21. Lance
Chapter twenty-one
Lance
Ican tell the moment he’s awake. He doesn’t do it gradually.
He opens his eyes, blinks up at the ceiling, and a shadow of a frown crosses his face as he takes in the cracks in the plaster.
This is not the ceiling he was expecting.
I shut my eyes so he doesn’t catch me staring like a creeper.
I feel him shift to look down at our bodies and the tangle of sheets we’ve destroyed, and I know he’s doing it because I’ve done it at least five times in the past ten minutes.
“Shit,” he whispers.
“What is it?” I give up trying to pretend I’m napping. I stare at him. He’s still on his back, searching the ceiling.
“You realize we just really complicated our lives, right?” he asks without looking at me.
“Pretty much.”
“For a fuck that was epic but very short.”
“That was not the fuck. That was the appetizer,” I say.
“And what about when I go home?”
“We’ll cross that bridge in a couple of months.”
“I meant home as in across the street, not back to India.”
“Oh. That home.” This would probably be the wrong time to admit that I knew exactly which place he was talking about.
He rolls over to face me. “A woman died today. And I just got laid.” He checks the clock on my nightstand—it’s after three. “What is wrong with me?”
I put my hand on his face. “I’m going to talk to you like I would a buddy. Marine to Marine.”
“Neither of us are Marines. You’re a former Marine.”
I draw in my breath. “Just in case we work out, that’s not a thing. I’m still a Marine. I’m just not active-duty anymore.”
He nods.
“Alice’s death was senseless. But your need to feel connected to someone isn’t.
Think about it as you reaffirming that you’re alive and me taking this time to make sure that you were alive and next to me.
” I pause and touch the skin above his heart, where the phoenix’s beak is.
“Even if this is all we ever do, I will hold it in my heart as the best decision I’ve ever made. ”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Alice.” He says her name like he’s testing it. “You knew who she was, didn’t you? Before today.”
“Not well. I’d seen her on campus—she runs HR, I’m in the Comptroller’s office, we’d have crossed paths. And I used to watch the Phoenix Society memorial ceremonies online. From wherever I was posted.” I pause. “She was always on stage. Every year.”
“Why did you watch them?”
“I was looking for you,” I say. “You never showed up.”
He’s silent. Then: “I didn’t know they existed until Henry invited me.”
“Alice did. She was one of the founders. She cared about that community more than almost anyone.” I run my thumb across his cheekbone. “What happened to her was not because of you. And what happened between us was not dishonoring her. Those are two separate things.”
He doesn’t say anything for a while. I feel the tension leave his body in stages—first his shoulders, then his jaw, then his hands, which unclench against my chest. He rolls closer and lets me hold him.
I am careful not to move, not to ruin it, not to be anything more than the warm body he’s chosen to rest against.
We lie like that for a few minutes. The afternoon light moves across the ceiling. I can feel his heartbeat against my ribs, slower now, steadier.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” he says. “I kept trying to get at it. The party.”
“You were six. Nobody remembers—”
“That’s not it.” He’s still looking at the ceiling.
“It isn’t gone. I stopped going in there.
After the fire I stopped going into any of it, deliberately, because every single thing in there had my family in it.
Every memory was of them. So I stopped remembering them.
And I got very good at it.” He turns his head.
“And it turns out that if you don’t go in for long enough, you can’t find the door. ”
I don’t say anything.
“That’s the part that frightens me. I did it on purpose and now I can’t undo it. Whole years. My grandmother’s voice. What Elliott’s laugh sounded like.” He stops. “I can’t get any of it back.”
I put my hand flat on his chest, because there is nothing you can say to that.
“You, I never lost,” he says. “Not one single day.” He is quiet for a second. “I did try.”
Then he lifts his head and looks at me with something that isn’t quite a smile but is close. “So,” he says.
“So,” I say.
“Now that we’ve established that I’m not a monster for sleeping with you,” he says, “I have a practical question. How am I going to get to the DMV? My license is expired. The cop made that extremely clear.”
I stare at him patiently. He smiles very brightly at me. I arch my brow and let the silence linger way too long.
He bats his eyelashes. “Lance, would you please take me to the DMV?”
“And they say romance is dead.”
