Page 44 of Lovely War
“Sasha’s my mom’s dog, not mine. She has horrible separation anxiety when she’s alone. She howls and chews on her paw until it bleeds.” He pauses, waiting for me to catch up. “My mom works nights, and my sister is usually home, but gymnastics sometimes runs late on Mondays. She loves that dog. I don’t want her to worry while she’s at her workouts.”
“That’s very—” A layer of black ice materializes under my feet, and my treads find nothing to grip. My leg slides out from underneath me and my body jerks forward. I reach out, and one hand hits the cold, rough sidewalk, but Ben catches me around the waist before the rest of my body crashes into the ground and hoists me back to my feet.
“—on-brand for you,” I finish. “Thanks.”
He doesn’t let go right away. “You okay?” he asks first. The words brush my temple, his face close to mine. My balance isn’t coming back to me yet, so I sway toward him.
“I’m fine,” I say faintly. “Oh. I’m bleeding.”
The hand I used to break my fall is wet and stinging. I squint at it in the dark.
“Let me see.” He cradles my hand in his and uses hisphone to get a better look. It’s not that bad. The source of the blood is an inch-long shallow scrape, but most of the wetness is melted ice from where I touched the ground. He traces a path alongside the scrape with his thumb and I shiver.
Human contact. It’s been a while. First his hands on me when we fought over his phone, and now this. My body has completely forgotten how to keep its cool.
“Will I live?” I joke in a scratchy voice.
“We should clean it,” he says.
“Do you have a Band-Aid?”
He’s still holding my hand. “A Band-Aid?” he repeats. “Do I seem like someone who carries around a first aid kit?”
“Kind of!” I say. “It’s not a weird question. I asked for a Band-Aid, not a condom.”
“Acondom?” He drops my hand.
“I need Taylor,” I continue, sighing. “She’d have both.”
“Dare I ask what the condom is for?”
“Well, Callahan, when two people love each other very much…”
“You can’t be nice to me for five minutes after I stop you from falling on your face?”
“I can’t hear you,” I say, pretending to sway unsteadily. “Everything’s fuzzy. I think I’m bleeding out. You’ll have to go on without me.”
“Okay,” he says. “Bye.”
I walked right into that one.
He’s right aboutthe sidewalks being clearer on the main road. Thanks to the weather, the bars are dead. Mostof them have closed early, stools stacked upside down on the bar tops, barely visible as shadowy outlines in the dim lighting.
“You said your mom works nights, right?” I ask. “What does she do?”
“She’s a nurse,” Ben says. “She went back and got her degree a few years ago.”
“That’s great,” I say. There’s no mention of a dad. There never has been, has there? He’s not in any of the photos in Ben’s office, and I can’t remember ever seeing him at a game with the rest of his family.
“Before that she was all over the place, jobwise,” Ben adds. “Mainly waiting tables.”
Oof. Ben and his sister were raised on restaurant tips, likely by a single mom, and last week I asked him to jeopardize the one stable job he’s had in his whole life like it was nothing. After months of trying to make sure he gets laid off instead of me. While his sister’s gymnastics scholarship hangs in the balance. The reminder of my misconceptions plucks some internal guitar string inside me, and embarrassment reverberates throughout my body.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something else,” he says in a tentative voice. We’re between streetlights, so his face is all shadows. “I spoke to Phil Coleman.”
I wince. “Let’s not do this.” We’ve been doing so well. Cooperating, being friendly. It’s all I need from him to get through the rest of this year until our fates are decided. I don’t need to convert Ben. He can go on believing what he wants about Coach Maynard; it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to talk about it, not if it’s going to ruin this. It’s better if we don’t.
“No, I need to. Phil told me Coach used to tell him that the longer he sat out, the more likely it was that someone else would take his spot in the lineup. That athletes need to push themselves and sometimes that means playing through pain. That he was letting everyone else down by focusing on himself instead of the team. He thinks he pressured the doctor to clear him early.”
