Chapter Sixteen
TAD’S APARTMENT building is in Inwood, backing on to Broadway and the Seaman-Drake Arch. Lewis has a soft spot for historical preservation, so he maybe gets a bit nerdy about the latter when Tad lets him in.
“It’s always killed me that the campaign to get it protected as a landmark failed back in the early 2000s. I mean, how cool is it that a nineteenth-century marble arch is just there , and it’s part of an auto-body shop? Have you ever been inside? Oh my god, I think this apartment complex is on the site of the mansion!”
His hands are on his face, which he only realizes after he takes note of the expression on Tad’s—some combination of amused, impressed, and… fond?
“I don’t think I’ve ever really appreciated it,” Tad says. “But yeah, I’ve been inside it.”
“AHHH.”
“So you’re really a huge dork, huh?” Tad’s wearing a soft, faded henley and charcoal sweats that hug his ass, which Lewis is trying hard not to stare at as Tad unpacks the Cuban takeout that Lewis brought.
Lewis runs his fingers through his hair. “I guess camping made me seem more cool and macho than I actually am?”
That makes Tad laugh, which is what Lewis was going for. Before he launched into full-on nerding out, Tad seemed tongue-tied and shy. “I’ll neither confirm nor deny,” Tad says.
“Great, so I just didn’t seem as dorky .”
“How about I give you the tour?” Tad asks, not even trying to seem like he isn’t clumsily changing the subject. There’s a gleam of mischief and humor in his eyes, and Lewis reminds himself they’re here to fill out divorce paperwork, not to flirt.
It’s just. Flirting with Tad is so easy.
“Sure,” Lewis says. “And I can meet your cat.”
“She’s shy,” Tad says. “I spent the afternoon lavishing her with attention and treats in an attempt—clearly futile—to get her to stick around when she heard the buzzer.”
“I would’ve brought treats for her if I’d known bribery was on the table.”
Tad smiles and Lewis mentally congratulates himself on getting in good on the cat front. Though he doesn’t really need to ingratiate himself, because if the cat doesn’t like him, they can always do friend stuff outside Tad’s apartment.
“Next time,” Tad says, and looks immediately mortified. “So! Living room, obviously. And kitchen.” Tad’s face is pink, but he gestures expansively. Light catches on his left hand. He’s still wearing his wedding ring.
The apartment isn’t a big space, which goes without saying in Manhattan. What it lacks in size, it makes up for in personality. There are plants everywhere: hanging from the ceiling, trailing fronds and leaves, on the windowsills, in big pots on the floor, on 90 percent of the kitchen counter. A mini-greenhouse holds several cactus-y looking things. There’s even a vine creeping up the wall by one of the windows.
Lewis knows the names of exactly zero of them. Can’t you buy those cactus-y looking things at Target?
“Wow,” he says. “Are these all real?”
“Yup.” Tad sounds proud.
There’s a magnet on the refrigerator that says, My plants are honors students . “And you, like… take care of all of these?”
“Yeah. Some are high maintenance. I have an app to help keep track of everything, but honestly, I mostly just remember.”
“Wow,” Lewis says again, spinning slowly to take everything in. There are shelves all over the apartment at staggered levels, and those have plants on them too, though they’re sharing with books.
Tad fingers a leaf of the nearest hanging plant, something with thick, waxy leaves. A sudden image flickers through Lewis’s imagination: himself, Tad’s app installed on his phone, learning how to take care of all these plants too.
He shakes it away. No. Bad.
Anyway, Tad’s leading him through the rest of the small apartment. There’s a hallway with one bathroom, a coat closet, and Tad’s bedroom. While Tad flips the light on in the bathroom, he doesn’t for his bedroom. “Hetty’s in there,” he says. “I can get her.”
“I don’t want to scare her,” Lewis says. “If she’s shy, she’ll be happier hiding.”
Tad gives him a funny look. Lewis wonders if he said something wrong, but Tad just leads him back to the main room.
When they’re done with dinner, Lewis asks, “You didn’t get in trouble for taking extra time off, right?”
That same funny look flashes over Tad’s face. “No,” he replies. “I meant it about having a ton of unused PTO. My boss actually said she was hoping I’d take another week. She likes hanging out with my plants and my cat.”
“Your boss takes care of your cat when you’re gone?” The idea of Lewis’s boss doing that for him is laughable. Not like his boss is bad or anything, but—he can’t imagine having a relationship with her outside of work, let alone one where she has a key to his apartment.
“Er, yeah.” Tad flushes and looks down at the remains of his sandwich. “I, um. Don’t really have many friends.”
Which is honestly baffling. Why wouldn’t Tad have many friends? He’s amazing! He’s so funny and smart, and totally charming, and there are so many endearing little things about him. “Well, I’m your friend,” Lewis says.
