Epilogue
hours and years later…
We walked back into my apartment with the eclipse still in our eyes, that particular blue-shadow quality the world takes on after something extraordinary has moved through it and left everything technically the same but permanently altered.
Taylor’s hand was in mine, and I closed the door behind us, and the familiar smell of the apartment wrapped around me, coffee and old books and something faintly floral from the pothos that had grown three new leaves in the past two weeks without asking anyone’s permission.
I went to the corkboard.
I didn’t plan to, exactly. My feet found it the way feet find a place they’ve needed to go for a long time, and I reached into the drawer of the side table where I’d kept it, the Polaroid I’d taken of Taylor at the cottage.
He was lying on his stomach across the bed, ankles crossed, the fire behind him throwing all his angles into warm relief.
I’d looked at it many times when he wasn’t in the room.
I’d held it and put it back and told myself things that were not quite true.
I found a pin and pressed it into the center of the corkboard.
Taylor came up behind me. I felt him before I heard him, the warmth of him, the particular gravity of a person you love arriving into your orbit.
His arms came around my torso and crossed over my chest, and he pressed his face against the back of my neck, and I felt his breath, slow and deliberate and warm.
“To be loved by you, Harrison,” he whispered into my ear, “is like being loved by the eclipse itself.”
I covered his hands with mine and held them there.
For a while, neither of us spoke, and it was the best kind of silence, the kind that doesn’t need to be filled because it is already full.
Then, somehow, we were in bed, and the lights were off, and his skin was warm against mine, and his head rested in the curve of my shoulder in the way it always did, like the shape of me had been designed with exactly that in mind.
I lay in the dark with Taylor breathing against my chest and thought, with the staggering simplicity of a thing finally understood, that this was what the last several years had been moving toward.
Not deliberately, not in any planned sense, but with the particular logic of lives that find their own true north despite all the storms and misdirections.
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, it was morning, and light came in at the angle that meant we had slept well past when we’d intended, and Taylor was already awake and watching me with his chin propped on his hand, patient and quiet and entirely himself.
I looked at him and felt the beginning of every day stretch out ahead of us, new and generous and ours.
Everything was in its place at last.
He moved in at the end of the semester. The Bel House made a day of it, Greg carrying boxes with his usual wordless mood, Finn making a running commentary on everything Taylor owned and whether it deserved to come with him, Jason holding Peanut back from attempting to follow the boxes into the moving van under the impression that the boxes were going somewhere fun.
Taylor stood in the center of the pavement with his hands on his hips and directed operations with the focus and authority of someone who had finally decided where his life was pointed.
When the last box was in the van, Jason pulled him into one of those bear hugs of his that compressed the air from your lungs and left you feeling briefly like a smaller person, and Taylor laughed into his shoulder.
In Taylor’s hand, not to be trusted in the boxes, was a small, handmade stork that had decorated his windowsill for the better part of the semester.
That winter, I took him to the cottage.
Snow had come early that year, and the forest path up was mostly hidden under a foot of white, so we navigated by instinct and familiarity and argued affectionately about which way the bend was for seven minutes before discovering we had both been right.
The cottage emerged from between the trees in the early afternoon, when the light on the snow had that particular quality of silver and gold occurring at the same time, and Taylor stopped walking for a moment, just stopped completely, and looked at it, and I watched his face instead of the cottage because I already knew what it looked like.
We made a fire before we made anything else, and when the ground floor was warm enough to exist in without coats, Taylor announced that we were going to build a snowman and that this was nonnegotiable.
I built the base, and he built the middle, and we argued pleasantly about whether the head was proportional, and Taylor won the argument by default because he was the one holding the head, and he placed it exactly where he wanted it, and I found two good sticks for arms while he pressed stones into a face.
We stood back and looked at it. The snowman was imperfect in the way handmade things always are, leaning slightly to the left, one arm longer than the other, and Taylor looked at it with an expression of such pure, uncomplicated satisfaction that something happened in my chest, something I recognized after a moment.
I had felt this way when I was very young, early enough that the memory had no clear edges, only a feeling. The feeling of being someone’s center of gravity. Of being the point around which the important things organized themselves.
I felt it every day with Taylor. I was only just then finding the words for it.
Our first anniversary, we were nine people around a table at a bar with a jukebox against the back wall and wooden floors that had absorbed thirty years of spilled drinks and kept them as a kind of warmth.
Jason and Bennet sat across from us, Bennet’s glasses catching the light every time he tilted his head, which was often, because he was saying something precise and unanswerable, and Jason was looking at him with the expression he always wore when Bennet spoke, that particular mix of pride and helpless affection that Jason couldn’t have hidden if you’d paid him to try.
Finn was at the end of the table, being loud as ever, and Greg sat next to Emma, the two of them deep in a conversation that had started an hour earlier and showed no signs of finding its natural conclusion.
Emma laughed at something Greg said, and Greg looked genuinely surprised that she’d laughed, which made her laugh again.
Taylor had been feeding coins into the jukebox all night.
He’d been doing it every fifteen minutes with the dedication of a person with a mission, returning to the table between songs and saying nothing about it, until the opening bars of “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” came through the speakers, and he looked at me across the table with those lit-up eyes.
We danced. Of course we danced. The floor cleared for no one, and we danced anyway, and the table made noise behind us, and Finn whistled through his fingers, and Emma and Greg were clapping, and Bennet covered his face with one hand, but he was smiling behind it, and Jason was laughing with his whole body.
Taylor spun me once, which he had gotten good at, and I let him.
Another year after that, Taylor stood at the front of an altar in a suit that had been fitted so precisely it took my breath away, and I sat in a pew near the front and watched him instead of watching the ceremony with any particular care, because the ceremony was happening and would continue to happen regardless of where I looked, but Taylor in that suit required direct attention.
He stood to the right of Jason, who was facing Bennet across a narrow distance.
Between them, with an expression of total self-satisfaction, sat Peanut, a string tied loosely around his neck from which two rings hung.
He was very still, which was unlike him, which meant someone had recently given him an extraordinary treat, and he was enjoying the memory of it.
When Jason and Bennet said the things they had written for one another, I heard Jason’s voice catch on one word and recover, and I watched Taylor’s face watch Jason’s face, and there was a tenderness there that I loved him for, a tenderness he’d always had and had been careful with, and I thought, sitting in that pew, that I would spend my life being grateful I had been the one he’d stopped being careful with.
And though Taylor didn’t know it yet, Jason would be his best man, too. And I knew it with the same certainty with which the waves carved caves and with which the sun decided to rise each morning.
New York arrived the way New York always does: with more boxes than you remembered owning and an elevator that was slightly too small for the sofa.
We found Hudson Burrow inside the first week, a bar two streets from the apartment with good natural light in the mornings and a menu that included a breakfast worth writing home about.
I wrote three pieces there in the first month.
Taylor left for his office every morning at seven forty-three and returned every evening with the look of someone who had accomplished things, and we ate dinner on the small balcony when the weather allowed, close enough together that our elbows touched, and the sounds of the city rose up around us like the sound of a large, indifferent engine that had no idea we were sitting inside it in love.