33. Brendan
Brendan
There was a Tuesday, a few weeks before the bar’s anniversary, that I keep coming back to.
Nothing had happened, but that was the entire point.
Adrian closed the panadería at noon and came over.
We didn’t go anywhere or celebrate anything or mark any occasion.
He just let himself in with the key I’d given him.
Neither of us had made a ceremony of the giving.
I’d just had one cut and set it on the counter.
He’d looked at it for a second longer than a key required, then slid it onto his ring and said nothing, which from Adrian, was the loudest possible thing.
He fell asleep on my couch at two in the afternoon.
Puck assessed the situation from the arm of the couch.
He had opinions about Adrian, Puck did. They had negotiated a treaty over the preceding weeks, the terms of which appeared to be that Adrian was permitted to exist and to occasionally provide warmth, in exchange for Puck retaining the right to steal one item of Adrian’s per visit and secrete it into his hammock.
So far, the hammock contained a dancing shoe insole, a hair tie, and, inexplicably, a single flour-dusted sock that Adrian had been looking for across two visits.
Puck climbed down, crossed the blanket, and installed himself in the warm valley behind Adrian’s knees with the smug entitlement of a creature claiming disputed territory before the other party could wake to contest it.
I didn’t move for a long time.
Mind you, I am a man who reorganizes when he’s happy the same way he reorganizes when he’s not, because motion is how I metabolize feeling.
I have stood at more than one significant moment in my life and thought, with the back of my brain, about whether the supply cabinet was in order.
And here I was, pinned under a sleeping dancer and a ferret who had chosen violence in the form of proximity, holding a phone that wasn’t mine, unable to reach the coffee I wanted and unwilling to disturb the arrangement to get it.
Oddly, I felt no urge to reorganize anything at all.
Instead, I felt the slightly terrifying peace of a man who has stopped bracing himself.
Gerald sat on the windowsill in his patch of afternoon.
Beside him sat a second succulent, the one Adrian had turned up with the Sunday before and announced that Gerald needed a companion because “a plant that lives alone gets weird.” I had pointed out that I, too, had lived alone for many years and turned out mostly fine.
Adrian had looked at me when I said that.
He hadn’t argued. He’d just nudged the little pot an inch closer to Gerald and let the silence make his point for him, which was a rhetorical technique his abuela had clearly perfected and passed down like a family knife.
The new succulent didn’t have a name yet.
He said that part was mine to decide, and I was taking my time, because it felt, obscurely, like it mattered.
Now the two of them caught the light on the sill, Gerald and the nameless one.
I thought—not in words, exactly, more in the wordless way you think a thing you’ve been avoiding wording—that I didn’t want to go back to before.
That was the whole of it. No fireworks. Just a Tuesday, and a sleeping man, and a ferret committing petty theft, and two succulents in the sun, and a veterinarian who had spent his whole life being extremely good at the fixing of things discovering that there was nothing here to fix.
Adrian woke at four with a crease from the couch cushion down one cheek and a moment of disorientation before he located me and the ceiling and the whole situation.
“I fell asleep,” he said, appalled.
“You did.”
“In front of you.”
I grinned and nodded. “On me, actually. Puck participated.”
He looked down at the ferret, who clearly had no intention of moving. “He’s on my legs.”
“He’s claimed you. It’s a whole thing. There’s paperwork. Dona Carmen has a copy.”
Adrian laughed, still half asleep. Then he reached up and pulled me down by the collar and kissed me with morning breath and a couch-crease. I thought, again, in the wordless place, This, whatever this is, I want to not wreck this.
I should have paid closer attention to the word I reached for.
Wreck.
That was such a poor choice.
I have since thought about the fact that even in the happiest afternoon of my life to that point, some part of me was already bracing for the version of me that broke things.
I stayed on the couch until my leg went numb, and the light went orange, and the man I loved slept against me again. For once in my life, I let a good thing simply be good, without opening it up to see how it worked.
That was the last completely uncomplicated memory I had before the party.