Chapter 22 #2
“I need to not say, ‘Not yet,’ again.”
His head somehow cocked even further, causing locks of hair to dangle like tiny, dirty blond nymphs clinging to his scalp lest they fall to the floor.
“I’ve been saying, ‘Not yet,’ for two years.
I’ve been saying it to everything, to people, to my manuscript.
Hell, I’ve been saying it to my own life.
” I let out a deep, pained sigh. “And I said it to you last night. It was true. I mean, it was the truth of where I was in that moment; but I’ve been sitting at my desk all evening, and the truth has moved.
I don’t want to be in ‘not yet’ territory anymore, not now and .
. . not with you. Benji, I think . . . I think I want to be in ‘whatever comes after.’”
Benji’s face did the thing it did when something too big for the performance arrived.
It was the dropping of every mask, the stillness that was nothing like his manufactured quiet but was instead the involuntary pause of a person whose body has stopped because his heart needed all available resources.
He stood slowly, closed the distance between us in two strides, and stopped in front of me.
He stood close enough that I could feel the warmth of him, close enough that looking at him required tilting my head down slightly, because I was taller than him by several inches, a fact I’d been aware of for months and that had never felt as relevant as it did in that moment, with his face turned up toward mine and his eyes dark and steady and holding nothing back.
“After is good,” he said. “I’ve been in after’s waiting room for a while now. The magazines are terrible.”
I laughed.
It surprised me, the way my laughs always surprised me these days.
It arrived before I could catch it, and Benji’s face broke into something so warm and real.
His warmth did it, his warmth and his joke and the fact that this man could make me laugh while I was standing in his room shaking myself apart, that he could hold the weight of that moment and the lightness of it at the same time without dropping either.
I leaned forward and kissed him.
Not carefully or with the measured, analytical approach I brought to everything else.
Oh, no.
I put my hands on his face and I kissed him, and it was clumsy because I was out of practice and because the angle was slightly wrong and because my glasses bumped his forehead.
I didn’t care about any of it, not the clumsiness or the angle or the glasses, because his mouth was warm, and he tasted like coffee, and his hands came up and gripped the front of my shirt and held on.
Three seconds.
Maybe four.
Maybe longer.
I lost the ability to measure time, which was unprecedented and which the clinical part of my brain noted with distant interest before the rest of my brain told the clinical part to shut the ever loving fuck up for once.
I pulled back but kept my hands on his face.
His eyes were closed.
They stayed closed for a beat after I pulled away.
His face in that moment was the most unguarded thing I’d ever seen, stripped of every layer.
He was just a man with his eyes shut and his hands on my shirt and an expression that made my chest ache with something I hadn’t felt in years.
I recognized it all the way one recognizes a song he hasn’t heard in a long time: not immediately, but completely, the name and the melody and the memory of what it felt like the first time he heard it.
His eyes opened.
“Oh,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You kissed me.”
“I did.”
“You came to my door and told me you couldn’t write because of a blanket and then you kissed me.”
“That’s an accurate summary.”
“Your glasses hit my forehead. My forehead grease is on your glasses. There might be makeup, too. I use base. You know that, though.”
“I’m aware.”
“I didn’t mind . . . the kiss, not the smear. I’ll clean the smear. I have Windex. It works on glasses, too, you know?”
“That’s good,” I said, and I could feel myself smiling.
He was still holding my shirt.
I was still holding his face.
The foster room was very small and very warm, and Princess Consuela was watching us from her carrier with an expression that, on a creature with more facial mobility, would have constituted a smirk.
“Peter,” Benji said.
“Benji.”
“You’re shaking.”
And I was.
My hands, against his jaw, were trembling with a fine, visible tremor that I couldn’t control. My surgeon’s hands, which held steady through six-hour operations, which didn’t waver during emergencies, which had earned a reputation at the clinic for preternatural calm, were shaking.
“I haven’t done this in two years,” I said.
“Kissed someone?”
