Chapter 9 #2
“He soaks the dishes,” Theo said, deadpan.
“He calls it a technique. It is not a technique. He talks during television. He cannot be quiet for the length of one program. He blocks shots like he is trying to die and then complains that his body hurts.” A beat.
“He gives everything away. To everyone. And keeps nothing for himself, and thinks no one notices, and it makes me—” Theo stopped.
The officer waited, pen up. And Shane turned to look at him, because this wasn’t on the list they’d rehearsed, this wasn’t the couch-moving cover story, this was Theo’s flat voice cracking open in a federal building, and Theo finished, quietly, looking at the table, “—it makes me want to be the one who notices. That is what drives me crazy. That he does not let anyone take care of him. I am still working on it.”
The officer wrote a note. Shane couldn’t breathe.
The hand he was holding had gone tight in his, and somewhere between the metal detector and this chair the lie and the truth had become the same sentence, a lurch that bottomed out his stomach, and they were both just sitting in a government office telling the truth to a stranger because it was the only place safe enough to say it, because here it counted as evidence and not as feelings.
“Last one,” the officer said. “Mr. Novak. Where do you see this going? Five years.”
And the rehearsed answer was we take it day by day, an answer that didn’t commit, and Shane opened his mouth to say it, and what came out instead, click-free, no tell, was: “I see him better. The shoulder, I mean. I see him getting it taken care of, not hiding it. And I don’t know.
I see us not having to do interviews to prove it.
I see it just being true and nobody needing us to prove anything.
” His voice roughened. He pushed through it.
“Five years, I see a guy who finally lets himself be wanted. That’s where I see it going.
Took me a while to figure out that’s what I wanted to see. ”
The officer looked at them for a long moment over her glasses. Then she stamped the form, and slid the folder back, and said, “You’ll get the decision by mail.” She almost smiled. “Off the record, you two didn’t need most of what’s in this folder. Congratulations. Watch the shoulder, Mr. Lindgren.”
They walked out into the cold Chicago afternoon not holding hands, because the building was behind them now, and the cold where Theo’s hand had been spread through Shane’s whole side, and he got in the car, and pulled onto the highway, and made it about thirty miles before he broke.
“You meant it,” Shane said, eyes on the road. “In there. The stuff about wanting to be the one who notices. About me not letting anyone take care of me. That wasn’t the rehearsed answer.”
Theo was quiet in the passenger seat, the sling making him sit at a careful angle. “No,” he said. “It was not rehearsed.”
“And the five-years thing. The folder doesn’t have a five-years thing.” Shane’s hands were tight on the wheel. “We never rehearsed five years.”
“No.”
“So.” Shane swallowed. The highway unspooled, the divide made of asphalt, ninety miles of it.
“So we just told the truth. To the government. Because it was the only place safe enough to say it. That’s messed up, Theo.
That’s a messed-up thing, that the safest place for either of us to say a true thing was a federal building with a lady taking notes. ”
“Yes,” Theo agreed, and his voice went raw under the flatness.
“We have never said this much. And it counts as evidence and not as feelings. So it was allowed.” He looked out the window.
“I do not know how to say those things when they are only feelings. I know how to say them when they are evidence. It is a defect. I am aware of it.”
“It’s not a defect.” Shane reached over, without deciding to, and put his hand on Theo’s knee, the braced-arm side, careful, and Theo went still under it.
“We’ll figure out how to say them when they’re just feelings.
Someday. When there’s not a call-up and a divorce and a clock.
” His voice broke on the last word. “I’d like to hear them when they’re just feelings. Just once. No notary.”
Theo put his good hand over Shane’s on his knee, and held it, and didn’t say anything, because saying it without a notary was what he could not yet do, and they drove the rest of the ninety miles like that, hands stacked on a braced knee.
Not enough, as it turned out. Shane parked the car and neither of them moved.
The apartment was sixty-three degrees and dark. Theo fumbled the lock one-handed, and Shane reached past him to push the door, and their arms crossed in the narrow entryway, as they had been crossing for months, and Shane didn’t step back.
