Chapter 6 #2
"I know what you're just." He set the scissors down, careful, because his hands had gone unsteady and you don't scissor a live animal with unsteady hands.
The cockapoo, sensing management trouble, sighed.
"Don't do the thing. The long-distance fantasy thing.
'I'll come back, we'll figure it out, we'll text.
'" He turned around. Malcolm was close, and open, and hopeful, and it was unbearable.
"It's a really nice weekend, Malcolm. It's the nicest weekend I've had in two years.
Don't wreck it by making it a promise, because then Sunday isn't a good thing ending, it's a promise breaking, and I've — I've had the promise-breaking one.
I know exactly how much it costs and I'm not spending it again on a maybe. "
Malcolm was quiet. Reading him, the way he did. Not pushing — he never pushed, it was the most effective and now the most infuriating thing about him.
"Okay," he said finally, gentle. "Okay. I hear you."
And he backed off. He honored it. He was so good about it, so careful, folding his hopeful thing away because Frankie had asked him to, because you don't grab the frightened animal, and Frankie should have felt relieved and instead felt something drop through the floor of him, because — some traitor part of him had wanted Malcolm to fight.
To push. To be stupid about it. And Malcolm, doing exactly what Frankie asked, had just quietly proven he'd let it go if Frankie let go first.
He'll leave easy, the old soundproofed voice said, almost kind about it. See? He'll respect your wishes right onto the plane. That's what the good ones do. They don't even make you throw them out.
Frankie picked the scissors back up.
His phone would have been a mercy. It was Malcolm's that rang.
He watched Malcolm look at it — Renata — and watched the shop-Malcolm resurface, the working one, the one with a slate and a Monday, and Malcolm mouthed sorry and stepped toward the door and answered, and Frankie heard it in pieces.
Yeah. No, I've got the red-eye Sunday, I land — right.
Monday's fine. Tell them I'll have notes on the cut by — Renata, I said I'll be there.
A pause. Then, lower, turned toward the window, not quite quiet enough: No.
It's — it's nothing. It's a festival thing. I'll be home Sunday.
It's nothing. It's a festival thing.
Frankie kept scissoring. Even, careful, professional. The cockapoo came out beautiful. He didn't feel his own face at all, which was how he knew it had gone flat, the shutter down, the shop voice moving into his chest where the warm thing had been that morning.
He knew Malcolm hadn't meant it. He knew, distantly, that you say it's nothing to a business partner about the person you're standing eight feet from because the alternative is explaining a thing you don't have words for yet on a phone call about a Monday meeting. He knew all that.
It didn't matter. His body had already heard it's a festival thing and filed it exactly where it filed everything, next to we're going to be the place, baby, and started, quietly, competently, packing up the shop of his heart for the season.
Malcolm ended the call and came back rubbing the back of his neck, apologetic.
"Sorry. Renata's got Monday mapped to the minute, she gets like a border collie about it.
" He came in close, easy, and kissed Frankie's temple like it was the most natural thing in the world, like nothing had happened — because to him, nothing had.
"Where were we. You were making that cockapoo gorgeous. "
"Always am." Frankie leaned into him on cue, gave him the smile, hit every mark.
It was a good performance. He'd had years of practice being fine on schedule, and Malcolm — happy, unsuspecting, still inside the bubble — didn't catch the difference, because the difference was on the inside, where Frankie kept the things nobody got to see.
That was the part that got him, weirdly.
Not the festival thing. That the man who read everyone — who saw the laundromat lady, who clocked the wall behind the sparkle on night one — could stand eight inches away while Frankie went flat and grieving and not see it.
Because Frankie was that good at hiding.
And because Malcolm, just now, didn't especially want to see it.
Both true. True things kept arriving in pairs lately, and not one of the pairs was kind.
***
That night Frankie took him to bed like a man saying goodbye and pretending he wasn't.
He wouldn't have called it that. He'd have called it Saturday.
But it was slower than the first night, and more deliberate, and he did the thing he was best at — the low unbroken attention, the hands that learned and gentled and gave — except the first night it had been to open Malcolm up, to hand him the whole radio station he'd been missing his whole life.
Tonight it was to memorize him. The scar on his shoulder Frankie had never asked about.
The exact catch of his breath when Frankie did that — there, that.
The gray at his temples in the streetlight.
The way he said Frankie's name, still, every time, like it cost something and was worth paying.
Frankie took his time. Took all of it. Slowed everything down past sense, because slow was the only way to make a thing last, and this was the last of it — pressed each piece somewhere deep and permanent the way you walk a house one final time before the movers come, touching the doorframes, learning the light in every room you're about to lose.
Malcolm came apart under his hands, and then over him, generous and undone and so openly, uncomplicatedly happy that it was almost impossible to watch.
Because he still thought it was a bubble.
He didn't know he was being memorized. He thought there'd be a next time to be careless in.
Frankie knew there was a countdown. So he was careful.
He was so careful with him — gave him the best of everything he had and kept his own face pressed to Malcolm's throat where it couldn't be read, and if his eyes stung the whole way through, that was between him and the dark, and Malcolm — undone, grateful, still inside the bubble — didn't seem to notice, because Malcolm still thought they had a bubble and Frankie already knew they had a countdown.
"Hey," Malcolm said, after, tracing the wrist tattoo again in the dark like it had become a habit. His voice was wrecked and soft. "Where'd you go just now. At the end. You went somewhere."
"Nowhere. I'm right here." Frankie kissed his shoulder so he wouldn't have to hold the eye contact. "Go to sleep. You've got a big Monday."
He felt Malcolm almost say something. Felt him decide — carefully, always so carefully — not to push. Felt him settle instead, and pull Frankie in, and drift off with his whole enormous trusting weight wrapped around a man who was, at that exact moment, doing math.
Because Frankie was doing math.
It was Saturday, a little past one in the morning, which made it technically Sunday.
The red-eye was Sunday night. So he had — he ran it, cold and exact, the way he'd run the rent letter — he had one more morning of this.
Maybe a slow breakfast. Maybe both dogs on the floor and the bad coffee and Malcolm on the counter he wasn't supposed to sit on.
And then a cab, and an airport, and a plane, and a Monday two thousand kilometers south where all of this was, correctly, a festival thing.
One more morning.
Frankie lay in the dark under the warm weight of a man he wasn't going to keep, in an apartment with no photos on the walls, and counted the hours he had left like coins, and did not let himself cry, because he was very good at this part.
He was the best in the city at this part.