Chapter 6 Sully
Chapter six
Sully
The citrus station was giving me problems.
It wasn't the limes. They were fine. It was the lemons, specifically how I'd cut and arranged them. I had eight wedges carefully placed on a tray at precise angles.
I stared for a moment and then redistributed two wedges before I could stop myself.
"Sullivan."
Nora was watching me from the service end. She had a pencil behind one ear.
"What?"
"Nothing." She watched me move the second wedge a quarter inch to the right. "Nothing at all."
I put the knife down.
I was running on four hours of sleep, which wasn't unusual, but it was four hours that lingered at the edge of being awake.
"The prep looks intense tonight," Nora said, pulling a bottle from the rack.
"I'm planning ahead. Gets crazy on Friday."
"It's Tuesday."
"I'm getting a jump on Friday."
She uncapped the bottle and studied the label. "You're prepping citrus as if you'll have a test on it later."
"Or like someone who ran out of things to think about and needed to do something with his hands."
She looked up. That was not the snappy deflection she'd expected. Nora had two years of Thursday-to-Sunday shifts with me. She knew the difference between busy-Sully and unsettled-Sully.
I picked up the knife again and tried to look like I was doing something purposeful with it.
"Did something happen?" she asked.
"No."
"Did something almost happen?"
I put the knife back down.
I gave her the condensed version, including the lockout, soup, grilled cheese, and sharing an unplanned meal at 1:30 am.
Nora listened. She didn't interrupt.
When I finished, she tilted her head. "You invited him in after one-thirty and made him soup."
"The soup was already made. I just reheated—"
"Sullivan."
"It was a carton."
"You reheated a carton of soup for your neighbor at one-thirty in the morning and then made him a grilled cheese." She set the bottle down. "You're not circling this anymore. The eagle has landed."
I winced. She wasn't wrong. I went back to the lemon tray, adjusting a wedge that didn't need adjusting.
"He's a professional athlete, and he probably eats at specific times for specific reasons. He wouldn't say no to grilled cheese."
"You made grilled cheese as a training meal?"
"I made grilled cheese because it was late and someone was in my kitchen and that's what you do—"
"You made him soup and a grilled cheese, and now you're prepping citrus for Friday on a Tuesday." She picked the bottle back up. "Being gone on this guy is a good look on you. It's better than you pretending you're not."
The shift caught up fast. A table in the back wanted to split a check six ways, and the guy on the end kept changing his mind about what he'd ordered. I sorted it, moved on, and by the time I'd handled the next three tickets, I'd almost stopped thinking about Pratt.
Nora was counting the drawer when I dropped my apron on a hook. She didn't look up. "You're going to do something about it," she said.
"Goodnight, Nora."
"That's a yes."
I pushed through the back door into the frigid January night.
***
I'd slept until noon, a win by recent standards. I brewed coffee to wake up and checked my phone. I regretted that immediately. It had more about what my brother was doing in Boston than I wanted to know.
I needed to return a library book three weeks overdue. It was Devil in the White City, and I'd checked it out from the Harold Washington Library on a very sincere afternoon in December.
I'd been meaning to finish it ever since. I'd gotten far enough to know it wasn't about the architecture.
I grabbed my coat, picked up the book, and opened my door.
Pratt's door was open. The gap wasn't wide, maybe eight inches. I saw the clean edge of his kitchen counter.
I stopped. Leaning slightly to the left, I saw Pratt, still in practice gear. On the far wall, the lamp was still in its box, flush against the baseboard.
"Are you and that lamp in a long-term standoff?" I called through the gap.
Pratt turned. "I haven't needed it yet," he said.
"That is the least convincing thing anyone has ever said in a room with one dark corner."
He looked at the corner. The corner was objectively dark. There was no arguing with the corner.
Pratt approached the door and opened it wider. "You own tools?"
I blinked. "That sounded so much dirtier than either of us meant it to."
