jesse
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The leaves came down for two straight weeks, and we watched them.
Finn’s gym had mirrors on three walls, which he claimed was for form and I claimed was for Finn. He racked his warm-up weight and looked at me like he was about to present a thesis.
“Watch,” he said. “Then apologize.”
I watched. His stance was a disaster in progress, feet too wide, bar drifting off his shins, and none of it mattered, because he moved like it was as easy as breathing.
Between sets, I put my hands on his hips and turned them two degrees, and he grinned at me in the mirror like I’d done something else entirely.
His knee I fixed without telling him. I swapped the lunges out of his plan and slid step-ups in, and he did them; and if he noticed that his muscles were being used more effectively, he let me have it quietly. He counted his reps under his breath, and I stood behind him and kept a different count.
On the bench, I spotted him, fingers under the bar without touching it, his face upside down beneath mine.
“Hi,” he said, mid-set.
“Eyes on the bar.”
“You’re prettier than the bar.”
“Rack it, Romeo.”
He racked it while laughing, which was a safety violation, and I told him so. He said the gym had never been this fun before me. I put that one away too.
At the front desk on the way out, the kid with the lanyard looked between us. “You two together?” He had the partner rates up on his screen. That was all he meant.
“He’s my guest,” Finn said.
I paid the guest fee while Finn watched me with a sideways smile.
Whatever we were, it ran. You don’t open up a machine that’s running. Outside, the late October wind pulled at his curls the whole walk home, and I let it do the reaching for me.
The library still kept its lights golden over the bookcases, four rows down from where he’d found me in September. We took the far table, the one nobody wanted because the chair legs were uneven, and we worked. Actually worked. That was the trick nobody would have believed about us.
Then his pen stopped. I watched it hover over the corner of his page, tip down, not writing, long enough that I set my own pen on the table and got ready.
He tore the corner off, folded it, and slid it across. A stick figure with a dog’s head, mid-leap, and above it a stick squirrel, escaping.
I wrote acquitted under the squirrel and slid it back, and Finn read it and had to leave. He actually stood and walked out between the shelves with his shoulders going, silent as a church mouse, and came back two minutes later with his face under control and his eyes not.
He took the paper back and wrote under my word, pen moving with great ceremony. Objection.
Overruled, I wrote.
Corrupt judge.
Recuse yourself, I wrote, and this time, he pressed his lips flat and shook his head, A librarian drifted past the end of our row, and the two of us bent over our separate books like twelve-year-olds with one brain cell between us.
When we packed up, I took the corner of paper and put it in the inside pocket, the one that buttons. He watched me do it and said nothing, and the carpet took our steps all the way to the door.
We lived five minutes apart by foot and still burned an hour a night on the phone.
Settle a debate, he sent, near midnight. Bennet says Peanut doesn’t dream. I say he chases the squirrel all night.
He dreams, I sent back. Everything with a spine dreams.
Knew it. Spine gang.
What would he even do if he caught it?
Nothing, I wrote. It was never about the squirrel.
Deep. Put it on a mug.
The dots came up again. Then they went away. Then they came up and stayed up, a long time for Finn, who typed the way he ran, and I sat up against the headboard with the phone on my chest and got ready again.
Also, it said when it landed. You looked stupidly good today.
I breathed out. I typed a longer thing, watched it sit in the box, and traded it for Go to sleep, Finny.
Make me.
Five minutes away.
Promises promises.
The phone went dark in my hand, still warm.
Friday, Harrison got his rematch. The projector hummed and the sofas filled in the usual order, which now included me.
“Tonight,” Harrison announced, “we watch it properly. No commentary from the philosophy department.”
“I’ll be respectful,” I said.
“You said he had options.”
“He did have options.”
“He was on a boat, Jesse. A moving boat. Show me the options.”
“Movie’s starting,” Greg said, which was Greg for both of you shut up.
Peanut made his rounds and settled on Harrison’s feet, a dog with no idea he was lying on the night’s most wounded man.
Finn’s legs came across my lap sometime in the first act like they’d been assigned there. When the caramel corn ran low, Taylor shook the bowl, looked into it, and said, “Your boyfriend ate all the caramel ones.”
He said it to Finn. He meant me. The word crossed the living room. Finn didn’t correct him. I watched him not correct him in the projector light, and he just held the bowl out to Jason for a refill and kept his eyes on the movie.
I stared at the word where it lay. Easier to leave a thing where it landed.
On screen, Kong made his choices. Bennet fell asleep on Jason before the plane scene. It was, from start to finish, one of the great evenings of my life, and I would have signed anything to keep every part of it exactly where it was.
Peanut sighed like the credits were about his life.
Then Saturday came down to one room.
We’d trained in the morning, and Finn napped the way he napped after the gym, fully, professionally, face down on my bed in a shirt of mine, one arm hanging off the edge.
One of his shoes stood by the door, and the other lay on its side halfway to the bed, where the day had run out of him.
Malcolm was gone for the weekend, his side of the room frozen mid-escape, towel on the chair, drawers open.
The light through the window had gone the color of an aging orange.
I was at my desk with the reading I wasn’t reading. Kierkegaard, for what it mattered. I’d gone over the same paragraph enough times to recite it and couldn’t have explained a word. The highlighter had dried out with its cap off.
