Chapter 5 #2
He'd told Frankie he had no map, and it was true, and it turned out not to matter, because Frankie had the map and used it the way he did everything: patient, exact, generous.
His hands moved over Malcolm like he was learning him by touch, unhurried, that low murmur going the whole time — here, like this, is that good, tell me — the same frequency he used on frightened things, except every word of it aimed at taking Malcolm apart.
And it was working. Malcolm heard himself make sounds he didn't recognize and didn't care, because that was the revelation, again, bigger: forty-four years of watching himself from a polite distance, and now there was no distance at all, no watcher, no managing — just the specific unbearable good of this man's mouth and hands and weight, and the way Frankie said his name like it was worth saying slowly.
He got his hands on Frankie in return. Clumsy first, then less clumsy, reading the hitch of breath, the way the rings bit into his shoulder, learning fast because he wanted to — because for once he wanted the whole radio station and not the hum.
And Frankie's careful control started to fray, the guard he wore even here coming loose thread by thread, and that undid Malcolm more than any of the rest of it: that he could reach the man who reached everyone else. That he was allowed all the way in.
"Malcolm—" Frankie's voice broke on it, wrecked, all the sparkle stripped down to something raw and unguarded and true. "Malcolm."
"I know," Malcolm said against his mouth, holding on, holding him. "I've got you. I've got you."
And then it crested and took them both, the gold city glow through the plants and Frankie's hands fisted tight in his and no room left in either of them for Sunday, for planes, for rules, for anything but this—
At the peak of it Malcolm said Frankie's name like it was the first true word he'd ever gotten right.
***
After, the ceiling.
Malcolm lay on his back in a bed that was too small for a man his size and did not care even slightly, one arm asleep under Frankie, the other draped over his own chest, watching the streetlight move on the ceiling and doing no diagnostics at all.
His whole loud managing brain had, for once, absolutely nothing to say.
It was the quietest he'd been inside in years.
"You're smiling," Frankie said, into his shoulder. "I can feel it. It's smug. Stop being smug."
"I'm not smug. I'm—" He searched for it. Landed on the truth, which lately he kept doing by accident. "I think I'm relieved."
"Relieved."
"I spent a real long time thinking there was just something turned down low in me.
That everybody else got a whole radio station and I got — fine.
Pleasant. A nice quiet hum." He turned his head.
Frankie was watching him, guarded and soft at once, copper hair a disaster, and Malcolm's chest did something enormous.
"There was nothing turned down low. Turns out I was just in the wrong room my whole life. That's all it was."
Frankie was quiet a beat too long. Then, lightly — too lightly, the tell — "Careful. You keep talking like that and I'll start thinking you mean it."
"I do mean it."
"I know." Frankie sat up a little, and Malcolm watched the guard try to find its way back onto him, hunting for the exits even here, even now, warm and undone in his own bed.
"That's the — Malcolm, that's the problem.
You mean it tonight. On Sunday you get on a plane and go back to the room where you have a whole life and a father and a slate, and I stay up here with the plants and the records and a dog nobody wanted, and I do the part I'm good at, which is being fine again after.
" His voice caught, just barely. "I've done the after.
It's really long. I don't— I wasn't going to do it again on purpose. "
Malcolm reached over and took his hand, the one with the rings, and held it against his own chest so Frankie could feel exactly how hard his heart was still going.
"I hear you," he said. Not arguing. Not yet.
He'd learned, watching this man work, that you don't grab the frightened thing.
You hold still. You let it be slow. "I'm not going to stand here two days from a flight and make you a promise I haven't earned.
You'd know it was a con and you'd be right.
" He laced their fingers. "But I'm also not going to pretend tonight was nothing to keep it tidy for Sunday.
It wasn't nothing. It was the least nothing I've ever done.
" He pressed his mouth to Frankie's knuckles, once, over the rings.
"So let's not solve Sunday tonight. Sunday's not here. I am."
Frankie looked at him for a long moment, and Malcolm watched him decide — visibly, effortfully — to let that be enough for one more night, to leave the knife folded and put away a little longer.
"Okay," Frankie said, low. He lay back down, careful, and fit himself against Malcolm's side like he'd been annoyed into it, and Malcolm felt the exact moment the last of the guard went out of him, boneless and warm and finally, finally still.
For a while neither of them said anything, and it was the good kind of quiet, the weather kind.
Malcolm traced idle lines down Frankie's arm and stopped at the inside of his wrist, where a small crooked shape sat pale against the skin — a stick-and-poke, hand-done, a little wrong the way hand-done things are.
"What's this one," Malcolm said, thumb over it.
Frankie was quiet a second. "Gave it to myself.
Bad year." He didn't pull his arm back, which Malcolm had learned by now was its own kind of gift.
"Night I signed the new lease. The small one, this one.
Sat right there in that armchair with a needle and some ink and did it myself, because I wanted one thing on me that nobody else's hands had been anywhere near.
Something that was just mine, start to finish.
" A short breath. "It's crooked. I don't care. It's the least crooked thing I own."
Malcolm looked at it a long moment. Then he pressed his mouth to it, once, over the wobbly line, and felt Frankie go very still.
"No photos on your walls," Malcolm said quietly. Not a question. Just letting him know it had been seen.
"No." A beat. "Didn't want to hang anything I'd have to take down someday."
And there was the whole shape of the man in one sentence — a life arranged so nothing could be lost, because nothing had been let in.
Malcolm held it. Didn't poke at it. Filed it with everything else, in a folder that had stopped being a folder somewhere around midnight and turned into something more like a room he'd moved into without noticing he'd unpacked.
"Okay," Malcolm agreed, to the ceiling, to the city, to the three days he had left and the plane at the end of them and the enormous unmapped thing sleeping against his ribs.
He did not think about Sunday.
He was getting better at it, right up until the part where he wasn't.