jesse
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The lamp was still on. It had burned all night for nobody, and now it sat pale and pointless in the sunlight that came through the window in one wide slab and stopped just short of the bed. The day outside had that hard blue look, cold just from the color.
Finn slept on my chest with one arm hooked around me like I was luggage he wasn’t letting go of.
I knew this position. I’d woken up in enough beds that weren’t mine to have a system for it.
Find your shirt without moving the mattress.
Know where the door is before you need it.
Once, I’d navigated a beaded curtain and somebody’s sleeping Rottweiler without waking a soul, and I’d been proud of that.
It had seemed like a skill worth having.
There was no system for this. Finn had his ear over my heart like he was keeping tabs on it, and my arm had gone dead under him an hour ago, and he could keep the arm.
The strangest part, the part I kept turning over, was that I hadn’t done anything.
My whole life, I’d assumed that if this ever happened, it would be because I’d finally built the courage and crossed the room.
Instead, Finn had knocked on my door with his ears red and his mind made up.
He’d looked at the ghosting, at the whole sorry file, and wanted me anyway.
He’d claimed me the way he used to claim the front seat. First, and without apology.
I lay there and waited for the feeling to declare itself.
I assumed it would be complicated. Big feelings usually arrived with paperwork.
I went looking for the footnote, for the part where the chemicals in my brain were just doing their job on schedule, and the real life implications were getting ready to meddle.
There wasn’t one. I was happy. That was the whole diagnosis.
I kissed the top of his head. His curls smelled like his shampoo, something green and ordinary, and I breathed it in. There was more behind the feeling. A lot more. Ten years of backlog waiting for a window. I put the lid on the rest and kept just the one.
“Safe,” Finn mumbled into my chest.
“What?”
“He was safe.” His eyes weren’t open. “By a mile.”
He was arguing with me in his sleep, and he was winning, because I wasn’t going to fight a man who used my heartbeat for a pillow.
When he surfaced for real, it happened in stages. The arm tightened. The nose wrinkled. Then one eye, considering me from very close range.
“You stayed,” he said. His morning voice sounded husky.
“You were lying on me.”
“Mm. Strategy.”
We showered in shifts, which took discipline. He threw me a shirt from the clean pile, gray, with the fraternity’s letters across the chest.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“It’s that or last night’s, and last night’s smells like a cabaret.”
I put on the letters.
We went down together. I stepped over the fourth stair out of last night’s habit, and Finn caught it and grinned like I’d passed a citizenship test. The last time I’d come down these stairs, I’d been carrying my shoes.
They were all there. Jason at the stove with a pan of something brown and dutiful.
Bennet at the island behind a laptop and a brand-new clipboard.
Taylor eating standing up, with Harrison beside him, presiding over a second pan.
Greg by the door with a gym bag at his feet and a cup in his hand.
Peanut worked the floor under the stove like a man paid by the hour.
Jason saw us first. He raised the spatula like a gavel. “Gentlemen.”
“Don’t,” Finn said.
“I said gentlemen. That’s restraint.”
Taylor turned around and stopped chewing. “He’s wearing our letters.”
“It was this or the cabaret shirt,” I said.
“He’s wearing letters,” Taylor said to Harrison, as if Harrison lacked eyes.
Greg looked me over once. “Fits,” he said.
Finn poured two cups and handed me mine black. I hadn’t told him black. He’d watched me drink one coffee weeks ago, across one table, and remembered it. The mug was yellow with a handle that had been glued back on.
Bennet slid his clipboard an inch toward me. “I have questions. For the record.”
“No record,” Finn said.
“Purely for the data set. When you first re-encountered the subject…”
“The subject is drinking his coffee,” I said.
Jason lifted the clipboard out of Bennet’s hands without looking away from the pan. “Not at breakfast, baby.”
“This is how data dies,” Bennet said, mostly to himself.
“Is that the one Peanut ate?” Finn asked.
“The successor,” Bennet said darkly, and Peanut’s tail thumped once at his own name, unrepentant.
