Chapter Six
Shay
I was fine.
I was magnificently, comprehensively, structurally fine.
I had woken up in the hotel room with the city light still coming through the curtains and Felix's bed already empty , because of course it was, because Felix operated on a system and the system did not include lying in a hotel bed processing the previous twelve hours , and I had looked at the ceiling and I had assessed the situation and I had concluded: fine.
I was at breakfast. I was at the airport. I was on the plane. I was in a car. I was in my apartment, door closed, shoes still on, sitting on my couch with my keys still in my hand and my bag still by the door.
I was fine.
My phone said 4:47 PM.
I sent Charlie a voice message at 4:53.
It was ten minutes. I knew it was ten minutes because I could feel myself going , the thing I did when I was performing fine for everyone, including myself, and there was no one left to perform for and the quiet of the apartment had a specific quality that asked questions I hadn't prepared answers to.
I talked. I talked about the bar and the walk and the hotel room and the amber strip of light and his hands , both of them, Charlie, both hands, fisted in my shirt , and the half,second of stillness before he kissed me back and what it felt like and the two words and the thing he hadn't said that I was absolutely, definitely not mapping for meaning.
I talked about the morning. The breakfast table.
The way he'd set my coffee down across from his and sat with his phone and looked at me with a completely normal glance and said nothing and I'd said nothing and we'd both been so perfectly, killingly normal that Hartley had raised an eyebrow at me and I'd pointed at a pastry until he looked away.
I talked for ten minutes.
Then I sent a second message.
"Okay forget I said that."
My phone rang.
I looked at it. Charlie Drayton, the contact said, with the photo I'd taken of him at Mivo's birthday last season , the one where he was mid,laugh, mouth open, completely unsuspecting. I kept it because he hated it. This felt relevant right now.
I picked up.
"How do you kiss someone like that," I said, without preamble, without hello, without any of the scaffolding of a normal conversation because Charlie and I had not needed scaffolding in years, "and then say we can't?"
A pause. Short. The kind that meant Charlie was not surprised but was choosing his words.
"Felix said we can't," he said, "or Felix said I don't want to?"
I stopped.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. I was aware of my keys, still in my hand. I set them down on the cushion beside me.
"...we can't," I said.
Charlie was quiet for a moment. Then:
"Okay. That's different."
I put my elbow on my knee and pressed my fingers to my forehead. "Is it? Because from where I'm sitting,"
"Shay."
"He still said,"
"Shay." His voice was even. Not soft exactly, just , steady, the way Charlie was steady now, the way he'd learned to be. "I know what he said. I'm telling you we can't and I don't want to are not the same sentence."
"They lead to the same result, Charlie. I'm alone in my apartment with my shoes on."
"I know." A beat. "Take your shoes off."
"That's not,"
"Humor me."
I took my shoes off. I didn't know why that helped. It did, slightly.
"We can't is about something outside him," Charlie said. "Fear. Logistics. The team, management, the thing your dad," He stopped. Started again, more carefully. "It's about the situation. Not about you."
I was quiet.
"I don't want to," Charlie continued, "is about you."
"He didn't say I don't want to."
"No," Charlie said. "He didn't."
I lay back against the couch cushions and looked at my ceiling.
My ceiling had a water stain near the corner that I'd been ignoring for two months.
I was now very aware of it. Felix would have had it fixed the same week.
Felix would have known about it before it was a stain.
Felix had probably already identified a contractor.
"He kissed me back," I said. "I want to be clear. In case that didn't come through in the ten,minute voice message. He kissed me back."
"I got that part."
"Both hands."
"Shay."
"I'm just , for the record."
"I know." A pause. I could hear, distantly, something in the background at Charlie's end , a sound, a movement, the murmur of Henry somewhere in the house.
The easy noise of a place that had been built by two people for two people.
I had a water stain and a bag by the door. "Can I ask you something?"
"Theoretically," I said.
"Have you talked to him?"
"We were on a plane for three hours."
"That's not what I asked."
