Chapter 4 The Long Way Home #2
And under that, quieter, the real problem.
Something in me had moved when the warmth hit my hands.
Not wanting. I could at least say that plainly to myself, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road.
My body remembering what it was like to be looked after by him, that was all.
And up until that vent I had been certain there was nothing left in me to move.
I drove the last blocks up Pape too aware of the heater and of him.
“You went quiet,” he said, near the top of the hill. Not pushing. Just noticing.
“Long day at court.”
“Court,” he agreed, like that explained everything, and let me have the quiet, and I sat inside it hating that he still knew to do that.
His building was an old brown mid-rise with the lobby light out. He gathered the bag and thanked me a third time, plain, nothing on it.
“Say hi to Detective Carlson,” he said, with the door open.
And he got out into the rain. He didn’t hurry to the door, the same way he hadn’t hurried at the curb.
I waited until the door closed behind him.
Then I sat in front of the empty lobby a while longer than that took, with the engine idling, and then I drove home.
The pool car could go back in the morning. Nobody would miss it overnight, and I was done driving for other people.
I went over it the whole way down and got nowhere.
A dead battery. A ride. Old names, old cases, one laugh I hadn’t planned on and one vent turned in the middle of a sentence.
Nothing had happened. A review board made of saints could go over that evening minute by minute and find nothing to hold.
And I was going to tell Ryan all of it, that was a given.
I’d told him once that I didn’t want anything sitting between us that I hadn’t said out loud, and I’d meant it.
If I said the strange small thing, I’d find out how small it actually was.
I had the first sentence picked out before I crossed the Danforth.
The stairs of our building sounded the way they always sound under a tired man, and the hall light on three was out again, and none of it bothered me. The apartment smelled like clean laundry.
Ryan was on the couch with the basket at his feet, sleeves pushed up, folding towels his own way, in halves and then rolled, a method he had defended to me twice with a straight face.
He was barefoot. The lamp was on beside him and the rain was on the window behind him, and there was a towel over one knee, half done, and the television was on with the sound off, some panel of people disagreeing about hockey in perfect silence.
“Hey,” he said, looking up. “How was court?” And then, because he never waits for an answer when he has news, “Before you say anything. I met Almeida in the laundry room. We’re getting a new dryer.
Not repaired, Luke. New. He showed me the brochure like it was a car.
I’ve never seen a man that proud of an appliance, and by the end of it I was proud too.
It has a setting especially for towels.” He snapped a towel straight.
Then he actually looked at me. “You’re soaked.
Did they hold court outside this year? Sit down, there’s stew on the stove.
My grandmother’s recipe, and I got it mostly right this time. ”
I had the sentence ready. The whole evening was lined up in my mouth, the trial and the dead gray sedan on Shuter and the ride and the vent, all of it, in order.
And then I looked at him. Barefoot on our couch with his sleeves up and a towel over his knee, laughing at his own story, lamplight on him, rain behind him.
The whole rattled drive stopped mattering at once.
This was the real thing, right here, folding towels wrong under a lamp. Everything else was weather.
I crossed the room and took the towel off his knee and dropped it in the basket, and sat down on him.
“Okay,” he said, laughing, going backward into the cushions with my weight on him. “Hello. You’re enormous.”
“You’re in my spot.”
“I’m folding your towels.”
“You’re folding them wrong.”
“I’m folding them better,” he said, and then stopped defending the towels, because I kissed him.
It wasn’t a hello kiss. His mouth opened under mine and the basket went over the edge of the couch and neither of us looked.
His hands came up my back, under the jacket, and I got the jacket off without leaving him for more than a second, and his laugh went low and then stopped being a laugh at all.
He pulled me back down by the collar. I went.
“The towels,” he said against my mouth, not meaning it.
“Leave them.”
“Leaving them.”
We made a mess of them anyway. I got two buttons of his shirt and then stopped counting buttons.
He got my tie off in one pull and dropped it somewhere behind the couch, and his hands were in my hair and then at my belt and then flat against my chest, not pushing, just holding on.
He said my name once, quiet, in the voice that wasn’t for anywhere else.
I put my mouth to the warm skin of his throat until his breath changed, and his knee came up along the outside of my leg, and the couch complained about all of it and we ignored the old thing.
“You’re freezing,” he said, into my neck, and did nothing about it except pull me closer, which was the correct thing to do about it.
“It’s raining, detective genius.”
“I knew it.” His mouth was at my ear, and his hands went under my shirt, flat and warm against cold skin, and I heard myself make a sound I would deny in any official setting. He laughed, pleased with himself, and did it again.
The rain stayed on the window. The lamp stayed on.
The silent hockey panel disagreed about something else.
I stopped thinking about the day at all, and it was the easiest thing in the world, because he was warm and laughing and mine, with terrible opinions about towels, and every part of the evening that had rattled loose in the car quieted under his hands.
“How was court,” he said again, against my jaw, not meaning it as a question this time?
“Long. Tell you tomorrow.”
And that was the last either of us said for a while.