Kyle woke up with the most impossible crick in his neck. At first, he wasn’t certain where he was. He knew he wasn’t in his own bed; whatever he was sleeping on was too short and uncomfortable to be a real bed at all, and anyway the blankets smelled wrong. He pulled them halfway up his face to double-check.
“Did I wake you?” a voice asked. Kyle opened one eye to find Adam staring down at him over the back of a brown leather couch.
Right. He was at Adam’s.
“It’s okay.” He tugged the blanket back down below his shoulders. “What time is it?”
“Quarter to seven.”
Kyle stretched, making his neck pop, and he winced.
“I probably should have warned you not to let me fall asleep,” he said. “Once I’m down, I’m down. I once slept through a police raid in the apartment upstairs at our place in Seattle. There was yelling and doors kicked in and five squad cars parked outside the building, and I slept through it all.”
Adam grinned. “Then how did you know it happened?”
“Olivia told me about it later.” Kyle closed his eyes to stretch again, but not before he saw Adam’s smile dim. This was why Kyle didn’t like to talk about her with other people; he hated that her name made everything awkward. He smothered a sigh as he changed the topic. “What are we going to do today?” He paused to do the math. “Only thirty-four hours left until I’m Daddy again.”
“Well I’m going to start with a run,” Adam said.
Kyle buried his face in the throw pillow he’d slept on and moaned. “At six forty-five on a Saturday?”
Adam’s mouth quirked up. “On school days I run at six.”
“You’re an animal,” Kyle said. “I thought the whole point of my no-kid weekend was I wouldn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn. Can I bribe you with cartoons so I can go back to bed?”
“Do you want to come?”
“Absolutely not.” Running was not Kyle’s preferred way of expending energy before breakfast. Granted, it had been a while since the opportunity had presented itself for the other thing. There had been no lock on their bedroom door in Seattle, and no amount of loud Saturday morning cartoons on a laptop had ever given him and Olivia the sense of security that they wouldn’t be disturbed. But it also didn’t mean he’d take running up as an alternative.
Adam crossed his arms. The tight-fitting sports T-shirt he wore stretched across his broad chest. Kyle’s fingers twitched as he imagined what all that muscle and smooth skin would feel like to touch. The gray morning light that was slowly filling the room made Adam’s dark beard stand out against his skin. Kyle sighed. No man should look that good this early in the morning.
“How long do you usually run for?” he asked.
“On the weekends, probably an hour.”
“Seriously, you’re doing nothing for my self-respect right now.”
Adam laughed, and Kyle savored the warm feeling of the intimacy of all this, as he lay there, wrapped in Adam’s blankets. It should have been weird to share this with someone he didn’t really know, but then he’d hardly known Olivia the first time he’d woken up at her place either.
“Go back to sleep. There are clean towels in the bathroom if you want to take a shower later.” Adam turned and left the apartment.
When he was alone, Kyle felt embarrassed at having crashed in Adam’s apartment. It hadn’t been his intention to spend the night. He hadn’t had a plan at all, just a stir-crazy need to get out of the house as soon as the taillights on his father’s car had disappeared up the street. Everything that had happened from the time he’d texted Adam had been on the fly, and making Adam tuck him in had not been part of any plan ever.
Not that he would have minded tucking Adam in. Kyle wondered if Adam was a pajamas sort of guy, or maybe he only wore boxers to sleep. Maybe he wore nothing at all.
He wandered into Adam’s small kitchen and opened cupboards. If he was going to impose on Adam’s hospitality, the least he could do was make breakfast. As he worked his way through the cupboards and then the fridge though, it became obvious that breakfast was easier said than done. The fridge held one carton of milk with an expiry date from before Kyle had moved back to Red Creek, four different kinds of salad dressing, two takeout containers that a preliminary sniff sent straight to the garbage, along with the milk, and some limp celery. The cupboards weren’t any better.
“This is the man who’s teaching my kid about healthy eating?” He sighed in disgust. If they were at home, Kyle would have had an entire pantry to pull from. Saturdays were usually pancakes, although lately Caroline had been asking for French toast instead.
An idea formed.
Kyle checked the clock. It wasn’t quite seven. Adam said he ran for an hour. It was only ten minutes to drive to the house. Kyle could get there and return with all his supplies in a half hour tops. He opened the sad refrigerator one last time, but the inventory hadn’t changed. They deserved a real breakfast. He found a pen and a notepad in the small table by Adam’s front door and left a short note.
The street was quiet as Kyle stepped outside. It was early by anyone’s standards. Kyle got into his van and turned on the radio as he pulled out onto the road. He hummed and bobbed a happy seated dance as he made his way across town to his dad’s house. He felt good, although he hoped he hadn’t made a complete fool of himself by passing out on Adam’s couch. Blueberry pancakes would fix that. They worked on Caroline. There was no reason to think Adam wouldn’t go for it too.
He rolled the van window down. A blast of cool morning air blew through the opening. Maybe he and Adam could get out of town today. He had work to do, but not so much that he couldn’t put it off until later that evening.
The radio crackled and then faded away.
“I liked that song!” Kyle reached down, stabbing at buttons, trying to get the signal back.
A flash of color caught his eye, and Kyle hadn’t looked up completely before his foot reflexively stomped down on the brake. With the window open, he heard the screech of his tires, as he tried to avoid the woman who was standing, frozen, in front of his van.
Her eyes widened as she saw him coming. She was getting closer by the second. He pressed back with his entire body and willed the van to stop. There was no way there was enough distance between them. He was going to hit this woman.
The van skidded to a stop with only inches to go. There was a burning smell, maybe the tires. He gripped the steering wheel as he stared out the windshield at the woman. Her eyes turned angry.
