Feeling: emergent
Listening to: --
Reading/Watching: Brothers

1 a.m. at a friend's housewarming. The guys are playing pool, and the girls are in a separate room, drinking chocolate wine and talking about the guys.

When my phone rings, I see a Hometown number and smile. "Hi, sweetie!"

"Hey." A long, weird pause. "My grandma's dead. It looks like she killed herself."

Ten minutes later, I leave an apologetic message on a friend's phone, canceling plans for Tuesday. Fifteen minutes later, I call Matisse and beg her to come over and feed my dogs for the next few days. Thirty minutes later, I drive home.

Eight hours later, I throw some bags in my car and get on the highway to Hometown. I'm nervous, considering how I've never visited Will before without being invited. He's intensely private, fiercely independent, didn't even want to stay on the phone to let me comfort him last night. But the shaking in his voice had me driving 200 miles, unbidden.

When I arrive, Will looks at me and says "You weren't supposed to do that." He makes sideways jokes to his roommates about how he just can't keep me from visiting. I'm feeling more and more uncertain, increasingly stupid.

In a quiet moment, he looks me at me and says, "So you decided to come and be with me in my time of grief, is that it?"

The nonchalant tone of his voice (and the complete lack of a decent hug or kiss when I came in the door) is the last straw. I go into the kitchen to get a drink, deciding that I'll just get my bags and go stay at my parents' house. This was a bad idea. He doesn't want me here. He doesn't want me to see him sad, or he doesn't want to appear weak, or he doesn't...

He follows me into the privacy of the kitchen, and yanks me into his arms, clutching me tightly and running his hands up and down my back. He buries his face in my hair and breathes a deep, satisfied breath, exhaling slowly. It takes several long moments before he lets me go.

Stepping back, he gives me a thinly-bright smile. "Hi."

We spend the next three hours sitting pretzel-style on the couch, either hip to hip or in a tangle of snuggling legs and arms, even as we're talking and joking with his roommates and watching someone play video games. At one point he pretty much hauls me bodily into his lap. He never, ever stops holding my hand in some form or fashion. We fall asleep with his nose still buried in my hair.

When we wake up, he whispers "I'm glad you're here."

I may never meet a more confusing man. But I'm glad I'm here, too.

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