Chapter 6
Slow Drag
Marcus lasted nine days.
Josh counted them, because counting was a hobby now and because there wasn't a whole lot else to do with the particular ache of being kissed like that and then handled like a delivery for a week and a half.
Nine days of good set tonight and the horns need you back an eighth and nothing, nothing, in the eyes — the drawer shut so hard Josh could've filed a noise complaint.
He'd have believed the whole thing was a fever dream except that once, on day four, he'd caught Marcus watching his hands on the keys with a look on his face like a man reading a letter he wasn't allowed to answer, and Josh had thought: okay.
He's not fine either. Neither of us is fine.
The worst part was the arranging. They still did it — the book needed work and neither of them was willing to give that up even to keep the wall standing — so three nights a week Josh sat at the keyboard with Marcus a careful yard away, pointing, humming, never touching, both of them pretending the yard was normal and both of them aware to the millimeter of exactly how far a yard was.
It was the most excruciating foreplay of Josh's life and neither of them would have called it that under torture.
By day nine he'd have confessed to crimes.
He didn't push. He'd learned that much about the man — you didn't chase Marcus into anything, you left the door open and you waited.
So he left the door open for nine days, and on the tenth, a slow Tuesday with the room down to nobody and the rain finally coming, it was Marcus who walked through it.
It happened over the good piano, because of course it did.
Josh was closing up the fallboard after a run-through and Marcus came to take the cash bag and their hands landed on the wood at the same time, an inch apart, and neither of them moved.
The rain was loud on the windows. Monk had gone to sleep on the bar.
And Marcus looked at Josh's hand next to his on the black lacquer for a long time, like it was a decision he was watching somebody else make, and then he said, low, wrecked, not looking up:
"I can't do the nine days again."
"So don't."
"It's a bad idea."
"Yeah," Josh said. His heart was going like a snare. "I heard it's the best kind."
Marcus laughed — actually laughed, one rough surprised note, the first one Josh had ever gotten out of him — and that was the thing that did it, that was the crack in the granite Josh had been working at for two months, and when Marcus finally looked up his face had nothing shut in it at all.
"Come home with me," Marcus said. "I don't want to do this in the room. Not the first time." A breath. "Come home with me."
Josh had never said yes to anything so fast in his life.
***
Marcus lived eight blocks away, up over a shuttered print shop, in a apartment that told Josh more about the man than two months of guessing games had.
It was clean and spare and provisional — a good chair, a wall of records, a bed made with the corners squared, and almost nothing else.
No clutter, no photos, no evidence. A place a man kept ready to leave at an hour's notice, or a place a man had never let himself fully move into, ten years of living like the lease might get called.
There was no piano. Of course there was no piano.
There was a beautiful old turntable and a thousand records and not one single instrument, a musician's home scrubbed clean of the thing that used to be his whole life.
Ten years of a man who loved music enough to own every record ever pressed and would not — could not — keep one instrument in the room where he slept.
Josh took it all in from the doormat, dripping, and understood that he was being handed something.
That letting him see this room was its own version of the thing Marcus had asked for on the stage: the real one.
The unlit one. Marcus didn't do it with his face and he'd never do it with words.
He did it by leaving the door to his whole spare, guarded, provisional life standing open, and letting Josh walk in out of the rain.
"You're cataloguing," Marcus said behind him. Dry. But his hand had come to rest at the small of Josh's back, warm through the damp shirt, and it wasn't going anywhere.
"I'm not — okay, I'm a little cataloguing."
"Stop." And Marcus turned him around, there in the doorway of his too-empty apartment with the rain coming down the windows, and kissed him, and the nine days went out of both of them at once.
It was slower than the stage had been. That night on the piano had been a lightning strike, all adrenaline and shock — this was the thing lightning leaves behind, the low roll of it, a man taking his time because for once there was time.
