Chapter 30 Riley - August 2024, the Azores, Portugal #2
There were no walls doing double duty as an excuse.
Nobody two doors down. No nineteen-year-old with stitches in his eyebrow asleep across a corridor, no forearm braced against a headboard so it would not knock, no hand flat over a mouth.
There was nothing left to honor except each other, and it turned out that took some learning.
The lamps stayed on. That was his. The first night he reached for the switch out of pure habit and then stopped with his hand on it and left it, and lay back down, and I watched him make that decision and did not say one word about it.
And I found out what Nate Sinclair sounded like when there was not one single name at stake anywhere in the building.
Seven years, and I had never heard it once.
Every sound that man had ever made in my company had been managed, rationed, swallowed, put through a filter built by a boy who learned at nine years old that being heard was how he got graded.
In a farmhouse above a caldera with the ocean going and nobody within five minutes' walk, it came off him in layers over about four nights, and by the end of that first week he was loud, and he was not embarrassed about it, and the first time it happened he stopped afterward and put his forehead against my shoulder and laughed, actually laughed, out of pure surprise at himself.
"What?"
"Nothing." He was still going. "I have never done that in my life. Not once, not with anybody, and I would like a minute with that information before you say a single word about it."
"Take two."
And what he taught me back was worse, in the sense of being harder to survive.
Being wanted in the dark I understood. Seven years of that.
What I did not have any equipment for was a man looking at me in full daylight with the shutters open at eleven in the morning, laughing at something I said, and then not stopping looking.
That is more explicit than anything the dark ever let us do, and I put my arm over my face the first time, and he took it off and put it back on the pillow and kept his hand around my wrist.
"No. Leave it."
"Nate."
"You've been looking at me for seven years. Some of it from thirty feet across a ballroom and the rest of it in the dark with a bus in the courtyard." He did not let go. "Lie still and let me have the same thing."
Rosalina came at nine the next morning and found the front door locked, which it had not been once, and she went away and came back at eleven and never mentioned it, and every single day after that she knocked.
Then the days did the domestic inventory.
The coffee bit started on the fourth morning. He got up first, and I found out on day three that if I made it wrong on purpose he would come out of that bedroom in bare feet and stand in the kitchen doorway and supervise, which was the entire objective.
"That's not four."
"It's four large ones, and you're counting the ones that fell in, and the ones that fell in don't count, because that's an act of God and there's case law."
"Give me the spoon, Riley."
"Come and get the spoon, Sinclair."
He came and got the spoon. It took a while, and the coffee was cold by the end of it, and neither of us mentioned that either.
Then the café, which was the one that got me.
There's a place at the bottom of the road with three tables and a case with pastries in it, and we went in every day, and on the sixth day he got there ahead of me while I was tying a shoe and he ordered mine, in Portuguese, the whole thing, the abomination with the milk and the sugar in it that a man in Bratislava had learned to say in Slovak in a bathroom stall off a translation app in the spring of 2019, and which he had now learned in a second language, at twenty-eight years old, on a holiday, without telling me.
And I stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. Second time in seven years. The first was a corridor in a rink in Slovakia, and I never finished that sentence and I never told him what happened in my chest when the woman laughed and made the coffee.
This time I did.
"Nate. Look at me."
He turned around at the counter with his wallet still in his hand. "It's coming. They're grinding it."
"Nobody has ever learned my order. In my life, nobody. My mother knows it because she watched me make it for eleven years, and Dex knows it because we shared a car for two seasons, and that is the entire list, and both of those are accidents of proximity."
"Riley."
"You did it in Slovakia in 2019 in a bathroom stall off a phone and you never once told me, and I've thought about that morning more times than I'm going to admit in a café, and I never said one word to you about it because I did not have a format.
" My throat was doing something in a room with three tables in it.
"And you've just done it again. In a second language.
For a coffee that you have described, out loud, as an insult to agriculture. "
He looked at me for about two seconds. And then Nate Sinclair received the biggest thing I have ever handed anybody the way he received a pass in stride, which is without breaking the play at all. He picked the cup up off the counter and put it in my hand.
"It's hot," he said. "And I've had your order since Bratislava, so drink it and stop looking at me like that in front of a woman who has to work here."
The cliff jump was on the ninth day and there was cooking duty on it.
There's a place on the caldera where the rock goes straight down into water so cold it takes the top of your head off, and there is a ledge, and a local kid of about seventeen had already demonstrated it twice before we got there.
"Distance from the ledge," I said. "Furthest out wins. Loser cooks for three days."
"Two days."
"Three. You're a defenseman. You're going to go straight down like a piano."
He went out about four feet further than me and did it clean, and I hit the water sideways and lost about a lung.
I honored it loudly. I cooked for three days and announced it at every meal, and I introduced each dish by saying it was being served pursuant to a wager honorably lost.
"If you say the word pursuant one more time," he said on the third night, "I'm taking my plate and going to eat at Rosalina's, and she'll let me, and she'll give me the good bread."
"The good bread is in this house."
"The good bread is wherever the word pursuant is not."
The sunburn was day eleven and it was my own fault, and there is not one thing I will retract about the commentary I received while aloe was administered, except to say that a man who irons socks has no business enjoying anything that much.
And the dishes solved themselves. That's the part neither of us mentioned.
Second night, both of us at that sink, and inside four minutes there was a system.
He washed and I dried, and there was a spot on the counter where the dry ones went, and by the fifth night neither of us had to look up. Not one word was ever spoken about it.