Chapter 30
Peter
Two weeks had passed, and I’d became someone I didn’t recognize.
Recognize was too harsh a term.
Remember.
I barely remembered the person I was becoming . . . or returning to . . . or something.
It was all very confusing.
But not dramatically so, and not in the ways that movies depict a transformation, with montages and sudden revelations and a man staring at his reflection and seeing a stranger.
The changes were small and incremental, the kind that accumulate without announcement until you look up from your coffee one morning and realize that the person holding the mug is not the person who held it a month ago.
I slept through the night, every night, which was something I’d never done successfully often before.
But I’d done so for fourteen consecutive nights, a streak that I hadn’t achieved since before David’s diagnosis.
I attributed this to, with clinical precision, the presence of another body in my bed.
The data was clear. Benji’s weight on the mattress, his breathing beside me, and his arm that inevitably draped across my chest during the night were inputs that produced a parasympathetic response that my nervous system had apparently been waiting two years to receive.
I slept the way Hiro slept after a good day.
But it wasn’t just my sleep that changed.
Benji and I watched television on the couch, which was an activity I had not engaged in since recently, because the couch was a piece of furniture designed for multiple people. Using it alone had felt like eating at a table set for two.
Benji sitting on the couch changed the couch.
The way Benji in the kitchen had changed the kitchen.
And the way Benji in the bed had changed the bed.
We lay tangled together in the evenings with his head on my chest or my back against his front, arranged in configurations that would have horrified the version of me that had existed three months earlier, the version that would have classified “tangling” as a form of structural compromise.
The tangling was not a compromise.
The tangling was, against every expectation, the most comfortable physical state I’d ever occupied while watching television from a couch.
Benji’s body fit against mine with a specificity that the clinical part of my brain wanted to attribute to complementary anatomical proportions, but that the rest of my brain recognized as something less measurable and more important.
Mornings followed a new pattern, too.
We sipped coffee at the island. I sat on my usual stool.
He sat on the stool beside me, not his cereal-eating perch.
One of us would inevitably reach across and rub the other’s back while we drank, a gesture that had started accidentally but had become, through repetition, a fixed element of our routine.
It was as essential as the coffee itself.
Peter Loupier, who had not been voluntarily touched by another human in two years, now started his mornings with another man’s hand on his back and coffee made terribly wrong and the sound of said other man narrating the overnight activities of a hairless cat to an audience of animals who did not care.
And then there were our Post-it notes.
The Post-it notes had always been functional.
They conveyed information.
They negotiated logistics.
Most importantly, they served as the primary communication infrastructure of a shared living arrangement and, later, as the medium through which two men who were better on paper than in person had conducted the most important conversations of their lives.
I had never put an emoji on a Post-it note. Fine, once. I’d done it once.
Emojis were Benji’s domain.
He deployed them with the frequency and enthusiasm of a man who believed that no sentence was complete without a pictographic supplement.
He used stars, sparkles, hearts, tiny suns, and small creatures that I assumed were cats but that could have been anything.
The margins of Benji’s Post-it notes looked like the notebook of a cheerful child.
I did not use emojis.
I used words.
Words were precise.
Words meant what they said.
Emojis were ambiguous, open to interpretation, and a form of communication that prioritized feeling over clarity. I had built my entire life around the principle that clarity was more important than feeling—any feeling.
Then, on the Tuesday of the second week following our first night of sleeping together (yes, it confuses me, too), I left a note on the fridge about the new foster kittens’ feeding schedule.
It was a standard operational communication that included times, portions, and the medication that Scary needed mixed into her wet food.
At the bottom, where I would normally sign “— P,” I drew a heart.
It was a small heart.
Barely a heart, really.
More of a geometric approximation of two curved lines meeting at a point.
It was not a sparkle emoji or a dancing cat or any of the expressive pyrotechnics that populated Benji’s notes.
It was a single, tiny, precisely rendered heart at the bottom of a feeding schedule.
It had taken me four minutes to decide to draw it and another two minutes to decide not to cross it out.
Benji found the note.
