Chapter 14
Peter
Moisturizer, in itself, wasn’t important.
It was a tube of overpriced lotion that a man with no concept of boundaries had placed on my shelf without permission.
He’d accompanied said tube with a Post-it note that included the phrase, “Your face will thank me,” which was not a phrase that belonged in any roommate interaction, and which I had chosen to interpret as a general statement about dermatological health rather than anything more personal.
The first morning, I ignored it.
It sat on my shelf beside the coconut-argan conditioner that had already breached my defenses, a second incursion in what was clearly a coordinated campaign to inhabit my personal care routine one product at a time.
I showered, used the conditioner (which was, as I had already conceded, acceptable), and left the moisturizer untouched on the grounds that a man should not have to justify washing his face with water and nothing else.
This had been my system for thirty-two years and had produced results that I considered perfectly adequate.
The second morning, I picked it up.
Just to read the label.
For informational purposes only.
The label read: SPF 30. Lightweight. Non-greasy. Formulated for combination skin.
I didn’t know I had combination skin, whatever that was, and which the label seemed very confident about.
The ingredient list was long and contained words I recognized from veterinary dermatology, which was either reassuring or concerning depending on how one felt about the overlap between human and animal skincare.
In my professional opinion, this was more significant than most people realized.
I put the bottle back on the shelf.
The reading for informational purposes was concluded.
On the third morning, I used it.
In my defense, the weather had been aggressive.
Tampa in late spring operated under the apparent conviction that the sun was a personal challenge to be met with maximum intensity.
My walk from the parking lot to the clinic had started producing a tightness in my skin that I’d been attributing to dehydration but that might, possibly, upon reflection, have been attributable to the fact that I had been washing my face with bar soap and hoping for the best for three decades.
I applied the moisturizer after my shower, following the instructions on the back, which were straightforward enough that even I could handle them, as Benji had so generously noted.
It absorbed quickly.
It didn’t smell like anything in particular.
It left my skin feeling like skin, only slightly better, in a way that I found annoying because it suggested that Benji had been right about something, and I would have to live with that knowledge.
I wrote, “I don’t need a moisturizer,” on a Post-it and stuck it to the fridge.
Twelve hours later, after a full day at the clinic during which Ayesha had looked at me over her salad and said, “Your face looks different,” and Carlos had said nothing but had glanced at me twice, which from Carlos constituted a thorough investigation, I added to the note, “It’s not terrible.”
Benji’s response, waiting for me the next morning in his looping, chaotic handwriting with four sparkle emojis, should not have made me feel anything.
It made me feel something.
I filed it away and moved on.
The thing about living with Benji Kwon was that the man was impossible to keep at the distance I’d designed.
I had systems. I’d built said systems carefully over years of solitude, each one serving a specific purpose: the routine, the quiet hours, the Post-it notes instead of conversations, the blue mug, the newspaper, the twelve-minute showers, the animals, and the schedules and the whiteboard that organized everything into rows and columns that made sense.
These systems were not walls.
They were architecture.
They were the structure of a life that functioned, that got up every morning and went to work and came home and fed the animals and wrote, when it could, and slept when it couldn’t, and did not, at any point, require another person to hold it together.
Benji did not attack the systems.
That would have been easier to manage.
If he’d been loud about wanting in, if he’d pushed against the boundaries the way I’d expected him to, I could have pushed back and the structure would have held.
Instead, he found the gaps.
He found places where the architecture had thin spots that I hadn’t noticed or had chosen to ignore.
He found them not by looking for them but by being himself, by moving through my apartment with an energy that was so fundamentally different from mine that it illuminated every corner I’d been keeping dark.
And he cooked.
That was one of the gaps.
I’d been eating functional meals for two years, food that served the purpose of sustaining a body without any particular interest in the experience. Peter-food, David used to call it, shaking his head while he watched me eat a turkey sandwich over the sink for the third night in a row.
“You eat like a man fueling a machine,” David would say.
