Chapter 7 Wes
THEN
The penthouse smells like garlic. This time it's his.
Berger is at the stove with his sleeves pushed to his elbows, working a pan of shrimp with more confidence than three weeks of watching me cook should have given him.
He found the recipe on his phone twenty minutes ago.
He didn't ask if he could use the kitchen.
He just started, opening cabinets he's memorized, reaching for the olive oil on the shelf where I keep it, pushing the burner knob left first because he knows it sticks.
"Your heat is too low," I say from the counter.
"My heat is fine."
"Your heat is a six."
"My heat is an eight and the shrimp will prove it." He tilts the pan and adjusts the flame a quarter-turn without looking at the knob.
"You adjusted."
"I refined. Refinement is not the same as correction."
"It is when the garlic was about to burn."
"The garlic was nowhere near burning. The garlic was at the edge of caramelization, which is exactly where it should be." He glances at me over his shoulder. "You taught me that."
I did teach him that. Last week, standing behind him at this stove, reaching past his shoulder to move the pan off the hot spot. My hand on the handle next to his. I have been teaching him things in this kitchen and every lesson puts us closer together and I have not stopped giving them.
"Another minute," I say.
"Thirty seconds." He pulls the pan off the heat. The shrimp are curled and pink and the garlic is golden. He plates two servings, reaches into the drawer where I keep the good forks, and carries both to the table.
We eat. He gives the shrimp a seven-six. I give it a seven-eight.
"Seven-eight is generous," he says.
"The garlic was right."
"You said the garlic was about to burn."
"It was about to burn. Then it didn't. The recovery is worth two-tenths."
"You are a very difficult man to cook for. Micromanaging me in the kitchen."
"You're the one who started cooking without asking."
"I didn't need to ask. I live here." He says it fast, part of the rhythm, and then catches it half a second later. He doesn't take it back, just moves past it the way he moves past everything, with forward motion. "If I had a bigger pan, the sear would have been consistent."
"You're blaming my equipment."
"I'm identifying a variable. There's a difference."
The T-shirt he's wearing is mine. He pulled it from the laundry this morning without saying anything about it.
The cotton sits loose on his shoulders where it would be tight on mine.
He is sitting at my table in my clothes arguing about pan sizes, and I have been saying the same sentence to myself every morning since his door started opening before my alarm.
He is twenty-two and he plays on my team.
The sentence used to land heavy, but not as much this week.
He opens the spreadsheet on his phone and types the entry. "Seven-six, seven-eight, averaged seven-seven. Notes?"
"Berger cooked. First attempt. Garlic controversial."
"Garlic was not controversial. Garlic was perfect." He types without looking up. The grin is there, quick and certain, the one he runs when the bit is working and he knows his audience is with him. "I'm putting 'garlic: excellent' in the notes."
He sets his phone down and finishes his plate. "Have you been to the place on Brickell yet? The one with the croquetas."
"Not yet."
"We should go Friday. I heard the black bean ones are serious."
"Where did you hear that?"
"Paulson's wife told me after practice."
"Paulson's wife has better taste than Paulson."
"That is a very low bar. Friday?"
"Friday."
He picks up both plates and carries them to the sink before I can stand up.
I follow him to the kitchen. He runs the water and hands me a plate and I dry it, and we are standing at the sink together the way we have been standing in this kitchen since he moved in, close enough that his elbow brushes mine when he turns from the faucet.
He hands me the second plate. I dry it and set it in the rack.
"I had a good practice today," he says, still facing the sink. "My release has been off since Seattle but today it was back."
"Your release has been fine."
"My release has been a seven. Today it was an eight-two."
"You're still rating your own release point."
"Everything gets rated. You agreed to this system."
"I agreed to rate restaurants. I did not agree to rate your hockey mechanics."
"The system has expanded. You missed the memo." He shuts off the water and dries his hands on the towel hanging from the oven handle and looks at me, and the look holds for a beat longer. Then he turns toward the living room. "Balcony?"
"Yeah."
We take our glasses out. Water for me. He poured himself the end of a bottle of white wine that we opened last week. The railing is warm from the day, the water below is dark and flat.
He leans on the railing with both forearms. I lean next to him. There is a foot of space between us. The same foot that has been between us for three weeks on the couch, at the table, at the sink where his elbow just brushed mine. The foot has not closed. It has not widened.
