Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Pratt
Igot home just after eleven. The parking garage was quiet, with the car's engine ticking low before I turned it off. My footsteps echoed off the concrete.
Martin greeted me in the lobby. "Solid road trip."
"It works."
Inside my condo, nothing had changed.
The temperature was where I'd set it, a cool sixty-two. The counter was clear. In the corner, the lamp was still on. It was the one Sully helped me assemble while he read the instructions aloud in a documentary narrator's voice.
I'd always left lamps on timers before. This one I left on.
I set my bag down and hung my coat in the closet. Taking a glass from the cabinet, I filled it with water and drank it down.
Through the wall, I heard music. It was Fleetwood Mac, Sully's solo soundtrack.
I'd gone through three albums on the road: Rumours in Columbus, Tango in the Night on the flight out of St. Louis, and the self-titled one late in Minneapolis when I couldn't sleep and didn't want the TV on.
"The Chain" moved into its second verse.
I knocked on Sully's door.
He was there in a flannel shirt, sleeves pushed up to the elbow. His hair was longer than when I'd left, long enough that it had started to curl where it met his collar.
He stepped into me before I could say anything, wrapping me in a hug. I kissed him. His lips and tongue were exactly as I remembered.
"Well, hi," he said.
"Ten days. Over."
He pulled back and looked at me, a full read.
I'd spent parts of the trip trying to reconstruct how his smile arrived. The left side came first, and then the right. I hadn't gotten it right, but there it was.
"Come in," he said and stepped to the side.
I stopped a few feet inside, the door swinging shut behind me. Fleetwood Mac continued to play.
Sully was already moving toward the kitchen. He had coffee ready and handed me a mug without asking.
I joined him on the couch, sitting close.
"Okay, so yesterday," he said, turning toward me, one knee up on the cushion.
"Table of eight. It was eight people who clearly knew each other; all ordered separately in no logical sequence, and then they were annoyed when the food didn't come out at the same time.
Like the kitchen has a psychic link to their social dynamic. "
"Did you tell them that?"
"I told them the kitchen works in courses, not friendships, and somehow that satisfied everyone." He took a sip. "Nora thinks I have a gift. I think I have a very high tolerance for the chaos that people generate."
He moved into the next story without pausing.
"Speaking of Nora, she invented a new cocktail two weeks ago.
On the fly, for a customer who kept saying she wanted something that tasted like a vacation but also an apology.
" He gestured with his mug. "Nora made it, and the woman loved it.
Asks what it's called. Nora looks her dead in the eye and says The Nora. Named it after herself. Right there."
"Is it on the menu?"
"It's on the menu. Tomasz tried to push back, and Nora said, Tomasz, the customer named it, and he accepted that because what are you going to do?" He laughed. "We've sold three a night ever since."
I watched him over the rim of my mug.
The stories were good, and his timing was impeccable. What was off was the spacing. He left no gap between one story and the next.
Usually, when it was just the two of us, there was flex, a few gaps. Room for something to land before the next thing moved in.
He caught me looking somewhere else in the room after the Nora story. I shifted my attention back and listened as he kept going.
The stories tapered off around midnight.
"—and the guy tips forty percent, which, great, except he'd been so insufferable for two hours that Nora and I had to debrief afterward just to decompress.
Like a trauma response, but for hospitality.
" He sipped from his mug. "She got the forty percent, for the record.
I'm a firm believer in the tip going to whoever suffered most."
"That seems like a system that leaves room for disputes."
"Nora and I have a very sophisticated internal arbitration process." A beat. "She always wins. I let her. It's how the system works."
I smiled. He caught it, and for a moment something in his posture eased.
"There's also this regular," he said, shifting on the cushion. "Comes in every Friday, six months running. I figured out maybe three weeks ago that he's never ordered the same drink twice. He's working through the menu alphabetically."
"He told you that?"
"He didn't have to. I just—I started tracking it. Amaretto sour, Bee's Knees, Cosmopolitan." He paused. "That wasn't his speed, I could tell, but he ordered it anyway because it was next."
"What's he on now?"
Sully thought about it. "G, I think. Gimlet, maybe. It worked out for him."
He stopped. His mouth closed, and he looked at the coffee table. The story ended there, no landing or bridge to the next thing.
A gap opened. I waited, but he didn't fill it.
His foot moved to touch my thigh. My shoulder was close enough to his that I could feel the warmth of him through his sleeve.
Sully looked down at his hands wrapped around his mug.
"I haven't really stopped moving in a while," he said. "Like—actually stopped."
He didn't say more.
"I know," I said.
He looked at me, working out what I meant and whether it was accurate. He nodded once, slow.
Fleetwood Mac had looped around to "Songbird." I reached out for Sully.
My hand rested against his cheek. He leaned into it. We looked at each other.
He reached for the front of my shirt and pulled. He kissed me before I could say anything and flattened his hand against my chest. The other hand reached around to my back, trying to close any distance between our bodies.