There was almost a smile. Pratt's face didn't do straightforward smiles, or if it did, I hadn't seen one yet. He pulled the door completely open and stepped to the side.
That was the invitation.
I returned to my condo and grabbed a screwdriver from the kitchen drawer. I dropped the library book on my counter.
Pratt had already opened the box. He'd folded the top flaps back and removed the hardware bag. He was sorting the contents on the floor in a row.
"I'm organizing the components." He crouched beside the hardware. "It reduces assembly time."
I joined him and knelt by the other side of the box. The lamp was still mostly in the packing foam. It had a brushed brass base, a straight stem, and a linen shade, perfect for making the corner feel warm and lived-in.
"Your door," I said. "Were you airing the place out, or is there a reason a man with a very organized counter leaves an eight-inch gap for anyone to walk through?"
"The building's HVAC flow is low after five. I prop the door when I get back from the facility." He didn't look up from the hardware. "Fifteen minutes."
"Every day?"
"If we're in town and it's a practice day."
"So I walked in on your quarter-hour window," I said.
"Yes."
"Lucky me."
The instruction sheet had six steps, each illustrated. There were no words. Step three had an arrow pointing at something that might have been a washer or a belt buckle. It was genuinely unclear.
"Did you read this?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Do you understand step three?"
"The inner nut seats first, then the outer nut threads over the stem to lock it in place."
I looked at step three again. The arrow was still inscrutable. "You got that from this diagram?"
"I got it from looking at the hardware."
Of course he did.
I sat cross-legged on the floor. Pratt was on one side of the box with the instruction sheet and the lamp body. I was on the other with the hardware bag and good intentions.
There was a version of him that existed on the ice, behind glass. Now, I watched the careful way he held the stem while I threaded the inner nut. He was completely present for a task that anyone else would have half-assed while watching something on their phone.
Pratt was fully present.
"Pass me the cord collar," he said.
"Which one is the cord collar?"
"Cylindrical. Black plastic. Threads onto the lower stem before the base seats."
I found it and held it up. He confirmed with a nod, and I passed it across. I reached beyond him for a washer that had migrated toward his side of the setup. His shoulder was right there, and his neck, with the line of his jaw.
"We're missing a wrench," I said, because I needed to say something.
"We don't need one. The inner nut seats by hand."
"Are you sure? Step four seems like a wrench situation."
"Step four is a diagram problem. The nut's hand-tight." He glanced at me. "Trust the hardware."
"I will put that on a plaque."
We set the shade last. Pratt held the stem vertical, and I seated the shade bracket over the socket, checked the level, and locked it down. He let go. The lamp stood on its own.
"Plug," I said.
He picked up the cord end, walked it to the outlet near the baseboard, crouched down, plugged it in, and stood back.
"Your call," he said.
I found the switch on the cord, about eighteen inches up from the base. I flicked it.
The corner lit up. It had been unfinished since Pratt moved in, and now it wasn't.
"Okay," I said. "That's a good lamp."
Pratt looked at the corner. I picked a small square of Styrofoam off his sleeve. It was packing material, clinging there without his knowledge.
"This calls for a drink," I said. "I've got beer next door. Give me forty-five seconds."
He didn't say no, which I'd learned was one of Pratt's ways of saying yes.
I returned and held up two bottles from the back of my fridge. He took one and opened it with the flat of his palm against the counter edge in a single clean motion. I did mine the same way because I wasn't going to be the guy who needed a bottle opener.
One of us moved toward the couch. I don't remember which. We ended up angled toward each other with an empty cushion between us. He sat up straight, and I pulled one foot up under me because I'd never learned to sit like a person who owned furniture.
"You do this a lot?" I asked. "Buy something and then take a month thinking about where it will live?"
"If the placement will affect traffic flow." Pratt drank his beer. "Moving it later costs more than waiting."
"The lamp was against the wall for, what, three weeks?"
"Five."
"Five weeks," I said. "Did it ever occur to you to just—put it somewhere and adjust if it was wrong?"
