“Drink and tell me if you need it warm,” he commands. I obey, the peppermint soothing even though the tea is now cold.
“Sometimes it’ll come from nowhere,” he says as if justifying my outburst but then he adds, “Are you familiar with the ‘ball in a box’ analogy?”
I shake my head, never having heard of it. He explains, “The ball is large, filling the box when grief first appears. There’s a small button on one side of the box but the ball is so big it constantly bumps against it, triggering the emotional response. As time goes on, the ball shrinks in size, moving and colliding into the walls and occasionally, the button. There’s no stopping it and no matter how small the ball gets, there’s always a chance it will hit the button. There’s no preventing it.”
“I think my ball might be very big,” is all I can comment.
Zander nods and says, “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
A long moment passes of comfortable silence before Zander seems to take note of our proximity.
“You’re tired—”
Before he’s even said it, I know he’s going to tell me I need to go to bed. So I cut him off and say, “I don’t want to sleep.”
A moment passes,with the click of the heater coming on ensuring we’re both aware of just how silent it is between us. For the second time tonight, I feel insecure wondering what his response will be. Whether he’ll respect my desire to stay up or not. Or if he’ll push me to go to bed. “Please don’t make me,” I plead with him in a whisper. It’s a foolish request.
“I won’t ever make you do anything you don’t want to. Unless it’s for your own good.”
I raise a brow in question, unable to help myself from saying, “And sleeping in bed?”
Staring at me, he takes a moment longer before ignoring my question altogether and asking me, “I just remembered another time Cade got in trouble and blamed it on me. Do you want to hear it?”
There’s a pull at the corners of my lips and I nod before lying back down where I was, pulling the gray fleece up and setting the pillow back down. I’m more than aware of how inappropriate it is, and how little I care.
And this is how I drift off to sleep. Listening to stories told in the soothing cadence of a man I consider confessing all my stories to.