Chapter 22 Sully
Chapter twenty-two
Sully
It was twelve thirty-two am. The knock came in a pattern I didn't recognize.
Two. Pause. One.
It wasn't my lockout signal or the single knock on the wall. It was new, which meant he'd made it up on his way over. I shot off the couch and walked to the door.
The TV was on behind me, sound turned low. It was some documentary about bridge construction I'd turned on an hour ago and lost track after five minutes. I'd been sitting with it running because the alternative was a quiet room.
I didn't ask who it was or bother with the peephole. I just opened the door.
Pratt stood in the hallway in a grey t-shirt and dark joggers, with nothing in his hands. He immediately looked into my eyes.
I stepped back and let him in. The door swung shut behind him.
We were both silent for a beat. It wasn't uncomfortable or awkward.
I walked over to the couch, picked up the remote, and turned the TV off. I sat, and Pratt sat on the other end.
A joke bubbled up inside. It was assembled and stored in the ice-breaker repository in my brain. I thought it could ease us in.
I stopped myself short, realizing there was only one way to do this. I'd known that since I last saw Nora. You don't get to manage his response.
I couldn't come at it sideways and shape it into a story with a soft landing. I did that too often with Bryan, and I'd done it with everyone since. It was part of my motion, keeping the people surrounding me from having to sit with any of my darkness.
Pratt was ready. He'd come to my place without being asked.
"I need to start at the beginning," I said. "And not skip."
He didn't nod or tell me to take my time. He shifted slightly on the cushion, looking at me with full attention.
"Lexington," I said.
The word felt strange in my mouth when I said it stripped of context. It was a starting point without a story attached yet.
"That's actually where I'm from. Not Boston.
Lexington, Massachusetts. I say Boston because most people don't know the difference.
" I looked at my hands. "Some think muskets when I say it, but now it's mostly coffee and high-speed internet.
Walden Pond's down the road. It all sounds more meaningful than it really is. "
I stopped. I'd drifted too close to joke territory. It was time to pull it back. "Bryan was from there too. Six houses down."
"Let's start there," I said, more to myself than to Pratt. "Start there and go in order."
He said nothing.
"We were nine when we met," I said. "Bryan moved in from New Hampshire."
Pratt was close, at the end of the couch, eyes still fixed on me.
"He had this way of looking at you that made it clear he was interested.
Not in sex, but knowing what made you tick.
" I rubbed my thumb against the inside of my wrist. "We were in the same classes all the way through.
His mom and my mom became friends, too. His mom cooked.
Mine opened cans. Dinner was decent at either house. "
I went through the story in a logical order.
"He was the first person I came out to. I was seventeen, and I'd been trying to figure out how to say it for a long time. He just said, 'Okay.'"
I looked at Pratt, and he was almost smiling. "Then he said, 'You know how you told me that guy from the lacrosse team was annoying?' I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'You meant he was hot.'" I stopped. It sounded like I had a thing for athletes.
Maybe I did. I continued. "I said, 'Yes.
' He nodded and then asked if I wanted to do something with it or if I was just telling him.
I told him I was just telling him. He was okay with that.
" I paused. "That was the whole conversation.
He never made it weird. Never. It was just another fact about me, and Bryan had approximately nine thousand facts about me filed away somewhere. "
Pratt's hands were loose on his thighs. He was giving me all the space I wanted.
"That picture of us on the beach in the bedroom," I said. "That's what summers were like until the real world leaked in as we got older."
I told him about our drift when I decided I wanted out of the Boston area. It was two lives moving in slightly different directions, the way they do when you're in your mid-twenties and convinced that the people who matter will always be there because they always have been.
"Providence," I said. "I sublet a place there for about a year. There was a bar that needed someone, and I liked the change. Bryan was an hour away. Close enough that it wasn't hard to get together, but it didn't happen often."
I stopped there for a second.
"The last time I saw him in person was at a diner," I said.
"I was passing through Boston between seeing my parents and driving back to Providence.
We met at the diner for two hours. It was talking about ordinary stuff.
