"Say the thing I need to hear. You've always done that. Since we were kids."
"It's a gift."
"It's annoying."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
He laughed. The sound filled the truck cabin and I absorbed it the way you absorb a drug, through every available surface, into every available receptor. Ren Briggs's laugh in my truck on a Friday afternoon in Atlanta, and the wanting was so enormous and so old and so perfectly contained that it didn't even feellike pain anymore. It felt like weather. A permanent atmospheric condition that I had learned to live inside.
We got to my apartment. I showed him the guest room. He dropped his bags on the bed and looked around and noticed the lamp.
"Reading lamp," he said. "Nice."
"Yeah." My voice did not crack. My face did not change. "I figured you might need one."
"How'd you know I need a reading lamp?"
"Lucky guess."
He smiled at me. The smile. The one that was mine. And I stood in the doorway of the guest room and thought about the ten years that had led to this moment and the approximately one thousand ways this was going to go wrong.
"Hey, Jonah?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks. For all of this. I know it's a lot, having someone crash in your space."
"It's not a lot. It's nothing."
It was everything. He was everything. He had been everything since I was sixteen years old and he was standing on a dock and the lake was behind him and the world rearranged itself around his laugh.
But that was my business. Not his.
"Get settled," I said. "I'll order Thai."
"You remember my order?"
Of course I remembered his order. I remembered every order he had ever placed in every restaurant we had ever been to. I remembered the way he ate pad see ew, starting from the edges and working toward the center. I remembered that he didn't like bean sprouts but was too polite to pick them out in front of people, so he moved them to the side of his plate in a small, neat pile.
I remembered everything.
"Pad see ew, no bean sprouts," I said.
He blinked. "Yeah. That's exactly right."
"I pay attention."
"You really do."
I went to the kitchen and ordered the food and stood at the counter and pressed my palms flat against the granite and breathed.
He was here. In my apartment. In my guest room. Sleeping in a bed I had made for him, reading by a lamp I had bought for him, eating food I had ordered for him.
Ten years of wanting, and the wanting was now sleeping twenty feet from my bedroom.
This was either going to be the best thing that ever happened to me or the worst, and the distance between the two was exactly the width of a hallway and the depth of a decade.
Here we go.