Chapter 6 #2
And once Gus had hold, he didn't do it by halves.
That was the thing that undid Amos, that would undo him for a long time after — that a man who'd been so frightened of taking, once he let himself, gave with the same bottomless open hand he gave the whole harbor, except that now the whole harbor was one man in a narrow bed, and Amos had never in his life been the whole of anybody's attention and did not know what to do with the flood of it.
Gus learned him. Learned what made his breath catch and went back and did it again, patient, thorough, a man who fixed things right or not at all, and Amos who had spent six years making himself small and gone and easy to leave lay there being learned by heart and felt himself getting realer under the hands doing it, the way the pound had come realer crib by crib, the way a thing comes back when somebody finally decides it's worth the keeping.
He heard himself say Gus's name. He heard himself ask for things — him, Amos Kean, who asked nobody for anything — ask, out loud, in the dark, and get them, and ask again.
They got the rest of it off between them.
The narrow bed took them both. And Amos — who had not let a single soul close enough to matter in six years, who had made an art of the arm's length and the fair tide's distance, who broke what he tried to hold and so held nothing — let Gus's weight come down over him and open him and was not afraid, which was its own astonishment, lying there under a man big enough to break him and feeling only kept.
Held. Chosen. Gus's mouth at his throat and Gus's hand finding him and Gus saying his name low against his skin, not to signal anything, just because it was true, just Amos, like a man who couldn't believe the having of it — and Amos gave it back, gave him everything, arched up into him and took him in and held on, and for the first time in longer than he could stand to count there was a set of hands on him that wanted him, only him, this him, the wrecked and running and worth-nothing him, and did not seem to find him wanting at all.
It built slow, the way the day had built, and then it stopped being slow.
And what carried Amos over wasn't the body of it in the end, though God knew the body of it was enough — it was the moment he understood, with Gus moving over him and into him and shaking with the held-back care of it, that Gus had stopped keeping score.
That somewhere in the dark the ledger had gone out of the man.
He wasn't giving Amos this to pay a debt or earn a place or make himself useful and therefore allowed to exist. He was doing it because he wanted to, purely, for no reason but the wanting, the first free thing Gus Ouellette had let himself have in twenty years — and he was having it with Amos, in Amos, holding on to Amos like the one plank left of a wreck — and Amos, who had come around that point three weeks ago with one fender and no name on his boat and every intention of being gone by the tide, understood that he was being kept.
Not needed. Not used. Kept. Chosen and held and wanted and kept, and the understanding of it broke over him at the same moment the rest of it did, so that he couldn't have told you after which wave took him, the body's or the heart's — only that he went under holding on to Gus with everything he had, and Gus went under a breath behind him with his face in Amos's neck, and neither of them let go.
***
After, Gus lay half over him in the narrow bed with his ruined shoulder under Amos's hand and his heart still going hard against Amos's side, and neither of them said anything for a long time, and it was the good kind of not-saying, the kind Amos had thought he'd used up his whole allotment of years ago.
"You didn't apologize once," Amos said, finally, into the dark. "Whole time. Not once."
"Didn't dare. You'd have thrown me out." Gus's voice was rough and slow and Amos could hear the smile in it, and something else under the smile, something raw.
His hand was moving on Amos's chest, over the tattoo, slow, like a man learning a thing by heart.
"Cora Lee," he read, with his thumb, though there wasn't light enough to see it.
"You carry her on your arm and your boat's got no name at all. Why's that."
Amos was quiet. Trust the man to find the one loose plank in the dark and set his weight on it.
"Named her for my father when I lost him," he said at last. "The boat.
Went to paint it on her that first winter and — couldn't. Sat there with the brush an hour.
Couldn't do it." He'd never told anybody this.
He heard himself telling it and didn't stop.
"Because you name a boat for somebody, you're keeping them.
You're saying this one I hold on to, this one stays, whatever it costs me.
And I'd just watched holding on cost my father everything he had.
So I couldn't. I sailed her six years with no name, because a nameless thing you can let go of.
A nameless thing, when it comes time to run, you can just — run.
" His throat had gone tight. "I've kept her nameless so I'd be able to leave her.
That's the truth of it. I've never told a living soul that. "
Gus's hand had gone still on his chest.
"And now here I am," Amos said, lower, "in a house belonging to a man who won't keep a single thing for himself, having just — and I can't feel my own feet for wanting to stay, and it scares me worse than the water ever did.
Because the last time I let myself hold on to something, I broke it.
That's what I do, Gus. Dee told you what you do.
I'll tell you what I do. I hold on wrong and it breaks and then I run.
So." He turned his head. In the dark Gus was very close, listening the way he listened, the whole of him bent toward it.
"Two of us in one bed. One who can't keep anything, and one who can't keep anything either but calls it a different name. God help us both."
Gus didn't say the easy thing. Amos would have hated him if he'd said the easy thing. He just gathered Amos in, careful and sure, the bad arm and all, and held on, and said, into Amos's hair, "Then we'll be no good at it together. That's still better than being no good at it alone."
And Amos, who had a hundred reasons ready why that was a fool's arithmetic, could not for the life of him make his mouth say one of them.
They lay there a while in the dark. The house ticked and settled around them.
And Amos felt the exact moment Gus started to drift, felt the big body go heavy and loose against him the way a body only goes when it has decided, somewhere below the part that gets a vote, that it is safe — and understood that he was watching a man sleep who did not sleep, that whatever else this night had been it had also been the first full breath Gus Ouellette had let out in twenty years, and that Amos had done that.
Not fixed anything. Not paid anything down.
Just held on and refused to let the man be sorry, for a few hours, and it had been enough to put him under.
It was the most useful thing Amos had done in six years and it had cost him nothing but the terror of staying still.
He lay awake a long time holding a sleeping man he had no business keeping, and did not run, and was more frightened by the not-running than he had ever been by any weather in his life.
***