I looked at the water stain. "We did the thing. The thing where both of us are completely normal and nobody mentions anything and Kieran makes a joke about the game and I laugh at it and Felix says something useful about the coverage and we both," I stopped. "We're very good at the thing, Charlie."
"I know you are."
"It's our thing."
"It was your thing," Charlie said. Quiet. Specific. "It might need to become a different thing."
I didn't answer.
"He said we can't," Charlie said, again, like it was something he wanted me to sit with rather than argue with. "Not I don't. You know Felix. You know how he talks. You know the difference between what he says and what he means better than almost anyone."
I did know. I had been cataloguing the difference for four years.
The way he said fine when he meant I'm doing the math on this and I don't like the answer.
The way he said go to sleep, Shay at midnight when his lamp was still on and his phone was face,up and he was laughing at gas station sushi.
The way he said we can't with both hands fisted in my shirt.
"He meant I'm afraid," I said.
"Yeah," Charlie said. "I think so."
"That's not better."
"No. But it's workable." A pause. "Fear you can , there's something to work with there. I don't want to is a door. We can't is a wall with a reason on the other side of it."
I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye. "When did you get wise."
"I've always been wise. You just weren't listening."
"You were a disaster for thirty years."
"I was a disaster for thirty years and I was wise.
I contain multitudes." I heard him smile.
Heard, in the background, Henry say something , low, unhearable , and Charlie's voice soften in the way it did when Henry was in the room, without him meaning it to, without him even noticing anymore. "Henry says hi, by the way."
"Tell Henry I'm having a crisis."
A murmur. Then Charlie: "He says we know."
"That's , why does Henry know?"
"Henry knows things." A pause. "He also says: Felix ran for fifty,five minutes this morning. Thirty over scheduled."
I was quiet.
"He told you that?"
"Henry notices things. He noticed it and he told me and I'm telling you because , Shay. That's not nothing. A man who runs thirty extra minutes is not a man who put it down."
I looked at my ceiling. The water stain.
The corner. The flat, opinionless sky outside the window.
The bag still by the door, unzipped, spilling slightly, the sock that had escaped onto the floor and was probably Felix's because Felix over,packed socks on road trips, which I knew because I knew everything about Felix Wren that I had zero business knowing.
That was Felix's sock.
On my floor.
"Charlie," I said.
"Yeah."
"What do I do."
Not a question, quite. More the sound of a man who had arrived at the thing he'd been circling for the last hour and found it there, waiting.
Charlie was quiet for a moment. The real kind of quiet , thinking quiet, not careful quiet.
"Nothing yet," he said. "You give it a day. You let him land. You don't corner him and you don't disappear on him, you just," A pause. "Be Shay. You're very good at being Shay. Trust that."
"Being Shay is what got us here."
"Yeah," Charlie said. "It is. And Felix kissed you back."
The sock was definitely Felix's. It had that quality , a specific, practical grey, which was a very Felix color to have socks in. I was going to have to give it back. That was going to be a conversation.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." I sat up. Dragged a hand through my hair. "I'm fine."
Charlie's pause had a shape. I knew its shape.
"Sure," he said.
"I am."
"I know."
"Don't sure me, Drayton. You've been spending too much time with Henry. You've caught his,"
"'Say nothing and be devastating' thing, yeah, you've mentioned." I could hear him smiling now, easy and warm and the real thing, the smile that Henry had given back to him. "Call me tomorrow."
"What if I'm worse tomorrow."
"Then call me tonight." A beat. "Shay."
"Yeah."
"He ran thirty extra minutes."
I looked at Felix's sock on my floor.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
We hung up. The apartment was quiet. The bag was still by the door.
The sock was still on the floor. Outside, the city made its indifferent, ongoing noise, the same way it always did , unbothered, unhelpful, completely uninterested in the internal weather of one specific man on one specific couch who was in possession of one specific sock that was not his.
I was fine.
I was magnificently pretending to be fine, which was a different thing, and I knew the difference, and I was choosing, deliberately and with full awareness, to let the performance hold just a little longer.
Just until tomorrow.