Chapter 5 An Item on an Agenda
Ryan
I had to borrow a key off the super to get into the apartment. Mr. Almeida looked me over in the smell of his lunch, the slept-in shirt and the bad bandage, and didn’t ask how a man locks himself out of the only place he’s got. He pressed a spare into my hand. “Bring it back whenever.”
I climbed the flickering stairs and let myself in like a guest.
The apartment was clean.
That was the first thing, before I had the door shut.
The living-room floor where it happened was swept and dry and bare.
No glass. No water. No scatter of beige paper.
I crossed to the kitchen threshold and crouched and ran two fingers along the grout between the boards.
Nothing in the seams. No grit, no stain.
Somebody had got down on his knees on these boards and cleaned my blood out of the floor so I wouldn’t come home and find it.
And then it had me. All of it, at once. The way a wave takes you when you’ve turned your back on the water.
The floor. His weight coming down beside me.
His hand at the back of my neck, warm and certain, the last thing on earth I’d have looked for from a man who never touched anyone.
The way I leaned into it before I knew I was doing it.
My mouth on his. The low sound he made in his chest, the one I hadn’t stopped hearing from the moment I left.
I came up off my heels too fast and the room tilted and the memory came up with it. Total. Vivid. My body remembering ahead of my head. The heat of him. The give of his mouth. The wanting that came from nowhere and took the top of my skull clean off.
It made no sense. That was the wall I kept walking into and couldn’t get past.
And then a big silent difficult man knelt in my mess and said you don’t have to pretend with me, and I kissed him like I was drowning and he was the air, and every certainty I’d carried my whole life came loose off its footings at once.
Standing in the clean lamplit quiet of everything I’d been so sure of, I couldn’t have told you what I was.
The longing was the worst of it. Not the confusion.
Confusion I could file. Manage. Wait out like weather.
This was that some part of me, right now, alone in the emptied apartment with his kindness scrubbed into the floor under my feet, wanted him back in the room with a sharpness that scared me worse than anything the family or the police had in them.
Wanted his hand. Wanted the weight of him in the doorway.
Wanted, plainly, in a register I had no words for and had never needed words for, Luke. The whole impossible fact of him.
I shut it down.
No. Not this. Not on top of a folder marked INDEFINITE and a file being dug back up across the city by men who wanted me gone for good.
That was load enough for one man. Whatever this other thing was, it had to be a symptom of that, the same lie I’d fed myself on the bar stool the night before.
Once the case cleared, it would go back to being what it had always been.
I made myself believe it. For whole minutes at a time I managed it.
I showered because I couldn’t sit in yesterday’s shirt another hour. Held the bad hand out of the weak stream. Did not think about his hands on me. That lasted until the water hit the back of my neck and then it didn’t last at all.
I changed the gauze. The cut underneath was already closing.
Smaller than it had felt going in, the way they always are.
Clean shirt. I reached for the cologne out of an old reflex and stopped with my hand around the bottle and set it down unopened.
I wasn’t going to walk out into that kitchen smelling like I’d dressed for an occasion.
He’d have known. He knew that smell the way he seemed to know everything about me I’d never told him.
Then I sat at the counter in the dark and waited. I didn’t let myself rehearse a word. Rehearsing was how I stayed up on the surface, and the surface was where I’d spent my whole life hiding.
The light went while I sat. The window went from blue to the orange of the streetlight coming on below. It wasn’t long before a key turned in the lock.
My whole body came up off the stool before I’d decided to move. The deadbolt turned. The door opened on the shape of him, big in the frame, the cold of the stairwell coming in with him. He stopped when he saw me standing there in the dark.
He reached over and turned on the lamp by the door without looking at me.
“Almeida let me in,” I said. “I didn’t have mine.”
He nodded. Set his keys down. Hung his jacket on the hook, the one I’d grabbed mine off of going out the door a night ago. His eyes moved over everything in the small room except my face.
