Chapter 9 #2
"You once told me a person's allowed both," Malcolm said.
"The crisis and the wanting. That it counts.
I didn't believe you then. I do now. I'm allowed both.
The work I love and the person I love, and I don't have to torch one for the other, I just have to be brave enough to arrange my life like I mean it — and I mean it.
I mean it so much it's the only thing I've been sure of in two weeks.
" He was close now, close enough. "I saw the man under the show on the first night, Frankie.
The one who sits on a floor being kind to something nobody else will touch.
I didn't fall for the sparkle. I fell for the guy under it, the one you're so sure nobody stays for.
And I came back for him. And I'm not the one who leaves.
I already left once and it nearly killed me, and I am not doing it again. "
***
[Frankie]
Frankie stood behind the counter of the shop he'd built out of the worst year of his life and could not, for the length of several heartbeats, do anything at all.
Because here was the thing he hadn't planned for.
He'd planned for silence. He'd planned for a nice text that trailed off.
He'd planned, in his worst two a.m. hours, for a Christmas card next year, warm and meaningless, the long slow fade of a man doing the decent thing at a distance.
He had a whole shape ready for how this ended, filed and labeled, and it did not have Malcolm Reeves standing in Clip Joint on a Tuesday in October having signed a lease on Logan Avenue anywhere in it.
The wound went off anyway. It always went off. He's saying the thing. Damien said the thing too. Damien said we're going to be the place, baby, and he meant it when he said it, they always mean it when they say it, and then—
But.
But Damien had never once come back. That was the fact sitting in the middle of the floor that the wound couldn't get around.
Damien had gone, and stayed gone, and let the silence do the work, because leaving was easy for him and Frankie had never been worth the hard version.
And here was a man who'd flown two thousand kilometers on a random Tuesday, who'd told his terrifying father the truth, who'd signed his actual name to a year on a street three blocks away — who had done, in short, the hard version, the expensive version, the version that couldn't be taken back with a text.
The warm thing on the way in. He'd actually listened. He'd taken the cruelest, truest thing Frankie owned and built something out of it.
"You signed a lease," Frankie said again, stupidly, because his brain had snagged on the one detail his whole body understood was load-bearing.
A lease. A name on a thing. A year. Not a maybe.
Not a fantasy to text about. A man putting his name down on a street near Frankie's and refusing to be temporary.
"On Logan," Malcolm said. "Above the bakery. It smells incredible and it's too small for me and I don't care."
And Frankie — guarded, rebuilt, world-class at the after, the man who'd sworn on a needle and some ink that nothing would ever again get in close enough to hurt him — felt the whole safe room he'd been living in for two years, the clean one with no photos on the walls, the one he'd been so proud of, quietly fill with light.
He came around the counter. His legs weren't entirely his.
Baxter and Nigel had found each other by the grooming table and were conducting a reunion of great snorting joy, and Frankie stepped over both of them and stopped in front of Malcolm, close, and looked up at the ridiculous, hopeful, terrified, staying face of him.
"I have to say a thing too," Frankie said, and his voice was not steady, and for once he let it not be.
"Because you keep taking all the blame and it's not all yours.
I shut the door first. I did. You reached for a future in this shop and I slammed it before you could, days before, because I was so scared of you leaving that I made sure there was nothing to leave.
And then when you flinched I got to be right about it, which is the thing I do — I'd rather be right and alone than wrong and holding something.
Dez told me. She was rude about it. She was correct.
" He dragged in a breath. "So it wasn't just you being a coward at the end.
It was me being a coward for two years straight.
We're — apparently we're the same amount of coward.
It's very annoying. I was hoping to have the high ground. "
Malcolm laughed, wet and disbelieving. "You can have the high ground. I'll take anything you're offering."
"Yeah. See. That's the problem." Frankie got a fist in the front of his coat, the way he had the first night, the exact way, and did not let go this time.
"Because what I'm offering is I kept the dog, Malcolm.
I kept Baxter. I turned down a perfectly nice couple in Scarborough because I couldn't stand to give away one more thing that leaned on me, and I have spent two weeks being furious about it, because it meant the safe version wasn't working anymore, it meant I'd already started letting things stay, and if I could keep the dog then I had no excuse left to not—" His voice broke clean in half.
"To not want the whole stupid thing. Out loud.
Which I do. I want the whole stupid thing.
I want you on the counter you're not supposed to sit on for the rest of my life. "
"Frankie," Malcolm said, like the word was the only one he had left.
"Don't get on any more planes," Frankie said, finally, the sentence he'd swallowed in the bubble two weeks ago, out loud at last, no teeth around it now. "That's — that's the whole ask. That's it. Just don't get on the plane."
"I already didn't," Malcolm said. "I signed a lease instead."
There was a joke right there. Frankie could feel it loading up — above a bakery, you'll gain forty pounds, I'll have to groom you myself — the reflexive deflection reaching for the exit even now, even here, because that was the last thing the wound knew how to do: make it light so it couldn't get too heavy, too real, too losable.
He let the joke go. Didn't say it. Let the moment be exactly as heavy and real and losable as it actually was.
And Frankie — off the leash of the safe clean careful life he'd built to keep from ever feeling exactly this — pulled him down and kissed him in the middle of the shop, with two French bulldogs celebrating around their ankles and the CLOSED sign not yet flipped and the whole gold-lit room he'd rebuilt alone finally, finally holding two.
The vault didn't just open. It came off the hinges.