"You've got a printer in a box in your living room."
I opened my mouth.
"Eight months," he said.
I closed my mouth. "That's different."
"How?"
"The printer is—okay, the printer is a symbolic object. It represents the possibility of becoming someone who prints things. The day I unbox it, I've made a commitment to a specific version of myself, and I'm not sure I'm there yet."
"That's not different."
"It's completely—" I stopped. Thought about it. Looked at the lamp in the corner, finally lit, sitting where it belonged. "Okay, maybe it's not so different."
Pratt turned his head to look. I watched him. "Good corner," I said.
"Yes."
I took another drink and then excused myself to use the bathroom. On the way back, I noticed his bedroom door was open. I glanced in as I passed. There was a single blanket, folded with care, lying along the baseboard beside the bed.
I stood in the hallway for a moment and looked at it.
Then I went back to the couch. Pratt was where I'd left him. I sat six inches closer than before.
"The blanket on the floor—"
"It's where I sleep—before games."
He looked at me with no change in expression.
"Every game?"
"Every home game."
I drank again. "How'd that start?"
"Second season," he said. "We had a six-game winning streak in February. My mattress was in storage. I'd sublet my apartment over the break and hadn't moved back in yet. I ended up sleeping on the floor. We won six straight, and I traced it back to that change."
"Six games," I said.
"It was enough to notice."
"And it created a pattern that's stuck for years."
He turned the bottle in his hand once, a single rotation. "I know it causes nothing. The correlation isn't meaningful, but it stuck."
I sat with the info for a moment. "What's the floor part, specifically?" I asked. "Why not just — a sleeping bag or a different mattress, some other variable from that run?"
"The floor is the lowest point. You can't fall from the lowest point."
The room went very still. I didn't laugh and didn't race for a joke.
"That sounds lonely," I said.
Quiet. Not soft exactly — just true, the way his thing had been true.
Pratt was quiet. He looked at me.
Many people looked at me every night at Carver's. That was the nature of the work. People always had their eyes on the bar.
This was different.
"Yes," he said.
Neither of us spoke for a while.
I stood because I had to. It wasn't an emergency, but the room was tense. Standing interrupted. It was the responsible choice.
"I should let you do your thing—that pre-game sequence. Don't want to throw off the system."
"It's not a game night."
"Right," I said. "Of course it's not."
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. Then I picked up both bottles from the coffee table, walked them to the kitchen, and set them by the sink.
Pratt followed. He was in the entry when I turned around. A small square of packing foam still clung stubbornly to his shoulder. I reached out to brush it off.
He didn't step back, and my hand stayed. I took another step forward, and kissed him.
It wasn't frantic. It also wasn't what I'd imagined two nights earlier while staring at my ceiling at four am. That had involved more dramatic circumstances and less packing foam.
This was just—Pratt. His mouth was careful at first, and then he was kissing me back with full attention, his hands on my shoulders, gripping. He wasn't half-assing it.
We broke after a second beat. Nothing failed. Success needed room. I stepped back a few inches.
"Well," I said. "That happened. I give it a 9.5."
"Not perfect?"
That was funnier than if he'd tried to be funny, and I laughed, short and real. I pulled on my coat. "Goodnight, Pratt."
"Goodnight."
I walked into the hallway and heard his door close behind me. The hallway was empty and aggressively ordinary. I was a completely different version of myself from the one who'd asked about the lamp through a partially open door.
I entered my place. My hand was not at my mouth. I was a twenty-nine-year-old adult, and I was not standing in my living room with my hand pressed to my mouth like I'd just been kissed for the first time by someone I'd been thinking about since I walked into the wrong unit.
On second thought, I was absolutely doing that.
I turned the music on, and the condo started breathing again. It felt like a room after something great had happened.
I sat on the couch and leaned back.
Bryan would have had something to say. "Sul, this isn't casual and you know it."
He wasn't wrong.
I turned the music up.