It was the kind of afternoon I would have once called wasted. Nothing moved in it but his breathing and the dust the light found. I hadn’t turned a page in an hour, and I couldn’t have said where the hour went, which, from me, was like seeing a unicorn.
The phone buzzed against the desk. Once, twice.
SUNSHINE. It is decided. The tour ends where it began.
One night only, December 19th, Neon Nights, the finale to finish all finales.
Mama Viv is holding the table by the piano, the one with two chairs, and you will be sitting in one of them.
Put the one who cries at the good parts in the other. I have spoken. xo
Then, before I could set it down:
Wear something devastating.
I read it twice. Then the room faded, and I was there instead.
December in the Burrow. The cold would have teeth in it by then, the kind of cold that improves a bar just by existing outside of one.
Finn’s ears would be red under a hat he’d refuse to admit he needed.
The two of us coming down the steps with the crowd, through the door that sticks at the bottom, into all that moody light.
I’d show him the taps. Which one pulls foamy, which one I poured from for a summer of Fridays.
Whoever was holding the bar down these days would look at Finn, then at me, and charge us for neither.
The show I could see plainest of all, because I’d stood through a hundred nights in that room with a rag over my shoulder.
The piano would start before the lights finished dimming.
The wood of the bar would give off its aged scent, with beer soaked so deep into the grain that the place would smell like a poured pint until the day it burned down.
Viv would find us inside ten minutes; she’d always found her people first, and she’d say something filthy about my coat and mean something kind by it.
She’d sing the old closer, the one she saved for nights that mattered, and I’d watch Finn instead of the stage for most of it, the way he leans into a thing he loves with his whole face.
He’d cry at the finale. She’d point him out to the whole room for it, and he’d take a bow from his chair.
And after, in the crush of coats by the door, he’d reach for my hand without checking whether I’d let him, because by then, he wouldn’t be checking anymore.
We’d walk out into whatever the sky was doing, and the cold would be a reason to stand closer, and there’d be a room somewhere with our two coats over one chair. Because by then…
By then.
I counted it out on the desk calendar Malcolm never used. Seven weeks and change.
Nothing I’d ever had with anyone had lived seven weeks.
Most of it hadn’t lived to a second morning.
Three years of practice, and the longest anything ran was a guy called Aldo, who lasted from a Thursday to the following Wednesday and left with my copy of the Meditations.
I never asked for it back. Asking would have meant a second conversation, and I’d already gotten what the whole arrangement was built to produce.
I had built an entire way of being around never finding out what the third week looked like.
And that way had worked, if working meant nobody ever got to watch anything rot.
The bar in my head closed the way bars close.
Lights up, chairs flipped onto the tables with their legs in the air. Viv’s table too. Both chairs.
I typed, We’ll be there.
I looked at it. The We sat in the box, two letters claiming two months.
I deleted it back to I’ll be there, and that was worse. That one had the ending folded up inside it already.
There was no third version. Two months was too long to promise and too long to refuse, and the box sat there blinking, waiting for me to pick one or the other.
I deleted the rest and set the phone face-down on the desk.
Finn slept on. The pillow had left its crease on his cheek.
My shirt had ridden up his back, and his breathing kept doing its slow work, and I caught myself at it again.
Taking things. The exact hang of that arm.
The crease. The corner of paper buttoned into my jacket across the room.
A grin in a gym mirror. A goodnight text turned to an hour of talking.
I’d been at it for weeks, pocketing him a piece at a time.
But I knew the procedure. You pack the room before the move.
The things you can’t stand to lose get wrapped first.
Nobody was moving. I made myself say it in my head. Nobody is moving.
Saying it didn’t help. It never had. I’d known men who quit smoking the day they understood cigarettes.
I understood plenty. The clearer I saw my own worst habit, the more room I found myself giving it, and I’d written essays about other people’s versions of this exact disease and gotten good grades on them.
So I saw it. I saw that I could wake him with her message and watch December land on his face.
He’d say yes before the phone left my hand.
He’d say yes with his eyes still closed, probably, and then he’d pull me down by the wrist and fall back asleep mid-sentence about coats, and it would be settled, the way everything settled with him, in about four seconds, without a single casualty.
That was the thing about him that I had no defense prepared for.
He treated the future like a place we were obviously going.
He said next week the way other people said, “In the kitchen.”
The invitation was a good thing. Good things had a record with me. My thumb, I noticed, had found the seam of my jeans pocket on its own and was moving along it.
I took my hand out of my pocket. I closed Kierkegaard. He’d keep.
The floor was cold from underneath, the way dorm floors are. I lifted the blanket, and Finn moved to the wall without waking, an entire negotiation conducted while fast asleep, and left me the warm part.
I fit myself in. The bed was built for one person, and we’d beaten it before.
It complained under the second person and then accepted the situation.
He backed into me until we agreed on a shape.
His hair was still damp at the neck, and the radiator ticked twice and went quiet, and somewhere down the hall, a door opened onto somebody else’s Saturday and closed again.
“Who was that?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“Nobody,” I said. “Viv says hi.”
“Mm.” He found my arm and pulled it over himself like a second blanket. “Hi back.”
He was gone again inside a minute. I lay still and held on. There was no pocket in a bed. My thumb found the seam of the pillowcase instead and worked the stitching, back and forth, back and forth, while the best thing I’d ever held slept straight through all of it.