“I’m sorry.” He tried to say it, but the words got stuck somewhere on the back of his tongue and he was having trouble breathing. Her lips thinned, and she flipped him off before she continued across the street.
Kyle sat, frozen, hands in a death grip on his steering wheel.
He hadn’t seen her. A second longer and he wouldn’t have seen her until it was too late. The adrenaline pounding inside him crashed as he sat on the empty street. The unknown woman disappeared between two parked cars. His hands shook on the steering wheel as his whole body went hot and cold at the same time. He felt light-headed, as his throat closed over.
He had nearly hit her.
He might have killed her.
He hadn’t seen her coming.
He managed to get the van pulled over to the curb before the panic attack swallowed him. The sob escaped in two gasping hiccups. Kyle buried his head in his arms. His chest squeezed until the pain made him dizzy. He couldn’t get any air into his lungs. He gasped and tried to find a way to make his body expand to take in the breath he needed.
Olivia’s body on a cold morgue gurney played through his mind.
A fist grabbed ahold of his heart and crushed it. The pain radiated across his chest and down his arms. He coughed out another sob. His vision started to fuzz and blur around the edges.
His fingers were going numb. He still couldn’t breathe. The pain worked its way up his neck, clamped down on his throat, and made the hairs on his scalp burn.
“Fuck.” He leaned toward the steering wheel. He wanted to rest his forehead against it, but he misjudged the distance, and smacked his mouth against the edge instead. He bit his lip and tasted blood. The pain there was dull, but it pulled the pain from his chest, opening it up again. Air poured into his body and his vision blackened for a second, and then the interior of the van came into focus.
The gasping subsided slowly and Kyle squeezed his eyes shut. Tears leaked out as he concentrated on his breathing. In and out. In through his nose and out through his mouth.
He shifted until he could see himself in the rearview mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, his face mottled. He took a few more slow breaths. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Kyle’s last panic attack had been a little over two months ago in Seattle. Caroline had been sliding across the apartment floor in her sock feet when she’d slipped and hit her head on the dining room table. When his hand had come away bloody from the back of her head, he’d bundled her up and driven her to the hospital. Caroline had been quiet the entire time, and Kyle had stayed calm. Four hours and three stitches later, they’d been home again, with a prescription for painkillers if she needed them and instructions on how to check her for concussion symptoms overnight. No one at the hospital had seemed worried. They had said it was a minor childhood accident. Practically a rite of passage.
He’d tucked her into bed, with extra kisses and promises to come check on her soon. Then Kyle had let himself into his own room and gone to pieces, collapsing on the floor against the door. The crushing sensation in his chest was the worst it had ever been, and in that moment he had been so sure he was about to leave his daughter a total orphan less than six months after Olivia had died.
He’d called his dad the next morning, and three weeks later, his father had flown to Seattle to pack them and their belongings into the old van for the drive across the country back to Red Creek.
Gradually, Kyle’s eyes stopped tearing and his breathing evened out. There was a water bottle in the glove compartment. It had been there for a few days and was warm, but Kyle emptied it. His hand hardly shook as he set the bottle down on the passenger seat. He put the van back in gear and made his shaky way to his dad’s.
He stumbled into the front hall. Every movement seemed heavy and slow. As he crossed to the stairs, the picture on the wall caught his eye, the one of him and Caroline and Olivia. A friend had taken it the previous fall in a park in Seattle. Olivia had been dead three weeks later. Kyle sat on the steps, with his head in his hands. In all the turmoil that had followed after the accident, he’d forgotten he’d sent the picture to his dad, until months later when they’d arrived, after five nearly continuous days of driving. Caroline had seen it first as they had come through the door, the picture hanging in its place of pride by the bottom of the stairs.
“Mommy!” she’d said, and Kyle had been caught so off guard that he’d only been able to drop the bag he was carrying, before he’d excused himself to the bathroom in the back of the house to bury his face in his hands and sob. His dad had removed the picture by the time Kyle came back out, but Kyle had refused to keep it hidden and made him put it back on the wall.
“I’m so sorry,” he said now, maybe to Olivia, maybe his dad, maybe to the woman on the street.
The stairs creaked as Kyle pulled himself to standing. He glanced again at the picture and went upstairs to his bedroom. Panic attacks always left him exhausted, and this one was no exception, even though he’d been sound asleep less than an hour ago. Fortunately, with the house to himself he had the luxury of sleeping off the after-effects.
Kyle woke up numb but functional a few hours later. He checked his phone. There was a text message from Adam, asking where he was. There was also a missed call with a voice mail.
“Oh man.” He rubbed his eyes. Kyle had forgotten about Adam. It was pretty pathetic that in his own misery, Adam had fallen to the wayside.
He tried to write a quippy text about pancakes and needing extra time so he could grind the flour himself, but he didn’t feel very funny. He knew he should call Adam to apologize, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that either. Adam shouldn’t have to deal with Kyle’s mess of a life. He tapped out a few basic words and sent it off, then turned off his phone and went to his laptop. There was no sense on dwelling on his humiliation.
There were two new emails from Shannon. She had written the day before to say that Vegas would be too hot in the summer—which was what he had told her in the first place—and could he make arrangements for a girls’ weekend in Maine instead? Kyle dove into emails and work. When he checked the time again, it was after eight in the evening. He turned on his phone and went to the kitchen to reheat some leftovers. There was a voice mail from Caroline, but it was too late to call her back. No new messages from Adam. Kyle ignored the twinges of guilt and disappointment. He genuinely liked spending time with Adam, and today’s disappearing act was not the best way to make friends. The failure of it only left him feeling more alone.
He ate dinner in silence and then put on a movie, but he fell asleep halfway through it. When he woke again, the house was still empty and silent. He made his way upstairs, past the photo of the last time his family had been happy together, and went to bed alone.