Being home for three weeks was boring, but boring was just what my broken heart needed.
Thankfully, my mother didn’t dote on me as much as she had the summer before. Not only was I used to doing things for myself again, but she’d had more than three months in an empty nest.
I was careful to smile and tell my parents how well everything at Harkness was going. And I was careful not to brood. I even volunteered to make Christmas cookies with my mom, finally making use of all the handicap accessible changes my folks had made to their kitchen after my accident.
But when I was alone — lying in my new main floor bedroom, or staring out the passenger-side window of our car — my mind always went back to Hartley’s birthday. I would relive the sensuous slide of his lips against mine, and the stroke of his tongue. When he touched me, I’d felt it everywhere. How was it possible for him to kiss me like that, and not want to do it again?
Obviously, he’d felt nothing, and I tried hard to make sense of that. I forced myself to replay Stacia’s reappearance in my mind, remembering how avidly he’d kissed her. I even made myself calculate how many hours had elapsed between the moment he had gasped with pleasure in my bed and then stuck his tongue in her mouth.
It was fourteen hours. Give or take.
The word paralysis kept running through my mind. His heart was like my unfeeling toes. I felt Hartley’s touch all the way through, but he hadn’t felt mine at all.
For Christmas, my parents gave me a new laptop — a smaller, lighter model — and I had a good time setting it up. Of course, it came with a lecture from my mother.
“The therapist says you need more time in your braces. We thought this would be easier to carry around when you’re walking.”
“Thanks,” I sighed.
“While you’re home, I booked seven sessions at the River Center.”
“Mom! Don’t I even get a vacation?”
“Not from physical therapy,” she said. “But if you want, you can do all of them in the pool instead of the gym. To mix it up a bit.”
I put my proverbial foot down. “No! Just…no.”
“Corey, you’re being unreasonable.”
I didn’t want to argue with her. I just rolled out of the room.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t much easier talking to my father. He was in the midst of his hockey season, which I’d been following online. The girls were doing really well this year, but he did not want to talk about it with me. When I tried to make conversation, I received only monosyllabic responses.
“Dad,” I said one night when we were all watching TV in a semi-comfortable silence. “Have you ever played RealStix?”
“The video game? No,” he said, surprised. “Have you?”
“It’s a lot of fun, actually. My neighbor — the guy with the broken leg — he taught me.”
“Adam Hartley?” my mother asked. “I remember him. He’s quite a looker.”
“Marion!” my father said, laughing.
“I call ‘em as I see ‘em,” my mother said, which made me laugh. And then I noticed something important. For the first time since my accident, my mother didn’t look tense.
“Anyway, we’re friends,” I said. “And we play a lot of hockey on the screen. Since neither one of us can play the real thing.”
There. I’d said it out loud.
My father picked up the remote and shut the TV off. There was silence as he turned to study me. “And that’s fun for you?”
I nodded.
He hesitated, deciding. “Well, where can we get one?”
We bought RealStix at Best Buy that very night. That was one clue that things were still weird at my house. My very thrifty parents had been spending money like water since my accident. They renovated the house, they bought me every device and distraction I pointed to. So even though Christmas had just come and gone, my father handed over his credit card for a video game console.
Coach Callahan quickly became a RealStix fan, too. And when my brother Damien came home for a long weekend over New Years, he played as well.
But I could easily beat them both. After all, I’d learned from the master.
Hell and damn it. I was thinking about Hartley again. That had to stop.
— Hartley
I woke up on New Years Eve lying naked in what felt like a cloud. In reality, it was a big guest bedroom in the east wing of Stacia’s mansion. I was alone, because whenever I stayed in Greenwich they put me in a room by myself. Her parents weren’t idiots — they probably knew that we had sex. But they wanted plausible deniability.