Chapter 20 #3
During the film’s climactic scene, a sudden burst of sound from the screen sent Hiro into a brief anxiety spiral.
I was on the floor beside him before the second note hit, my hand on his ribs, my voice dropping into the low register that told his nervous system the world was safe.
Beside me, Dante reached down without looking away from the screen and placed his hand on Hiro’s back, adding a second point of contact.
Hiro settled between us in under a minute, and neither of us acknowledged the coordination, because men who were good with animals recognized each other’s competence without needing to discuss it.
After the credits, the room erupted into the kind of discussion that happens when opinionated people have watched something worth arguing about.
Jacks and I talked for ten minutes about the director’s use of negative space, which was the first conversation I’d had since Portland with someone who understood that what a filmmaker leaves out of a frame is as important as what they put in.
Jacks thought about images the way I thought about animals, reading the empty spaces for information that the occupied spaces didn’t provide.
Rod said the movie reminded him of cooking, because the best meals were about what you left off the plate.
Finn said it reminded him of running a bar, because the best nights were about what you didn’t say to a difficult customer.
Chase said it reminded him of crosswords, and everyone looked at him, and he said, “What? Sometimes movies make me fall asleep.” Finn kissed him on the temple with the unthinking intimacy of a man who found his partner’s particular logic endlessly charming.
Dante said, “Tolstoy would have appreciated the pacing,” and returned to his book.
Mark, who had arrived late and let himself in without knocking because Mark treated all Barbacks-adjacent spaces as extensions of his personal domain, said, “The revenue model for Korean film distribution is actually fascinating.” The collective groan that followed seemed to genuinely confuse him, and, thankfully, stilled any future discussion of the international entertainment industry.
Dostoyevsky had slept through the movie and the discussion and was now draped across Hiro like a gray silk blanket.
Hiro, who had started the evening trembling at the sight of this creature, was using him as a body pillow and snoring.
Ruthie had migrated from Rod’s feet to my chair at some point during the film.
I chose not to reclaim the cushion, sitting instead on the floor beside the couch.
General Tso had not descended from the refrigerator all evening, but his tail had been visible over the edge throughout the film, twitching at intervals that suggested he was either following the plot or maintaining a running count of the indignities being committed in his domain.
During a quiet scene, I heard him purr. I could not prove this, and he would certainly deny it.
By midnight, everyone was gone except the mess.
Benji and I moved through the cleanup with the wordless coordination that two and a half months of cohabitation had built, a rhythm that didn’t require discussion.
I washed. He dried. I collected bottles.
He broke down boxes. I wiped the island while he swept around the dogs, who had collapsed into a pile near the couch that neither of us was willing to disturb.
The apartment was quiet again, but it was a different quiet than the one that had existed before the evening. It was the quiet that follows fullness, the acoustic memory of voices and laughter held in the walls like heat in stone after the sun goes down.
“That was okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
I searched for the word, the right one, the precise one, the one that meant what I actually felt rather than the one that kept a safe distance from it.
“That was good,” I said.
Benji’s face lit up in a way that I was learning to anticipate and that I was not, despite significant effort, learning to be unaffected by.
“Peter Loupier just admitted a social event in his apartment was good. I want this in writing. No, I want a Post-it! A notarized Post-it.”
“Don’t push it.”
“I’m going to push it, push it real good.”
I groaned. A Salt-N-Pepa reference was well and truly out of bounds at midnight.
“I’m going to refer to this as ‘the night Peter admitted he likes people,’ and I’m going to bring it up at every opportunity.”
“I didn’t say I like people. I said the evening was good. Those are different statements.”
“You liked having Jacks at your bookshelf. You liked talking film with someone who knows film, which surprised me, by the way. Not you. Jacks. He played football. I thought the only negative space he understood was the grass between him and a quarterback.”
I chuckled as I wiped down the counter.
“And you liked Rod in your kitchen even though he moved your cutting board—yes, I saw that, too—and brought a blowtorch.”
“He put the cutting board on the wrong side of the sink, and nobody should travel with a blowtorch. It’s not natural.”
“You liked Dante in the armchair. And you liked Chase with Potato. And you liked the fact that there were people in your home and dogs on your floor and noise in your rooms and nothing broke. Nothing broke, Peter. Everything held. Even you.”
He was right.
Everything had held.
Even me.
The structure I’d built for solitude had absorbed an evening of seven people and three dogs and Milk Dud tongs and a blowtorched pizza and the entire catalogue of social interaction that I’d been avoiding for years.
Magically, the walls were still standing.
The rooms felt larger than they had that morning.
Not emptier.
Larger.
As if other people had stretched something in my apartment that had been contracted for too long.
“David would have loved tonight,” I said without thinking. “He would have been the one organizing it. He would have known everyone’s drink order within five minutes and fallen asleep during the movie and woken up for the discussion with the best opinion in the room.”
“He sounds like he would have been a great addition to movie night.”
