Epilogue
Seven months later, I knew the arrivals board at Tampa International better than I knew my own framing schedule.
I’d also learned the rhythm of Wes by then.
Lisbon, then a food shoot in Oaxaca, then three weeks in Vietnam that turned into four, then a wedding in Edinburgh he swore would be his last wedding and wasn’t.
He left, and I kissed him goodbye at the security line every time, and I measured the days every time, because I never learned how not to.
Every time, without fail, the arrivals board lit up with a flight and a city and a man walking out through the sliding doors with everything he owned on his back—and his eyes scanning the crowd for me.
He always found me fast.
I’m easy to find.
I’m the largest thing in most rooms, and these days I’m usually the one grinning like an idiot, which is strange, because I’d never been a grinner before Wes and our cove.
What I hadn’t expected was that he kept coming back.
The first few months I’d donned my armor and braced for the one where he didn’t, where the open sky won out over the fixed point in Tampa, where the falcon decided the glove was a cage after all.
I’m good at bracing.
I’d built a life out of it.
But he never stopped coming back.
And somewhere in there, without either of us announcing it, the bracing stopped, and the armor was set aside.
Coincidentally, that’s roughly when Finn started inviting himself over for dinner three nights a week.
“He’s here again,” Wes said, not looking up from the onions he was chopping. “I can hear his car. He drives like a man being chased by his own decisions.”
“He brings wine,” I said, in Finn’s defense. “And amusing stories of those decisions.”
“He brings one bottle of wine and drinks most of it himself.” Wes pointed the knife at me fondly. “I love him. I want that on the record before I say the rest. I love that man like a brother, but he’s eaten in this house more times than you have this month, and you live here.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Finn had taken to Wes the way he took to everyone, instantly and completely.
Except that with Wes, there was an added layer, because the two of them had discovered within about a week of meeting that their shared favorite hobby in all the world was making me suffer.
They pursued that hobby like a priest does his calling.
The door banged open without a knock.
“I brought wine,” he announced, holding up a single bottle.
“He’s brought wine,” Wes drawled into the onions.
“And I’ve news.” Finn dropped into a chair at the kitchen island with the gravity of a man about to deliver a State of the Union. “I’ve a date, a real one, on Saturday.”
I set down the pan I was holding.
This was, in the four-plus years I’d known Finn, a rare and precious event. It was something like spotting a comet, or him offering to carry luggage. “A date?”
“A date . . . with a man. He’s a whole man, Mark, with a job and his own teeth and everything.” Finn was glowing, the way he glowed when a plan was coming together. “I met him at a bar. He’s an architect.”
And that’s when Wes, my beautiful falcon, swooped down.
I watched the way I’d once watched him see the gold light coming over a headland, a man recognizing the exact instant a thing becomes worth capturing.
He set the knife down, turned around slowly, and leaned back against the counter with his arms crossed.
He wore the lazy, dangerous grin of a man who had waited seven months for the tables to turn.
“An architect?” Wes asked.
“An architect,” Finn confirmed, oblivious to the danger approaching, as he poured himself wine.
“So let me see if I’ve got this.” Wes tilted his head.
“After four years of torturing this man”—he nodded at me—“about his terrible taste in workwear and his inability to relax and his great tragic loneliness, you, Finn O’Brien, have gone and fallen for a man who designs buildings for a living.
Said man will, on your very first date, almost certainly want to talk about load-bearing walls. ”
There was a silence.
I watched it slam into Finn the way a clothing-optional sign had once smacked me in the forehead—slowly, then all at once.
“That’s . . . no . . . that’s different—”
“You’ve found yourself a Mark,” Wes said, delighted, advancing now, scenting blood.
“A smaller, Irisher Mark, another man obsessed with structure. Tell me, does he have a favorite type of beam? Has he mentioned his feelings about drywall? Because I have to tell you, Finn, the last time someone in this house got excited about a man who reads blueprints, it ended with him giving the least romantic speech in recorded history in a doorway at midnight.”
“It was a good speech,” I objected.
“It was a frequent-flyer program with feelings, and you know it.” Wes didn’t even break stride.
He was fully on offense now, looming over Finn the way Finn had spent four years looming, metaphorically, over me.
“Four years, Finn. Four years of ‘when’s the last time you took a holiday, Mark,’ and ‘barely a date, Mark.’ You sat that man in the front row of a drag show to be devoured alive, and now look at you.
Look at you. Red as your own head over an architect you’ve not even taken to dinner.
You’re vibrating. You’ve gone the color of a stop sign. ”
And he had.
That was the glorious part.
Finn O’Brien, who had made a four-year career of turning me purple at parties, who had narrated my every blush to entire rooms of strangers, who had once announced to a clothing-optional resort that I was covering a mark on my neck, was sitting at my kitchen island the precise shade of a fire engine, opening and closing his mouth, for once in his life entirely without words.