“Any of it. The kissing, the wanting to kiss someone, the showing up at someone’s door because I couldn’t sit in my room anymore pretending I didn’t want to be in theirs. All of it. I’m out of practice.”
“For a man who’s out of practice, that was a pretty definitive kiss.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I had time to prepare.”
“How long is a while?”
I considered lying, considered softening the truth into something less exposed, but decided against it, because I’d come to his door to stop lying or hiding or telling whatever half truths made life easier but didn’t express what I was truly feeling.
“Since the night you sat on my floor with Hiro,” I said.
“You came into my room at 3 a.m. because you found a note about his phantom pain. You sat on the floor and you didn’t say anything, and he put his head against your leg and went to sleep.
You stayed until morning . . . on my floor. That’s when.”
Benji’s hands tightened on my shirt.
“That was two months ago,” he said.
“I’m aware.”
“You’ve been thinking about kissing me for two months?”
“I’ve been thinking about a lot of things for two months. The kissing was one component of a larger situation that I’ve been processing.”
“Processing. You’ve been processing kissing me. Like a computer running a program?”
“The analogy isn’t inaccurate.”
“Peter.” He said my name the way he always said it, each syllable given its own space. I felt it the way I always felt it, in a place that had nothing to do with hearing. “You are the most impossible man I have ever met.”
“You’ve mentioned that.”
“I’m going to keep mentioning it, regularly, possibly daily, possibly on Post-it notes.”
Benji’s mouth quirked. “I’d expect nothing less.”
He let go of my shirt. I let go of his face.
We stood in the foster room and looked at each other. The looking was different now, changed by the fact that my mouth had been on his, and his hands had been on my chest, and we were standing on the other side of something that couldn’t be undone.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know? You’re a man who owns tongs for candy. You always know.”
“I don’t know what happens after kissing my roommate in the foster room while a hairless cat watches. This isn’t a situation I’ve prepared for. There’s no whiteboard or manual or YouTube for this.”
“There might be a YouTube. There’s a YouTube for everything. If not, we could make one. Or we could make a color scheme. Green for kissing, blue for talking about it, red for—”
“Go to bed, Benji.”
“I’m just saying, a system could be adaptable—”
“Good night.”
“—we could add a purple category—”
“Good night, Benji.”
He grinned.
The real one.
The one that was too wide and too bright and that did something to the whole structure of his face and made it impossible to look away.
It was the grin that I’d been pretending for months didn’t affect me and that I was now, standing in his room with the taste of coffee on my lips, done pretending about.
“Good night, Peter.”
I walked to the door, stopped at the threshold, and turned back.
“The stove light stays on,” I said.
“I know.”
“It’s not for Hiro.”
“I know that, too.”
“Good night.”
I went to my desk and opened my laptop. The cursor blinked from the fish taco paragraph; but this time, for the first time in months, the next sentence was there, waiting, as if it had been ready all along and had simply been waiting for me to catch up.
I wrote the car ride home.
I wrote David falling asleep against the window.
I wrote the streetlights moving across his face, the knowing that came not as a single moment, but as a slow, steady accumulation of evidence that a body I loved was leaving, and that the leaving was not something I could operate on or schedule or organize into color-coded rows on a whiteboard.
It was a knowing that was plain and terrible and true.
I wrote the last good day, the whole day, from start to finish. I wrote the morning coffee and the fish tacos and the car ride and David saying, “I’m sorry,” and me saying, “Don’t be,” and him saying, “Peter, I need you to know that you were the best thing,” and me saying, “You still are.”
And I wrote him closing his eyes.
I saved the file and closed the laptop.
The apartment was quiet.
Hiro had moved to the foot of my bed.
General Tso was on the refrigerator.
Potato was on the couch.
Through the wall, Benji’s room was silent.
Something I’d been carrying for a very long time had just set itself down.
It wasn’t the grief. The grief stayed and would never truly be set aside.
No, it was a shape that changed, from the clenched, airless thing it had been for two years to something with more room in it, a container that could hold David and the missing and the love without requiring that every other door remain shut.
I slept through the night for the first time in months.
The stove light stayed on.