Chapter 31 Aware
JAKE POV
He said her name.
He has been lying on his back in the dark for forty-three minutes, thinking about that. Not the hand, though the hand is also a problem, the hand is its own separate thing, he is not ready to examine, but the name. The way it came out. The way his mouth just opened and produced it without any instruction from the rest of him.
Penny.
Like it was urgent. Like something was leaving that needed to be acknowledged before it got too far.
She didn't turn around.
He doesn't blame her.
He stares at the ceiling of his own room, which he has been staring at for two years and has never once stared back with anything useful. The familiar rectangles where the posters used to be. The crack near the window he keeps meaning to mention to someone. The ceiling of a person who has everything planned out and is currently lying awake at two in the morning because a girl didn't turn around.
He has a plan.
He has had a plan since he was fifteen and realized that football was the way out, not out of Westbrook or out of his life, but out of the suffocating smallness of being one bad grade or one bad game away from everything collapsing. The plan is simple: scholarship, college program, keep Lily stable, keep the house running, keep moving forward. The plan does not have a section for this. There is no column in the plan for girl down the hall or hand in the dark or the way she says I know, like it's the whole truth and nothing else.
He tells himself that in the morning, everything goes back to normal.
He tells himself this until he almost believes it.
He does not sleep for another hour.
Practice is physical, the way he needs it to be.
Coach runs them hard, conditioning first, then routes, then a full red zone drill that goes wrong twice before it goes right. Jake throws until his shoulder aches pleasantly and his brain has no room for anything except the next read, the next release, the next decision. This is the other thing about football nobody talks about. It is the only place where the thinking stops. Where everything reduces to what is in front of you right now, the field, the play, the moment.
He stays twenty minutes after everyone leaves.
Just throwing. Just the motion. Just the clean, simple physics of it.
Marcus sits on the bench and watches him. Doesn't say anything for the first fifteen minutes, which is genuinely unprecedented.
"You good?" Marcus says finally.
"Yeah."
"You've thrown that same route six times."
"I'm working on my release point."
Marcus is quiet for a moment. Jake can feel him deciding whether to push.
"The post is still up," Marcus says.
Jake's hand tightens on the ball.
"I know."
"Sixty-one comments last time I checked."
"I know, Marcus."
"She tagged the scholarship."
"I know." He throws again. Perfect spiral. Hits the cone at twenty-two yards dead center. "I'm handling it."
"How."
Jake doesn't answer.
He picks up another ball.
He comes home at noon.
He has been preparing himself the whole drive. He has constructed a version of this morning where everything is manageable, where last night was just a storm and a conversation, and nothing that cannot be quietly folded and placed back into its correct compartment. He is good at that. He has been doing that for two years. He is excellent at it.
He opens the door.
Penny is at the counter making lunch.
She looks up when he walks in. "Hi."
"Hi," he says.
Normal. Completely normal. She turns back to the counter. He puts his bag down. The kitchen smells like toast and something with eggs.
Then Lily explodes in from the back door with mud on both knees and something that might be grass in her hair, holding a stick she has apparently decided is important.
"JAKE. I found a worm."
"Great."
"His name is Gerald Two."
"Gerald is your stegosaurus."
"Gerald Two is different. He's a worm." She holds the stick closer to his face. "Say hi."
"Hi, Gerald Two."
Lily looks satisfied. She turns to Penny. "Can Gerald Two live in the kitchen?"
"No," Penny says.
"Can he live in the bathroom?"
"Also no."
"The garage?"
Penny considers. "The garden is better. He'll be happier."
Lily weighs this with great seriousness and then takes Gerald Two back outside, the door banging behind her. Jake stands in the kitchen. Penny puts a plate of eggs on the counter and slides it two inches toward his side without looking at him.
He sits down.
He eats.
She makes her own plate and stands at the counter and looks at her phone, and everything is completely, perfectly, maddeningly normal.
Except.
He is aware of where she is.
When she moves to the sink, he knows it without looking. When she steps around the counter, he adjusts without thinking. When she reaches past him for the salt, he does not flinch because some part of him already knew she was going to do that. He has been aware of her position in every room of this house for weeks. He knows this now, admits it to himself, the way you admit things that have always been true and that you have just been calling something else.
He has been calling it proximity. Coincidence. Just living in the same house.
He is done calling it that.
Lily comes back inside without the stick, which means Gerald Two has been rehomed successfully to the garden, and she climbs onto her chair and reaches for the toast and says conversationally: "Penny, Jake was up late."
Jake looks at Lily.
Lily looks at her toast.
"I heard him," she says. "In the hallway." She takes a bite. "I heard both of you talking."
Penny, to her significant credit, does not react. She picks up her glass. She drinks. She sets it down.
"We were just talking," Jake says. "Go wash the mud off your knees."
"After toast."
"Now."
Lily sighs the sigh of someone profoundly misunderstood by the world and slides off her chair and goes to the bathroom, trailing a small amount of garden.
Jake looks at the counter.
Penny looks at the counter.
He says, quietly, "About last night."
"It's fine," she says.
"Penny "
"Jake." She finally looks at him. Her face is neutral and careful and completely assembled. "It's fine. It was a long night. We were tired." A pause. "It's fine."
He looks at her.
She holds the neutral expression with both hands.
He says, "I looked up the scholarship committee account this morning. The one Brianna tagged."
Something shifts in her face. Barely. "And?"
"And the post is still up. And the committee reviews external reports as part of their annual renewal process." He keeps his voice even. "Penny, the renewal is in three weeks."
She goes very still.
"If they see that post."
"I know what happens if they see it," she says quietly.
He watches her absorb it. The specific way she processes bad news is going inward, going still, going somewhere behind her eyes where she does the math alone.
"I'm not letting her take it," he says.
Penny looks at him for a long moment.
"It's not your scholarship," she says.
"No," he says. "But it's your life."
She opens her mouth.
His phone rings on the counter between them.
Unknown number.
He answers it without thinking.
"Jake Mercer?" A woman's voice. Professional. Clipped. "This is Sandra Osei from the Westbrook Academic Scholarship Committee. We've received a report we need to discuss with both you and Miss Penelope Cruz. Can you both come in on Monday morning?"
Jake looks at Penny.
Penny has gone completely white.
"Yes," Jake says. "We'll be there."