Epilogue Trust My Heart
Ryan
The last box would not close.
I pressed the flaps down and they popped back up.
I had packed a winter coat on top, like a man who had learned nothing all afternoon.
Luke came up behind me, put both hands flat on the cardboard, and leaned.
The box gave up. I ran the tape across it under his weight, and before he let go he kissed the back of my neck, unhurried, like we had all day.
We did not have all day.
“Last one,” he said, against my hair.
“Last one.”
He carried it to the line by the door and set it down square with the others, no wasted moves.
He packed like he did everything, economical, nothing done twice.
I watched him instead of flattening the leftover cardboard, and I’d watched more than I’d worked.
He was sure of every move, and it had been getting to me since the first week, back when I couldn’t stand him.
It still did. I wanted him, right there, boxes and all.
The one framed photo we owned rode on top of the second box, wrapped in one of his shirts. He hadn’t trusted me with the glass. That was the arrangement, start to finish. He did the careful things and handed me the ones I couldn’t wreck, and I’d stopped minding it somewhere around box four.
The apartment did not look empty. It never would.
The worn couch out of surplus, the low table, the two beds, the strip of a kitchen with its two burners and the fridge that always hummed too loud.
All of it belonged to the Service, and all of it was staying for whoever they assigned here next.
Forty square meters, furnished out of a supply catalogue.
Two strangers had been handed one key and told to make it work, and somewhere in these four rooms we had.
The old keys were already on the kitchen counter, next to the building’s checklist, signed at the bottom, and the note Almeida had left us.
Block capitals, no greeting, the way he wrote everything.
DON’T TOUCH GNORMAN ON THE WAY OUT, HE’S BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH TENANTS.
Then, farther down, smaller, the part that cost him: YOU TWO WERE NO TROUBLE.
THAT’S THE NICEST THING I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT ANYBODY IN THIS BUILDING.
DON’T LET IT GO TO YOUR HEADS. NEW PEOPLE MONDAY.
DON’T COME BACK TO CHECK ON THE PLACE. A.
Gnorman was the gnome by the front step, chipped, one boot repainted the wrong green. Almeida guarded it the way he guarded that basement dryer, and he had cleared our steps before dawn all winter without being asked.
“We’re going to miss the old man,” I said.
Luke read the note again. “He’d hate hearing that.”
“He’d put it in capitals.”
The new keys were in my front pocket. I had checked three times that they were still there. All that was left was to pick up twelve boxes and walk out of the first home I’d ever had that deserved the word.
I wasn’t ready. I’d known it for hours and hidden it well.
“Do a last pass with me,” Luke said. “Before we load.”
“We have everything.”
“Then it won’t take long.” He held out his hand.
I took it.
We walked it slow, in no hurry to finish. It didn’t take long. Forty square meters, four small rooms and the strip of kitchen, the green tile in the bathroom, the metal desk in the second bedroom that had held my suits and nothing else. There wasn’t a foot of it we hadn’t lived hard in.
None of it should have worked. Two men a bad week from getting fired, put in the same apartment and left to sort it out, and the Service had bet against us in writing before we ever unpacked.
We turned into this instead. The counter we’d fought at and made up at more times than I could count.
The couch where he told me the truth about his life.
The door he slammed exactly once and never again.
I didn’t stop and take any of it apart. I didn’t need to.
By the end the whole place was just him to me.
I reached for his hand again on the way through. I’d been reaching for it every chance I got. He let me every time.
He caught me at the bathroom door and kissed me, for no reason except that we were leaving, and I kissed him back and let the schedule wait. Then he tipped his head down the hall and we kept moving.
We finished the pass without much talking. There wasn’t much left to see, just bare rooms and clean corners and the shapes our things had left in the dust.
At the door of our bedroom Luke stopped. The bed was stripped to the mattress, the closet standing open and empty, the window bare. He looked at it a while, and I watched him.
“Strange,” he said. “Smaller with everything gone.”
“Bigger to me.” I didn’t know why I said it. It was true anyway. “More room to miss it in, maybe.”
He found my hand without looking. We stood in the doorway of the room we’d slept in and didn’t go in. His thumb moved slow across the back of my hand. He never talked to fill a quiet. He just stayed in it with me until it stopped being lonely.
I kissed him for that, both hands in his shirt, until he made a low sound and eased back an inch.
“We’re never getting out of here,” he said.
“That’s the idea.”
“Boxes first.” But he took his time letting go, and pressed his thumb to the inside of my wrist before he did.
Back in the living room I took the new keys out again. Fourth time, maybe fifth. Two of them, bright, the cut edges still sharp. Nobody had slid these across a desk at anybody. We had stood at the hardware counter on Parliament and paid for them ourselves.
