Chapter 26
Peter
Benji: Finn sent me home. Bar’s dead. Boat show in Sarasota stole everyone. I’m on my way.
My brain, the one that had spent the entire afternoon replaying the zoo and the truck and the kiss and Benji’s face when he’d held a manatee’s head in his hands, produced a thought that bypassed every checkpoint and filter I’d built over thirty-two years of careful, deliberate living.
He’s coming home early. The apartment is empty.
You could be on the couch, I thought. But not on the couch reading.
Not on the couch with tea and the newspaper.
On the couch with nothing.
Wearing nothing.
You could be, for the first time in two years, a person who is available in a way that could not be misinterpreted or filed under roommate behavior or explained away as an accident of proximity and blanket-folding.
I sat at my desk and considered these thoughts with the clinical detachment I brought to complex decisions.
I weighed the variables. I assessed the risks.
I evaluated the probability of success against the probability of catastrophic embarrassment.
I constructed a mental decision tree that branched into outcomes ranging from “transformative romantic moment” to “Benji walks in, sees me naked on the couch, and calls the authorities.”
The decision tree was not helpful.
I texted back.
Me: Good. Door’s unlocked.
Then I stood up, walked to the front door, unlocked the deadbolt, and returned to the living room, where I stood in the middle of the floor and confronted the reality of what I’d just set into motion.
I was going to take off my clothes and lie on the couch and wait for Benji to come home.
This was not something I did.
This was not something I had ever done.
David and I had been together for six years, and in those six years, I had never once arranged myself on a piece of furniture in a state of undress for the purpose of romantic ambush.
David had initiated. David always initiated, because David understood that I operated on a delay between wanting something and acting on it.
He’d learned to bridge the delay with his own momentum.
I’d been grateful for it, but now that David was gone, the momentum was mine to generate, which left me standing in my living room at 9 p.m. trying to generate it, and the generation was not going smoothly.
First, the animals, I thought.
They were a practical concern.
I could think my way through dealing with them.
They represented safe, comfortable ground on which to tread first.
Potato was on the couch because Potato was always on the couch.
Potato had been on the couch since 2016 and regarded the cushions as sovereign territory.
I picked him up, which required both hands and a revised understanding of how much a hairless bulldog could weigh when he was actively resisting relocation, and carried him to Hiro’s dog bed.
I set him down with the care of a man defusing an explosive.
He wheezed once in protest, circled twice, and collapsed with the theatrical resignation of a creature who had been displaced from his sacred homeland.
“Sorry,” I told him. “This is a one-time requisition of the couch for purposes I’m not going to explain to you.”
Potato closed his eyes and began snoring.
General Tso was on the refrigerator. General Tso was always on the refrigerator.
General Tso would remain on the refrigerator, because General Tso did not take directives from me and because moving a twenty-pound cat with opinions was not a battle I was going to fight while also trying to orchestrate a romantic gesture.
He would witness whatever was about to happen from his elevated position.
I would have to accept this as a condition of living with an animal who considered himself the apartment’s surveillance system.
“Don’t look at me,” I told him.
He looked at me, directly, and with the unblinking assessment of an animal who had already judged the situation and found it wanting.
Hiro was asleep. Hiro would remain asleep. Hiro was not a factor.
The animals were handled. The door was unlocked. The stove light was on.
Now the clothes.
I stood beside the couch and removed my shirt, folded it, then set it on the chair.
I then removed my pants, folded them, and set them on top of the shirt.
I removed my socks, because a naked man in socks was not a romantic image—it was a cautionary tale. I had enough self-awareness to understand that whatever I was about to attempt required the complete absence of sock-based comedy.
My boxers came off last. I removed them, folded them—because I’m not a caveman—and set them on the pile.
At that point, with nothing left to remove, I stood in my living room at 9:07 p.m. wearing nothing except my glasses, which I removed after a moment of consideration because glasses introduced a variable I couldn’t resolve.
With them on, I was a man who had gotten undressed but forgotten a step, as if nudity were a checklist and he’d missed an item.
With them off, I became a man who had committed fully to the endeavor but who could not see clearly, which introduced its own problems because I wanted to see Benji’s face when he walked in.
Glasses on. Final answer. Lock it in.
The visual inconsistency was less problematic than partial blindness.
I looked down at myself.
The clinical assessment was not encouraging.
I was thirty-two years old, six-foot-one, and built in the lean, angular way of a man who forgot to eat when he was working and whose primary form of exercise was standing for six hours in an operating room.
My chest was adequate. My arms were adequate. My legs were adequate.
Everything was adequate, in the way that a Honda Civic is adequate, functional and reliable but unlikely to inspire poetry.
And then there was the matter of what Benji would no doubt call “Little Peter,” a phrase I was constructing preemptively because Benji named everything and there was zero probability that this particular anatomical feature would escape his naming convention.
Little Peter was not rising to the occasion.
This was a physiological reality rather than a reflection of desire, because the desire was present, had been present all afternoon, had even been building since the zoo and the truck and the kiss.
Unfortunately, that particular body part operated on its own timeline, and my body’s assessment of the situation in that moment was that its owner was standing naked in a chilly apartment with a twenty-pound cat staring at him from a refrigerator and a bulldog wheezing from a dog bed.
The circumstances were not, from a purely biological standpoint, conducive to the kind of physical enthusiasm that the moment arguably warranted.