“We should eat,” Shane said, not moving.
“Yes.”
Neither of them moved. The certificate sat on the counter behind them in the dark, squared and still, and the place where Shane’s hand had been on his knee for sixty miles still held the phantom heat of it.
“I am going to kiss you,” Theo said, the flat voice, no question in it, “and it will not be evidence.”
Shane made a sound, half breath, half crack, and then his hands were on Theo’s face, careful of the sling, always careful of the sling, and they kissed in the entryway standing up, slow, the slowness new, because every other time had been fast and furious and plausibly deniable and this was none of those things.
This was what the immigration officer had seen in them and stamped.
This was just true. They stayed like that for a long time, standing, the sling between them, learning a new tempo, and somewhere in it Shane started talking into Theo’s mouth, because of course he did, because Shane processed everything out loud and he was going to process this too.
“You taste like the gas station coffee,” he said.
“Federal-building husband. God. You kissed me in front of a notary in December and I’ve been thinking about your mouth for four months, that’s the truth, you want truth, there it is, four months of wanting to do this slow and being too chicken to ask. ”
“Shane.”
“Yeah.”
“You are talking.”
“I’m gonna keep talking,” Shane said, against his jaw, down to his throat, “you should know that going in. That’s the package. You married a guy who narrates.”
Shane walked him backward into the apartment without breaking it, one hand on Theo’s jaw and the other finding the small of his back, steering him with his whole body pointed in the direction of what he wanted, and Theo let himself be steered, the vertigo of it, the letting, and they made it to the bedroom that had been Shane’s and then theirs and Shane eased him down onto the left side.
My side, Theo thought. The side the officer knew.
The side Shane knew by heart. And stood over him and said, “The shoulder.”
“It is fine.”
“Theo.”
“It is not fine. It hurts. It always hurts.” The truth, given freely, as they’d given it in the building.
“But I want to keep going. I do not want to stop because of it. I want you to work around it. Work around it the way we do in the morning. In the treatment room.” His voice was rough.
“You know how to move me now. You have learned my body. So move me.”
Shane had learned him: weeks in a fluorescent room mapping the shoulder’s limits with two fingers and a patience he’d never shown for anything else in his life.
He undressed him with the same clinical attention he used in rehab, easing the sling off, setting the braced arm against the pillow, working the shirt off the good side first and then sliding it down the bad arm without ever loading the joint, the rehab order, the morning order, and Theo lay there and let himself be handled, which was its own obscenity, the letting.
Shane got his belt open and paused with his fingers on the zipper.
“Still good?” he said. “Say it. I want to hear you say it.”
“Yes. Take them off.”
“There he is.” Shane stripped him bare and knelt up and looked at him, all of him, the brace and the scar and the rest, and didn’t pretend not to.
He knew where the rotation failed. He knew which angles were safe.
He knew the difference between the wince that meant stop and the one that meant more carefully, and he applied all of it now, every morning’s worth of learning, to a different kind of tending.
“Tell me,” Shane murmured against the hollow of Theo’s throat, working his way down. “The hockey answer or the real one. Which thing hurts and which thing doesn’t.”
“The real one.” Theo’s good hand found Shane’s hair, held on.
“This does not hurt. Lower, yes. That does not hurt.” Shane’s mouth found the scar, the long seam, and Theo’s breath caught, not pain, the opposite, the scar that had been his most guarded secret now the place Shane went first, always first, as if to say I know this part, it is mine too.
“That does not hurt. Shane. None of this hurts.”
“Good,” Shane said, into the seam of it, “because I have plans, I’ve had plans since the parking garage in Chicago, you sat in that waiting room clicking your tongue and all I could think about was getting you home and getting my mouth on you.
” His mouth moved as he talked, the talking and the kissing the same act.
“Gonna take you apart, big man. Slow. You okay with slow?”
“Yes.”
“You okay with me running my mouth start to finish?”
“Yes,” Theo said, and his breath went uneven as Shane’s teeth found his hip. “Do not stop.”