Chapter 21
Benji
Not yet.
Two simple words.
And one massive door left open by a man who locked everything.
I turned them over in the dark, examined them from different angles, testing their weight.
He hadn’t said, “No,” which would have been clean and survivable.
Nor had he said, “Yes,” which would have been terrifying and wonderful.
“Not yet” was neither and both and left me suspended in a space I didn’t know how to occupy, a space where something was going to happen but hadn’t, and where the distance between Peter and me had been measured in an unfolded blanket’s width.
I gave up on sleep at 4:30 a.m., fed Princess Consuela, showered, and stood in front of the bathroom mirror examining my face for evidence that I’d been fundamentally altered by a man’s fingers on mine over a piece of fleece.
My face looked the same.
This seemed like a design flaw.
Peter’s door was still open a few inches when I passed it on the way to the kitchen.
I could hear his breathing, slow and even.
I kept walking because stopping outside his door at 4:30 in the morning to listen to him breathe was a line of utter creepiness I was not prepared to cross, even though I was apparently prepared to cross every other line, including the one where I might fall for my temporary roommate who communicates through refrigerator stationery and folds blankets into thirds.
Like a masochist.
Or a serial killer with a folding fetish.
The kitchen was dark except for the stove light.
I made coffee.
I stood at the island and drank it and looked at the fridge, where the Post-it notes had accumulated over the weeks, forming themselves into a layered history of two people learning each other’s rhythms. There was his precise handwriting and my chaotic loops, his dry observations and my sparkle emojis, a whole ongoing conversation that had started with milk placement and had become, without either of us naming it, the most honest relationship I’d ever had.
I wanted to write something.
Not a joke or a rebuttal or a negotiation about shampoo or shower schedules or the correct way to operate a French press.
I wanted to write something true.
Something that acknowledged what had happened over a blanket at midnight without the safety net of humor or deflection.
I pulled a Post-it from the pad, then uncapped the pen.
I stood there for a full five minutes with the pen hovering over the yellow square, unable to write a single word, because every word I considered was either too much or not enough, and the distance between those two things was exactly the width of the half second Peter had been living in for two years.
I understood now, finally, standing in his kitchen at dawn, that the half second wasn’t just his. It was mine, too. I’d been living in my own version of it since the night I’d sat on his floor with Hiro and felt something shift that I’d spent three years keeping still.
I put the pen down, and I drank my coffee.
The bar was closed on Mondays, but Tuesdays started early because Tuesday was delivery day, a day that required the kind of organizational focus that I was, on this particular Tuesday morning, spectacularly incapable of providing.
“That’s the third time you’ve counted that case,” Jacks said.
“I’m being thorough.”
“You counted it, wrote the number down, crossed it out, and started over. That’s not thorough. That’s distracted.”
“I’m not distracted. I’m applying a new level of rigor to our inventory process.”
Jacks set down the case of gin he was carrying and looked at me with the quiet, steady attention that always made me feel transparent.
Jacks never pushed. He simply created space and waited for you to fill it.
His waiting was more effective than any amount of questioning because it trusted you to arrive at honesty on your own schedule.
I lasted about forty seconds.
“Something happened last night,” I said. “After everyone left.”
Jacks leaned against the shelf and waited.
“We were cleaning up, folding a blanket, and our hands touched. We just, I don’t know, stood there holding the blanket and looking at each other.
I asked if he was going to let go, and he said, ‘Not yet.’ Princess Consuela screamed, and the moment ended before either of us could say or do more.
We went to our separate rooms, and I haven’t slept, and I can’t count boxes, and I think I might be losing my mind. ”
Jacks considered this for a moment. His lips twitched as though they wanted to form into a smirk or a smile or something, but he kept them neutral. I was fairly certain the effort had cost him something.
“What did ‘not yet’ mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know what it meant, Jacks!” I threw my hands into the air, though for what purpose, I couldn’t say.
“That’s the problem. It could mean, ‘Not yet, but soon.’ It could mean, ‘Not yet, and possibly never, but I’m being polite about it.
’ It could mean, ‘Not yet because I’m holding a blanket and my hands are occupied.
’ There are multiple interpretations, and none of them came with footnotes or IKEA instructions.
For once, IKEA instructions might’ve been clearer than reality—and never, in the history of furniture assembly, has that been a true statement. ”
Jask snorted, his lips giving in to a small smile.
“Which one do you think it is?”
“I think it’s the first one. I think he meant soon.
I think he was standing in his kitchen at midnight looking at me with a face that didn’t have any walls on it and telling me that he’s not ready but he’s getting there—but I’ve been wrong about people before, Jacks.
I’ve been spectacularly wrong. I once thought a guy was flirting with me for three weeks. It turned out he was just Canadian.”
Jacks’s brow furrowed. “Canadian?”
“They’re very friendly. It makes flirting very confusing. Mounties are the worst with their swarthy shoulders and broad smiles and horses and shit.”
Jacks snorted again.
“Peter’s not Canadian.”
“No, Peter is a man from Austin, Texas, who folds blankets into thirds and uses tongs for Milk Duds, which, for the record, is fucking weird. He’s also a man who looked at me last night with an expression that I have been replaying on a loop for approximately eight hours and that I am going to continue replaying until my brain either resolves the ambiguity or catches fire, whichever comes first.”
“Have you talked to him today?”
“I left before he woke up.”
“You left before he woke up?”
