Chapter 6 #2
So Hollis opened his eyes and looked, and that was almost more than the wanting itself — being watched wanting, being watched being wanted, the two of them seeing each other with nothing at all in the way.
He'd kept himself unlooked-at for so long it had stopped feeling like a wound and started feeling like weather, just the climate a man like him lived in, gray and constant and unremarked.
And here was a stranger in his own lamplight who would not let him hide in it.
It was, he thought later, the being-seen that undid him more than anything their hands did, though their hands did plenty.
Roan touched him like he was cataloging him, learning him, like there'd be a test and Roan intended to pass it, and under all the practiced ease of him there was something almost desperate, a hunger with grief in the bottom of it, and Hollis understood without being told that he was watching a man let himself have a thing he'd sworn off.
Roan bared to the lamplight was not the easy charming drifter at all.
Roan bared was scarred too — rope burns old and white across his palms, a long thin one down his ribs, and the little faded bird on the inside of his wrist that Hollis now, close, could finally read: a storm petrel, wings back, done in a shaky amateur hand that could only have been one particular hand, a long time ago, and gone soft with all the years since.
Hollis put his thumb over it, gentle, and Roan went still, and Hollis did not ask, just pressed his mouth to it the way Roan had pressed his to the burn, and something passed between them in the lamplight that neither of them had words for and neither of them needed.
And then there was less thinking, and more of the plain astonishing fact of it — Roan's weight, Roan's mouth, the sounds Hollis hadn't known he still had in him, the way Roan said his name like it was the only fixed point on a chart, Hollis, Hollis, there, and Hollis let himself want out loud for the first time in his adult life, let himself reach and take and ask, said please into the dark of his own bedroom and had it answered, had a man's whole attention bent to the single project of him, and it was not being needed, it was the other thing, the thing he'd stopped believing in, and it broke over him and kept breaking.
When it crested he had Roan's face in his big hands and his eyes open, because he wanted to see it, wanted to be looking right at the man who wanted him while it happened, and Roan looked back, wide open, nothing hidden, gone, both of them gone, and for that long stretched second the whole careful machinery of both their lives just stopped.
He had thought — the few times in twenty years he'd let himself think about it at all — that if this ever came to him again it would be a thing he endured gratefully, a kindness done to a man who'd stopped expecting kindnesses.
It was not that. Roan was not being kind to him.
Roan wanted him, specifically, particularly, with a focus that was almost frightening to be the object of — found what made Hollis's breath come apart and did it again on purpose, watched his face the whole time like the view was the entire point of the exercise, said his name like it was land after a long crossing.
There was no enduring it gratefully. There was only being in it, drowned in it, a man twenty years thirsty handed the whole cold sea to drink at once.
After, Roan didn't move off him the way Hollis half-expected — the way a leaving man might, already reaching for the edge of the bed and the rest of his life.
He stayed. He put his head down on Hollis's scarred chest, over the old burn, and lay there heavy and warm and breathing, and Hollis got one arm around him and didn't dare do anything else, held still the way you hold still when a wild thing has decided to land on you and you don't want to be the reason it startles off.
"You're doing the thing," Roan murmured, after a while, into his skin.
"What thing."
"The holding-still thing. Like I'll spook.
" A breath. "You did it on the float too.
You do it every time I let you close. Like you're — managing me.
Making room. Giving me the out." He turned his head, chin on Hollis's sternum, and looked up the length of him, and his pale eyes were tired and honest in the lamplight.
"You give everybody the out, Hollis. It's the saddest thing about you.
You'll hold a door open for a man to leave through and call it love. "
"It is love," Hollis said. "It's the only kind I've got."
"I know it is." Roan said it softer, like he was sorry for the sharp thing. He was quiet a while, his hand moving slow over Hollis's ribs, tracing the old scars the way Hollis traced a seam. "Warren," he said finally. "That was his name. The one who left. Dee told me." A pause. "He was a fool."
"He wasn't." Hollis looked at the dark ceiling.
"He was right, mostly. I told him go on ahead and I'd come after, and I never came.
He waited longer than I'd have. It's not the leaving that's the sin — everybody's got to be somewhere, and it's usually not here.
" He felt Roan go still against him, felt the man hear the shape of his own absolution in it, an absolution Hollis hadn't meant to hand over and found he didn't want back.
"The sin's telling somebody you'll come after when you know in your boots you never will.
That's the one that leaves a mark. So don't do that one.
Whatever else you do." His arm tightened, once, around the warm weight of him. "Don't tell me you'll come after."
Roan didn't answer that for a long moment. Something in him had gone very quiet, the way water goes quiet over the deepest part of a channel.
Roan was quiet a moment. Then he put his head back down, and his arm came across Hollis's ribs and tightened, and he said, low, "Then let me tell you the other kind exists," and it was the closest thing to a promise Hollis had heard in twenty years, and he lay in the dark of his own house holding a man who would be gone by fall and let himself, for one night, believe it.
***
Roan woke before light in a bed that was not his, in a house that was not his, on land, and for one long unguarded minute before the machinery started up again, he was home.
That was the word. That was the exact and terrible word.
Hollis was a furnace beside him, on his back, one big scarred arm still thrown over Roan like ballast, snoring the honest snore of a man who did not, as a rule, sleep next to anyone and was making up for it.
The window was going gray. Somewhere down the hill a truck started, and the first gulls, and the harbor doing its harbor things, and Roan lay in the warm dark of another man's bed with another man's arm across him and felt the whole shape of a life he did not get to have settle over him like a quilt — mornings like this, a house that smelled of woodsmoke, a yard down the hill, a man who reached for you in his sleep.
It was so good it was a countdown. He could hear it ticking under everything.
This is the thing that gets taken. This is exactly the size of the thing that gets taken.
He should get up. He should go down to the boat, to his own cold cabin twelve feet off the ground, and remember what he was.