Chapter 22
Peter
Iwrote a sentence. Deleted it. Wrote another.
Deleted that one, too. Frustrated, I opened a second document, the one about the bar, the one I’d been writing alongside the David chapters without fully acknowledging what it was becoming.
I typed half a paragraph about the stove light and erased it because it was too honest and then typed it again because dishonesty required more energy than I had left.
The manuscript was not cooperating.
Neither of them were.
I should’ve been used to this by now. My manuscript had not cooperated in months, the cursor blinking from the same paragraph on David’s last good day, the fish taco chapter stalled at the moment where we get in the car and David falls asleep against the window, and I watch him and know.
I’d been unable to write the knowing.
The knowing was the end of something. Writing the end meant arriving at whatever came after, and the after was the part I’d been flinching from for two years.
But tonight, oddly, the problem wasn’t the fish taco chapter.
Tonight, the problem was that I’d opened the laptop at 5:30 p.m., written three words about David, and then deleted them because the words that wanted to come out were not about David.
They were about a blanket and a pair of hands and the phrase “not yet.” I’d said those words twelve hours ago in this kitchen.
They’d been reverberating inside my skull ever since with the persistence of that damned Kars4Kids jingle again.
I loved kids.
But God, I hated Kars4Kids and their stupid ad campaign.
At 6 p.m., I turned on the stove light.
For Hiro. I turned it on for Hiro.
Hiro didn’t like the dark.
There was no other reason.
That lie was so thin I could see through it from where I sat.
At 6:15, I heard the front door followed by the careful sequence of sounds that heralded Benji’s arrival.
He was earlier than usual. He didn’t work Tuesdays, but he’d gone to the bar for inventory, and he usually stayed until seven or so.
He’d come home early, which meant something or nothing.
Or it meant that I was now tracking another person’s schedule with a rigor I’d previously reserved for medication dosages and feeding times.
His footsteps went into the kitchen, then stopped.
There was the silence of a person reading something on a refrigerator.
Yes, I recognized that particular silence. It’s a skill. A learned, honed skill. I possessed it.
I’d left a note, one I’d written at the clinic between appointments.
It required four drafts—for a Post-it note about pizza that was not about pizza.
I’d stuck it behind the whiteboard in the spot that had become ours through repetition and mutual understanding.
Benji was now reading it. I was sitting at my desk seventeen feet away with a laptop full of deleted sentences and a heartbeat I could feel in my teeth.
I caught the soft scratch of a pen.
I stared at my laptop screen.
The cursor blinked.
The words still didn’t come.
Through the wall, I heard Benji’s footsteps retreat down the hall, heard his door close, and heard the apartment settle into the unmistakable quiet of two people in separate rooms who were both thinking about the same thing.
I tried to write.
The cursor blinked.
I typed a word. Deleted it. Typed the same word. Deleted it again.
I read the sentence before it, which was about David in the car. The sentence was fine. It had been fine for weeks. The next sentence was right there. I could feel it; but every time I reached for it, my brain instead supplied the image of Benji’s fingers on mine above a piece of fleece.
I closed the laptop.
Opened it.
Closed it again.
Hiro, who was now on his bed in the corner, lifted his head and looked at me with the patient concern of a dog who had been watching his human open and close a laptop for ten minutes and who was beginning to question the purpose of the exercise.
“I know,” I told him. “Daddy’s okay, buddy. I promise.”
He put his head back down. His tail moved once. It was an almost wag.
I didn’t make a decision to stand up. My body simply performed the action, the way it performed actions in surgery when my hands knew what to do before my mind had finished deliberating.
I was on my feet and moving toward the hallway before the analytical part of my brain could intervene with objections.
The objections were there. I could hear them assembling in the background.
They were a well-organized queue of reasons why walking down a hallway toward the man whose hands I’d held over a blanket twelve hours ago was inadvisable and premature and inconsistent with the careful emotional distance I’d maintained between myself and literally everyone in the world since David.
The objections were noted.
But I kept walking.