I raked my fingers into his thick hair, starting at the base of his skull. He made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my chest. He worked at the buttons on my shirt.
Sully pushed me backward against the couch. He kissed my jaw and then my throat. He finished with the buttons and pushed the shirt open. I was back against the arm of the couch now, one leg still on the floor. My heart pounded faster.
"Hey," I said.
He stopped.
His weight was still over me, one hand braced on the cushion beside my shoulder. I cupped the back of his head, and he exhaled against my neck before pulling back to look at me.
"Hi," he said.
He was back, fully present again. He kissed along my collarbone and ran a hand down over my jeans, closing his fingers around my hard cock. "I missed you," he whispered.
I tugged his t-shirt over his head, and he dropped back over me immediately. I slid my leg up onto the cushion, and he shifted over me, finding a better angle on the narrow couch without pulling back.
Then something gave. His mouth moved down my chest and his hands went to my zipper. The pace had changed—faster, focused on my anatomy rather than me.
He was gone again.
Not all the way—his hands moved with confidence as he kissed my mouth again. It was the angle of his approach, the speed, and the lack of words. I placed my hands on both sides of his face and held him still.
He looked at me. His hair was wrecked and lips swollen.
"You're somewhere else," I said.
"I'm here."
"Not all of you."
He didn't argue. He lowered his forehead and rested his head against my chest. His hand stopped with my zipper half down.
"I know," he said.
I kept one hand on his face, my thumb stroking his cheekbone. We stayed there.
After a while he kissed my chest again, slower, and it was better, closer to the real thing.
It wasn't all the way there, but it was close enough.
His palm rested flat on my chest, with the heel of it over my heartbeat, and I felt the weight of each finger separately. There was still a slight catch in his breath.
"The team knows," I said.
"Knows what?"
"That I have someone."
He looked up, and his smile returned. He rubbed my chest and slowly moved the hand down over my stomach.
"Do they know who?"
"Heath and Kieran do."
"And that's okay?"
I kissed him. "Yes."
"Yeah?"
"Yes."
Sully was back. “Good, good. This reminds me—okay, not the same thing, but—there was this place I worked at in Boston. Thought it was a secret that I was seeing this guy. We were so subtle, or we thought we were.”
I said nothing. Let him go.
“Guess we weren't,” he said. “At all. I think Thomas—not Tomasz—this is Thomas, a different guy. He started a pool on how long it would take us to figure out that everyone already knew.”
“And?”
“We made it about two weeks.” He laughed softly. “Whole speech planned. Timing, location, emotional arc. I’m ready to deliver it, and my manager just looks at me and goes, ‘Sully, we know.’”
I stared at him.
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” he said. “That was the whole thing. Nothing happened.”
"I should sleep," I said. "It was a long trip."
"Stay." It was a request, not a question.
"Yes."
Sully's bedroom was the same organized disorder it had always been—clothes on the chair, books stacked with no particular logic, and he had the window cracked despite the cold.
What I hadn't noticed before was the photograph on the nightstand: two boys, maybe ten or eleven, squinting into the sun somewhere that looked like a coast. It didn't look new, but I rarely missed things.
Sully was recognizable even then, same wavy hair. The other one I didn't know.
On the wall above the dresser, the seed turkey was still there. I looked at it a beat longer than before.
"What is that?"
Sully glanced up from where he was pulling back the covers. "The turkey?"
"Yes."
"Danny made it. In high school, I was in this program where we hung out with little kids and read them stories.
" He straightened the pillow on my side.
"He did it in school and said his mom didn't want it.
I said it looked like a real turkey, and he gave it to me.
He thought that was the funniest thing anyone had ever said.
" He paused. "It looks nothing like a real turkey. "
"No," I said.
He looked at it another moment, then got into bed.
"Did you ever do those?" he asked. "Art projects."
"Yes."
"Any good?"
"I made a ceramic bowl in seventh grade.
I'd measured the clay thickness at four points around the rim to keep it even.
The glaze came out uneven on one side, and my teacher marked it down for lack of control.
" I sat on the edge of the bed. "It was a deliberate gradient. I'd tested it on a tile first."
Sully propped himself up on one elbow. "What did you do?"
"I learned to avoid people who got it wrong."
He looked at me for a moment, then put his head back down on the pillow. "That tracks," he said.
I turned off the light on the nightstand and got in beside him. He rolled toward me and moved close, placing his cheek on my chest, over my heart. His hand settled against my ribs.
"Goodnight, Pratt. I'm glad you're home," he said.
"Goodnight."
Sully's breathing slowed almost immediately. In the next minute, he was fast asleep.
I looked at the photograph on the nightstand. It was barely visible in the ambient light from the city. Was it there before? Both boys laughed at something just outside the frame.
Sully's thumb moved once against my ribs. I didn't sleep for a long time.