The Internet Told Him to Leave Me, but He's Still Holding Me novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Snow Day

Knox looked at me across the counter for a long moment.

"Front row," he said. "Aisle."

"Close enough that he can see us."

"He'll see us." He picked up his phone and opened the group chat with Inga and Gran, the one I didn't know existed until that week. "But we tell the family first. Rule six."

"Rule six is about us."

"Gran says she's us now."

The apprentice yelled from the back, "I'm us too!"

So that was the plan.

Then, for eleven days, I didn't think about Chad Brixton at all.

I couldn't. The moose was due December 1st.

I had two spreads left, and no ending.

I worked at the drafting table from seven in the morning until my eyes crossed.

At night I drew the true story in a separate sketchbook, in bed, with my feet on Knox's legs.

He read his lighthouse book and didn't look at it unless I held it up.

Every morning, I kissed the moose on his arm.

Every afternoon, a sandwich showed up at my elbow, and now he stayed to watch me eat it, with his chin on my shoulder.

On Sunday, November 30th, the sky fell on Minneapolis.

It started at dawn and didn't stop.

By noon the radio said fourteen inches and the mayor said stay home.

Gran called at one, like every Sunday, on video, to cancel dinner.

"I'm not driving in this, I'm not an idiot," she said. "Are you two touching?"

"Gran," Knox said.

"I'm asking as your grandmother."

I put my head on his shoulder in the frame.

She looked very satisfied and hung up.

I painted until three.

Then I put down my brush and looked out the front window.

Northeast had disappeared.

The cars were white humps. Nobody was on the street. The streetlight had come on early and the snow fell through it in fat slow pieces.

"Come outside," I said.

"You have a deadline tomorrow."

"I have a deadline tomorrow. Come outside."

We climbed out the kitchen window onto the fire escape in our coats.

His tomato pots were buried to the rims.

He brushed the snow off one of them.

"They're dead, Knox."

"They're resting."

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