John and Ted's room at six-fifteen in the morning had the specific silence of places where two people are sleeping with the conviction of someone who has no intention of changing that situation in the immediate future, with John in his bed in the exact position in which he had fallen asleep and Ted in his with the pillow over his head as an additional shield against any outside disturbance.
Wyatt sat up on the cot with the same care with which he would have gotten up in any hotel, trying not to produce the metallic sound the cot made regardless of how careful one tried to be, and sat on the edge for a moment, letting his eyes finish adjusting to the dimness of the room.
It was six-sixteen according to the phone in his hand.
In Clemson at this hour, he would have already been in the gym for twenty minutes.
He stood up with the same care as before, changed into the workout clothes he had in his backpack—which was the only thing he had brought besides normal clothes for two days, because he hadn't anticipated the possibility of staying more than one night—and left the room, closing the door with the slowness of someone who has learned that the last centimeter is the most important one.
The second-floor hallway was completely silent, with the doors to all the rooms closed and the only light being what came through the small window at the end of the corridor, featuring the gray December Massachusetts sky that was already showing the kind of light that precedes dawn without actually being dawn yet.
Wyatt went down the stairs, avoiding the third step that had creaked the night before when they went up, and reached the ground floor, where the Bennett house slept with that specific stillness inhabited places have when their occupants are all sleeping. He left the keys Susan had given him the night before in case he needed to go out and opened the door with the same care with which he had closed the room door.
The Framingham cold greeted him immediately with an efficiency Wyatt had learned to respect since the day he arrived, which was considerably more serious than anything November in South Carolina could have produced.
He spent the first ten minutes warming up on the porch of the house with stretches he did from memory, while the neighborhood began to take on the gray texture of a December morning, with a few lights turning on in distant houses and the sound of a car starting somewhere beyond the houses.
When his muscles indicated they were ready, he took off running.
The neighborhood where the Bennetts lived was the kind of place where streets had tree names and houses had porches with flowerpots that were empty in December, and dogs barked from inside when they heard footsteps on the sidewalk with that territorial precision that made them useful as a time reference. Wyatt had already passed the same Labrador three times when he calculated that he had been running for approximately forty minutes.
Wyatt found his rhythm in the first five minutes and maintained it with the same consistency with which he maintained anything else worth maintaining, letting his legs do the work while his head did its own thing—which this morning was a mixture of things in no particular order.
He ran without music because in Katy his father had always said that running with headphones took away your opportunity to think, and Wyatt had adopted that principle without questioning it too much, in the same way he had adopted several of his father's habits over the years without anyone needing to explain them in words.
He thought about how things were progressing with Blaire, how in a way so gradual it was almost unnoticeable, they had reached a point neither of them had anticipated in the Bennett house closet two months ago.
He thought about what happened after today, because today was December 29th and he had to be back in Clemson by January 1st for practice in preparation for the Orange Bowl, which left exactly one day before his return.
He thought about the more immediate question of when was the appropriate time to ask someone if they wanted to have an official date when that someone had already kissed you twice and let you sleep on their twin cousins' cot, which on any reasonable evaluation scale meant something, even if neither of them had named it with that precision yet.
He reached no conclusion on the second topic, but by the time he turned back toward the Bennetts' street with the vapor of his breath visible in the cold air, he had made at least one decision regarding the third.
When he reached the front door of the house, the neighborhood had awakened enough for a few cars to be heard, along with a couple walking a dog on the opposite sidewalk, who looked at him with that expression early risers have when recognizing another early riser with silent respect before continuing on their way.
He entered the house using the keys he had left in his running pants pocket.
Back in the House
Breakfast inside the Bennett home had that look of holiday breakfasts where no one is in a specific hurry to be anywhere, and the table was in that intermediate state of occupancy, with Susan in the kitchen, Matty with his coffee in the armchair watching the news on low volume, and John sitting at the table with a bowl of cereal he was looking at with the expression of someone who hasn't quite finished waking up yet.
Ted was in the adjacent chair with his phone in hand and his cereal still untouched.
"Hasn't Wyatt gotten up yet?" Susan asked, poking her head out from the kitchen with a frying pan in hand.
John and Ted exchanged a look.
"When I got up, he wasn't there," John said.
"I didn't see him either," Ted confirmed, looking at the empty chair as if expecting to find some additional information there. "But the cot was empty."
"Empty?" Susan repeated.
"Completely," Ted said. "And his backpack wasn't there either."
"His backpack is there," John said. "I saw it in the room."
"So only he isn't there."
"Correct."
Susan frowned slightly with the expression of someone processing a situation they didn't expect to encounter at this hour of the morning, and opened her mouth to say something when the front door opened.
Wyatt walked in with his shirt completely soaked in sweat, his cheeks red from the cold outside, and his breathing still slightly elevated like someone who has just finished a physical effort. He looked toward the kitchen, where Susan was watching him from the doorway, frying pan still in hand.
"Good morning," Wyatt said.
"Good morning," Susan responded with an expression that mixed surprise with something close to approval. "Did you go out for a run?"
