Chapter 23
Benji
Iwoke up on the floor.
Not the bed.
Specifically, I lay slumped on the floor, where I’d apparently slid down the door last night after Peter left and then failed to complete the journey to any horizontal surface with a mattress on it.
Princess Consuela was sitting in my lap, which meant she’d escaped her carrier at some point during the night.
She was staring at me from approximately four inches away with the unblinking intensity of a creature who wanted breakfast and who considered the unconscious state of her human an obstacle rather than a boundary.
“He kissed me,” I told her.
She blinked once and bit my chin, a reminder that her needs existed independently of my emotional state, and that kibble waited for no man’s romantic breakthrough.
I fed her.
Then I stood under the scalding water of a shower for twenty minutes while replaying the previous evening with the obsessive focus of a film editor reviewing dailies, scrubbing forward and back through every frame.
His hands on my face.
The tremor in his fingers.
The bump of his glasses against my forehead.
The way he’d said, “Since the night you sat on my floor with Hiro,” which meant two months, which meant that Peter Loupier had been thinking about kissing me for two whole months while maintaining the most convincing facade of emotional neutrality I had ever encountered.
I had spent years in professional dance around people who performed for a living.
To play a part for two months? Peter had processed his desire to kiss me through what he described as a “larger situation,” as if wanting someone were a software update that needed to be installed in stages, and that kissing was just one patch in a comprehensive system upgrade.
I was going to lose my mind.
I got out of the shower, got dressed, and walked down the hall to the kitchen.
Peter was at the island.
He had coffee. His glasses were halfway down his nose.
Peter Loupier had woken up after kissing his roommate and had decided that the appropriate response was to maintain his routine with meticulous precision, because routine was how Peter held the world together, and the world had shifted on its axis last night and routine was all that was keeping him from acknowledging that out loud.
He looked up when I entered.
His face was neutral and composed. The walls were back in place, rebuilt overnight.
But his eyes . . . His eyes hadn’t gotten the memo.
His eyes tracked me across the kitchen with an attention that was new, a quality of focus that I recognized from the moments at his desk when he was writing something that mattered.
That recognition sent a current through my entire body that I managed, through what I consider a heroic act of self-control, to not visibly react to.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning.”
“Coffee’s ready?”
“Made a full pot,” he grunted.
I poured coffee into a not-blue mug.
We occupied the kitchen together in a silence that was different from every previous silence, charged with the knowledge that his mouth had been on mine eight hours earlier, and that neither of us had mentioned it yet.
The not-mentioning was creating a pressure system that was going to produce weather eventually.
I looked at the fridge.
There was a new Post-it in our spot.
I finished the chapter, the one I’ve been stuck on. Wrote the whole thing last night. Thought you should know.
— P
I read it twice.
He’d finished the chapter.
The David chapter about the fish tacos and the car ride and the last good day that he’d been unable to write for months.
He’d gone back to his room after kissing me, and he’d sat down at his desk, and he’d written the thing that had been stuck—and he was telling me this on a Post-it note.
This particular truth, placed in our spot the morning after he’d kissed me, was saying something so much bigger than a finished chapter.
I had to put my coffee down because my hands weren’t steady.
I wasn’t sure any part of me was steady in that moment.
“Peter,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me, too.”
We looked at each other across the island. Four feet of counter stretched between us, the same four feet I’d crossed last night, the same distance that now felt like both nothing and everything.
“I have to go to work,” I said.
“I know.”
“We should probably talk about, you know, the thing.”
“The thing.”
“The thing where you kissed me in the foster room last night.”
“I remember that thing.”
“Do you want to talk about it now?”
He folded his newspaper with the precise, unhurried movements of a man who was buying time, set it on the counter, and aligned it with the edge.
“I want to talk about it,” he said. “But I’d rather talk about it when we have time to do it properly, not in the fifteen minutes before you leave for work.”
“Properly. You want to have the conversation properly.”
“I want to have it in a way that doesn’t involve one of us standing by the door with keys in hand. This is a sitting-down conversation.”
“You’ve categorized the conversation. You’ve assigned it a posture.”