He’d then take the sandwich out of my hands and make something with it that involved heat and seasoning and a plate and the expectation that food should be enjoyed rather than administered.
Benji had started leaving plates in the fridge.
Not every night, but often enough that I’d stopped being surprised by them and had started, if I was honest, looking for them.
He’d learned things from Rod. Not complicated things, but competent things.
He made a garlic shrimp that was better than it had any right to be, a chicken and rice that was seasoned with a confidence suggesting he’d made it more than once, and a soup that appeared one Sunday with a Post-it saying, “Made too much. Don’t read into it. — B.”
I’d eaten two bowls while pretending I hadn’t.
He brought the kittens into the living room in the evenings.
That was another gap. On the nights he wasn’t working, he’d open the bathroom door and let the Destiny’s Child kittens swarm into the apartment like a tiny, furry invasion force.
The hours that followed would be a controlled catastrophe of fur balls exploring every surface, while Princess Consuela watched from her carrier with the horrified disgust of a dowager observing peasants at a carnival.
I should have objected.
The kittens had a schedule, and the schedule did not include “rampage through the living room while Benji films them for TikTok.”
But Hiro loved it.
That was the thing I couldn’t argue with.
When the kittens came out, Hiro came alive.
He’d chase them with his lopsided, three-legged gallop, and they’d climb on him like he was a jungle gym or some kind of wobbly medieval steed.
He’d lie on the rug with three kittens on his back and one on his head and Beyoncé perched on his remaining front leg like a tiny calico figurehead.
His tail would wag with the steady, happy rhythm of a dog who had forgotten, for a few minutes, that the world had ever hurt him.
I watched Hiro with the kittens one evening from my desk.
I’d been trying to write and failing.
I’d suddenly realized the apartment sounded different.
It wasn’t louder, but there was a difference in quality that made it somehow fuller.
The silence I’d cultivated had been clean and controlled and exactly what I’d needed to survive my first brutal stretch of grief, but it had also calcified somewhere along the way into something less like peace and more like preservation.
I hadn’t noticed because there was no one around to show me the difference.
Now, there were kittens on my dog and a man on my couch narrating their adventures to a phone camera and a hairless cat who judged everything from behind a mesh door.
My apartment sounded like a place where things were alive rather than a place where things were being maintained or held back or suppressed.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
So I did what I always did when I didn’t know what to do with something. I wrote it down, closed the laptop, and went to the kitchen to make tea.
Benji was on the couch with Beyoncé in his lap and his phone in his hand, scrolling through comments on the latest video.
He’d changed out of his work clothes into the boxers and inside-out T-shirt that constituted his evening uniform.
His hair was doing its usual post-shift thing, which was to abandon any pretense of style and go wherever gravity and product residue took it.
“Peter,” he said, without looking up. “Beyoncé’s video has forty-two thousand views.”
“Which video?”
“The one where she opens the bathroom door while I narrate it in the voice of Jane Goodall.”
“You didn’t sound like Jane Goodall. Besides, that’s offensive. She was a legend.”
“I was honoring her, Peter, and I sounded exactly like her. Even my pitch was perfect.” He let out a pouty huff.
“Beyoncé’s execution evolved. This time she did a thing with her tail at the end that makes it look like she’s taking a bow.
It’s generated eleven hundred comments. Someone called her ‘the Houdini of cats.’ Someone else said she should have her own show. A woman in Ohio wants to adopt her.”
“Beyoncé is not going to Ohio.”
“Obviously Beyoncé is not going to Ohio. Beyoncé is going to a carefully vetted local family that meets your rigorous adoption standards and ideally lives close enough that I can visit, but the point is that Ohio wants her, Peter. She’s a national figure.”
“She’s a kitten who can open a door.”
“She’s a kitten who can open a door and take a bow afterward. That’s range.”
I made my tea.
I sat at the island.
From the living room, I could hear the kittens doing whatever kittens do when unsupervised, which based on the sounds was a combination of sprinting, climbing, and engaging in the kind of small-scale warfare that would be alarming in any species larger than a bread loaf.