Little Peter looked, honestly, like an elderly man who had fallen asleep in a turtleneck on a chilly day. He looked compact, unambitious, possibly conserving resources for a future event that he was not yet convinced was ever going to occur.
“This is fine,” I said, to no one—but really to Little Peter—while standing in my empty living room, naked.
General Tso’s tail twitched once from the refrigerator.
“I said don’t look.”
He stared harder, if that was even possible.
I sat on the couch.
Stood up.
Sat again.
The couch was leather, which introduced a temperature variable I hadn’t accounted for. The leather was cool against my bare skin in a way that was not uncomfortable but that was certainly not helping Little Peter’s confidence situation.
I shifted.
Crossed my legs.
Uncrossed them.
Crossed them again.
My pose was wrong.
Sitting upright on a couch while naked communicated “a man who has forgotten to get dressed” rather than “a man who has intentionally undressed for romantic purposes.”
I needed to recline.
Reclining communicated intention.
Reclining said, “I planned this,” which was important because I had planned this, and the planning should be legible in the posture.
So I reclined.
I stretched my naked-ass body out along the length of the couch, one arm behind my head, the other resting on my stomach.
Then I assessed the result.
The result looked like a man at a doctor’s office who had misunderstood the instructions about the gown . . . or possibly the “donation cup.”
I adjusted, turning slightly onto my side. Then I propped my head on my hand and assessed again.
This was worse.
This was a pose from a calendar, the kind sold at gas stations.
The disconnect between the two poses implied confidence, and my actual emotional state, which was approximately forty percent determination and sixty percent terror, created a visual contradiction that even Benji’s generous interpretation of my behavior could not bridge.
I turned onto my back again and let my arms rest naturally.
I stopped trying to arrange my body into a shape that communicated something it wasn’t and let it be what it was, which was the body of a man who had taken off his clothes because he wanted to be seen by someone and who was scared of the wanting but was doing it anyway.
Little Peter remained unimpressed.
Little Peter had, if anything, retreated further into his turtleneck. He had assessed the ambient conditions and concluded that the current environment, characterized by leather upholstery, feline surveillance, and an aggressive AC vent, did not merit his full participation.
“It’s going to be fine,” I told Little Peter.
And then, because the absurdity of the situation had reached a critical mass that my dignity could not survive without acknowledgment, I added to the rest of me, “You’re lying naked on a couch talking to your shriveled penis while your cat watches. David would be howling.”
David would have been howling. He would have been on the floor, tears streaming, gasping, because David found my discomfort with vulnerability endlessly funny and endlessly endearing.
The mere idea of me arranging myself on a sofa like a nervous centerpiece would have provided him with material for years.
The feeling that washed over me next was stranger than all those that came before, because the thought of David laughing didn’t hurt the way it would have three months ago.
It settled into my chest with something warm, an affection that had found its place alongside the grief instead of buried beneath it.
“I’m trying,” I told the empty room, meaning David and myself and whatever part of me was still standing at the edge of the half second, trying to decide.
I glanced at the clock mounted to the kitchen wall, the one on the far wall that did not require eye contact with General Tso.
Fifteen minutes.
That was my estimate, based on Benji’s typical drive time from the bar. It included the high probability that he might sit in the parking lot for a few minutes processing, because Benji processed by staying still before he processed by moving.
I lay on the couch and breathed. I let the stove light do what the stove light did, which was to make everything warm and soft and a little more forgiving than it deserved to be.
General Tso jumped down from the refrigerator.
This was unexpected enough to make me turn my head.
He padded across the kitchen floor, entered the living room, and stopped beside the couch.
He looked at me. I looked at him. Twenty pounds of orange fur evaluated his naked human on a leather couch with the detached interest of a health inspector visiting a restaurant he fully intended to shut down.
“Don’t you dare get on this couch,” I said.
He jumped onto the back of the couch, settled behind my head, and began grooming himself with the aggressive nonchalance of a creature who had chosen his position for maximum psychological disruption and was content to hold it.
I was lying naked on my couch with a cat behind my head and uncooperative anatomy and my glasses slightly crooked and absolutely no idea what to do with my hands . . . and the sound of my own heartbeat filling the room like a second clock.
This was, without question, the least smooth romantic gesture in the history of human intimacy.
But it was honest, and it was me, without the walls and the routine and the careful layers.
It was Peter Loupier, stripped of everything except the wanting.
It was Peter Loupier with a willingness to be seen wanting, and if that wasn’t enough, if the glasses and the cat and the reluctant biology and the leather couch and the trembling in my hands added up to something that fell short of whatever Benji deserved, then at least it was true.
I’d promised him true, and true was what I had.
I heard the elevator ding, then the muffled sound of metal doors opening and closing.
Then I heard the specific rhythm of Benji’s walk, which I could identify from a floor away because I’d been listening for it for months without admitting that listening for someone’s footsteps was something people did when they were falling in love.
The word arrived without permission.
I let it stay.
The key turned in the lock, then the door creaked open.
There was a pause.
A long, electric pause, the kind that has a sound of its own, the sound of a person’s breath stopping and their brain recalibrating and their entire understanding of an evening reorganizing itself around new information.
I couldn’t take the silence any longer, so I said the most romantic thing I could think of.
“Hey.”