"You should bring your camera out here in the morning," he says. "The light was good today."
"I saw it. I was up at six but the clouds were wrong."
"How can clouds be wrong?"
"Flat overcast. No texture. The water looks dead when the sky doesn't have shape."
"You need clouds with ambition." He takes a sip of wine. "I don't understand photography. I don't understand how you look at the same water every morning and find new things in it."
"That's because you rate everything on the first look. You'd give the ocean a seven-three and move on."
"The ocean is at least an eight. The ocean has range." He pauses. "But you're right. I would move on."
For a while we don't talk. The waves are low tonight, barely audible underneath the hum of the building. I can hear him breathing. I can hear the wine shifting in his glass when he adjusts his grip on the stem.
"Can I ask you something?" he says.
"Yeah."
"Do you ever think about leaving here?"
I look at the water. "No."
"Not even to go home?"
"Minneapolis isn't home anymore. It's where I'm from. Home is wherever I've set up the coffee maker."
He considers this. His thumb runs along the railing. "I don't know what Bern is to me right now. It's not where I'm from the way it used to be. I was there for twenty years and then Seattle for one and now I'm here. I think the place I'm most from is wherever I was last."
"That's not a bad way to be."
"It's not a way to be at all. It's a way to keep moving so you don't notice you don't have anywhere to stop." He says it without the broadcast running. Just his voice, lower than usual, saying words he hasn't rehearsed.
"You have a place to stop," I say.
"I have a guest room."
"You have a guest room in a place where someone makes you coffee in the morning."
"That's not the same."
"It's close."
He turns his head. I am already looking at him.
The foot of space is still there. His gray-blue eyes are dark in the low light and the expression on his face is not the one the locker room gets.
It is not the kid who walked in on the first day and sold his confidence to a room of strangers before his bag was unpacked.
This is the version underneath, the one I have been catching in pieces for weeks, in the kitchen at midnight, in the beat before he looks away, in the voice he uses when he stops running.
"Wes," he says.
"Yeah?"
"I haven't called my realtor."
"I know."
"I don't think I'm going to."
"I know," I say. "Roommates, then?"
"Roommates," he says. He turns it over once, like checking whether the label holds weight. Then the corner of his mouth moves. "Roommates who share a spreadsheet."
"Roommates who share a spreadsheet and argue about garlic."
"Roommates."
He hasn't looked away. I haven't looked away.
The foot of space between us on the railing has been the same for weeks, and then he shifts his weight toward me, a degree, barely a lean, and I don't move back.
His face is closer now. His mouth is closer.
I can see the place where his lower lip is dry from the wine and the night air, and the balcony is high enough that no one can see us and that thought arrives out of old habit and passes through without stopping.
I lean in. An inch at most. Close enough that his breath is warm on my mouth and my breath is on his. His eyes drop to my mouth and come back up and his lips part and I can feel the heat of him.
We stay there. The ocean is underneath us and neither of us is listening to it.
My hand is on the railing and my knuckles are white on it.
Everything in me is in the last inches between his mouth and mine.
My breathing is slower than it should be, controlled the way I control things, the way I have always controlled things, except the control is shaky and he can probably see that.
He pulls back first. Half an inch. Then an inch. Then enough that the air between us is just air again and not the charged margin it was three seconds ago. He looks at me and his face is flushed and his eyes are wide and steady but neither of us says a word.
He picks up his wine glass. Takes a sip. His hand is not steady. He turns back to the railing and puts both forearms on it and looks at the water, and I stand next to him and do the same, and the foot of space between us is back except it doesn’t feel the same.
"Buenas noches, Berger," I say, after a while.
"Buenas noches," he says. His accent is still wrong.
I walk inside and leave the balcony door open behind me.
I stand in my bedroom with the light off.
The camera is on the nightstand. The novel is still open to page 212, the receipt from La Marea marking a paragraph I haven't moved past in a week.
Through the wall I hear him come inside.
The balcony door slides closed. His footsteps go down the hallway. His door shuts.
The apartment settles into the silence it settles into every night, except tonight I am standing in the dark with my hand against my mouth, and the heat that is there is not mine.
In the morning, I’ll make two coffees and bring them to the table.
He’ll come out of the guest room in my shirt, and we won’t bring up what happened on the railing.
We'll sit, argue about bread scores, add a row to the spreadsheet, and the foot of space will be different, and neither of us is going to say why.
?