He walked me to my car and said I should call him the next week. I said yeah, definitely."
I inhaled.
"I didn't call that week," I said. "Or the one after."
I didn't offer my reasons.
"His mom called me on a Sunday morning two weeks later," I said. "She opened with this is Bryan's mom. She'd been Mrs. Baker my whole life." I did my best to keep my voice even when I said the next part. "He used a gun."
Pratt didn't move.
I kept going because stopping there would settle on the worst of all of it.
"I moved to Chicago a year later," I said.
"Got the job at Carver's. My grandpa gave me money.
I built a new—" I gestured at the condo.
"They liked me at my job. I told myself it was who I was—a people person.
I enjoyed closing out the bar at two in the morning with strangers.
" I looked at Pratt's hands folded in his lap.
"It wasn't a lie, exactly. I do like people, but that wasn't why I moved here and took the job. "
"The records," Pratt said.
"Yeah. His mom went through his room," I said.
"It took her a while. At the bottom of a closet, she found a box.
It was a bunch of records. Some of them were Bryan's.
Some were mine. I'd lent him a stack before I left for Providence and just never asked for them back.
She mailed the two Fleetwood Mac albums." I exhaled through my nose.
I pressed my lips together for a second.
Pratt was quiet.
"She put a note at the bottom of the box," I said. "Cath did." I could say the words now. They were still heavy, but I could get through them. "She said he talked about me all the time."
We were both silent for a beat.
"If he did," I said, my voice quieter, "then he knew I would have picked up. He knew I would have gotten in my car. He didn't call."
A longer beat.
"But I didn't call him either."
That was it. I'd gotten through all of it without skipping any important parts.
Pratt waited. "There's something else. I said it to you in your condo the other night. It was about you doing the same thing."
"I remember," he said.
"I'm not saying it the same way now. It's not the same panic. I know you're not Bryan." I reached out for his hand. "But I didn't say the underneath part. I said I was afraid of losing you, and I left out why I hadn't said it sooner."
He didn't speak.
"If I say it, then it makes it real, and real things can go wrong.
" I took a breath. "As long as I didn't say it out loud, I could pretend nothing was at stake.
I could keep moving and just think you were something good happening in the next-door condo.
" I looked at him. "The problem was that it was already real. "
Neither of us moved. I could barely breathe.
"I've been waiting for the right time," I said.
Pratt looked at me. "It's real," he said.
His comment wasn't comforting, exactly. It was clarifying.
I nodded once.
He looked away briefly, toward the window, and then he looked back at me.
"I don't—" He stopped and then tried again.
"I don't know how to be that for someone." The words were a little rougher than his usual confident statements. "I have a bad habit of keeping things at a distance where they can't ask much of me."
He took my hand in his.
"But I want to be that person for you. I want to try to be."
I didn't reach for him and hand his words back gift-wrapped. I let them stand right where they are, unpolished and honest.
I said: "Okay. I'm not going anywhere—anymore."
I'd made that decision somewhere around the moment I'd set the record at his door and walked back to my condo in sock feet.
We both stood and walked to the bedroom without discussing it.
I turned the lamp on low. Pratt stood near the door, and I stood near the bed.
The joke arrived the way my best ones did—uninvited, fully formed, and completely inappropriate to the moment.
It was something about the general absurdity of two people standing in a bedroom regarding each other like they'd misplaced the instruction sheet.
I had no idea why my brain did this at precisely the wrong moments. It just did. It always had.
I let it out sideways.
"Do you ever think sex is funny, Pratt?"
He didn't speak.
"Like, inherently," I said. "As a concept. Two people deciding to do this extremely specific thing together and then committing to it completely seriously, as if it isn't objectively ridiculous."
"I haven't thought about it that way."
"I think about it constantly," I said. "I guess it's an occupational hazard of bartending. You watch people all night, working up to going home together. Some of them build an incredibly elaborate social architecture around it. The more honest just say something like, 'Okay, let's go do this now.'"
He smiled.