Milo #2
They turned and walked.
* * *
Two weeks later, Adrian came to Milo’s apartment for the first time.
It wasn’t planned. Milo on the phone from his car, the parking lot emptying around him, saying he was twenty minutes away and had eaten nothing since the morning skate.
Adrian saying he’d make something. The ease of that, I’ll make something, as if making food for someone were just a thing a person did.
The logic of the exchange arriving at the conclusion that somewhere had to be where the making happened.
Adrian’s building was farther in the opposite direction.
The choice settled the way the left turn on Michigan had settled.
He pulled into the parking garage and sat with the engine off. Concrete and fluorescent light and his own breathing. He went up.
Adrian was in the lobby studying the decorative sculpture near the elevator, which Milo had never once registered as an object with qualities. His head was tilted. The painter’s inventory at work.
“Nice building,” Adrian said.
“It’s fine,” Milo said.
He unlocked the door. Went in first.
Adrian came in behind him. Set the canvas bag on the counter, the clink of glass, the thud of something wrapped in paper, and then his hands stopped on the granite.
His eyes moved from the counter to the living room to the ceiling and back. Not the objects. The space between them. What was there and what wasn’t.
Adrian moved through the apartment. Into the living room where the furniture was arranged correctly and the shelves held one book and nothing else.
The couch was gray. The coffee table was glass.
He looked at the walls. Bare. Eggshell white.
Not a single nail hole. He opened the refrigerator.
Two bottles of water, pre-made protein, condiments from a delivery order. He closed it.
He turned around.
“You don’t live here,” he said. Not cruel. Just true, the way he’d say it’s raining or that’s blue.
“I sleep here,” Milo said.
“That’s not what I said.”
He turned back to the canvas bag and started taking things out.
Adrian moved through the kitchen the way he moved through every space he decided to occupy, which was like it already belonged to him.
He found the utensil drawer on the second try.
Pulled the largest pan from the lower cabinet.
Tested the burners and chose the left because the gas caught faster.
He’d brought real ingredients: things in paper bags, loose herbs, a head of garlic with the skin on.
Olive oil into the pan. The first sizzle.
Then garlic, his thumb splitting the clove, the papery skin falling, the knife going through it in three quick rocks, and the smell that followed was the smell of every kitchen that had ever been a kitchen.
It went into the oil and the air changed and the apartment that had never held the smell of cooking began to fill with it.
Milo took off his jacket.
He sat on the counter across from the stove and watched Adrian cook.
The ease of his hands, the sleeves pushed past his elbows, the tendons in his forearms when he shook the pan.
He tasted from a wooden spoon he’d brought in the bag, his own spoon, not trusting the apartment to have one, and adjusted.
Salt. More oil. A pinch of something red.
They ate on the floor in the living room because the dining table had never been used for eating, the surface carrying its factory shine, and they’d both understood without discussing it that the floor was more honest. The hardwood was cool through Milo’s jeans.
Detroit’s skyline through the south-facing windows, no other light on.
The pasta was hot and the garlic was in the air and Milo ate with the bowl warming his palms.
“What did you eat before,” Adrian said. He was twisting pasta with one hand, his back against the wall, legs stretched toward the windows.
“Restaurants. The team meal. Protein bars.”
“Every day.”
“Most.”
“How long.”
Milo thought about it. How long since a kitchen had smelled like this. “Since my last billet family. In juniors.”
Adrian looked at him. He didn’t say anything. He ate.
“My mother still cooks,” Milo said. He wasn’t sure why he was continuing.
The words coming up from somewhere he hadn’t opened on purpose.
“When I’m home in the summer. Which is two weeks.
” He turned his fork against the bowl. “My dad built a clock. For the kitchen. Wrong by eleven minutes. He’s been meaning to fix it for six years.
” He stopped. The heel of his hand went to his sternum.
“Nobody moves it. My mother bought a second clock. He hasn’t noticed. ”
Adrian’s fork rested on the rim of his bowl. Hands stopped. He didn’t fill the space.
“She didn’t want to embarrass him,” Milo said.
“Yeah,” Adrian said. Quiet. The word carrying everything it needed to carry.
After: the kitchen cleaned, side by side at the sink, Adrian washing and Milo drying.
Adrian’s sleeves pushed up, his hands in the water.
The rhythm of it, wash, rinse, hand over, dry, stack, building its own silence.
The kitchen smelled like garlic and oil and the window above the sink showed their reflections doubled against the city at night.
Adrian’s hand came to Milo’s jaw.
The warmth of his palm. His thumb at the hinge where the muscle lived, his fingers along the bone toward the chin. The exact placement from the studio, found again without searching. His palm was damp from the dishwater.
Milo let himself be studied. Stood in the dark living room of his empty apartment and let someone look.
“Come on,” Adrian said.
Milo followed him down the hall, through his own apartment, past the spare room where nothing was stored, past the bathroom with its single towel, and toward the bedroom.
The hallway was narrow and the walls were bare, and behind him the kitchen smell held.
It would be gone by morning when the air system cycled through and replaced it with the apartment’s native nothing.
The bed was correctly made, sheets pulled tight. Adrian sat on it and looked at the room. Bare walls. Closed closet. Nightstand with a single phone charger plugged into nothing. His eyes came back to Milo in the doorway.
He reached for him. One hand extended, palm up. Not pulling. Offering.
Milo crossed the room and took it.
Adrian drew him down. Milo’s knee between Adrian’s thighs, Adrian’s face tilted up, his breath warm on Milo’s chin. Adrian’s hands came to his hips, thumbs in the hollows above the hip bones, the pressure patient. Then his mouth on the side of Milo’s neck, below the ear, and Milo’s eyes closed.
The pace was different from the studio. Adrian’s hands traveled up his back under the shirt, the fabric gathering at his wrists, traveling the length of his spine like he was memorizing each vertebra.
Not the confidence of his own space. The care of someone who had come into an empty room and understood what empty rooms needed.
Adrian pulled Milo’s shirt over his head and pressed his mouth to the center of his sternum, the exact place where Milo pressed his own hand when the weight came.
Lips against bone. Breath hot through the skin.
The sound Milo made came from somewhere behind his ribs, and Adrian’s hands tightened on his hips and his mouth moved lower, over the ridges of his stomach, taking his time the way he hadn’t the first night, the way the empty apartment seemed to require.
Adrian’s thumbs traced the lines of muscle from hip bone to groin, the pressure following the topography. Milo’s fingers dug into Adrian’s shoulders, gripping harder than the moment required.
He knew the grip was different from the studio.
In the studio he’d held on because his body was braced for the end of it, every muscle ready for the moment Adrian would pull back.
Here, in his own bed, in his empty apartment with garlic in the air because someone had cooked for him, he held on because of how much he wanted it to stay.
The wanting was the new thing. Not the fear of losing but the weight of having.