I knew he found it because I heard a sound from the kitchen that I could only describe as a controlled detonation of a joy bomb.
It was a gasp that became a laugh that became a silence that was louder than both.
When he appeared in the bedroom doorway holding the Post-it note with both hands, his face was doing something I hadn’t seen before.
It shone with an expression that was beyond the usual taxonomy of Benji faces.
It was an expression that suggested he had just been handed evidence of a miracle and was trying to decide whether to frame it or eat it.
“You drew a heart,” he said.
“I annotated the feeding schedule.”
“You drew a heart, Peter.”
“The annotation is supplementary to the primary content. The feeding schedule is the relevant information.”
“You drew a heart on a Post-it note. You, Peter Loupier, who once told me that emojis were ‘the vocabulary of people who have run out of words,’ drew a heart on a feeding schedule. For kittens.”
“The heart is not an emoji. It was not drawn for the kittens. It was drawn for you. The heart is a hand-drawn symbol that I included as a—”
“It’s an emoji, Peter. It’s a heart emoji rendered in analog. You’ve gone analog on me, and I’m here for it. You’ve crossed a threshold that cannot be uncrossed.”
“I’m not discussing this.”
“I’m going to discuss this for the rest of my life. I’m going to tell our friends and post on Insta and have photos made and hung in galleries around the world. I’m going to tell Mia, and Mia is going to cry.”
“Please don’t tell Mia.”
“Oh, I’m going to tell Mia, and she’s going to make it her phone wallpaper.”
I drew a second heart three days later.
On a note about the grocery list, tucked after the reminder to buy more of the coconut-argan conditioner (which was now listed simply as “conditioner” because it had ceased to be Benji’s conditioner and had become the conditioner, the only conditioner, the conditioner that I would deny preferring and that I ordered in bulk from an online retailer whose shipping notifications I had configured to arrive silently so that Benji would not discover the bulk ordering and interpret it, correctly, as evidence of total capitulation).
Two hearts in two weeks.
It was a rate of accelerated emoji deployment that would have been imperceptible by Benji’s standards.
It further represented, by mine, a seismic shift in personal communication philosophy.
I was becoming, very slowly and against every instinct I’d cultivated over thirty-two years of precise, unadorned expression, a person who drew hearts on Post-it notes.
Benji was turning me into an emoji-wielding monster, and I was strangely fond of it.
Then Terri called.
It was a Wednesday.
I was at the clinic, between a routine spay on a young tabby and a follow-up on Gremlin, who had developed the unsettling habit of ambushing staff members from inside the supply closet.
My phone buzzed, and Benji’s name appeared on screen.
Benji: Terri called. Apartment’s done. Everything passed inspection. I can move back whenever.
I read it twice, set the phone down, picked it up, and read it again.
Three words in the center of the message held my gaze.
Move back whenever.
I performed the spay.
My hands were steady, because my hands were always steady during procedures.
Surgery existed in a compartment that operated independently of whatever was happening in the other compartments.
What was happening in the other compartments was a rapid assessment of the fact that Benji’s apartment was repaired and the arrangement that had produced the Post-it notes and the stove light and the 3 a.m. kitchen and the sparkle emojis and the two hand-drawn hearts that I had placed on notes about kitten food and conditioner was now officially over.
I texted back after three drafts.
Me: We should talk about this tonight.
Benji: Yeah. We should.
There were no emojis or exclamation points or sparkles.
The absence was its own kind of data.
That evening, we sat at the island after dinner.
The stove light was on. Hiro slept at my feet.
General Tso glowered from the refrigerator.
Potato scratched himself on the couch. Princess Consuela yowled from inside her carrier.
Our new kitten fosters did whatever squirmy newborns did in a cardboard box lined with a fluffy blanket.
“So,” Benji said.
“So.”
“The apartment is done.”
“The apartment is done.”
We sat with this, two people stating a fact that neither wanted to be true and that both knew was necessary.
“I think I should move back,” Benji said.
That sentence slammed onto the counter like a mallet.
“Tell me why,” I said.