Epilogue #3
They lower me slowly. Wyatt sinks to his knees first and they settle me between them on the garage floor, and Jai’s hand rubs slow circles on my back, and Wyatt pulls me against his chest and holds me there while I shake and breathe and come back to myself in pieces.
“I have a verdict,” Jai announces, into the quiet of the garage.
I don’t open my eyes. “Yeah?”
“Garage is fuckworthy.”
* * *
Walking is a project. My legs have opinions about recent events and those opinions are mostly expressed as trembling, which means Wyatt has his arm around my waist and Jai is three inches from my shoulder and together they steer me through the door from the garage into the house like a man being helped off a field.
The kitchen is small and galley-style, brand-new appliances still wearing their protective film.
Wyatt points at the counter with the air of a general indicating terrain.
“Stool there, stool there, and a big wooden cutting board thing in the middle so it’s like a bar.
Jai says he doesn’t cook but he’s going to cook. ”
“I’m not going to cook,” Jai says.
“He’s going to cook,” Wyatt tells me.
Through the kitchen is a small eating area, a window over a table that hasn’t arrived yet, and then a back door. Wyatt opens it. A rectangle of grass approximately the size of a large bath towel looks back at us.
“Backyard,” Wyatt announces.
“I can see that,” I say.
“We’re getting a dog.”
Jai closes his eyes briefly. “We’re not getting a dog.”
“We’re getting a dog, we’re naming him something dignified like Bruce or Gerald, and he’s going to sleep at the foot of the bed.” Wyatt is already nodding, the decision made. “You like dogs, right, Cade?”
“I like dogs,” I confirm. “Gerald is a good name for a dog.”
“Gerald,” Wyatt repeats, with satisfaction. “See. Math boy agrees.”
Jai looks at the ceiling. “No dogs until we’re settled. That’s the rule.”
The back door closes. We move through a narrow doorway into the living room, which is not yet a living room.
It’s boxes stacked against the baseboards and a single floor lamp in the corner producing a circle of warm light that doesn’t reach the walls, and bare floors that echo when we walk across them.
“Living room,” Wyatt says.
“Where’s the furniture?”
He makes a gesture, broad, sweeping, architecturally ambitious. “We have a vision.”
“What’s the vision?”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. “There’s going to be a couch,” he says. “It’s going to be a good couch.”
“And a TV,” Jai adds.
“The vision is a couch and a TV.”
“It’s a strong vision,” Wyatt says, without irony.
My legs have improved marginally by the time we reach the stairs.
The staircase is narrow, and Wyatt goes first and Jai stays behind me and his hand rests between my shoulder blades the whole way up, not steadying, exactly, just present.
That’s the word for it. Present. Both of them always somehow exactly calibrated to how much contact I need before I know I need it.
At the top of the stairs, a short hallway. Two doors.
Jai nudges my shoulder toward the left one. Small room, empty, a window looking out at the street below, afternoon light falling in a clean rectangle across the floor.
“Yours,” he says.
I look at him. “Mine.”
“For studying. Your math stuff. Whatever you need in there.” His voice is easy, like this is a completely ordinary thing to say.
Like allocating a room in a house to someone is a logistical detail rather than a statement.
“We thought a desk, maybe some shelves. Wyatt looked up shelving for three hours.”
“I don’t know anything about shelves,” Wyatt says, appearing beside me. “I learned so much. There are so many types of shelves, Cade.”
I stand in the doorway. They made a room for me.
Not a room where I’ll sleep, not a room that doubles as somewhere to put me, a room for me specifically, for the part of my life that has nothing to do with them.
For the math. For the work. For the person I am when I’m not between them.
I breathe through my nose and look at the light on the floor and do not say anything embarrassing.
“Come on,” Wyatt says, and takes my hand.
The master bedroom takes up the full width of the hallway’s end. The bed is enormous, already made up in white and gray, the only completely finished surface in the house, and my whole body wants to fall into it immediately. I have to physically resist the impulse.
“How much is the rent?” I ask. Something practical. Something I can manage.
Jai shrugs. “Depends whether I buy it. I can use the trust fund, get somewhere permanent, or we can keep renting if you want to see the neighborhood first. There’s another place two streets over with a bigger backyard.”
“For Gerald,” Wyatt says.
“Gerald is hypothetical,” Jai says.
I open my mouth to say something about the purchase price of residential property in central New Jersey and close it again, because they’re both looking at me now with the same expression, that combination of warmth and expectation, like they’re waiting for me to catch up to something they’ve already decided.
And I realize, standing in the doorway of a master bedroom with a made bed and an office down the hall with my name on it, that they have never at any point asked if I was moving in.
They’ve been explaining it. The whole tour has been an explanation, cheerful and detailed, of a future they’ve already filed under settled.
Their careers in proximity to the campus: Wyatt has connections at an athletic club two miles from the university, he’d mentioned it in the car; Jai’s golf coach runs clinics in Mercer County and has been asking him to stop messing around and commit.
Their jobs, sorting themselves out near Princeton.
My classes. My office. Their bed. The three of them, in this tall narrow house four blocks from campus, and at no point have they said if you want because they clearly don’t think if is a word that applies.
The old reflex forms. I can feel it starting up: the impulse to establish process, request explicit confirmation, negotiate from first principles.
I should say: we need to discuss this properly.
I should say: this is a significant decision and I should have input in the timeline.
I should produce a pros-and-cons framework.
I look at the bed.
I look at them.
Wyatt’s dimples are doing that thing they do when he’s happy in a way he doesn’t have words for.
Jai is watching me with those dark, sharp eyes that always make me feel seen in a way that should be uncomfortable and isn’t, because it’s Jai and he’s never once pretended to see anything other than exactly what’s there.
They made me a room.
“You both,” I start, and my voice comes out lower and more wrecked than intended, “have absolutely terrible communication skills and I need you to work on that.”
“Completely fair,” Jai says.
“And I love you,” I finish, “which is a separate issue.”
Neither of them moves for exactly one second.
Then Wyatt makes a sound that’s mostly a laugh and pulls me into his chest and his arms come around me, his chin on top of my head, and he squeezes until my ribs creak, warm and solid and exactly the right size for me to disappear into.
Jai steps in from behind, his arms wrapping around both of us, and I am surrounded, contained, taken up by them completely.
“We love you too,” Wyatt says, into my hair. “Obviously. That’s what we’ve been saying.”
“It wasn’t obvious,” I say, muffled against his chest.
“Fucktelligence gap,” Jai says. He presses his mouth to the back of my neck.
I pull back just enough to kiss Wyatt, his mouth warm and easy, and then turn to Jai, who kisses me back with the intentionality he applies to everything, his hand cupped around my jaw. I’m laughing when I pull away, genuinely laughing, and the sound of it surprises me.
“Thank you,” I say. “For showing up. For the room. For all of this.”
“Don’t thank us,” Jai says. “Move in.”
I look at the bed one more time. Then I fall into it backward, pulling them both with me, and we land in a heap of arms and legs in the white-and-gray sheets, and someone’s elbow catches my ribs and someone else is half on top of me, and they’re laughing, both of them, loud and warm in the bright afternoon room.
“Gerald is going to need a bed of his own,” I say, when I can breathe. “He’s not sleeping on this one.”
Wyatt’s laugh shakes the mattress beneath us.
“Gerald,” he says happily, “can have the office.”