“Yes! I left before he woke up because I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to stand in the kitchen making small talk about the weather while we both pretended that we didn’t hold hands over a blanket twelve hours earlier.”
“You could try saying to him what you just said to me.”
“To Peter? Come on, Jacks, the man communicates through Post-it notes, for Christ’s sake.
His emotional bandwidth is allocated to quarter-inch yellow squares.
I can’t just walk into the kitchen and say, ‘Hey, about last night, when you said not yet, did you mean not yet in a hopeful way or not yet in a gentle-rejection way, because I need to know so I can calibrate the rest of my emotional life accordingly?’”
“Why not?”
“Because . . .”
Jacks stared . . . and blinked. Fucking football player and his level head.
“What if . . . I mean . . . but really . . . he might . . . or he might instead . . . fuck me.” I ran my hands through my hair and pulled so hard I thought half of it might come out. “Jacks, what if he says it was just gentle rejection, a Texas-sized ‘hell no’ packaged in kind words?”
The words landed on the stockroom floor between us.
They were twisted in the way I twisted most words, but they were also true.
They were the words underneath all the counting and the rambling and the Canadian anecdote.
They were . . . the fear. My fear. They didn’t represent the fear of Peter saying, “No,” exactly, but of Peter saying, “No,” and me having to continue living in his apartment, sleeping twenty feet from his bedroom, hearing him breathe through the wall, and sharing the stove light and the Post-it notes and the 3 a.m. kitchen.
They summed up the fear of all of it continuing exactly as before except with the knowledge that “before” was all it would ever be.
“Benj,” Jacks said in the voice he used when he was about to say something he’d been thinking for a while.
“That man drove to this bar on a weeknight to bring you your cell phone. He sat in a corner for two hours watching you work. He kneeled on the floor of this bar and talked to a scared little girl because it was the right thing to do, and then he told you she reminded him of his sister. He cooked you dinner for weeks without being asked. He left his door open at night. When you touched his hand, he said, ‘Not yet.’ He didn’t say, ‘No.’ He didn’t pull away.
He stood there and held on and told you the truth about where he is. ”
Jacks paused.
“That’s not a man who’s rejecting you. That’s a man who’s getting ready, preparing himself, possibly steeling his own courage to jump off his own terrifying ledge.”
I stood in the stockroom holding a clipboard I’d forgotten I was holding and tried to breathe around the thing in my chest that Jacks’s words had just cracked open.
“When did you get so wise?” I asked. “Football players aren’t supposed to be wise.”
“I’ve always been wise. You just talk too much to notice.”
“That’s fair.”
“Go count the gin, Benj, and count it once this time.”
I went home at 4 p.m., which was early for me but which I’d justified on the grounds that inventory was done and there was nothing left to do at the bar, and I was absolutely not going home early because I wanted to see Peter—except that I was absolutely going home early because I wanted to see Peter.
The apartment was quiet when I opened the door.
It was the particular quiet of a space that was occupied but still, the quiet of a man and his animals in their evening routine.
He’d come home early from the clinic. No, that wasn’t right.
He’d worked a regular shift that ended at a regular hour.
He was home now. I was the one who’d come home earlier than expected.
I was the one doing something extraordinary.
Fuck my life.
I could hear the faint clack of computer keys coming from the direction of Peter’s room, which meant he was at his desk, which meant he was writing or trying to write or staring at the cursor. Any of those activities carried a weight that I’d learned to respect by giving them distance.
I went to the kitchen and made a snack, then I stood at the fridge and read our Post-it notes, the old ones, the ones that had accumulated over months. I felt that particular ache of looking at something that used to feel simple and now felt enormous.
Then I noticed a new note tucked behind the edge of the whiteboard.
His handwriting was neat, precise, and unhurried. There were exactly four lines.
The pizzas were good. You should make them again. I liked the peach one especially. I’ve been thinking about the peach one all day, which is not something I expected to write on a Post-it note or in any other context.
— P
I read the note three times.
On the surface, it was about pizza.
It was one man complimenting another man’s cooking, which was a normal thing that normal roommates did. There was no reason to read it as anything other than a straightforward assessment of a baked good.
Except that Peter didn’t write Post-it notes about food.
Peter wrote Post-it notes about feeding schedules and shampoo territories and French press protocols. Peter’s Post-it notes were functional. They conveyed information that served a purpose, and the purpose was always the smooth operation of a shared living space.
“I’ve been thinking about the peach one all day” did not serve the smooth operation of anything.
“I’ve been thinking about the peach one all day” was Peter admitting that something Benji had made had occupied space in his mind.
Had been carried with him through a full day at the clinic, through surgeries and examinations and the structured routine of a man who did not let things occupy space in his mind without vetting them first.
Peter had been thinking about something I’d made.
All day.
And he’d written it down.
And he’d put it in our special spot.
I pulled the pen from the cup, then pulled a Post-it from the pad.
This time, I didn’t hesitate or stand there for five minutes weighing every word against the risk of saying too much. I just wrote the truth, because Peter had written his truth disguised as a pizza review, and the least I could do was write back with my own.
I’ll make them whenever you want. You don’t have to ask. Just leave the light on and I’ll know you’re up for it.
— B
I didn’t add a sparkle emoji, didn’t make a joke, didn’t try to deflect anything he’d said—or not said.
I stuck my note below his, went to the foster room, closed the door, and sat on the bed with my hand pressed against my sternum where the warmth was, where it had been since midnight, where it was going to stay.