That was the thing I couldn’t get my hands around.
He wouldn’t look at me. Luke, who watched everything, who’d unsettled me for a month with the flat unbroken attention he gave a room, wouldn’t bring his eyes up to mine.
And I couldn’t read it. Anger held down to the coals, or something I wanted to look at even less.
The not-knowing sat in my chest beside the guilt, which had taken its own seat by now and wasn’t giving it up.
I’d done this. Kissed him and run and let him clean the floor alone.
And I still didn’t know what I’d done it for, or what I wanted now, and being guilty and unsure at the same time turned out to be a particular kind of sick.
“I came back,” I said. It was meant to be the whole speech. In the lit kitchen it was four words, and they just sat there.
“I see.” He said it to the counter.
I waited for the rest of it. There wasn’t any rest of it.
He didn’t ask where I’d been. Didn’t ask about the night, the kiss, the running, any of it.
He moved around the edge of me into the kitchen and I stepped back to give him room.
We did the small careful dance of two men too aware of each other in four feet of space.
Both of us minding not to touch. Both pretending the minding was nothing.
“You eat?” he said. To the kettle.
“Not for a while.”
He filled it. Got the rice on. Cracked eggs into the scratched pan one-handed the way he did. The smell came up, oil and egg and starch. The smell of the only other night I’d watched him cook, weeks ago, after the fall, when he put me to bed and made me eat first.
I understood this was the conversation. The food was what he had in place of the words. He was going to feed me and not say the thing, and let the feeding be the saying, and that was as close as either of us was getting tonight to the floor and what happened on it.
“The Inspector asked after you,” he said, after a while, his back half-turned, not looking around. “Said the desk’s there when you want it. He’s not writing you up for today. Come in when you’re ready. No rush.” A pause, the spatula moving. “He means it. He’s not pushing you.”
I should have felt something clean at that.
Relief. The small mercy of a boss who’d hold my chair while I came apart.
What I felt instead was the cold edge of the bigger thing behind it.
The file. The reopening. Men I’d never see, across the city, weighing whether I got to keep the only thing I’d ever been any good at.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe. We’ll see.”
It came out vague and I let it stay vague.
He didn’t reach in after it. Didn’t push.
Maybe he knew there was nothing in me tonight worth pushing against. Maybe he just didn’t have the words for are you going to be all right any more than I had them for the truth, which was that I didn’t know.
That I was scared in a way I’d never once let anyone see.
Scared the way you’re scared of a thing already in motion that you can’t get in front of.
The desk, the badge, the whole shape of my life, sitting on a table being decided by people who’d decided against me once already and found it easy.
He put the plate in front of me. Sat across with his own.
We ate without talking. The eggs were good, plain and hot and salted right, and I was hungrier than I’d let myself know.
For a while there was nothing in the room but the two of us and the small sounds of forks and the fridge going behind it.
It was the most peace I’d had in two days.
And it was built entirely on us agreeing, without one word passing, not to say the thing.
When the plates were empty he stood and took them both and washed them and dried his hands and folded the towel square over the rail.
“Early shift,” he said.
“Okay.”
He came back past me, close in the narrow kitchen. Close enough that I felt the warmth come off him and the plain clean smell of the soap we both used. He didn’t stop. Didn’t slow. Didn’t look at me. He went down the short hall to his room. His door closed. Soft. The latch finding home.
I sat alone at the counter and let out the breath I’d been holding since five o’clock.
It hadn’t been a fix. He hadn’t forgiven me, because there was nothing to forgive that either of us would name.
He hadn’t said it was all right, because it wasn’t, and he didn’t lie.
He’d fed me and gone to bed and left both our doors where they’d always stood.
A room each. The wall between. It wasn’t a fix.
It was a floor. After a night of standing on nothing, a floor was more than I’d come home daring to hope for.
Then the phone lit up on the counter, buzzing hard against the wood, and the floor went out from under me again.
Mother.