Chapter 6
Grace Period
Malcolm Reeves took up approximately the entire bed.
Frankie had known this in theory — the man was built on a scale the apartment was not zoned for — but it was different at seven in the morning with the light coming gray-gold through the plants and Malcolm sprawled diagonally across a mattress that had, until last night, comfortably held one bitter groomer and, on bad nights, a French bulldog.
Now there was a great warm continent of sleeping film producer taking up all of it, one heavy arm thrown across Frankie's chest like it had opinions about him leaving, and Frankie lay there pinned and stared at the ceiling and thought, with the specific dread of a man who has felt this exact thing before and knows how it ends: oh no. Oh, no, I like this.
He should get up. There were dogs. There was a rescue in a crate downstairs who'd need feeding, and a shop that opened at ten, and a whole life he'd built precisely so that no one else's arm would ever be flung across it like a claim.
He did not get up. He lay there another forty minutes, warm and doomed, memorizing the weight.
Malcolm woke slow, the way he did everything, and the first thing he did — before his eyes were even properly open — was tighten the arm and pull Frankie in and say, gravel-voiced, "Don't tell me you've been awake. You've been awake, doing math. I can hear you doing math."
"I don't do math. I'm an artist."
"You're doing math right now about whether this counts." Malcolm cracked one eye. "It counts. Good morning."
"It's seven a.m., you've been conscious ninety seconds, and you're already insufferable."
"I'm a morning person. One of my worst qualities.
" He made no move to release him. If anything the arm got heavier — deliberate, a man staking a lazy claim.
"There are, by my count, two dogs downstairs who need you, a shop that opens in three hours, and a whole city of matted animals depending on your genius.
And I've decided, unilaterally, that none of it is happening for at least twenty more minutes. "
"You can't annex my morning."
"I'm a producer. Annexing mornings is the whole job." He pressed his mouth to Frankie's hair. "Twenty minutes. Then you go be the best in the city at something, and I'll watch. I'm good at watching you be good at things, turns out. New hobby."
And Frankie, who had exactly one rule about warm men annexing his mornings, let him — for twenty minutes, and then thirty, because he was already lost and some animal part of him had decided to be lost thoroughly while it still had the chance.
Friday night, they didn't leave the apartment.
***
Malcolm cooked — actually cooked, conjured a whole dinner out of Frankie's near-empty fridge and two bags from the Portuguese grocer on the corner, moving around the tiny kitchen like he'd lived there for years, while Frankie sat on the counter for once and drank wine and pretended to supervise and mostly just watched.
The gray rescue had crept upstairs, a first, and fallen asleep in the good armchair like he'd bought it.
A record turned on the wall unit — something old and warm, Malcolm's pick — and the plants threw jungle shadows up the wall, and it was, Frankie thought, the single most domestic thing that had happened to him in years.
It had taken a man he'd known six days to make his own apartment feel like a place he lived instead of a place he hid.
"You're staring," Malcolm said, not turning around.
"I'm supervising."
"That's my line."
"Everything good is your line eventually." Frankie took a sip. "You cook like there's someone you're trying to impress."
"There is." A glance back, warm. "He's on the counter being difficult. Bit of a project dog."
And Frankie — three glasses in, warm, cracked open by the sheer ordinariness of it — felt a sentence come up his throat, big and stupid and disqualifyingly sincere.
I could do this. Every night. Don't get on the plane.
He got his teeth around it just in time and swallowed it whole and chased it with wine.
Because that was the exact sentence you couldn't say.
That was the one that turned a nice weekend into a wound.
He knew the price of it down to the cent, and he was not paying, not even here, not even with the record playing and a rescued dog asleep in his one good chair and Malcolm Reeves plating dinner in his kitchen like a man who meant to stay.
"What," Malcolm said, catching something.
"Nothing. Feed me before I waste away and you have to explain it to Nigel."
That was Friday night. By Saturday it had given up pretending to be a one-time thing.