“I always think it’s so sweet when spouses say they’re each other’s best friends,” Tad deadpans.
Lewis laughs. “Yeah, that’s me. Keeping the romance alive.”
Tad’s eyes flick up to meet Lewis’s, and Lewis’s breath catches. The soft fall of Tad’s auburn curls over his forehead makes his eyes look so blue, and so endless. Like you could fall into them and keep falling and falling forever and you wouldn’t want anything to ever catch you.
Dating Break. Dating Break Dating Break Dating Break. It doesn’t matter that Lewis always has been the guy to keep romance alive. Totally the guy swooning over every Taylor Swift song that talks about moving the furniture to dance in the living room. The dork who loves holiday movies, the cheesier the better.
The point is… what was the point, again? He can’t remember because he can’t stop looking into Tad’s eyes.
It’s Tad who finally looks away, getting up to clear the table. When he comes back, he has a manila folder. “I wanted to start filling everything out, but I figured you’re the paralegal, so I should probably wait to make sure I don’t do anything wrong.”
“You would’ve been fine.” Lewis flips the folder open and scans the first page. Lots of legalese, which is fine—this stuff is his bread and butter, even if he doesn’t do family law.
He shifts on the chair, trying to get comfortable as he loses himself in the text. Or tries to lose himself in the text. He’s getting that disconnect-y feeling in his brain that he recognizes all too well as his anxiety ramping up, and before he knows it, he’s read half the page and internalized none of it.
With a breath, he goes back to the top and starts over. This isn’t hard or scary. He deals with legal documents every single day, and this one’s designed for regular people to be able to complete by themselves.
But the disconnect-y feeling gets worse, and suddenly it’s hard to get a breath.
“Hey.” A hand slides onto his shoulder, warm and grounding. “Are you okay?”
“Um.” Lewis feels like he’s physically heaving a two-hundred-pound sack—a sack containing his concentration—back into his brain. “Yeah, I….”
Usually it’s no problem to handwave his anxiety. He’s used to it. He has so many excuses to explain away an anxiety attack that half the time he has himself fooled.
With Tad’s hand on his shoulder, the excuses fall away. “Sorry,” he says, trying to breathe around the weight on his chest. “I guess I’m still sort of freaked out about this.”
Tad squeezes his shoulder. “What would help?”
None of the men Lewis has dated have ever asked that. Then again, Lewis has always taken great pains to hide his anxiety from his boyfriends. He’s told himself to get over it and not give away the fire alarm screaming in his head. It’s fine. He’s fine. He has a place to live, a good job, a good life. What does he have to be anxious about?
Now here’s Tad, who understands that what he’s seeing is Lewis having an anxiety attack. And he’s not minimizing it or rolling his eyes or snapping that there’s nothing to worry about, it’s just a form, no one’s dying. He’s not grabbing the folder and taking over, thinking he’s removing the source of stress, when that just sets off Lewis’s need for control and amps his anxiety up further.
Tad’s thumb rubs tiny circles on Lewis’s shoulder blade. “What do you need? To like… feel better? Or… sorry, should I not have asked that? You seemed like you were getting anxious, and sometimes people have stuff they do to help them? God, sorry. I should shut up, shouldn’t I—”
“No,” Lewis says more forcefully than he means to. Tad’s hand jerks back. Losing that warm weight on his shoulder seems uniquely terrible, and he reaches up to cover Tad’s hand with his and keep it there. “No, no, it’s fine. Thank you. For asking. I was just surprised.”
“Do people normally not ask?” Tad is quiet.
There can’t be a lump in Lewis’s throat, because he is definitely not close to tears from something so simple and silly.
“Is it okay if we sit on the sofa?” He can’t answer Tad’s question. Maybe the answer is obvious without him saying anything.
“Of course.” Tad squeezes his shoulder again.
There’s nothing special about the sofa. It’s not like Lewis has a ritual where he has to read forms there. He’s read legal forms all sorts of places—in his office, in waiting rooms, on the train. But the moment he sinks into Tad’s sofa, his breathing eases. And when he gestures for Tad to sit next to him, the anxiety ebbs away.
“Maybe I should’ve gotten my chakra scrubbed,” Lewis says with a wan smile.
Tad smirks. “I’ve heard chakra enemas are really effective for treating anxiety.”
Lewis snorts. “A chakra enema sounds hugely violating.”
A crooked smile twitches onto Tad’s face. Lewis’s heart flutters, and this time it’s definitely not anxiety.
Would it be an amazingly bad idea to hold Tad’s hand right now?
Before he can argue with himself about it, something lands on the sofa on his other side, accompanied by a querying, “Brrrrp?”
