Adrian
Cold floor through his socks. The creak of the board before the bedroom doorway, which he stepped around.
He made coffee in the kitchen corner of the studio, the French press and the two-burner, and the smell filled the room and mixed with the turpentine and the linseed oil, which was what his mornings smelled like, except usually without the part where a professional hockey player was asleep in his bed.
He stood with his coffee and looked at the painting on the east wall.
The morning light through the north windows was different from the work lamp. Colder, flatter, no flattering warmth. The painting in this light was just the painting as it was, and the painting was finished, and the man it was a painting of was forty feet away with his forearm over his eyes.
His brain, helpfully, offered him the ex.
Not the face. He’d stopped keeping the face.
What his brain offered was the morning feel of it.
A different apartment, narrower windows, the blinds always drawn.
Himself lying rigid in someone else’s bed, calculating the distance to his shoes.
Three years of mornings like that, each one teaching him the same lesson, which was that lying frozen in someone’s bed while they figured out how to explain you was not a thing he was built to survive twice.
He set the coffee cup down harder than he meant to. The sound carried.
He heard the loose board.
* * *
Milo came through the corridor in his shirt, unbuttoned, bare feet, and the cold of the studio floor hit him at the threshold. His hair was pushed sideways from sleep and his jaw was loose and he stopped in the doorway and his eyes went to the painting.
He stood there long enough for the radiator to cycle through its full complaint and start over.
“That’s me,” he said. To the painting, not to Adrian.
Adrian’s grip on the mug tightened. “It’s not finished.”
It was finished. It had been finished for two days. He said it anyway because the alternative was saying what was underneath it, and the morning was not big enough for what was underneath it.
Milo turned and looked at him. Not the quick inventory glance. The morning face, jaw loose, looking at Adrian with unhurried attention. Morning light on both of them, cold and even.
Adrian held it. Milo’s eyes were darker in this light, and the unbuttoned shirt showed the hollow at the base of his throat where Adrian had put his mouth six hours ago. The pulse there, visible. Adrian watched it.
Then Milo’s hands went into his pockets.
“I can’t do this in public,” he said.
Plain. No apology, no hedge. He was looking at Adrian when he said it.
Adrian looked at him. The coffee cup. The chip on the rim he kept meaning to stop using. He traced it once with his thumb.
He nodded.
He knew this shape. He’d lived in it for three years, the specific geography of accommodation, adjusting himself to fit inside someone else’s closet.
He’d built his current life on the rubble of it.
And here it was again, arriving in his own studio on a cold morning with a different man and the same sentence wearing different clothes.
He nodded and said none of that.
Milo did not move toward the door.
Adrian noticed. Every other time things had broken through between them, Milo had left. The laugh, the kiss, every time. The door was ten feet away and Milo was standing on the cold floor in his unbuttoned shirt and his feet were not moving.
“Coffee?” Adrian said.
“Yeah.”
He poured the second mug, the blue one, heavier, no chip, and brought it over. Their fingers overlapped on the ceramic during the handoff, Adrian’s paint-stained knuckles against Milo’s bare ones, and neither of them adjusted to avoid it.
They stood in the cold studio with their coffee, and the radiator ticked, and the city came up outside the windows. The first bus on Michigan Avenue, the delivery truck backing on the next block. Adrian’s socks on the cold floor, the left one damp where he’d stepped near the sink.
Milo held his coffee with both hands. The way he held everything. All the way, or not at all.
* * *
Adrian was in the studio when the Hounds played the Fury.
He’d been checking the schedule since preseason.
He’d set up score notifications weeks ago, standing behind the bar on a slow night, tapping the toggle and setting his phone face-down and going on wiping.
Before the wrist, before the kiss, before any of it.
Because he’d wanted to know when Milo was playing, and he hadn’t made himself examine why until it was too late to pretend the answer was casual.
