Page 9 of Thin Ice

"This week then," I said.

He studied me for two full seconds. Whatever he was checking for, my face declined to provide it, and I watched him file the composure in the wrong drawer. The one marked compliance. His shoulders settled a quarter inch.

I looked at my mother once, near the end. She was rearranging the last bite she wasn't going to eat. She felt the look.

"Your father knows best, Alexander," she said. The words had the smoothness of a stone kept in a pocket for thirty years.

Dinner carried on with little visible drama, but it was all there swimming underneath us. I couldn't wait to get back upstairs and text Liam and feel like myself again. Wearing the mask was getting tiring, especially after I'd spent so much time working on being my true self.

I finished my last bite and folded my napkin. "I'm tired from the drive," I said.

"I'm sure you are, honey," my mom said after taking a sip of her wine.

"Goodnight, Alex," my father said.

I pushed out my chair and left the table; relief hit me the moment I was out of their sight and on my way up the stairs.

***

I went upstairs and closed the bedroom door and stood there for a second in the quiet. Then I started taking off everything that reminded me of the person I didn't want to be anymore.

The button-up first. I hung it on the hanger and put it back in the closet. Then the slacks. Folded them over the chair the way I'd been taught. Belt coiled on the desk. The whole uniform, piece by piece, until I was standing in my boxers. I pulled on sweatpants. Then I reached under the pillow and grabbed the Liam's Riverside hoodie. It was soft in a way that expensive things never get, because expensive things get replaced before they have the chance.

I pulled it over my head, and the smell hit me. Laundry detergent that wasn't mine, deodorant that wasn't mine, and underneath both… Liam. The smell of the person I'd been pressed against in a twin bed for weeks.

This was the part of the day that was mine. Not the foyer, not the dining room, not the study with its shut door. This was where I got to stop being Alexander and just be Alex.

The window faced south, over the water.

I'd stood at it two summers ago, on the night my father had assigned me to the marina, and I'd looked out at the dark lake and thought about a boy whose last name I didn't know yet. The moonlight on the water. One light near the marina. The heat low in my stomach and the fear right behind it.

Is he thinking about it too?

Almost two years. Now the lake was frozen white to the far shore, the marina dark for the season, and the south side lay along the ice like a thin string of lights. Small houses, low and warm.

The phone buzzed in my hand.

Liam

Status report. Did you survive dinner?

Alex

Survived. Light psychological warfare. He wants to go through everything this week.

Liam

Okay. You going to be okay?

Alex

I'm in your hoodie and sweatpants looking out the window at your side of the lake. I feel like myself.

Liam

<3

Liam