Chapter 6
Open House
The invitation, when it finally came, was so Dave that Albert almost walked right past it.
They were the best four days he could remember, and every one of them had a hairline crack running through it, because every morning Albert walked in and told himself today, I'll tell him today, after coffee, before the rush, and every morning the shop was so warm and Dave was so newly, carefully happy that Albert put it down for one more day.
He was very good at putting things down for one more day.
It was, he was starting to understand, the same muscle as never wanting anything for himself — the one that kept the peace by swallowing the hard thing whole.
And on the fourth evening, at close, with the card turned and the case dark, Dave had wiped his hands on his apron and looked at Albert and said, in the exact flat tone he used for everything that mattered:
"I live upstairs. If you wanted to see it."
If you wanted. Albert would follow that phrase off a cliff.
"I wanted," he said.
***
The stairs to the flat were behind the shop, narrow, and Albert went up them behind Dave in the dark with his heart doing something acrobatic and unhelpful, hyper-aware of all of it — the creak of the third tread, the warmth still rising off the ovens below, the back of Dave's neck, the fact that Dave hadn't touched him once since the invitation, was letting him climb these stairs under his own steam, was leaving the whole decision, as ever, entirely with Albert.
Four months of watching this man not-reach, and Albert understood now that it had never been coldness.
It was the opposite. It was the most patient thing anyone had ever done for him.
At the top Dave unlocked a door and stood back to let him through first, and Albert stepped in, and forgot for a second to be nervous, because the room stopped him.
The flat was one room over the shop, and it told Albert more about Dave in ninety seconds than four months of mornings had.
He read it on sight, the way he read every space he walked into — the closest thing Albert had to a religion.
And this one was spare in a way that wasn't poverty and wasn't minimalism-as-taste — it was a room built by a man who'd decided, deliberately, to own only what he'd chosen on purpose.
A bed, made. A bookshelf, half full, the books actually read.
One chair — one, a good one, worn soft, positioned by the window where you'd get the morning light and the fog and, if you leaned, a slice of the ocean.
No television. No clutter of a life accumulated by default.
Everything in the room was load-bearing.
Nothing was there because it had drifted there.
There were three things on the windowsill by the chair: a chipped mug full of pens, a paperback splayed face-down, and — Albert's breath caught — a small square of napkin, flattened and kept, with a drawing on it he recognized, because he'd drawn it, weeks ago, without thinking, and left on the counter assuming it went in the trash.
Dave had taken it home. Dave had set it on the windowsill, in the one spot in the whole room that got the morning light.
Albert didn't say anything about the napkin. Some things you just filed, carefully, in the part of your chest that kept the good evidence.
"You have one chair," Albert said.
"I'm one person."
"Were," Albert said, before he could stop himself, and then went hot to the ears, because it was too much, four days in, presumptuous, and he opened his mouth to walk it back—
"Were," Dave agreed, and the correction landed in the quiet room like a small, enormous thing, and Albert stopped trying to walk anything back.
Dave crossed to him. Unhurried, the way he crossed to everything, no motion wasted, and stopped close, and lifted Albert's glasses off his face with more care than the gesture needed and set them on the shelf, and Albert's whole nervous system reorganized itself around the fact that Dave Nowak had just taken his glasses off so he could kiss him without them getting in the way.
"You keep looking at the room," Dave said, low, "instead of at me."
"The room is a lot. The room is telling me things."
"Look at me."
Albert looked at him. The gray eyes up close, the gray at the temples, the burn scar he'd drawn a hundred times now within reach of his mouth, the whole guarded weathered wanting face of him with the guard, for once, all the way down.
"I don't know how to be looked after," Dave said.
It cost him; Albert could see what it cost him, the words coming out like they had to be pried up one at a time from somewhere they'd been set in concrete.
"I built the whole — this whole life so nobody'd ever have to.
So I'd never have to need it. And you keep — you made me a coffee.
A terrible coffee. And I've been off the rails ever since.