“He would have been the reason for movie night.”
Benji let the sentence sit.
He didn’t try to fix it or respond to it or move past it, and the letting-be was a kindness I recognized and was grateful for.
We finished the dishes.
I did a final sweep of the living room, straightening cushions and retrieving a Milk Dud that had rolled under the bookshelf and checking on the dogs.
Benji carried recycling to the bin by the door.
I picked up a blanket that Mia had used and left crumpled on the couch. As I began to fold it, Benji came back from the door and reached for the other end.
Our hands met in the middle of the fabric.
Fingers overlapped on fleece.
His landed on mine with the warmth and weight of a hand I had watched make cocktails and cradle kittens and hold a three-legged dog’s head with a gentleness that didn’t match anything else about its owner.
It was a hand that had spent all day making pizza dough because he’d wanted tonight to be good.
We both froze.
The blanket hung between us, suspended by hands that had found each other in the most ordinary way, in the middle of the most ordinary task, in an apartment that still smelled like pizza and popcorn and dog fur.
I should have pulled away.
That was the safe response, the one consistent with the boundaries I’d maintained since . . . that I’d maintained.
But I didn’t pull away.
My fingers stayed where they were.
I could feel Benji’s pulse through the point of contact.
Or maybe that was mine.
The distinction seemed less important than the fact that I could feel it at all, and that my body’s response was not to flinch but to hold still.
Benji’s eyes met mine. They were dark in the stove light and very close.
He wasn’t performing. He wasn’t narrating. He was just looking at me, waiting, the way I waited with frightened animals, giving me room to come forward or retreat on my own terms.
“You fold it wrong,” I said quietly.
“There’s no wrong way to fold a blanket.”
“There are several wrong ways, and you’ve found most of them.”
His mouth quirked. “Your standards for blanket folding are unreasonable.”
“My standards are precise. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Yes.”
We were still holding the blanket.
We were still touching.
My voice had dropped to something barely above a murmur, and the apartment was very quiet, and I was aware, with a clarity that felt almost clinical, that I was standing at the edge of something.
I knew that stepping forward would mean leaving a place where I’d lived for two years.
I knew also that stepping back would mean staying in that lived-in space.
Both options were terrifying, but only one of them involved the warmth of Benji Kwon’s fingers on mine.
“Peter,” he said.
“Benj.”
“We’re still holding the blanket.”
“I’m aware.”
“Are you going to let go?”
The question wasn’t about the blanket.
We both knew it wasn’t about the blanket.
It was about the half second, the space between wanting something and allowing yourself to reach for it, the flinch I’d been living inside like some prismatic snow globe since David died.
I looked at him.
His face in the stove light was open and patient and entirely without agenda.
He was giving me what he always gave me in the moments that mattered: time.
Time to assess, time to decide, time to arrive at whatever conclusion I was going to arrive at without pressure or performance.
“Not yet,” I said.
It was the most honest thing I’d said in two years.
Not no.
Not yes.
Not yet, which meant that the yet existed, which meant that somewhere on the other side of the grief and the walls and the blue mug and the half second, there was a door I hadn’t opened and I was, for the first time, acknowledging that it was there and that maybe, just maybe, I wanted to open it and see what might live on the other side.
Benji’s fingers tightened on mine.
Just slightly.
A pressure so small it could have been involuntary, or could have been the most deliberate thing he’d ever done.
Then Princess Consuela, who had been in her carrier behind the couch for the entire evening, and who had apparently selected this precise moment to register her displeasure with the duration of her confinement, let out a yowl of such piercing, existential outrage that we both flinched.
The blanket dropped, and the moment shattered the way soap bubbles break, gently and completely and with the faint shimmer of something that had been beautiful while it lasted.
“Your cat,” I said, “has the worst timing in the entire animal kingdom.”
“She has impeccable timing. She saw an emotional moment developing and shut it down. She’s protecting me from myself.”
“She’s a terrorist.”
“She’s my terrorist.”
I picked up the blanket, folded it correctly, in thirds, lengthwise, then in thirds again, because some things should be done properly even when your hands are shaking.
Mine were.
I couldn’t remember the last time my hands had shaken outside of a surgical emergency.
“Good night, Peter,” Benji said as I finished the last fold.
“Night, Benj.”
I drifted down the hall, in no hurry to bid the night adieu.
I left my door open about three inches, which I’d been doing for Hiro on bad nights, but which I’d started doing on other nights, too, for reasons I’d attributed to airflow and was now willing to admit had nothing to do with airflow.
I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling fan I couldn’t see and listening to the apartment settle.
To Benji’s footsteps down the hall.
To his door closing softly.
To Princess Consuela’s chirp of recognition.
To the creak of his bed.
I pressed my hand against my chest and felt my own heartbeat, still elevated, still carrying the expectancy of a moment where I’d held a blanket and a man’s fingers and my own breath . . .
And had said, “Not yet,” instead of “No.”
And had meant it.