Chapter 6
The Offer
For two days after the boat, Theo lay on the bad couch every night and listened to Rory not sleep.
It had become, over five weeks, the most intimate thing in his life, which was its own kind of joke.
Four a.m., every morning, the sounds through the floor: the burner, the knife, the water, a man starting bread in the dark because grief and dough kept the same hours.
Theo had come to know the whole liturgy of it by ear.
He could tell by the rhythm what Rory was making.
He could tell, lately, by the pauses, when Rory stopped and stood still in the dark kitchen and let the thing catch up to him that he wouldn't let catch him in daylight.
And Theo lay up here on his ruined couch above it all, forty-seven days down to forty-five, a navy business card in his wallet and a man's saliva-taste two days stale in his memory — that was a mistake — and he did the thing he was best at, which was nothing.
He performed sleep at a ceiling stain and waited for morning and the border of heard.
The days were worse than the nights. At night at least there was a floor between them.
In daylight there was only the pass, and the pass had stopped working as a border the moment Rory kissed him in that boat — because now every plate that came across it came with the memory of Rory's hands, and every heard came in the voice that had said that was a mistake, and twice Theo turned in the narrow galley and found Rory right there, closer than the work required, both of them going still, the air gone thick and wrong, before one of them stepped back and it was behind you and order up and the whole unbearable machine ground on.
Dee watched it like a woman watching a pot she knew would boil over, and said nothing, for once, which was how Theo knew it was bad.
Twice in those two days he almost told him.
Almost crossed the pass and said, there's something you need to know, about Colson, about why I really came — got the whole confession loaded and ready — and both times looked at Rory's shut hard face and lost his nerve, because you couldn't hand a man the truth through a wall, and because — this was the coward's reason, the real one — confessing now, in the cold, would just prove the wall right, and Theo would lose even the heard.
So he waited. For a better moment. For a softer Rory.
He was, he'd think later, always waiting for a better moment to be honest, and the better moment was always the one where honesty would cost him least, which meant it never came.
Which was the whole tragedy of him in a single sentence.
On the third night, the sounds stopped early.
Theo came awake — he'd been almost under — to a wrongness in the pattern.
Four-ten. The burner had clicked on and then clicked off.
No knife. No water. Just the stairs. The narrow back stairs, one particular creak on the fourth tread that Theo had memorized without meaning to, and then the floor of the apartment taking a weight that wasn't the building settling, and Theo lay very still in the dark with his heart going and did not, for once, reach for a single word.
Rory stood at the end of the couch. A shape against the harbor-glow in the window.
He hadn't turned on a light. He was in a T-shirt and the flannel pants he slept in and he was breathing like a man who'd walked a lot farther than one flight of stairs, and for a long moment he didn't say anything, and neither did Theo, and the whole apartment held still the way the harbor held at slack.
"I can't sleep," Rory said finally. Low. Rough. "Haven't slept right since the boat. Since you—" He stopped. "Since."
"I know." Theo's voice came out of him with no smile on it because there was no smile left; it was four in the morning and he was too undone to build one. "I hear you. Every night. I know exactly how you don't sleep."
That landed on Rory. Theo watched the shape of him take it.
"I told myself it was a mistake," Rory said.
"I heard that part too."
"I've been telling myself a lot of things.
" Rory's hands were at his sides, opening and closing, a man who never knew what to do with his hands unless there was work in them.
"About you. Since you got here. Built a whole— I had a whole shape for you.
The one who left. The one who'd sell. Kept it real solid so I wouldn't—" His voice did something.
"And it's easier. It's so much easier to keep the shape than to—"
"Than to look," Theo said.
"Than to look."
The tide of it was coming in now, Theo could feel it, the thing that had been building for five weeks and had crested in a boat two days ago and pulled back and was coming in again now full and certain in the dark, and he sat up slow on the couch, the blanket pooling, and he looked up at the shape of Rory Nash against the window — the size of him, the stillness, the man who'd kissed him like drowning and then rowed him home in silence — and Theo said the truest, most dangerous thing he'd said in fifteen years.