He was at the worktable with a smaller canvas, a study in warm tones, yellows and siennas. His hands were blue-black from the earlier session, the pigment settled into his knuckles. He worked the upper quadrant harder than it needed and let himself think about the nod.
Not the same person. The ex had said of course the first time, with a smile that Adrian now understood had been the smile of a man closing a negotiation.
Of course had meant nothing. I can’t do this in public was a different sentence.
It was ugly and honest and Milo had said it first thing in the morning with his jaw loose from sleep and his eyes on Adrian’s face and Adrian was not going to pretend those two things were the same just because they rhymed.
His phone buzzed. Hounds 3, Fury 2. Final.
He read it. Set the phone down. Picked it up again because the score didn’t tell him what he wanted to know, which was how Milo was, and the score would never tell him that, and he was going to have to sit with that until the intercom buzzed or it didn’t.
He scrolled through the post-game highlights because he had no dignity left and had stopped pretending otherwise.
The Hounds’ winning goal was a breakaway, and the player who scored it was Milo, and Adrian watched the clip three times and could see even through a phone screen that Milo was playing angry, not focused-angry but something rawer, the kind of angry that came from somewhere other than the game.
The hit that preceded the breakaway was hard enough that the broadcast team called it “a statement.” Adrian didn’t know what the statement was. He knew it wasn’t about hockey.
He kept scrolling. The pre-game warmup footage was there, the way it always was, thirty-second clips the team accounts posted for engagement.
The Fury’s warmup. Adrian recognized Cole Kiernan from the interviews he’d watched on his phone in this studio at two in the morning while Milo slept in his bed, the ones where Kiernan talked about hockey with the specific ease of a man who had stopped performing and was just being a person on television.
In the warmup clip, Kiernan was skating past the Fury bench.
The other player, Lindqvist, was at the boards.
Kiernan’s stick tapped Lindqvist’s shin pad as he passed.
One tap. Brief. The camera caught it and moved on.
Adrian set the phone down and looked at the studio ceiling and breathed.
One tap. Public. Casual. The smallest possible gesture of belonging, the kind of thing couples did a thousand times a day without thinking about it, the hand on the shoulder, the knee pressed against a knee under a table.
Except these two were doing it on an NHL ice surface in front of cameras and twenty thousand people and the whole infrastructure of professional sports, and the cameras had caught it and moved on because it was nothing.
It was normal. It was two people who belonged to each other doing what people who belonged to each other did.
Adrian looked at his hands. The paint in his knuckles. The wrist where Milo’s thumb had been.
He made pasta in the kitchen corner. The olive oil he kept next to the turpentine and had once, memorably, confused. He ate standing at the worktable and washed his dish and went back to the canvas and waited.
* * *
He heard the intercom at eleven-fifteen.
“It’s me,” Milo said.
Two words. Adrian’s chest went tight and warm at the same time, which was becoming a familiar problem. He buzzed him in.
Two flights. The loose board. The door.
Milo came in with the cold on him, the smell of the arena underneath his jacket, sweat and rubber and tape.
His face was the operational version, jaw set, but something underneath it was moving, a pressure Adrian could see in the way Milo stood in the doorway and didn’t take off his jacket right away, his hands in his pockets, his eyes going to the painting on the east wall and staying there.
There was a bruise forming on his ribs that Adrian saw when he finally took the jacket and Milo’s shirt rode up.
He didn’t ask about it. He hung the jacket on the third hook, where it went now, because the jacket had a hook now, because Milo had been here enough times for the jacket to have a hook.
“Good game,” Adrian said. He was already filling the kettle.
“How did you know.”
“I set up a notification. Weeks ago. I wanted to know when you were playing.”
Milo stood in the middle of the studio. The work lamp caught the smaller canvas on the worktable, warm tones, the heavy line in the upper quadrant.
The large canvas was in shadow. Adrian watched him process the notification thing, the weeks-ago thing, the fact that someone had been tracking his schedule not because they had to but because they wanted to.
“Tea?” Adrian said.
“Yeah.”