"Seven across. It’s a Tuesday. They’re easy on Tuesdays. Seven across."
"Soucy."
"I’ve had this one since the morning of Game 1. I kept not reading it to you."
"Why are you reading it to me now."
This is the part where I’m supposed to look at him and I can’t. So I look at the paper, because the paper has a grid and the grid has rules. My pulse is in my throat. The last time I felt this exact thing I was asking him to call me Jules, and it cost more than going to bed with him had cost. I learned that day that the most expensive words I own are the short ones. These aren’t short.
"Because I’m going to lose you if I don’t, and I’d rather read you a crossword in a car than lose you. Those are the two options I’ve left. So. Seven across."
"Put the paper down."
"No. I need it in my hands. Let me keep it in my hands." The crease in the paper is under my thumb. I press it flat and it doesn’t stay flat and I press it again. The pressing is the only reason the words come out in order, because the brain will give me the words if the hands have a job. "I meant the thing I said. About not needing you to fix me. That part was true. I don’t need you to fix me. I’ve never needed anyone to fix me."
"I know. You made that very clear."
"I said it like the not-needing was the whole sentence. It isn’t. I let you walk out of that room believing it was the whole sentence, and that’s the thing I did wrong. That’s the one I can’t stop counting."
"Soucy, we have a game."
"I don’t need you. Let me finish. Please." The hands flatten the crease. The crease comes back. "I don’t need you. I want you. Those are not the same thing. I made you believe they were the same thing, and you of all people cannot afford to believe they’re the same thing, and I did it anyway."
"You don’t get to do this to me right now."
"I want you. Je te veux. I don’t need you to fix one single thing and I want you anyway. That is the whole sentence. That's the part I left off in the room. I’m giving you the part I left off."
He’s looking through the windshield at the parking structure. His jaw is working. His hands are at ten and two like he’s still driving a car that’s in park.
"You’re asking me to sit here and be wanted and do nothing with it," he says. "You know that’s the one thing I’ve never once known how to do."
"I know. That’s why I picked it. I could have brought you fish food. I could have fixed something of yours so we’d be even and you’d have a job again. I didn’t. I brought you a crossword I can’t finish and a sentence I can’t take back, and I’m asking you to do nothing with either one. Just take them."
"That’s not fair."
"It’s not. It’s just true. I picked the true one, not the kind one. I’m out of kind ones."
"You picked the worst possible morning for this."
"I picked the only morning I’d left. If we lose tonight there’s no tomorrow morning. So it’s this one. It had to be this one." I fold the paper back along its soft creases and set it on the console between us, seven across still empty. He can reach it or not. "You don’t have to do anything. I’m not asking you to do anything. I did the thing. That’s all I came to do. You can answer whenever. You can answer never. I just couldn’t go play that game with it still folded in my bag."
He looks at the paper on the console for a long time. Then he picks it up and his eyes go down it once. The corner of his mouth does the thing it does when the answer is already there and he’s going to make you wait for it anyway.
"Seven across is ‘anchor,’" he says.
"I know it’s anchor."
"You read it to me upside down and you still gave me the answer."
"I always give you the answer. You take forty-five seconds to get there anyway."
"There was one I couldn’t read you. In Boston. Twelve down."
"Lagoon."
"And fourteen across. Steady." I flatten the crease. "I’d them both. I just couldn’t say them to you."
He does not say anything else. He puts the car in gear. But he sets the paper on the dash instead of handing it back, face up, where we can both see it the whole drive in. That is not an answer. It is not nothing. I let it be the not-nothing it is.