"So look," he said. "I'm right here. Stop building the shape and look at the actual person.
I'm terrified of it, for the record. Being looked at.
It's the one thing I've spent my whole life making sure nobody gets to do.
So if you're going to, Rory—" His voice cracked clean in half.
"Then come here and do it. But don't do it halfway and row me home again. I can't do the row home twice."
Rory came here and did it.
He crossed the space between them in one step and got a hand in Theo's hair, the way he had in the boat, and tipped Theo's face up to the window-light and looked at him — actually looked, the way he looked at a delivery, at a seam, at anything he meant to understand with his hands — and Theo made himself hold still under it, hold still and be seen, the couch-blanket and the ceiling stain and the ruined couch and the whole shabby truth of him laid out in the gray light, no charm on it, nothing performed, and it was the most exposed he had been since he was seventeen years old and Rory looked at all of it and did not flinch and did not pity and did not look away, and then Rory kissed him, and this time there was no tide left to turn.
Theo had been kissed as an opening move a hundred times — kissed like the first line of a transaction both parties understood.
This was not that. Rory kissed him like he'd decided something and was furious about the decision and was going to see it through anyway, kissed him with the whole stubborn weight of a man who did nothing halfway and had just, against every wall he owned, chosen to do this.
Theo felt the last of his own performance burn off in it — felt himself go from being kissed to just kissing, clumsy and greedy and real, hands fisted in Rory's shirt like the boat, like the one fixed thing in a turning tide.
They got each other up the four stairs to the actual bed somehow — Rory's bed, Eddie's old room, the one door Theo had never gone through — mouths and hands and the shedding of the little they wore, and Theo, who had done this a hundred times as a performance, a service, a way to be adored without being known, found that he had no idea how to do it like this, exposed, in the dark, with a man who kept stopping to look at him.
Rory kept stopping to look. That was the thing that took Theo apart.
He'd brace for the next practiced beat and instead Rory would pull back an inch and just — take him in, the whole of him, in the gray harbor light through the curtainless window, run a scarred hand slow down Theo's bared chest like he was reading it, and say nothing, and it wrecked Theo more thoroughly than anything anyone had ever done to him with skill.
"You're allowed to make a sound," Rory murmured, mouth at Theo's throat, hand moving lower, deliberate, unhurried, the same economy he brought to the line. "Nobody's here. It's four in the morning. It's just us and the foghorn."
"I don't— " Theo's breath went ragged as Rory's hand closed around him. "I perform sounds. I don't— I don't know how to make a real one."
Rory went still. Then he lifted his head and looked at Theo in the dark with something fierce and tender both, and said, in the gruffest, plainest voice, "Then don't make any.
Just let me." And he moved down Theo's body and took him in his mouth with no performance and no hurry and a devastating, focused attention, a man who did nothing halfway, who'd never in his life done a thing with his hands or his mouth that he didn't mean completely, and Theo's head went back and his hands found Rory's hair and the sound that came out of him then was not one he'd ever made before, was not a sound he had in his repertoire, was raw and broken and entirely real, torn out of the seventeen-year-old in the basement of him who had never once, not one single time, been touched by someone who wanted nothing back but him.
He came apart embarrassingly fast and did not have the armor to be embarrassed.
Rory came back up the length of him and Theo pulled him in, got his hands on him, wanted — desperately, clumsily, without technique — to make Rory feel a fraction of it, and Rory let him, Rory who let no one do anything for him, gave Theo his own undoing in the dark with his forehead pressed to Theo's collarbone and his breath breaking and his whole controlled body finally, finally losing the control he'd built his life out of, and he said Theo's name once, low, into Theo's skin, like a word in a language he'd forgotten he knew, and that — the name, the loss of control from a man made entirely of control — undid Theo a second time, in the chest, where it counted.