Chapter 5
First Cut
The shop light was on.
Malcolm stood on the dark stretch of Queen East at almost midnight, still in the charcoal suit, tie gone into his pocket somewhere around College Street, and looked through the glass at the one lit window on the block.
Which meant Frankie hadn't gone home. Which meant he was sitting up with the frightened dog.
Which meant Malcolm had been right to get out of the cab twenty blocks early and walk the rest, working out — the way he worked out everything — exactly what he was doing and why, and arriving at no good answer except the true one, which was that the deal was closed and the party was over and there was only one place in the whole city he wanted to be, and it wasn't west.
He'd shaken Halveson's hand. He'd said the right things. He'd watched the man leave happy, watched Renata's shoulders drop with relief, done the entire job he'd flown two thousand kilometers to do. And the second it was done he'd turned east like a compass needle and not fought it even a little.
The walk had sobered him, if he'd been anything but stone sober to start.
Twenty-odd blocks of the city changing around him — the glass towers and valet stands of downtown thinning out, giving way to streetcar wires and dark storefronts and the particular hush of the east end, the whole city getting realer and smaller and more like the man at the end of it with every block.
Somewhere around Broadview he'd stopped pretending he was deciding anything.
He'd decided on the rooftop, with two knuckles against a jaw and a headset ninety seconds too early.
Everything since had just been walking toward it.
Through the glass, Frankie was on the floor again. Cross-legged, jacket off, the good jacket in a heap on the grooming table, and the little gray rescue dog was — not in his lap, not yet, but close, curled a careful foot away, both of them lit gold and quiet in the after-hours hush.
Malcolm knocked, once, soft, so as not to spook the dog.
Frankie looked up. Went still. And for a second his face did the whole argument at once — surprise, want, the shutter trying to come down and not making it — before he got up and crossed the shop and opened the door, and the cool night came in between them, and neither of them said anything at all.
"You're supposed to be closing a deal," Frankie said finally. Quiet. Wary. "In your actual life. Two thousand kilometers of it."
"Closed it." Malcolm stayed on the step. "Shook the hand. Made everybody happy."
"So."
"So I left." He heard how simple it sounded and let it stay simple, because for once in his managed, reasonable, forty-four-year life it actually was.
"I stood in that room with the thing I flew here for finally done, and all I could think about was whether you'd gone home, or whether you were sitting on a floor somewhere being kind to something nobody else would touch.
" He looked at him. "You were. Obviously. Here you are."
Frankie's jaw worked. "Malcolm—"
"I know the rule," Malcolm said. "Warm easy men passing through.
I know it's a good rule. I told you to keep it, and I meant that.
" He took one breath, the one before you step off the high board.
"But I've been doing the reasonable thing for forty-four years, and I flew up here to do one unreasonable thing, and I keep finding out my gut is louder than I ever let it be.
And right now it is extremely loud, Frankie, and it is not saying anything about Sunday. "
"Sunday's real."
"Sunday's real," Malcolm agreed. "I'm not lying to you about Sunday.
I'd never." And that was the thing he needed him to hear, so he said it plain, no charm on it, nothing to hide behind.
"I'm not offering you a story. I'm not Damien.
I don't know what I'm offering — I've never wanted anybody like this in my life and I mean anybody, I don't have a map — but whatever it is, it's not a con.
If you want me to go, I'll go, and I'll still think your movie taste is criminal and your dog is perfect and you're the best thing I found in this whole city.
" He stopped. His heart was going like a much younger man's. "But I'd rather not go."
The little dog, forgotten, had crept to the doorway and was leaning on Frankie's ankle.
Frankie looked down at it. Looked at Malcolm. And something in his face gave — not the shutter slamming, the opposite, the whole guarded architecture of him just quietly setting itself down, tired of holding.
"You walked here," Frankie said. "From King West. In that suit."
"I walked here."
"That's— God, that's such a stupid thing to do. It's miles." His voice had gone rough at the edges. "Come in before you let all the heat out. The dog gets cold."
Malcolm stepped in. Frankie shut the door behind him and turned the deadbolt, and the sound of it was very loud in the quiet, and then they were standing close in the gold light with a locked door and a sleeping city outside, and Malcolm reached up, slow, giving him every second to step back, and set his knuckles against the edge of Frankie's jaw the way he had on the roof — the touch the deal had interrupted — and this time nobody's phone rang.
