31. Thomas #3
We were slow about it, and careful, the way you're careful in a house after a funeral: not sad, just aware of what rooms can hold.
His collar still had the drive on it, cold wool and the ghost of the facility's polish, and under that the Lodge's own weather, woodsmoke off the banked fire, candle wax.
I got him out of the jacket first, on principle.
The day could stay; it didn't get to stay dressed.
Every button got finished properly for once.
I did his left cuff one-handed in four seconds because I don't lose to a button twice.
When his right hand crossed me I caught it and put my mouth to the cold stripe the severing left in the palm, which fixes nothing, which is why it needed doing.
The stripe stayed cold under my mouth, and it tasted of nothing at all, which is what it cost, and I stayed on it until the nothing warmed.
He watched me do both with the whole day still standing in his face, and let the day stay in the room with us, which is the entire difference between this bed and every bed before it.
Nothing has to leave. Grief stays; want doesn't wait for it to go.
They carry each other. We found that out with our hands first, his moving over me like a man rereading rather than reading, slow enough that the wanting had time to double back through the wire and come home again with his signature on it.
I put my mouth to his throat and got salt and soap and the long day under both.
He undid the rest of me kneeling, methodical, and the floor's cold came up through my feet while his hands stayed warm, and warm won.
It kept winning. That's the finding of the night.
"Still yes?" he said, against my ear, grammar intact.
"Still yes. All the way down."
There were logistics, because there are always logistics: the lamp out, the one candle lit, the oil warmed in his hand first because he is incapable of handing anyone a cold anything, the pillow squared under me like the watch.
He opened me slowly, patient as inventory, his marginalia low against my temple, there you are, and I have you, and once, undone, home, one word with no grammar around it, and the word went down the wire and lit every room it passed through.
The candle held gold, small, steady, hearth-colored.
Nothing white tonight. Nothing reading us. Just kept.
When he came into me it was unhurried and entire, a sentence with no clause spared, and the loop did its round unfair generous thing, his pleasure landing in me and mine in him and the interest compounding, and we moved like that a long time, past talking, past the last of the light, two men keeping one appointment.
His breath at my ear went even, then counted, then lost, procedure failing in the direction I love best, and the salt of his shoulder got into my mouth and stayed.
The loop folded the day in with the rest, the window chair, the folded hands, and none of it broke the night.
It went in. It was carried. Somewhere in the middle of it the frost corner let go of the glass.
I heard the tick, ice quitting a pane, small as a page turning, and by the time I had attention to spare the corner was clear and running with melt, and the room felt attended: far under the floors, past the cellars, past the county of stone, the warmth we make goes where everything we make goes now, and the thing that holds the lease down there turned toward it the way you turn toward a fire lit in another room.
Being watched by winter used to crawl my skin.
Now the winter melts. I've stopped pretending to understand the difference.
I've settled for being on the right side of it.
It took us the loop's way, no one first, no one driving, one event with two spellings, and afterward he stayed and I kept him there, his weight the best argument I own against ever moving, the sweat cooling on us in the candle's gold, and the house was quiet all the way to the roof.
In the dark, his heart under my ear running its half-beat argument with mine, I said, "September third. I asked if you still liked the post. You said ask me in December."
The watch on the nightstand, squared to the edge, had opinions about the hour. I ignored them. "It's December for two more days. Asking."
He was quiet for one full four-in, hold, six-out.
"I did not like the post," he said. "I kept it. Nine years, the way you keep a watch: wound, correct, and never once consulted for anything but the time." His hand found the back of my head in the dark, unhurried, certain. "The post has since changed hands. Ask me again at Candlemas."
"That's a date, Headmaster."
"It is on the calendar, Dr. Mercer. Both of ours."
Term starts on the ninth. For the first time in my working life I can't wait for a term, and there's nobody left to be surprised by that, least of all the man asleep on my arm, who heard me think it and smiled without waking.
I reached over him for the notebook, because some entries don't keep till morning, and put the last line of the year under PEOPLE, and here it stands.
Us. Filed. Sharing.