The kitchen was empty and dim, the only light coming from the stove, which cast everything in that warm amber glow that had become, over two and a half months, the color of every honest conversation I’d had with Benji Kwon.
I went to the fridge and read his note.
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
No sparkle emoji. No joke.
Just leave the light on.
The stove light was on.
It had been on for twenty minutes.
He would have seen it when he came through the kitchen. He would have known what it meant because Benji knew what everything meant. He understood every gesture and every silence and every light left burning in every empty room.
I stood at the refrigerator and read the note. I could feel the architecture shift. It wasn’t a collapse or a crumble, but a shift, the way a building shifts when the ground beneath it changes, when the foundation adjusts to accommodate a new weight that isn’t going away.
I could go back to my desk, I thought. I could open my laptop and try again and spend another hour deleting sentences about David while my brain refused to think about anything except the man in the foster room and the note on the fridge and the light on the stove.
I could maintain the structure for another night, another week, another month.
The structure would hold. It had held for two years. It could hold longer.
But holding wasn’t the same as living, and I was tired of the difference.
I walked down the hall, stopped at the foster room door, raised my hand, and knocked twice. It was the same knock I used at exam room doors at the clinic. It was measured and professional, the knock of a man who was about to enter a room where something vulnerable was waiting.
The door opened slowly.
Benji was in his boxers and dinosaur shirt—inside out, as always. His hair was doing the thing it did in the evenings. His face, when he saw me standing in his doorway, went through a rapid sequence of expressions. I was an expert, a professional, in reading unspoken cues.
I couldn’t read his.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“Everything okay?”
“I can’t write.”
He blinked. “Okay.”
“I’ve been sitting at my desk for an hour trying to write, and I can’t because every sentence I start turns into something that isn’t about the manuscript.
I keep deleting and rewriting and deleting again.
” I sucked in a breath, closed my eyes tight for just a second, then opened them again.
“Benji, the problem isn’t the manuscript.
The problem is that I’m in my room trying to write about David and my brain is in the kitchen holding a blanket. ”
Benji blinked.
Behind him, Princess Consuela shifted in her carrier with the quiet rustle of a cat adjusting her position to better observe . . . and perhaps eat popcorn while the spectacle unfolded.
“You came to my door to tell me you can’t write because of the blanket,” he said.
“No, I—”
I’d said that too quickly.
I needed to breathe. I really needed to breathe.
I took a breath.
Benji blinked.
And cocked his head.
“I came to your door because the stove light is on. You said to leave it on, so I left it on, and I don’t want to pretend that was about pizza.”
“It wasn’t about pizza?”
“You know it wasn’t about pizza.”
“It was a little about pizza. The peach one was genuinely good.”
“Benji.”
“Sorry, though not for the moment, for the pizza commentary. I’m hearing that.”
We stood in his doorway, me in the hallway and him a foot inside the foster room, separated by a threshold that felt less like a physical boundary and more like the last in a series of lines I’d painted over two years, each one designed to keep exactly this from happening—with anyone—each one thinner than the last.
“Can I come in?” I asked.
He stepped back.
I stepped forward.
The foster room was small and warm and smelled like kitten formula and the scent of Benji’s shampoo, the one that had migrated to my shelf and then to my shower and then into my awareness in a way that meant I could identify it in a room without looking.
Princess Consuela watched from her carrier with the flat, appraising stare of a cat who had opinions about this development and was reserving them for later.
Benji sat on the edge of the bed.
I stood in the middle of the room.
I was painfully aware that I’d crossed a threshold without a plan for what came after, which was not how I operated.
I operated with plans. I operated with whiteboards and schedules and color-coded systems that made the world manageable.
I did not show up in people’s doorways and announce that I couldn’t write because of a blanket.
“Peter,” Benji said. His voice was careful, gentle. “What do you need?”
The question was so simple and so direct and so completely Benji that it cut through every layer of overthinking I’d built between the hallway and this room.
What do you need?
Not What are you feeling? or What are you thinking?
He didn’t ask any of the complicated, layered questions that I would have spent hours constructing answers to.