I lost it.
And we’ve established that I don’t laugh easy.
But this came up out of me like water through a broken main, helpless and huge.
It was the kind of laugh that bends a man in half.
I had to put both hands on the counter to stay upright, because in all our years, I had never once seen Finn caught flat.
Wes had done it in under a minute with a single architect.
“Don’t,” Finn warned, pointing at me, going redder. “Don’t you dare, you great gray traitor—”
“You found a Mark,” I wheezed.
“I didn’t—”
“A smaller, Irisher Mark.” I was gone, completely gone, tears in it now. “He’s Irisher. I don’t even know what that means, but it’s perfect! Ask him about his favorite beam, Finn. For me. On the date. Ask him—”
“I hate the both of you,” Finn announced to the kitchen, with enormous dignity, which would have carried more weight if he hadn’t been the color of a poppy. “I brought wine into this house. I brought my joy. And this is the thanks. I’ve been ganged up on by a falcon and a building.”
“A falcon and a building,” Wes repeated, savoring it.
He looked at me, and that set me off again.
Then Wes started laughing, too, and then Finn, who could never stay outside a laugh for long, even one at his own expense.
He put his red face in his hands and started shaking with it, and the three of us stood in my kitchen and howled until the onions burned and we had to start the whole dinner over.
We had the real conversation later, after Finn had gone home flushed and threatening and beloved, promising to report back on the architect.
Wes and I sat on the back porch in the dark, his feet in my lap.
He told me about his next job. A hotel chain wanted him on retainer.
It was a real contract with a base, a center of gravity.
He could still travel, would always travel.
The wandering was stitched too deep to pull out, and I’d never want to, anyway, but it meant Tampa would officially be his home, not just the place his bags landed between flights.
It would become the place he actually, officially, lived.
“I’d keep the storage unit in Denver,” he said, turning his beer in his hands, looking out at the yard, which was how I knew it cost him. “For a while, just so I know it’s there.”
“Keep it forever if you want.”
“I might not want it forever.” He said it quietly, surprised by his own arithmetic.
“For seven months I’ve been waiting to feel trapped, Mark, waiting for the walls to close in, because that’s what always happens.
If I stay too long anywhere, the floor starts feeling like a held breath.
” He looked at me. “But it hasn’t, not here, not with you.
I’ve run out of ways to explain it except the obvious one.
It’s not the place. It was never the place.
” His mouth did the slow rearranging thing. “It’s the man standing in it.”
I wasn’t built for speeches, so I didn’t make one.
I took the beer out of his hands and set it on the rail and pulled him into me. He came easy, the way he’d come easy in a doorway at half past midnight a falcon’s lifetime ago.
“Take the job,” I said into his hair. “Bring the lenses and leave them in my sock drawer. Clutter up every system I’ve got.”
“You sure? It’s concrete, Mark. It’s the opposite of two bags. You’d have a man underfoot. Permanently.”
“I’ve spent my whole life trusting things I could measure,” I said.
“And then a falcon landed on my arm and taught me that the only thing worth having is the thing you can’t run the numbers on.
” I pulled back to look at him, at the weather and the good humor and the amber eyes that had snagged me across a lobby full of strangers when I was the most armored man on an island.
“You came back every time. I stopped bracing for you to leave a long time ago. Stay and I’ll spend the rest of my life trusting you to land. ”
He kissed me then, on a back porch in Tampa.
A man who’d spent his whole life never staying put decided slowly, of his own free will, to stay. I held on to him the way I held on to nothing else in this measurable world, loosely, without bracing, the way you hold a falcon that has chosen the glove.
Finn’s date with the architect went, by his own breathless account, catastrophically well.
He told us over dinner three nights later, the three of us crammed around our table, Wes refilling glasses and me pretending to be put upon and failing.
At some point, somewhere between the main course and Finn describing the architect’s unreasonable forearms, I sat back and looked at the two of them, my best mate gone soft and luminous over an architect, and the falcon who’d folded his wings in my kitchen.
I thought about a raffle ticket, and a front row, and a span of warm water I’d been too careful to cross.
“What?” Wes said, catching me looking.
“Nothing.” I picked my glass back up. “Just measuring something.”
“He’s doing the counting thing,” Finn stage-whispered. “And still his lips move. It’s the most romantic thing about him, and he’d die before he admitted it.”
“They don’t move,” I groused before taking a sip.
“They move a little,” both of them said at once, grinning at each other, two menaces who’d found one another across my dinner table. I let them have it, because they were usually right, and it was their worst quality.
Wes was always going to come back.
So I never measured that distance again.
I didn’t have to.
I really hope you loved comped!.
On the following pages, please enjoy the first few chapters of book one in the Barbacks series, popped!. It’s Finn’s story.