“Hetty!” Tad reaches across Lewis and scoops up the black cat who’s now staring at Lewis. Her legs flail as Tad pulls her into his lap and strokes her head. “She never comes out for people she doesn’t know!” The smile he aims at Lewis is blinding. “She obviously has a good feeling about you.”
“She’s so pretty.” Lewis holds a hand out for her to sniff, which she does. Tad beams. “Can I pet her?”
“What do you think, Hets?” Tad asks, his voice going sing-songy. Lewis dies a little from how cute it is. Hetty tilts her head back to look at Tad, blinks slowly, and starts to purr. With a soft smile, Tad leans over and touches her nose with his. His hair falls into his eyes as he bobs back up. “Yeah, you can pet her. She’s super loving, just shy. But she came out for you, so she’ll want you to pet her.”
Lewis reaches out, and his intent is totally to pet Hetty. Somehow, he’s brushing Tad’s hair out of his eyes instead.
They both freeze. Their eyes meet. A hot flush of mortification rises up Lewis’s neck to his face. “I… am so sorry,” he manages. His hand lands where it was supposed to in the first place, on Hetty’s head.
She butts her nose up into his palm and purrs louder. Tad relaxes. “It’s okay. I need to get it cut so it’s not in my eyes. Then people wouldn’t be tempted to do that.”
“Do you get a lot of randoms brushing your hair out of your eyes?”
Tad ducks his head in wordless acknowledgment that he doesn’t. As he strokes a hand down Hetty’s back and lets her tail curl around his wrist, he says, “You’re not a random.”
They sit in silence, petting Hetty while she soaks up the attention. Lewis has never heard a cat purr so loud, and she keeps rubbing her head against his knuckles when he goes to stroke her.
“I want to get a cat,” Lewis says.
“Yeah? How come you haven’t?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess I worry it would get lonely, and I’m not supposed to have more than one cat in my apartment.”
“Same,” Tad says, wrinkling his nose. “I’d love to get another cat to keep Hetty company. It’s not as big of a deal since I work from home so much, except now she gets super lonely when I leave.” He drops a kiss in the center of her head. “She’s been walking around glaring at me since I got home from Nevada.”
“I guess she finally forgave you.”
“I think she just really likes you.” Tad offers him a crooked smile. “Cats know what’s up.”
Their fingers brush as they both go to scratch behind Hetty’s ears at the same time. Electricity fizzes under Lewis’s skin.
“So, um.” Lewis clears his throat and tries to ignore the way his body is buzzing. “I’m guessing she leaves the plants alone?”
“Yeah.” Tad looks at her fondly. “When I got her, I only had a few plants, but she’s always been really good about not eating them. I still don’t keep anything dangerous where she can get it.”
Lewis’s gaze travels around the apartment. The plants are calming. It’s probably his imagination, but the air feels cleaner and fresher. “Everyone who comes over probably asks this and you’re tired of explaining, but how did you get into plants?”
Tad’s shoulders hitch and he looks away. “Well, no one really comes over, so, no. Not tired of explaining.” Hetty readjusts on his lap. “It’s not very exciting. My parents got me this, like, educational book for my eleventh birthday, and it came with a little greenhouse kit where you could grow your own plant. I loved that thing. It was like, my sole purpose in life for months.”
Even though Lewis doesn’t know what eleven-year-old Tad looked like, he can still picture it. “What kind of plant was it? Not that I know anything about plants at all.”
“Want to see it?” Tad asks eagerly.
“Wait, you still have it?”
“Yeah!” He glances down at Hetty in his lap, whose legs are stretched out, paws resting on one knee. “Jail for father for one thousand years,” he says, depositing her in Lewis’s lap. She looks disgruntled but stays as Tad goes to a table by the window and picks up a pot.
He holds it out for Lewis to see. “It’s an African Violet.”
It’s a small plant with fuzzy green leaves and clusters of purple flowers. Pretty. The pot is painted like a Pride flag.
“You’ve had this for twenty years?” Lewis asks, unable to wrap his head around that.
“Almost.”
“That’s so cool.”
“Really?” Two splotches of red appear on Tad’s cheeks, making his freckles stand out.
“Of course!” Does Tad really not see that? “You started growing this when you were a kid, and now you’re almost thirty. This plant has been with you for the majority of your life! I bet it’s gone through a bunch of moves, right?”
The red on Tad’s cheeks is spreading. His eyes look bright, and he’s clearly trying to bite down a huge smile. “Yeah. I was so worried about it when I moved down here for college. I held it in my lap for the entire drive.” He cradles the plant against his midsection. “I’ve repotted it a bunch of times to make sure it stays healthy.”
“How long do they live?”
