CHAPTER TEN
935 Words
I find him at the kitchen table on Sunday morning, which is strange in itself, because Damien doesn’t do mornings at the kitchen table. Damien does mornings standing at the counter, coffee in hand, already halfway out the door before the sun has fully committed to rising.
Today he’s sitting down. Sleeves rolled up. Papers spread across the table in front of him, though he isn’t looking at them.
“You’re still here,” I say, hovering in the doorway.
“Astute observation.”
“No meetings today?”
“Sunday,” he says, like that explains everything, though I’ve seen him take calls on Sundays before, seen him disappear into his study for hours even on the one day the rest of the house seems to slow down. “Even I’m allowed one.”
I pour myself coffee, the way I do every morning now, and without really deciding to, I pour a second cup and set it down across from him instead of leaving it at his usual spot by the counter.
He looks at the cup. Then at me.
“Sit,” he says. Not really a question, but not quite the flat command it would have been a month ago either.
I sit.
We don’t talk for a while. He goes back to whatever he’s pretending to read, and I open my laptop, the blog post I still haven’t published sitting there, half finished, waiting. The quiet stretches out between us, easy in a way I don’t examine too closely, the kind of silence that doesn’t ask anything of either of us.
“What are you working on,” he asks eventually, not looking up.
“Nothing.”
“You said that last time too.”
“Because it’s still nothing.” I close the laptop halfway, an old habit, protecting something before it’s ready to be seen. “Just something for the blog. I haven’t posted anything in weeks.”
“Why not.”
“I don’t know. I used to write every day. Now I sit down and nothing comes.”
He sets his pen down, actually looking at me now, which he doesn’t do often this early. “What used to make it come.”
I think about it, surprised he’s asking, more surprised that I want to answer.
“Honesty, I think,” I say. “I used to write about small true things. A conversation I overheard. A feeling I couldn’t explain any other way. It only worked when I wasn’t trying to make it sound like something.”
“And now.”
“Now everything in my life feels like something I’m not allowed to write about honestly.” I shrug, aiming for casual and missing by a wide margin. “Hard to write true stories when you’re living a fake one.”
Something shifts in his face, quick, there and gone.
“Is that what this is,” he says quietly. “Fake.”
I don’t answer right away. I don’t entirely know the answer anymore, and some small, careful part of me isn’t ready to find out what happens if I say that out loud.
“I don’t know what this is,” I say instead, which is at least true.
He nods slowly, like that’s an acceptable answer, or maybe the only one he expected. He goes back to his papers, and I go back to my laptop, and the quiet settles over us again, different now, a little heavier, a little more honest than before.
A few minutes later, without looking up, he says, “Write about this, then.”
“About what.”
“This. Sunday morning. Coffee you didn’t have to make me but made anyway.” He still isn’t looking at me, his pen moving across a page like the sentence cost him nothing at all. “It’s true. Small. It might be the honest thing you’re looking for.”
I stare at him a long moment.
“You want to be in my blog.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You basically said that.”
“I said write something true.” A small, reluctant edge of a smile pulls at his mouth, gone almost before I catch it. “What you do with that is your business.”
I laugh, actually laugh, surprised by the sound of it in a kitchen that has mostly only heard arguments so far. He glances up at that, something curious in his expression, like the sound caught him off guard too.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.” He looks back down at his papers, but the corner of his mouth stays soft a moment longer than it usually does. “I don’t hear that very often. That’s all.”
“My laugh?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I say, opening the laptop fully now, something loosening in my chest that I don’t have a name for yet. “Get used to it. I’m apparently writing a blog post about you now.”
“I said write about the coffee.”
“Same thing at this point.”
He doesn’t argue. He just goes quiet again, and this time when I glance up a few minutes later, he’s watching me type instead of reading his own papers at all, quick and careful about looking away the second I catch him.
I don’t say anything.
I just keep writing, and for the first time in weeks, the words don’t stop.
- Writer