" His hand came up and framed the side of Albert's face, rough thumb at his cheekbone.
"So I don't know how to do this. Fair warning. "
"I don't know how to be wanted for nothing," Albert said. It came out shaky. "I know how to be useful. I'm — I'm extremely useful, it's my whole brand. But you don't need anything from me. You don't need me to buy the pastries or fix the room or make anybody's morning. You just—"
"I just want you here." Dave said it plainly, like a fact off a balance sheet, the truest kind of thing he knew how to say. "That's all. You. Here."
Albert had heard I-love-yous that meant less than that.
Whole warm speeches, from Marcus, from the ones before Marcus, elaborate and secretly conditional — love that came with an invoice you didn't see until later.
This was four words from a man who didn't spend words, and there was no invoice anywhere in it, no fine print, nothing Albert would have to keep being in order to keep it.
You. Here. He'd wanted, his whole life, to be wanted like that, for nothing, for himself, and had long ago filed the wanting under childish, the part you were supposed to grow out of.
And that undid Albert more completely than any amount of being needed ever had, and he closed the last inch this time — his turn, his want, his name on it — and kissed the man in the spare deliberate room he was apparently now a permanent fixture of.
***
It was slow, because Dave did everything slow, and because slow was the whole trick and they both knew it now.
There was no rush in him anywhere, and it drove Albert quietly out of his mind — the patience of it, the way Dave took him apart one unhurried degree at a time like he had all night, like there was nowhere either of them had to be, like Albert was a thing you savored and not a thing you got through on the way to something else.
He undressed Albert like he was learning him, like there'd be a test later he intended to ace, hands and mouth taking their unhurried time, and Albert — who was self-conscious about the softness at his middle, who'd spent his whole life braced for the flinch — found no flinch anywhere in Dave, only a steady attention that took him in the way Dave took everything in, completely, and found whatever it found, and wanted it.
Dave's mouth at his throat, his collarbone, the flat of his stomach.
Dave's hands, those hands, the flour-strong careful hands Albert had filled a sketchbook trying to hold, moving over him like he was something worth the time.
Albert had braced — some animal part of him always braced — for the moment a man got what he wanted and went somewhere else behind his eyes, the way they did, the way even the kind ones did.
It didn't come. Dave stayed. He stayed present the whole way through, right there in his own body and right there with Albert in his, murmuring the low unfancy things a plain man says, there, that's it, you're okay, and it was the staying, more than anything his hands were doing, that took Albert apart.
"Okay?" Dave asked, against his skin, every few minutes, checking, and Albert lost the ability to do anything but nod and say his name.
And the thing that broke Albert open, in the end, wasn't the heat of it, though it was hot, though he'd remember it in pieces for weeks — it was the moment Dave stopped, above him, braced on those forearms, and just looked at him, wrecked and wide open and not performing anything, and let Albert see him need it.
Let Albert put his hands flat on his chest and feel his heart going and not hide that it was going.
The man who'd built a life to never need one single thing, needing this, needing him, and letting him watch.
"I've got you," Albert heard himself say, and meant it with everything, and Dave shuddered and dropped his forehead to Albert's and let himself, at last, be had.
It wasn't smooth. It was better than smooth; it was real, the two of them figuring it out with their hands the way they figured out everything, a little clumsy and then not clumsy at all — laughing once when Albert's elbow found the wall, going quiet and serious again the second it mattered.
They found the shape of it together, unhurried and then not unhurried at all, and Albert — who gave and gave, who was only ever the current running toward what other people needed — took, for once, took what was his, and was given it gladly, and somewhere in it he stopped keeping score of anything at all.
For once in his life Albert wasn't managing something.
Not the moment, not Dave's feelings, not his own performance of being fine.
He was just in it, with someone, giving and taking in the same breath with no ledger anywhere, and it was so unfamiliar and so good that his eyes stung, and he hid it against Dave's shoulder, and Dave — who missed nothing — felt it, and didn't make him explain, just held on.