Chapter 5 #2
Then he took Josh's face in both hands — the pianist's hands, the ones he kept in his pockets, out now, finally with somewhere to be — and he kissed him.
***
It was not a careful kiss.
Ten years of careful, and none of it made it into this.
Josh made a sound against his mouth, low and surprised and wrecked, and came up off that bench like he'd been waiting his whole broke hopeful life for exactly this and had given up believing it would come — his hands fisting in Marcus's shirt, pulling him in, the whole lean lit-up length of him pressing up and in, and Marcus backed him into the side of the piano and kissed him like a man drinking after a decade in the dry, and the good piano let out a low complaining chord where Josh's hip caught the keys and neither of them heard it.
He tasted like the cheap beer he let himself have and under that like something warmer, and he kissed the way he played — open, unguarded, holding nothing back, giving Marcus the whole of it and asking for the whole of it back — and Marcus, God help him, gave it.
Gave it the way he hadn't given anything to anybody since the last time giving had cost him everything he was.
Josh broke it once — pulled back an inch, just enough to breathe, his forehead dropping against Marcus's, both of them ragged — and said Marcus's name against his mouth like it was a question and an answer folded into the same word.
Marcus didn't answer with words; words were the one language he'd lost. He answered the only way he had left, tilting the kid's chin up and taking his mouth again, slower now, deliberate, a man who'd decided.
And Josh gave, and gave — the whole open unguarded everything of him, the thing that had emptied a room to silence an hour ago now spent down to the last of it on Marcus alone, close, in the dark, for no audience at all.
One of Josh's hands came up into the short hair at the back of Marcus's neck and the other stayed knotted in his shirt like he was afraid Marcus would come to his senses, and he was right to be afraid, because that was exactly the thing standing patiently at the edge of the light waiting for Marcus to remember it.
For a minute Marcus didn't remember it. For a minute there was just this, the kid warm and real and wanting in his hands, the music still ringing in the room, the wall down, the drawer open, ten years of held breath finally, finally —
The minute ended.
It always did. That was the whole lesson of Marcus's life, the one he'd paid full price for: the minute where you forget yourself is exactly the minute somebody's deciding what you're worth to them.
And Josh worked for him. Josh played this room.
Josh was the best thing to walk through that door in a decade and Marcus signed his envelope, and this — his hands on the kid's face, the kid's fingers in his hair — this was the first move in the only dance Marcus knew the ending of, and he knew the ending, he'd lived in the ending for ten years.
He stepped back.
It cost him something to do it. He watched it cost Josh more — watched the kid sway a half-inch after him before he caught himself, watched the wanting sit right out in the open on his face for one unguarded second, no shine on it at all, and Marcus had to look at the floor because looking at that was worse than any of it.
"This can't." His voice came out wrong, sanded down, nothing like the flat instrument he ran the room with.
He put a hand up — not sure if it was to hold Josh off or hold himself back, they'd stopped being different things.
"I run this room. You play in it. I sign your — this can't happen. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have."
And Josh — flushed, kiss-wrecked, his shirt twisted in a fist-shape that was Marcus's fault — Josh pulled the smile back on. Marcus watched him do it. Watched the polished one come up over the real one like a shade drawn down over a lit window, quick and practiced and awful.
"Okay," Josh said.
Easy. He said it so easy. The same easy he'd said it at the very first audition, okay, setting down a hot thing, rolling with the no, the callus sliding back over the place where wanting went.
"Yeah. No, you're right. Boss." He got up off the piano, found his jacket, and his hands were steady and his voice was steady and every steady thing about him was a lie, and they both knew it was a lie, and neither of them said so, because saying so would mean one of them had to be brave and they'd both used up their brave for the night on a single kiss.
He shrugged into his jacket. And at the last second, with his back half to Marcus, something slipped out from under the smile — not an accusation, Josh didn't do accusations, just a fact set down quiet on the bar between them: "For the record.
I wasn't gonna take anything from you." A beat.
"I know you can't hear that yet. But that's the part you've got wrong about me.
" Then the smile again, patched back over the top of it. "Anyway."
"Josh."
"I'll lock up." The smile didn't move. "Go home, Marcus."
He turned away to the register, to Monk, to anything that wasn't Marcus's face — busied his steady hands with the guttered candles, pinching them out one by one, and Marcus stood there a second too long watching the shade stay down over the lit window and understood that he'd just done to Josh the exact thing he'd spent the whole night terrified would be done to him.
Taken a man's open unguarded everything, and then, the second it was in his hands, decided it was safer to set it down.
"Josh, I—" But there was no end to that sentence he was brave enough to say out loud, and Josh didn't turn around to make him find one, and after a moment Marcus picked up his keys off the bar.
And Marcus, who had crossed twelve feet he'd spent ten years not crossing, went home — and hated, all the way down the clean blue-lit street, that he'd taught the kid that trick himself, the okay, the drawn shade, the art of pretending a closed door was fine.
He'd been so careful. He'd built the whole thing so nobody could take anything from him.
He could still taste the cheap beer and the warmer thing under it.
The sign burned steady and blue over the door — Josh's work, whole now, no stutter left in it — and Marcus stopped under it for a second, the way he'd stood on this same sidewalk the night the kid first played his piano in the dark, and then he made himself walk.
He hadn't planned on being the one doing the taking.