23. Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
Micah
The concierge calls up at quarter past eight to tell me I have a guest, and I already know who it is before he says the name, the same way I've started to know when Lennox is coming the way you know weather is changing, a shift in the pressure of things, some part of me tuned to a frequency I didn't use to have.
I tell him to send him up and then I stand in the middle of the loft and do three seconds of something that might be panic and then isn't, because Lennox is coming and that means everything is going to be fine, which is a sentence I could never have said about another person arriving at this door.
I catch myself in the dark reflection of the window, one hand raised, fingers combing through my hair.
I put my hand down. Then I think about it for a second and put it back up again, because it is slightly ridiculous to not care what I look like for the one person I actually want to look good for, and then I put it back down because he's seen me in far worse states than this and chosen me anyway, which is the whole point, which is the extraordinary and barely believable thing.
The lift opens.
He looks terrible.
Not the exhausted-but-functional terrible he looked the morning after the alley.
This is something deeper and quieter, hollowed out rather than wrung out, like something has been sitting on him all day and he's brought it home without meaning to and doesn't quite know what to put it down yet.
He's still in his work coat. His eyes find me and some of the tightness in his jaw releases, which does something to my chest I don't have a name for yet.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi," he says.
I step back and he comes in, and I close the door, and I look at him standing in the middle of my loft with all that London behind him and I think, whatever happened today, I'm going to fix it if I can.
"Sit down," I tell him. "I'm going to cook."
I don't ask what happened. I've learned that Lennox unpacks things in his own time and asking him to do it faster only makes him go quiet in the specific way that means he's closed a door that I'm going to have to find my way around later.
Instead, I put music on, low, something with no words in it, and I start pulling things from the fridge with the focused competence that cooking gives me, the one part of my day that is always exactly as complicated as I decide it's going to be, no more.
Tonight it's cacio e pepe. Simple on paper, unforgiving in practice, the kind of dish that requires you to keep moving and not look away for longer than thirty seconds, or the whole thing seizes up into something you can't save.
Which suits me fine. It gives my hands something to do while my brain does whatever it needs to do with the fact of him being here, in my space, looking like that.
I set the pasta water on to boil. I toast the black pepper in the dry pan until the kitchen smells sharp and warm and extraordinary, and I grate the pecorino, more than you think you need and then more still, because the cheese is the whole architecture of the thing and you can't be timid about it.
When the pasta goes in I start the sauce, pasta water and cheese and the pepper, the whole thing requiring constant attention, a continuous small negotiation between heat and liquid, and I am aware the entire time of him on the sofa behind me, the particular quality of that awareness that's become its own kind of comfort.
He sits on the sofa and watches me cook.
I'm aware of it in the particular way I'm always aware of Lennox's attention, that torch-quality of it, but it doesn't feel like being assessed tonight.
It feels like being kept company. Like I'm a fire he's sitting near because he's cold, and the idea of being warm to someone is so new and so large that I have to focus very hard on the pecorino for a moment.
The pasta takes twenty minutes. In that time he says almost nothing, just sits there with his elbows on his knees and his hands folded, watching, and occasionally I catch his eye and he gives me the look that isn't quite a smile but is adjacent to one, and that's enough, that's more than enough, that's the kind of thing that shouldn't be enough for a grown person and somehow is.
I'm plating up when he speaks.
"He died all alone under a bridge," he says. "And nobody went to his funeral."
I go still.
Tyler. I think about Tyler Cooke, who I knew for about two months, who was funny in a way that surprised you, who had a habit of making a particular face when he was pretending not to be frightened, a face I recognized because it was the same face I'd been making for years.
Tyler who got out before me and got further under than I did, and who I hadn't been able to find when I went looking, later, which should have told me something and didn't, not until now.
The tears come before I can stop them. Not the careful kind, not the kind I'm practiced at managing, just the sudden overwhelming kind that arrives without warning and doesn't particularly care that I'm holding two plates of pasta.
I put the plates down. Carefully.
"He deserved so much better than that," I say, and my voice does something I'm not going to be able to fix quickly.
Lennox is off the sofa before I've finished the sentence.
He's just there, suddenly, in front of me, and he reaches up and puts his thumb against my cheek and wipes the tear away, very gently, with the specific tenderness of a man who is choosing every movement.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't ask why I'm crying for a boy I'm not supposed to know.