Marcus kissed him like he was learning him, unhurried, thorough, his hands coming up to frame Josh's face and then down, mapping him, the damp shirt gone somewhere and then the rest, and Josh — who ran his whole life at a hundred miles an hour, who filled every silence, who performed even when he thought he wasn't — went quiet under those hands in a way he never went quiet.
There was nothing to perform. Marcus wasn't watching the show.
Marcus had never once been in the audience.
They got to the squared-off bed and Marcus laid him down like he was something worth being careful with, and the care was almost too much — Josh had to shut his eyes against it, the tenderness, the deliberate unhurried attention of a man who did nothing carelessly and had apparently decided to do this least carelessly of all.
Big warm hands. That low voice at his ear, saying his name, saying here, saying I've got you, the words spare and rough and worth more for how much they cost him.
Marcus touched him like he was reading braille, like Josh was a language he'd waited a long time to learn, and Josh gave himself up to it, arched into it, said things he didn't plan to say, the shine burned all the way off him until there was just the broke hopeful wanting truth of him, laid out under a man who looked at that — the actual him, unlit, unperformed — like it was the best thing he'd ever been handed.
"Look at me," Marcus said, when they were close, when Josh had come apart enough that the old reflex kicked and he turned his face into the pillow to hide it. "Josh. Look at me. I want the real one."
And that was the whole war of Josh's life, right there.
The real one. The face he kept for nobody.
He'd spent thirty years making sure the last thing anybody got was the unguarded truth of him, because the unguarded truth was need, and need was how you ended up watching the music leave from behind a window.
He looked at Marcus.
He let him have it — all of it, the fear and the want and the how-much, no smile on it anywhere — and Marcus held his eyes through the peak of it and didn't look away, didn't flinch, didn't do the drawer, just stayed, the whole time, present and unhurried and there, and it undid something in Josh that had been knotted so long he'd stopped feeling it as a knot and started feeling it as just the shape of himself.
It should have scared him more than it did — being seen like that, all the way down, by a man who missed nothing.
His whole life the plan had run the other way: keep moving, keep shining, never let anybody get the flashlight all the way to the bottom, because the bottom was where his father lived, where the fear was that the music wasn't worth what it cost and the joy was just a boy whistling in a dark house.
But Marcus had gone down there with him, into the unlit part, and hadn't recoiled, hadn't tried to fix it or talk him up out of it.
It turned out the thing Josh had been guarding his whole life like it was something shameful was, to at least one person, the exact opposite of shameful.
He didn't have a word for what that did to him.
He figured he'd be a while looking for one.
Afterward he cried a little, which was mortifying, and Marcus didn't make it a thing. Just pulled the sheet up and pulled Josh into the warm solid line of him and let it happen, one hand moving slow up and down Josh's back, saying nothing, which from Marcus was everything.
***
"Can I tell you something dumb," Josh said, into the dark, into the space under Marcus's jaw.
"Mm."
"I'm so broke it's a health condition." He hadn't planned to say it.
It just came, now that the door was open, now that there was somebody on the other side of it who'd looked at the real one and stayed.
"Like — the mattress. In my place. It's got a leak, and every morning I'm a little closer to the floor, and I keep meaning to buy the patch kit but the patch kit's nine dollars and nine dollars is — nine dollars is real, right now, that's the actual math of my life.
And I come in every night and play your room and grin at everybody like I'm a guy who's got it handled, and I don't have it handled, I haven't had it handled since Dayton, I'm just —" His voice did something he didn't authorize. "I'm really good at the grin."
Marcus was quiet for a moment. His hand didn't stop moving on Josh's back.
"I know," he said.
"You know I'm broke?"
"I know you're really good at the grin." A beat.
"I've been watching you not-eat in my bar for two months.
I know exactly how good you are at it." His arm tightened, drew Josh in closer against him.
"You don't have to do it here. That's the whole — you don't have to do it here, with me.
I've got enough grinning for the both of us covered, and I'm terrible at it, so it works out. "