He laughs, and the sound lets me stand down for the first time since the boathouse. He touches my belly, tracing the line of hair below my navel, and even though I raise my eyebrows pointedly at him, it feels good, so I don’t tell him to stop.
“Are you sure you can get the time off work?”
“I just helped discover a dead body. I think they’ll give me a few days.”
“Actually, I discovered the dead body.”
“Fair point.” He stretches and stares at the ceiling. “How much does the DMV cost, anyway? I mean, I can open a US bank account, right? It won’t be that hard.” He frowns. “Oh. I need a valid ID. Well—passport. That still works, at least. It’s about the only document I own that does.”
“What really happened to your visa?”
He grimaces. “Oh, that’s a story. I filed in March.
It should have taken six weeks.” He drags a hand down his face.
“It’s been referred up to Delhi for clearance, because first they thought I was a journalist, and I dare you to try to explain to an elderly man from Uttar Pradesh what a travel vlogger is, how internet monetization happens, why I don’t have a regular income, and why I don’t have a press pass.
That took four months and three trips to Delhi.
Then, once I’d satisfied him that I wasn’t a journalist or involved in something more nefarious, he referred me to a new person.
Who started my application again from the top.
Because the name on my passport and the name I go by in my vlog are not the same, and you’d think that would be easy to explain.
That restarted the entire process from scratch and I had to catch a plane.
So now I have to prove to a department that hasn’t answered an email since August that Jonny Bishop and Parker Jonathan Bishop are the same person. ”
I don’t laugh. But I want to so bad I can taste it.
“So I can go anywhere on earth,” he says, “except the one place I live.”
I successfully convert my look of obvious delight into one that I’m pretty sure looks like pained amusement, like if something really terrible and completely out of your control conspired to give you a wonderful gift at someone else’s expense.
He eyes me suspiciously. “I prefer you smiling. That didn’t look so deranged, at least.”
I give up and stop pretending.
Jonny huffs. “Can you at least try not to look so happy about it? I have no home, no job, no bank account, and no future.”
I stare at him. “How do you not have a bank account?”
“Oh, I do! Just not here. You can’t open one in India on a tourist visa, so YouTube pays into a fintech app.
It gives me a prepaid card that works at ATMs. Most of what I did in India was cash anyway—street food, rickshaws, guesthouses.
You can live really well on cash there. I closed my American account years ago because the maintenance fees were eating me alive and I wasn’t using it.
And my tourist visa only lets me stay for six months at a stretch, so every half-year I’m off to Nepal or Thailand or wherever, living out of a bag.
It’s hard to build a financial life when you’re always in transit. ”
I absorb this. “So your entire financial well-being is on one fintech app.”
“It’s a very good app.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
My fingers flex against the sheets. I rub my forehead.
The man I’m lying next to has been running a business for nine years on a prepaid debit card.
No bank account in this country. An expired license.
A visa renewal that has been sitting in an office in Delhi since March.
A life that bounces him out of India every six months. My finance degree is having a seizure.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah. Just trying to control the urge to do something.”
“It’s not broken, Lance. It’s a very sensible set of options.”
I breathe out very slowly and count to ten. “Agree to disagree. But I won’t meddle. Unless you ask, which—” I look at him. “Please just ask. Anytime. Day or night.”
“If I see a reason to make some changes in that department, you’ll be the first person I contact. Anyway, I think I have some royalties on the card. They’ll pay the fees.”
“Dear God.”
“Lance?” His voice has a practiced warning tone to it.
“I’m back. Just—this is hard.”
“You’re doing great.” He rewards me with a light kiss on the forehead.
“I think we need to drag ourselves to the police station first.”
He sighs and closes his eyes. “Do I have to ask you for that, too?”
“No. For this one, we’re in this together.”
“Are we?” He props himself up on his elbows and looks at me. “Together?”
My mouth goes dry. “You’re the boss,” I manage.
He sighs. “Not yet.”
“Sure.” My heart breaks a little, but this is ten times better than I thought I was going to get yesterday.
I stand up and offer my hand. He regards it for a long few seconds before he takes it.
I can feel his reluctance to accept the help, so I bend down and kiss it instead of pulling him out of bed.
His smile is so bright it leaves spots on my retinas.