Harrison’s pan came around, and the border dispute opened on schedule.
His French toast had a custard stage and a resting stage and, apparently, a philosophy.
Jason’s pancakes had macros. Taylor defended the toast with the loyalty of a man sleeping with the chef.
“You shouldn’t get a vote. You practically moved out of here,” Jason accused. Greg took one of each and ate standing.
I sat at the island between Finn and the window, and somewhere in me, the usual litany had gone quiet.
The commentary I ran on every room. The country I was always halfway to moving to.
I listened for it the way you probe a sore tooth.
Nothing. The cynic had eaten and gone back to bed.
I was a guy at a counter with a full cup, and my knee was warm where Finn’s knee kept finding it.
Harrison pointed his fork at me. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About Kong.”
The table groaned.
“It’s nine in the morning,” Taylor said.
“He knows what he did,” Harrison said.
“All I said was that he had options,” I said.
“He had options.” Harrison set the fork down, wounded all over again, and Finn laughed into his cup, and under the island, his foot hooked around my ankle and stayed.
Halfway through breakfast, Peanut detonated. The squirrel made its morning run along the yard, and Peanut hit the window with both paws, announcing his one enemy to the household. Nobody flinched.
“Every morning,” Finn said, getting up for the kettle.
Taylor saluted the glass. “Godspeed, you sturdy thing.”
That was when I saw the corkboard.
It stood by the sofas, turned face-out, nothing discreet left about it.
Finn’s photo sat in the middle, letter-sized, from some outdoor gathering, mid-blink, mouth open, caught trying to say something.
Red string ran out from it to the headshots, and every headshot wore an X.
The strings that had gone somewhere now went nowhere, a map of dead ends, and the only line still alive ran from Finn’s face to an index card. JESSE, in Sharpie.
The coffee went flat in my mouth. For one long second, it looked like the end of something.
A case being closed. All those faces crossed out to arrive at a name, and the name was mine, pinned up in a living room by people who had been keeping tabs.
I’d spent years making sure I never ended up on anyone’s board.
Then Finn, without breaking off whatever he was saying to Taylor, reached across me with the carafe and topped up my cup. He didn’t ask. He didn’t look. His other elbow rested on my shoulder for the pour, the way you lean on furniture you trust.
They left in installments. Greg first, bag over his shoulder. At the door, he stopped and looked at me for one second longer than Greg looked at anything. “Good,” he said, and then was gone.
Then Taylor and Harrison, Harrison walking backward long enough to say, “This isn’t over,” meaning Kong.
Then Jason and Bennet, with Bennet still talking as the door swung. “I’ll leave the questionnaire in the…”
The door told him where to leave it.
The house got bigger with every departure. By the last one, I could hear the seconds ticking on the old kitchen clock.
We did the dishes because they were there.
Finn washed, I dried, Peanut supervised from the floor with his chin on his paws, and the sun had made it all the way to the counter now, lighting up the soap bubbles on Finn’s wrists.
He was telling me something about Bennet’s questionnaire, about a column Bennet had for deal-breakers, and he kept having to stop because laughing and rinsing used the same part of his brain.
I had been treating it like weather. For ten years, I’d run on the theory that a feeling ignored long enough files itself away, and I’d had ten years of evidence against the theory, and I’d kept the theory anyway.
I was still in love with him. Not again. Still. The twelve-year-old had never let go of the rope. He’d just stopped looking at it.
The words were right there. Three of them, small yet enormous.
But I knew what I was like. I read until dawn.
I made whole courses my entire personality.
If I opened my mouth now, it wouldn’t come out the size of a sentence.
It would come out the size of ten years, and it would land on him like a piano, and I’d spend the rest of the morning watching him decide what to do with a piano.
So I kept it. I dried the yellow mug and put it where the yellow mug apparently went, and I smiled at the window, at the morning dew doing its patient work on the other side of the glass.
“What’s funny?” Finn asked, catching it.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” But my smile never went away.
Peanut sighed from the floor like he’d heard that one before.