23. Theo #2
I hear the shower before I see the steam. Our bathroom in this apartment is narrow, a tiled rectangle with a wide glass stall we both fit in if we don't insist on a lot of personal space, which we don't. He's leaning on the tile with water running down his spine.
He doesn't turn around. He heard me come in.
“How's your dad?”
“He's Paul.”
“Yeah.”
The water hits his shoulder. He tips his head to let it hit his neck.
“He said the pass was nice.”
“The pass was nice, kid.”
My hand flattens over his hip under the water.
“He's going to think about coming in August.”
“Good.”
I peel off the t-shirt. I peel off the boxers. I step into the stall behind him and I put my forehead between his shoulder blades and the water runs over both of us, hotter than I'd set it, his setting, because he likes to melt his own back muscles.
His hand comes back and pulls me closer against him.
“You good?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me.”
“I'm good. Every morning I wake up and I check if I'm still good, and I keep being good, and it's been six months, and it's not fake. I keep thinking it's going to be fake. It isn't.”
“It isn't.”
I press my forehead harder into his back.
“The class in May. I wrote a paper about The Great Gatsby and I got an A and nobody in my life had any idea what to do about that except you, and you framed the printout. Like a lunatic. You framed a ten-page paper.”
“It's a good paper.”
His hand draws a circle on my back.
“Maddox.”
“Mm.”
My hand flattens over his sternum.
“I like who I am here.”
He turns around in my arms.
His eyes are wet. Not from the water.
He doesn't say anything. He puts a hand on the back of my neck.
He leans his forehead against mine. The water is hitting the side of his shoulder now and spraying out across the tile, and it's warm and loud and close, and he just stands there and holds my face to his face until the wet in his eyes isn't separate from the water anymore.
“I like who you are here,” he says.
“Yeah?”
His nose brushes mine.
“I like who you are anywhere, Theo. Here's just easier.”
“Yeah.”
His hand slides down my spine. His other hand finds mine and pulls it against the tile above our heads, palm flat, and his mouth is on my jaw, my ear, my throat.
His hand that's holding mine flat against the tile goes tight.
His other hand slides down the inside of my thigh and he lifts it onto his hip and he is already hard against my hip and he has been since I came into the bathroom, and I wrap my leg around him the way I have learned to, and I wrap my arm around his neck and I let him press me back against the warm wet tile.
“We did this this morning,” he says against my mouth.
“Do it again.”
His teeth catch my lower lip.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The thing we have now. This. The bottle is on the shower shelf where we keep it because this is a thing we do.
His fingers are careful, slow, patient. He watches my face the whole time.
He has never stopped watching my face. Not in Frosthaven.
Not in Blackridge. Not in a shower in a rented apartment in July with a dog we own on the other side of the door and a man on the other side of a phone saying I'll think about it.
He slides into me. The tile is warm against my back.
His forehead comes to my forehead. His hand behind my head cradles the back of my skull so the tile can't touch it.
He has been doing that, the skull-protection thing, since we moved here.
Small courtesies I didn't notice until I did.
His other hand slides under my thigh to hold me open and steady.
He moves.
Slow. Close. He kisses me while he does it.
He says my name into my mouth and I say his name into his mouth and he says, “I love you,” at a volume only I can hear, and I say it back without stopping what we're doing, because we say it every morning now the way some couples say pass the milk, and the saying of it has gone down into a deeper place in my body than it started.
I come against his stomach with his hand on me and his mouth on mine, and he comes inside me with my name in his teeth, and we stand there propped together against warm tile with the water going over both of us for a full minute after, breathing.
He's the one who finally moves. He reaches back and turns the water down cooler. He rinses us both. He washes my hair with the hand that isn't holding me up, because he knows I forget to when he's distracted me, and he rinses it with his fingers through, and he kisses my temple.
“Breakfast.”
“Yeah.”
He wraps a towel around my shoulders before his own.
“Pancake's going to shred a couch cushion if we don't get out here.”
“Let him.”
“No.”
I lean into him.
“I know. I'm joking.”
“Not joking. The couch is nice.”
“Maddox.”
He laughs into my wet hair.
In the kitchen I make eggs. He toasts bread. Pancake sits on the kitchen rug and judges us. The phone on the counter lights up. Diane, a photo of her garden, a tomato she's proud of, the caption first of the season. I show Maddox. He grunts approvingly at the tomato.
Out the window the cedar waxwing has a friend now.
The kid next door is walking her own dog past our fence and Pancake notices and rushes the slider.
I let him out because I have learned to let him do his small, loud job of saying hi to passing dogs because he is always going to be a rescue and because letting him is part of loving him.
Maddox puts a plate in front of me at our small round table. He sits across from me. His knee finds mine under the table and stays there.
I look at him.
“Hi.”
“Hi, kid.”
His knee presses mine.
“Pass the salt.”
“Say please.”
“Please.”
He hands me the salt. His thumb slides once over my knuckles on the handoff. The sun is all the way in the kitchen now.
Six months ago, I climbed into a truck with a duffel I'd packed in ninety seconds and no plan. Six months ago, a man stood on a sidewalk and said, “Come to Blackridge,” loud enough for my father to hear it.
I came.
Every morning, I wake up and check if I'm still good.
Every morning, I keep being good. Every morning, the check gets a little shorter and the being-good gets a little bigger and the father I spent twenty years being small for gets a little further away, and the man across this kitchen table and the dog under it and the maple outside the window get a little more mine.
I eat my eggs and drink my coffee, and I look at him over the rim of the mug and he looks at me over the rim of his, and the morning keeps happening, and I keep being here for it.
A life.
Mine.