I shelve it with the half of the read I haven't finished yet and let it go.
"Good game," he says.
"You always say it like a scout filing a report."
"I'm always filing a report on you. It's a documented condition." He sets the fork down. Comes around the counter. Fits himself against me, arms around, face in my neck, the whole weight of him handed over for one long breath, and I get both arms around all of it and hold on. Here, I think. This. Whatever this is, it's here.
Then he goes still in the wrong way. Steps back. Picks the fork up again like it called his name.
"You do that," I say, before I've decided to say it.
"Do what."
"Come all the way in, and then leave. Lately. You'll be right here, and then you're checking a buckle that's already buckled." I keep it easy, because I'm not asking him to defend it, I'm naming the read I've only got half of. "If there's a door you're standing in front of, you can open it whenever. Whatever's behind it. I'm not going anywhere while you figure out the handle."
"You're not going to push." It's almost a question.
"No."
"People push. They want the thing named so they know where they stand."
"I know where I stand. I'm in my kitchen at midnight making eggs you're not eating. I don't need it named to know that." That gets the smallest sound out of him, almost a laugh and almost not.
"It's nothing bad," he says, after. Which isn't a no and isn't an answer.
"Didn't say it was."
"It's just new. Having a thing I'd hate to do wrong." He pushes the eggs around the plate. "Most of what I've got, I already know how to keep from breaking, because I built it small enough that I could. This one isn't small. I don't have a system for a thing this size yet. Give me a minute with it."
"Take the whole minute. Take a year of minutes." And I mean it, and I hook a finger in the hem of my own shirt and pull him back in, and he comes this time, and stays, and I stand in my kitchen at midnight holding the one read I can't finish, deciding to trust that the door swings toward me, because I've built my entire life on being the man who waits where he's needed, and I've never once stopped to ask what's left of me if the waiting turns out to be the only part that was ever really mine.
?
Chapter 13: Soucy
At one in the morning with the good headphones on and the lamp off, my brain goes somewhere it can't get to any other way.
People assume the music is loud for the sake of loud. It isn't. The apartment is clean and spare on purpose, because clean and spare hand the brain a thousand small edges to run a thumb along. The corner of a frame. The gap under a blind. Silence isn't rest. Silence is a field of small wrong things waiting to be counted, and the counting never finishes, it only pauses to reload. But the right kind of noise, the kind that takes up the whole chest, leaves no room for the field. The input is too big. It swallows everything. For a few hours the brain that doesn't stop just does.
The first time it happened in front of a teammate, neither of us said a word about it for a week. Thompson. A warehouse in Inman. A touring set. Halfway through I opened my eyes and found him across the floor doing the exact thing I was doing, head tipped back, eyes shut, two of the largest men in the building taking up the least room either of us knew how to take.He found me at the water station after and refused to make it a moment. You good. Two words. I said yes. That was the whole conversation. Since then, we've had a system. The cover story. The late exits. The rule that it never touches the group chat. Now there's a set Friday, a producer I've driven to two other cities to stand in front of, doing a warehouse off Marietta. Thompson's had the address since the morning it dropped.
And for three days I've been holding my phone with Lundy's name on the screen and not sending the thing. That isn't like me. I decide and then I execute, that's the order. The deciding finished in a ballet studio, watching a man hand me the one room nobody else stands in and trust me not to laugh at it. So the decision is made. It's the bill that won't sit down.
The body was easier. Letting him have the body was letting him have sensation, a thing that happens and ends. This is the place I go to prove the brain can go quiet. If he's in that room when the noise lets go of me, he sees the actual size of it.
Gaspard arranges himself across the forearm I'm typing with, in formal protest, and I stop typing, which was his whole objective, and I sit in the dark with the bass still running in the headphones around my neck. A feral cat asleep on the arm that won't send the message.
Thompson finds me in the lot after the optional, which means he came to a skate he had no reason to attend, which means he already knows something's moving, because he reads me the way I read shooters.
"You're quiet quiet," he says, leaning on my door so I can't open it. "Not your regular quiet. You've got a thing in your teeth. Out with it."
"I'm taking Lundy Friday."
He goes still. Not long. A beat, two, the precise length of a man recalculating a board he thought he'd memorized. "Friday Friday. The Marietta thing."
"The Marietta thing."
"You've never brought anyone to the Marietta thing. You've never brought anyone to any thing. The thing is the one place on the planet you don't bring people."