Our new place was ten minutes east, the third floor of a walk-up with south windows and a fire escape wide enough to sit on.
A real kitchen, one two people could stand in without fighting over the single square of counter.
A bedroom door that locked, for whatever that was worth to two men who’d stopped needing one to.
Both our names on the lease, in that order and then reversed, because we’d argued about whose went first and settled it by writing both.
Luke had already decided which wall the couch would go on.
Our couch, the first one either of us had bought on purpose, coming Thursday.
He’d stood in that empty living room for a while and had opinions about where the morning light fell.
I’d never once heard the man have an opinion about light.
I’d agreed to all of it on the spot. I would have agreed to a houseboat if he’d stood in it and looked like that.
Luke took one key off the ring and threaded it onto his own, next to his car key, like it had always lived there.
“You didn’t even hesitate. You stood in that kitchen twenty minutes and signed a lease. What made you so sure?”
“Nothing made me sure.” He pocketed his keys. “I’m trusting my heart this time.”
He said it plainly, no ceremony, and picked up the cooler like the subject was closed. To him it was. I stood there a moment longer with my key in my hand, and then I put it away carefully. I planned to keep it a long time.
And then there was nothing left to do.
I stood in the middle of the living room, in a furnished apartment that had already stopped being ours, and it caught up with me all at once.
I had been fine all day, fine with tape in my hand and a list to work through.
Now the tape was done and the boxes stood in their line by the door, and I did not want to go.
It didn’t make sense. The new place was better in every way a person could put on paper. We had chosen it ourselves. I stood there anyway, not wanting to walk out.
“Ryan.”
Luke had stopped by the door with the cooler. He looked at my face and set the cooler down.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re not.” He crossed the room. He didn’t touch me right away. He looked first. He always wanted the whole of a thing before he put his hands on it. “Tell me.”
“Everything good in my life started in this apartment.” It came out rough, and I let it. “You. Us. Whoever I am when nobody’s performing. All of it started inside these four rooms, and I know we’re taking it with us, and I still don’t want to walk out that door.”
He nodded slowly, like I’d said something reasonable.
“It would worry me if you could walk out of here and feel nothing,” he said. “This place made us. You’re allowed to love it.”
“You’re not sad at all, are you.”
“I’m not leaving anything here.” He said it looking straight at me. “Everything this apartment ever gave me is standing in the middle of the living room feeling sorry for himself.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. That was a good one.”
And he kissed me. Both hands on my face, thumbs at my cheekbones, thorough about it, a kiss that wasn’t going anywhere. I held on to his wrists and let the door stop mattering. When he eased off he stayed close, forehead to mine, and I was breathing differently than I had been.
“We’re not leaving yet,” he said.
“Almeida wants the keys today.”
“Almeida can wait an hour.” He took my hand and pulled, and he was smiling with about ten percent of his mouth, which on Luke was a billboard.
“Where are we going?”
“Bedroom.”
“There’s nothing in the bedroom, Luke. There’s a stripped mattress that belongs to the Toronto Police Service.”
“Then it’s had a boring life until now.”
I laughed. He kept pulling.
“Are you blessing the apartment?”
“Somebody should.” He walked me backward through the bedroom door, one hand at the small of my back so I didn’t have to look where I was going. “One more time. For the next two idiots they assign in here.”
“That’s generous of us.”
“We’re generous men.”
He took the last pillow off my arm, where I’d been carrying it, and dropped it on the head of the bare mattress.
“Amenities,” he said.
He tipped me onto the bed after it. The frame knocked the wall, the same spot it had always knocked, and we were both laughing before anything had even happened.
“The neighbors,” I said.
“We’re leaving. Let them miss us.”
He climbed over me and took his time settling, elbows on either side of my head, and then he didn’t kiss me right away. He just looked down at me, and I looked up at him, at the face that had once refused to shake my hand in a hallway, and I started grinning so wide it probably ruined the mood.
It didn’t ruin anything.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“I’m not sad anymore, if that was the plan.”
“That was half the plan.”
“What’s the other half?”
“Going well so far.”
He laughed then, the full one, the one almost nobody got, head dropping to my shoulder, his whole weight easing onto me while it ran through him. I would have paid money to make it last longer.
He got a hand under my shirt, warm, flat against my ribs, and I stopped keeping track of anything else. I pulled him down by the collar and felt him smile against my mouth, and somewhere under us the frame knocked the wall again and neither of us so much as paused.
“Bless the apartment,” I said against his mouth.
“New place needs one too,” he said.
We were both still laughing when he kissed me again.
Then we weren’t.
The End