“A long time. As long as I take good care of it, it could outlive me, in theory.”
“Whoa! Flowers can live that long?”
Maybe the comparison is too on the nose, but Tad absolutely blooms with Lewis’s interest. “They can live that long even outside if you just let them do their thing. There are peonies in the Better Homes and Gardens Test Garden that were planted in the 1950s and are still blooming. And hostas just keep going and going as long as the deer don’t eat them. My mom planted a ton of them on this shady bank in our yard when I was little and they’re still going strong.”
“I don’t know what those are,” Lewis confesses.
“I can show you?” Tad says without the slightest evidence that he thinks Lewis is dumb for not knowing what he’s talking about.
“I’d love that.”
Tad reaches over Lewis for an iPad, which is on the other side of the sofa. As he leans close, Lewis gets a lungful of his scent, detergent and a fresh, clean soap smell, and green. It’s different than how he smelled in Nevada, but underneath is the smell of his skin, which Lewis feels like he’s known all his life.
He snaps himself out of it as Tad pulls up pictures of the flowers he mentioned. The hostas look dainty, with their long stems and fluted, pale purple flowers. The peonies are all loud, brash blooms of violent, vibrant pinks.
“There’s this one gardener I follow on insta that has the most gorgeous peonies,” Tad says, voice thrumming with excitement. Lewis could listen to him talk about the things he loves all night. The way the passion lights his face makes him even more gorgeous.
There’s danger here, sitting next to Tad on his sofa, an iPad and a cat between them, Lewis’s body focused on Tad’s heat, the lengths of their thighs pressed together, the curve of Tad’s shoulder fitted against Lewis’s. There’s danger in the way the conversation flows effortlessly, never an awkward pause or a fumble for what to say.
An alert pops up on the iPad—11:00, time to go to bed.
“Oh my god! Shit.” Tad looks horrified. “I’m so sorry, god you probably wanted to get out of here hours ago, and”—he groans—“we didn’t even touch the paperwork. Fuck. I’m so sorry. Fuck, this is exactly what I always do. It drove John crazy, he’d always tell me I needed to talk to other people so it all didn’t pour out at home, and wow, I’m doing it again right now….”
“Who’s John?” Lewis asks, hating the unknown stranger already.
“My ex.”
Now Lewis hates him even more. What kind of guy says something like that to his boyfriend? “Yeah, well, screw him. Tonight was great.”
Tad looks flummoxed. “But it’s so late, and we didn’t get anything done.”
“I had fun,” Lewis says. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. I took up your whole night.”
Shaking his head vigorously, Tad replies, “No. No, this was nice.” His hair falls into his eyes again. “I had fun too.”
It’s true they didn’t get the form filled out. Not that they need to fill it out now, since they can’t get divorced for another six months. But getting it done will help his anxiety, which is definitely why he says, “I could come back tomorrow if you’re not busy, and we could work on the form then? I’ll bring dinner again.”
“Sure.” Tad sounds a little shy.
Hetty grumbles her displeasure with being displaced when Tad gets up to walk Lewis to the door. Lewis slips his backpack on and says, “So.”
“Same time tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
Lewis doesn’t make any move to go. He can’t stop staring into Tad’s eyes and breathing him in. He’s not close enough to feel Tad’s body heat, but he feels it anyway—that, and the ghost of Tad’s shoulder fitted against his.
Something gets stuck in his throat. He has to go now, because if he doesn’t, he might not leave at all.
“Well, bye,” he says.
“Bye,” Tad echoes.
When Tad got out of the car at the airport in Vegas, Lewis’s chest hurt enough to make him wonder if there was something wrong with him. That pain had nothing on the ache that starts now at the bottom of his rib cage and travels up, crawling along every rib, taking up a grasping presence in his sternum, and pressing down on his lungs and heart.
Lewis ignores the ache in his chest all through the walk down the hall, the elevator, and the ten steps he takes toward the lobby door. But the ache gets worse and worse, and when it’s unbearable he can’t do anything but stop and think about what’s causing it—even though he doesn’t actually have to think about what’s causing it at all.
When he knocks on Tad’s door, it swings open immediately, like Tad hasn’t moved. “Oh,” Tad breathes. “I was hoping you’d come back.”
They reach for each other at the same time, Tad fisting the lapels of Lewis’s coat as Lewis wraps his fingers in Tad’s curls and tugs his face down.
Their mouths meet as they stand in the doorway, and the minutes stretch out like honey as they kiss.
When they come up for air, Tad pulls Lewis across the threshold and shuts the door. Lewis runs his fingers down Tad’s jaw. “You never actually showed me your bedroom when you gave me the tour.”
“Well, let’s fix that,” Tad growls.
They don’t talk much after that.