV going and his arm around her and a pizza box on the coffee table. She had been happy that night, or had thought she was. She had turned her face up to his and said it, just like that, simple and brave and completely unguarded.

And Ryan had looked down at her and smiled a little and said, “You’re sweet.”

And turned the volume up.

She had never said it again. Not once in the year and a half that came after. She had folded it up very small and put it away somewhere, and she had learned to want less, and she had gotten very good at it. And then one night across a restaurant table he had told her he just didn’t think he was in love with her, like he was telling her it might rain.

That was the last thing anyone had ever said to her about love.

She lay in her bed with those three words on her tongue and felt every muscle in her body remember that Sunday. The TV. The pizza box. You’re sweet.

She could wait. That was the easy thing. That was what the old Allison would do. Wait for him to say it first. Let him go first, so she would never, ever again be caught holding out something bigger than what was being offered back. So she would never have to lie there and listen to the volume go up.

She could want less.

She looked at him.

You are allowed to want this, Margaret had said, in a warm kitchen with an ironed tablecloth. You’re allowed to want things, Becca had said, on this porch, before she drove away. I know how to do not chosen, she had said herself, on a cold granite shelf with the lake gone still. I don’t know how to do this.

She was done wanting less.

“I love you,” she said.

* * *

It came out quiet. Clear. Unguarded. Exactly the way it had come out on that couch eight months into the worst two years of her life.

And then the silence.

It was probably one second. It felt like the whole winter.

And in that one second she felt herself start to do the old thing. Brace. Fill the space. Make it easy. Take it back before it could be handed back to her.