He just looks at me with those eyes that read everything and know everything and have chosen, deliberately, repeatedly, against all available evidence of their own quality, to keep choosing me.
We stand there for a moment in the kitchen with the pasta going cold and London doing its evening thing beyond the windows and something enormous sitting between us that neither of us is going to say out loud.
If I don't say it and he doesn't say it, then maybe it isn't quite real yet. Maybe we get to have this, just this, for a little while longer. That's what the silence is. Not an evasion, not a pretense, just two people agreeing without words to protect something for as long as they can.
I take a breath. I reach up and put my hand over his, where it's still resting against my face.
"Dinner's going cold," I say.
"Right," he says.
We eat at the counter like we always do, shoulders touching, and it's quieter than usual but not uncomfortably so.
He takes his first mouthful and goes still for a second in the way he does when something is better than he was expecting, and he doesn't say anything about it but he also doesn't have to.
"What is this?" he says eventually.
"Cacio e pepe."
"It's very good."
"I know," I say, and he makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh and is adjacent to one, and that small sound in this quiet kitchen on this particular evening goes straight into the collection of things I'm keeping.
He eats properly. I notice it the same way I noticed it on the roof terrace, the way you notice when someone who probably hasn't stopped long enough to eat today finally does. I put a little more in his bowl without asking and he doesn't object, which is its own kind of conversation.
We talk about small things. A documentary he watched last week, that he claims was terrible and describes in enough detail to make it clear he watched the whole thing.
Something funny that happened on the tube that I get the story of in two installments because he keeps circling back to add details he forgot.
He asks about the lido footage, and I tell him how I fixed the color problem, and he listens in that way he has, like the information actually matters to him, which nobody has ever made me feel about my work before. I file that away too.
After, we end up on the sofa. Not in any planned way, just the natural drift of an evening that's decided what it wants to be.
I put something on, a film neither of us has seen, and he settles back into the cushions and I settle into him, and he puts his arm around me without making any kind of production of it, just does it the way you do something you've decided belongs to you now.
For a while, the only sound is the television and the city and the occasional observation from one of us that the other acknowledges without really breaking the quiet.
He says something dry about the film's logic around the halfway point and I laugh and feel his arm tighten slightly around me when I do, and I think, this is what it must feel like to be an ordinary person having an ordinary evening and not understanding how extraordinary that is.
His thumb moves, just once, against my shoulder. A small absent movement, the kind you make without knowing you're making it.
I stay very still.
On screen, two people are arguing about something in a kitchen. I couldn't tell you what. The kitchen is very yellow. That's as far as my attention gets.
His breathing slows down. I feel it happen, the gradual release of whatever today put into him, and then he shifts very slightly, settling deeper into the sofa, which brings me with him, closer, and I readjust without thinking and neither of us says anything about it.
"The geography of this film makes no sense," he says, at some point.
"Completely agree," I say.
"There's no way those two cities are that close together."
"Terrible research."
"Mm."
His arm doesn't move.
I look at the television. The same two people are now in what appears to be a different country, which doesn't help the geography problem.
A lamp in the corner of the loft is doing something warm to the room.
Outside the windows London is being London, orange and scattered and endless, and in here it is very quiet and very small and very enough.
At some point his head tips, just slightly, and rests against the top of mine.
I stop breathing for a second.
Then I start again.
The thought arrives with the particular clarity of things that are true.
This is the best day of my life.
I nearly say it out loud. The words are right there, fully formed, ready to go, and then I hear how they'd land, how small and devastating they'd sound, this is the best day of my life, sitting here watching a film I'm not paying attention to in a flat I bought to disappear into, and I understand why I can't say it.
Because it would make him sad. Because it would tell him things I'm not ready for him to know the full shape of, about what my life has been, about how low the bar was set for happiness by the time I was old enough to know what happiness meant.
Because it's true, and the truth of it is the saddest thing I know about myself, and I would like, just for tonight, to keep it.
So I don't say it.
I just watch the film and feel his arm around me and listen to him breathe, and I let this evening be what it is, which is more than I ever expected to have, and I let that be enough.
It's more than enough.
It's everything.