He cocked one brow, and I swear, one corner of his mouth twitched. “I’ve assigned it the respect it deserves. It might also require peach pizza.”
“Tonight,” I said. “After my shift. The 3 a.m. kitchen. The pizza will have to wait for a decent dinner hour.”
“Fair enough. I’ll be up.”
“You’re always up.”
“Then I’ll be up with intention.”
I picked up my keys, walked to the door, stopped, then turned around.
“Peter.”
“Benji.”
“Is it good? The chapter, I mean?”
He was quiet for a moment, considering the question with the thoroughness he brought to everything.
“It was true,” he said. “I don’t know if it was good, but it was true. I haven’t been able to write anything true in a long time. So yes. I would say it’s good.”
I nodded, opened the door, and left the apartment. I made it all the way to the elevator before I pressed my back against the wall and closed my eyes and let the full force of everything I’d been containing for the last twelve minutes hit me.
Peter Loupier had kissed me and then gone back to his room and written the chapter about David that he’d been stuck on for months.
This morning, he’d told me about it on a Post-it note.
He wanted to talk about us properly. He’d said, “with intention,” and I was going to have to function at a bar for eight hours while carrying all of this inside my body.
There was no version of reality in which I was going to be able to do that without completely falling apart.
I drove to Barbacks with both hands on the wheel and the radio off and my brain running a continuous loop. Over and over, I watched his hands shake. Surgeon’s hands that never shook were shaking because of me. The world didn’t contain enough therapy sessions to unpack whatever the hell that meant.
Jacks knew within thirty seconds.
I walked through the back door, hung up my jacket, tied my apron, and started prepping the garnish station with what I believed was a perfectly normal demeanor. I was calm and professional, the standard operating Benji, powered on and ready for deployment.
“What happened?” Jacks said without so much as a “Hey, how ya doin’?”
“Nothing happened. Good morning. How are the limes?”
“The limes are fine. What happened?”
“I just said good morning to you. That’s a normal greeting. That’s how people start conversations. With greetings. Then we discuss limes.”
Jacks set down the bottle he was stocking and turned to face me fully, which was a level of direct engagement that Jacks reserved for situations he’d already diagnosed and was simply waiting for the patient to confirm.
“Your hands are shaking,” he said.
I looked down. My hands were, in fact, shaking.
The garnish knife I was holding was producing a visible tremor in the lime I was attempting to cut.
The resulting slice was approximately three times thicker than Finn’s regulation wedge and angled at a degree that would have earned a failing grade in any bartending fundamentals course.
“Cold,” I said. “It’s cold in here. Is the AC up? The AC feels aggressive.”
“It’s seventy-four degrees.”
“Seventy-four is cold for me. I run warm . . . I mean cold. I have a high metabolic baseline. This is documented.”
Jacks waited.
Jacks was very good at waiting.
Jacks had once waited through an entire shift for Finn to admit he was upset about a vendor dispute, saying nothing, simply existing in patient proximity until Finn cracked at closing time and spent forty minutes talking about wholesale tomato prices.
Jacks’s silence was a tactical instrument, deployed with the precision of a man who understood that most people will fill a void if you give them long enough.
He understood that was usually more honest than anything you could have extracted through questioning.
I lasted about forty-five seconds, which was actually longer than usual. It might’ve been a Benji Kwon World Record.
“He kissed me,” I said.
Jacks’s face didn’t change. His body did not move. He simply stood there, holding a bottle of Ketel One. The absence of reaction was itself a reaction. It was the careful stillness of a man who had expected exactly this and was choosing not to make a production of it.
“Peter,” he said, not a question, because who else would kiss me and cause my hands to shake until I murdered a poor, unsuspecting lime in the blaring neon lights of Barbacks?
“Peter came to my door last night, to the foster room. He knocked. Then he stood in my doorway and told me he couldn’t write because his brain was in the kitchen holding a blanket, which is the most Peter Loupier sentence ever constructed. Then he stepped inside and kissed me.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And how was it?”
“His glasses hit my forehead.”
Jacks smiled.