It’s too early to go home, and I’m too fried to do anything else. Matt drives us through the dusk to the back of the Target parking lot. Yesterday’s snow has already melted, except for a few salty brown humps left on the grassy median where the plows deposited their loads. We sit and stare at them, beneath the anemic glow of a pole light.
My hands are shaking. Breathing in and out requires all my focus.
Matt’s eyes are closed, his head leaning against the headrest, hands resting loosely in his lap.
“You wanna talk?” he says softly, at the very moment my gaze shifts from the plow pile to his face. Did he sense me turn to look at him?
“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about it.”
“Nah,” he says. “That’s club rules. Not you-and-me rules.”
A sharp stab of emotion arcs through me. Sudden stabby sensations hit me all the time lately, TBH, but this is different. This awakens something. It’s a ray of sunshine, not a slice of lightning. You-and-me rules. “Oh?”
Matt smiles, eyes still closed. “We make our own rules.”
Then there’s silence because being invited to speak doesn’t actually make me able to. The roar of the highway in the near distance punctuates the stillness.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out.
“About what? I don’t see anything you need to apologize for.”
My hands shake. I’m sorry that I can’t talk. Sorry that you’re stuck here with me. That I dragged you to church. That I’m such a mess all the time. That I’m not brave enough to take your hand. That I’m not a better person.
“I very much want to play laser tag with you,” I confess. My voice is low but I put the last of my waning energy into it, hoping he might glean that “laser tag” means a hundred different things in this sentence.
“We will,” he says, cracking a lid to peer over at me. “We’ll do all the things. Don’t even worry about it.”