"Tell me to stop," Malcolm said, "and I'll stop."
"I'm not going to tell you to stop," Frankie said, unsteady, furious about it, already tilting into his hand. "That's the whole problem, I've been trying to for a week—"
Malcolm kissed him.
It wasn't smooth. He'd like to report it was smooth.
He caught the corner of Frankie's mouth first and had to correct, and Frankie made a small startled sound and then a much better one, and got a fist in the front of Malcolm's ruined shirt and hauled him in, and after that there was nothing to manage, no room to read, no next thing to say — just Frankie's mouth and Frankie's hands and the rings cool against Malcolm's neck, and the total, roaring simplicity of finally, finally, and Malcolm — who had spent a whole life being fine — understood in about four seconds exactly what he'd been fine instead of.
He pulled back an inch — just to look, because he wanted to and because he was allowed — and Frankie's face in the gold light was wide open, no sparkle, no armor, just a man caught wanting and finally done fighting it.
"What," Frankie said, breathless, self-conscious under the looking.
"Nothing. You. I keep—" Malcolm shook his head. "You keep changing the exhibit."
Frankie went still. "That's my— you said that. First week. In the shop."
"I did."
"About me."
"It's still about you," Malcolm said. "You keep getting better."
Frankie made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite anything, and hauled him back in by the ruined collar, and kissed him until neither of them could have found the exit if the shop were on fire.
"Okay," Frankie breathed against his mouth, when they finally broke for air, both of them wrecked. "Okay. Not down here. The dog's got opinions and I'm not doing this on a floor at forty—" He stopped. Laughed, shaky. "Upstairs. Come upstairs."
***
The apartment was up a narrow stair at the back, and it was small, and it was — Malcolm registered it in fragments between kisses — completely Frankie.
A wall of records. Too many plants for the light.
One extremely good armchair and nothing else that matched.
No photos, he noticed, and filed even that away tender.
A place built by a man who'd learned to make a whole life fit in the space that was only, ever, his.
"Stop cataloguing my apartment," Frankie said, walking him backward. "I can see you doing it. Reading the room. Turn it off."
"Can't. It's the one skill." Malcolm's hands found the hem of Frankie's shirt. "Anyway I like the room."
"You like the—" Frankie's breath hitched as Malcolm's palms went flat against the warm skin of his sides.
"You're impossible. You show up at midnight in a Tom Ford apology and then you're nice about my terrible apartment, it's not—" He got Malcolm's shirt open, got his hands on him, and lost the rest of the sentence somewhere.
Malcolm had thought — in the two days he'd let himself think about this at all, alone, with the lights off — that he'd be nervous. That the newness of it, the not-knowing, the forty-four years of never once, would make him hesitant, clumsy, in his head.
He wasn't in his head. That was the revelation.
For the first time in longer than he could name, he was nowhere but exactly here — in his hands, in his skin, in the specific real weight of this man against him, Frankie's mouth on his throat, Frankie's clever hands and the low unbroken murmur of him, the same frequency he used on frightened things, except now it was Malcolm being gentled, Malcolm being told I've got you, it's okay, I've got you without a single word, just hands and mouth and that impossible patience turned all the way toward him.
"You're allowed to want it out loud," Frankie said, low against his ear, reading him after all. "Whatever you want. I'll go as slow as you need. There's no wrong way to do this. There's just — tell me."
And Malcolm, who had spent his whole life smoothing over what he wanted until he'd forgotten he was allowed any, heard himself say it — plain, greedy, unguarded, true — and felt Frankie go still and then shiver at the sound of it.
"Yeah," Frankie breathed. "Okay. Yeah."
They got the rest of the clothes gone in the clumsy, laughing way of two grown men in a too-small room.
Malcolm's cufflink defeated them both for an unreasonable stretch, and Frankie said "leave it, oh my God, leave the whole shirt," and Malcolm laughed into his neck, and they left the whole shirt.
Then it was skin — the long warm line of Frankie against him, finally, nothing between them — and the laughing quieted into something with weight.