Chapter 31 Nate - August 2024, the Azores, Portugal #3
The tie came off on the stairs, and he did it with more care than that piece of silk has ever been shown in its life, including by me and including by my mother, who bought it.
He got the knot with two fingers and worked it loose and did not pull it, and slid it out from under the collar whole, and folded it once, and set it on the newel post at the top of the stairs like a man handling a document.
And then he took my face in both hands and kissed me on the landing with the window open behind him.
He came up into it, because I had a step on him.
I got a hand in the back of his shirt and pulled it loose and got my palm flat against his spine, and he made a sound into my mouth that he would have swallowed in any hotel on earth and did not swallow there.
His mouth opened over mine. There was salt on him from the climb and the wind still in his hair and the whole ocean going on underneath the window.
He got a fist in my collar and turned me into the wall, and I heard the plaster take my shoulder, and neither of us stopped.
He bit my bottom lip, not hard, and then went back and kissed it, and said my name once against my mouth without any of it coming out as sound.
What happened after that was not different from the hundred nights before it in any way except the one that rewrote all of them.
Everything we knew about each other we had learned inside a clock.
There was not one thing either of us did that had not been designed, originally, to be done in under four hours in a room with a bus in the courtyard.
On that island we had spent fifteen days taking all of it apart and putting it back together slowly, and that night we went all the way down to first principles, one at a time.
He talked. He always talked. He narrated the first ten minutes of it the way he narrated everything and I let him, because the talking was not a defense with him, it was how he stayed in the room, and the night I made him stop would be a night I had taken something.
And then somewhere in the middle of it, at the exact moment when it can least be performed and least be defended and least be turned into a bit, with his forehead against my jaw and both my hands where they were, he said it again.
"I love you."
Unwagered. Nobody owed anybody anything. No coin on the nightstand, no lamp off, no dark to say it into, because the lamp was on, because we had stopped turning them off on the first night.
I said it back, out loud, in a voice with nothing in front of it, and did not take my eyes off him while I did it, and he made a sound I had never heard out of him in seven years and put his face into my shoulder and stayed there.
Afterward, neither of us pretended to be asleep.
That was the difference, and it was the only one.
Every previous morning of our lives, one of us lay with his eyes shut doing an arithmetic and the other one lay six inches away doing his own.
In Vegas in 2018 I got out of a bed a quarter of an inch at a time like a man defusing something.
In a Courtyard off exit fourteen we lay eight inches apart in the dark and told the truth because neither of us could do it with the lights on.
We lay in a bed above a caldera with a lamp on and both of us awake and nobody performing anything. Much later I turned the lamp off, because the light was in his eyes.
And in the dark, with his back against my chest and my arm where it was, Riley said it to the ceiling.
"What happens in September?"
Here is what I had. A media training regime that started when I was sixteen.
A briefing folder from my uncle that arrived on the second Monday of every month.
An answer for every single question that has ever been asked of me in a public room, all of them ready in advance and in order for twelve years, because I have never in my life walked into a space without knowing where the doors were and how long it would take me to reach them.
He asked me what happened in September and I opened my mouth and there was nothing in it. No line, no bridge, not one prepared sentence anywhere in the building.
And I lay there in the dark with my arm around him and waited for the alarm to go off, the way it went off in Las Vegas at four in the morning in 2018 when a man's hand came to rest over my heart in his sleep, and the alarm did not come.
What came instead was a piece of information I had never once had about myself.
I did not want an answer prepared. I wanted to sit at a table with him and work it out from nothing, out loud, with both of us saying things and neither of us knowing what was coming next, and I wanted it to take a long time, and I wanted to lose some of it.
"I don't know," I said.
"That's not an answer."
"No. I've had an answer ready for everything since I was sixteen and I haven't got one for this, and I've just found out I don't want one."
He was quiet for a second. "So what do you want?"
"I want to negotiate. Terms, clauses, a session, the whole apparatus, and I want it to take all week."
And Riley Kowalski laughed into the pillow in the dark, one short surprised laugh, and said, "Oh, buddy. You've come to the right man."