Page 107 of Caden & Theo
There’s no triumph in his voice. There’s only the assertion of a skill he’s had since we were boys playing one-on-one in his driveway. He could read my body like a book; I could trust him to tell me the truth when it lied. The fact that this is still true shouldn’t matter so much, shouldn’t squeeze my throat tight after everything that’s happened. But it does anyway.
He looks down at his pocket and taps it lightly with two fingers. “Thank you for this,” he says. “I’m trying not to cry over two inches of plastic, but I’m not making any promises if you keep being… you.”
“Don’t,” I say, trying to make my tone light, “slander the hot dog vendor. He held a program together single-handedly. But I’ll also be needing it back.”
Theo’s laugh comes out half choked and wholly beautiful. He wipes at his eyes with the heel of his hand and takes a step back after passing me the LEGO man, as if he needs to put a breath of space between us to stay upright. I let him. I don’t want him to feel cornered by his own heart.
“I watched you leave after the alumni game,” I say. “I wanted to follow. The guys stopped me, and I let them because it felt easier than pushing through. And then it was too late. I hated myself for that.”
“I didn’t leave to hurt you,” he says quickly. “I left because I felt like my skin didn’t fit. I was angry at Soren and at myself, and honestly, I didn’t trust my mouth not to make everything worse. You have a game face when you play. I had to put on my teacher face and keep my shit together.”
“That tracks,” I say, and it pulls another laugh from him—a small one that unspools my shoulders.
A pair of alumni come outside with their phones lit up like fireflies, talking loudly about who won “Most Changed.” We step a few paces deeper into the shadow beyond the outside lights. I can still see him clearly enough: the line of his jaw, the clean cut of his hair, the suspenders that should be ridiculous and instead make me ache with a complicated kind of tenderness.
“You look good,” I tell him, and I say it like a fact. “The suspenders are criminal.”
He glances down at them, then up again with a sheepish tilt of his mouth. “They’re dorky. I love them. I promised myself I wouldn’t shove parts of me back into the dark when I came home, no matter who didn’t get it.”
“I get it,” I say. “I always did.”
His eyes soften. “You did.”
We let the quiet expand again, and it’s not empty, but full of the kinds of things people only understand when they’ve lived long enough to know what they almost lost. I hear a faint run of synth and drum machine from inside the gym, a beat that would have made us laugh in high school and is somehow perfect now.
Theo rocks once on his heels and then looks at me like he’s decided to risk something.
“Tell me about the leg,” he says. His voice is steady. “Not the medical chart. Your chart.”
I breathe out. “It’s carbon and silicone that fits me well enough that I can take stairs without thinking. It grips better than most shoes, even if I have to choose function over style. Some days I barely notice it. Some days I feel a phantom itch in an ankle that’s not there, and I want to argue with my own body.” I pause. “But it’s solid. It carries me.”
Theo listens the way he always did when it mattered. He doesn’t rush to fill the silence. He doesn’t pull the spotlight onto his own guilt. He lets the last sentence sit between us until it finds a place to land.
“I read about sockets and liners and suspension systems,” he eventually says, and his blush is immediate and unhidden. “That sounds creepy when I say it out loud. I’m not a creep. I?—”
“You’re a man who wanted to understand,” I say. “I’m not surprised. If roles were reversed, I would’ve made a spreadsheet with footnotes, which I’d have asked you to help me with.”
“You would,” he says, and the fondness in his voice nearly undoes me.
I shift my weight and check the fit out of habit. The socket is still comfortable, but the residual limb is a little warm from the day. “After tonight, I’ll ice,” I say lightly. “I’d rather hurt a little than not have played.”
“I’m proud of you,” he says. He holds my gaze when he says it. “Not for playing, though that was beautiful. For all of it. Forbuilding a life that helps people. For being here. For letting yourself be seen.”
The words lodge in my chest with a kind of clean pain. I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear them from him. I don’t look away.
“I didn’t come to hide,” I say. “I came to see what was left.”
“What do you see?” he asks.
“You,” I say. “And a chance.”
Something passes over his face then—a mix of relief and fear and the smaller, wilder hope I recognize from another night beyond another set of doors, when he stood in someone else’s backyard at an after-party and looked at me like he didn’t know who would move first. Back then, I reached for him and kissed him because hoping hurt more than acting. I understand now that this is the same moment, just twenty years later, dressed in different clothes and lit by different lights.
He clears his throat. “What happens next?” The question is careful. It’s also honest.
“We don’t try to fix fifteen years on a gym lawn,” I say. “We don’t bleed out every memory until there’s nothing left to hold. We dance tonight if you can stand it. We talk after the weekend when the noise is down. You come to San Francisco.”
His breath comes out in a single shaken rush. “You want me to come?”