"Every day," Wyatt responded, closing the door behind him.
From the table, Ted looked up from his phone and stared at him for a full second. "It's seven-forty," he said.
"Yeah," Wyatt said.
"In the morning," Ted added.
"That's usually when seven-forty happens," Wyatt responded.
Ted looked at John with an expression that John answered with the same, no words needed.
"Are you going to have breakfast?" Susan asked.
"Yes, ma'am," Wyatt said. "If it's no trouble, I'll go upstairs for a quick shower first and be down in ten minutes."
"We'll be here," Susan responded, returning to the kitchen while Wyatt headed up the stairs with the same efficiency with which he did everything related to his training routine, which was the only area of his life where his movements were completely automatic.
He met the ten-minute mark with millimeter precision.
When he came down, his hair was completely wet because he clearly hadn't had the time or interest to dry it beyond a towel, and he sat in the chair Susan pointed to next to John.
Susan placed a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, and fruit in front of him, then went back to the kitchen and returned with another plate with more eggs, which she set next to the first one.
Wyatt looked at her.
"I figured you'd be hungry," Susan said simply.
"Thank you," Wyatt responded.
What followed over the next fifteen minutes was observable to anyone sitting at that table, and which John and Ted watched with the specific attention of people witnessing something they didn't expect to witness that morning, because Wyatt ate a quantity of food that neither of them had ever seen a person of that size consume in their everyday domestic life.
The first plate disappeared at a speed John internally cataloged as reasonable, but which Ted found impressive.
The second plate followed immediately.
Susan reappeared with additional toast, which Wyatt received without the slightest sign of discomfort and consumed with the same efficiency as everything before, while maintaining a perfectly normal conversation about Framingham's December temperature compared to Katy's, as if both things could happen simultaneously without any effort.
"How is that possible?" Ted whispered to John at a volume he considered inaudible to third parties.
"Metabolism," John responded at the same volume.
"It's more than metabolism."
"It's training," Wyatt said without looking up from his plate.
Both twins looked at him.
"I have good hearing," Wyatt said.
"How much do you eat a day in total?" Ted asked, completely abandoning the whisper in light of the evidence that it was useless.
"Depends on the season," Wyatt said. "During game season, close to four thousand calories."
"Four thousand?" Ted repeated.
"Four thousand," Wyatt confirmed.
Ted processed that for a moment, looking at his own cereal bowl, which was still sitting there half-finished. "I don't even reach fifteen hundred," he said.
"That's why you don't have that physique," John pointed out.
"We already established I could have it if I wanted to."
"Four thousand calories a day," John said, ignoring him and looking at Wyatt with genuine curiosity. "And all controlled? No junk food?"
"As little as possible during the season," Wyatt said. "On breaks, it's more flexible."
"And this counts as flexible?" Ted asked, pointing at the empty plates in front of Wyatt.
"This is breakfast," Wyatt responded with the naturalness of someone describing something completely normal.
Ted looked at John once more with an expression that this time contained something close to philosophical surrender before a reality that was simply beyond the reach of his everyday experience.
Matty, who had followed breakfast from his armchair without participating directly, looked at Wyatt for a moment with an expression Wyatt couldn't quite classify before going back to the news without saying anything, though something in Matty's silence this morning was different from the evaluative silence of the night before, and Wyatt registered it without overanalyzing it.
Blaire had come down at some point during breakfast in an oversized navy blue flannel covering her entire body, her hair still uncombed and tied in a bun that was more the result of having gotten up than of any aesthetic decision, with that naturalness of someone who has no intention of making extra effort to be in her own house. She had sat at the far end of the table with a cup of black coffee she held with both hands, looking at her phone with the concentration of someone using the screen as a way to ignore this entire situation.
Wyatt had seen her walk in from the other end of the table and had continued his breakfast without saying anything, because he had learned in the last 24 hours that Blaire was someone who needed her space and time to do things.
It wasn't an uncomfortable situation; it was simply a situation that required timing.
When the plates were empty and Susan was starting to clear the table, and Matty had gotten up to go somewhere in the house, and John and Ted were engaged in a conversation Wyatt had stopped following several minutes prior, Wyatt stood up with his cup of water and walked over to the end of the table where Blaire was still with her phone and her second cup of coffee already half-finished.
"Hey," he said in a voice low enough for the conversation to be just between the two of them.
Blaire looked up with that expression of someone who has registered approaching footsteps for several seconds, but has decided to wait before reacting.
"Do you have plans this afternoon?"
Blaire looked at him for a moment. "Why do you want to know?" she asked with the quiet caution Wyatt already recognized not as disinterest, but as her way of processing things before responding to them.
"Because we could go on a date," Wyatt said with the same naturalness with which he might suggest anything else. "An official one this time. No closets, just the two of us."
Blaire looked at him for another second with that expression of hers, which this morning had something different underneath that Wyatt couldn't fully name, but didn't need to name to understand what it likely meant, before lowering her gaze to her coffee and bringing it back up with something that wasn't quite a smile, but came close enough.
Author thought
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