That was the trouble with a bubble: you told yourself you'd get out of it after coffee, and then Malcolm made the coffee — badly, in Frankie's terrible little machine, and was so pleased with himself about it that Frankie didn't have the heart — and then they took both dogs to the shop, because Malcolm had cabbed east with Nigel that first afternoon "just to say hi" and somehow Nigel had simply moved in, and now there were two dogs — Nigel and the traumatized gray rescue — conducting a slow suspicious summit on the shop floor while Frankie worked and Malcolm sat on the counter he wasn't supposed to sit on and made phone calls to Atlanta in his warm unbothered voice and got, visibly, in the way.
"You're in the way," Frankie told him.
"I'm supervising."
"You're on my counter."
"I'm supervising from the counter. It's the best vantage." Malcolm hung up on someone important without looking at the phone. "That woman with the poodle tipped you fourteen percent. I saw it. Want me to go break her mailbox."
"That's — no. What is wrong with you." But Frankie was laughing, again, still, the involuntary real one that used to cost him something and now just kept falling out of him like he'd lost the lid.
That was the thing about the two days. They were so stupidly easy.
Malcolm learned the regulars' names by the second afternoon.
He was good with the scared rescue, patient in the way Frankie had clocked on night one, and by Saturday the little gray dog would take a treat from his hand, which Frankie had privately not expected for a month.
"He likes you," Frankie said, watching it. "He doesn't like anyone. He barely likes me and I'm the one who saved his life."
"I have a trustworthy face."
"You have a face people trust and then regret trusting."
"That's just called being from the South." Malcolm checked his phone. "I'm going to go get us lunch from the Vietnamese place before you collapse on a customer. Dez? You eat?"
"I would commit crimes for their lemongrass chicken," Dez said.
"Bring napkins. He never brings napkins.
" She said the last part to Malcolm, jerking her chin at Frankie, and Malcolm laughed and went, the bell chiming behind him, Nigel making a brief doomed lunge to follow before giving up and lying down on the cool tile with a sigh.
The shop got quiet. Dez kept wiping down her station, which she had already wiped down, which was how Frankie knew it was coming.
"So," she said.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said 'so.' I've known you nine years. I know what your 'so' costs." Frankie kept his eyes on the cockapoo. "Say it."
Dez set the towel down. When she looked at him her face wasn't teasing, which was worse.
"You're happy," she said. "Actually happy.
I haven't seen it since before. You're humming.
You brought the good coffee machine down from upstairs so he'd have real coffee.
There's a Frenchie and a rescue on my floor and you look like a man who lives somewhere warm.
" She let it sit. "He flies out tomorrow night. Doesn't he."
Frankie didn't answer. That was an answer.
"Frank." Gentler. "I'm not saying don't. I watched you rebuild yourself with tweezers last time, and I'm the one who's gonna be standing here Monday when the shop's quiet and he's not on that counter.
So whatever this is — and I hope you're letting yourself have it, God knows you earned a nice thing — just know which one you're in. The nice thing, or the one that costs."
"I know which one I'm in," Frankie said.
"Yeah." Not unkindly. "That's what scares me. You always know. Never once stopped you." She picked the towel back up. "Napkins. Bet you he forgets the napkins."
He didn't. Malcolm came back with food and a fistful of napkins and laid them in front of Dez with a little flourish, and Dez looked at Frankie over the top of them with an expression he chose not to read, and the afternoon closed warm and easy back over all of them, and Frankie let it, because he was weak and because there was so little of it left.
It was later — food gone, light going long, Dez off to her evening — that Malcolm slid off the counter he wasn't supposed to sit on and came to stand behind Frankie at the grooming table, not touching, just near, watching him scissor down the last dog of the day with the quiet attention he gave everything, and said, easy, like it was nothing, like it wasn't the most dangerous sentence in the language:
"So what if I came back for it. The festival. Next year."
Frankie's scissors stopped.
***
"Don't," Frankie said.
"I'm just—"