Chapter 31
Benji
He knocked on my door. Nineteen minutes. The man had lasted nineteen minutes.
“You left this,” he said, holding the mixing bowl.
“I told you to just hang on to it.”
“I know, but I’m returning it. It doesn’t fit in my cabinet without a mixing bowl reorganization, and I haven’t done a reorganization yet.”
“You came across the hall to return a mixing bowl fourteen minutes after I moved out.”
“Nineteen. And the mixing bowl is yours.”
“The mixing bowl has been in your kitchen for three months. It doesn’t know any other kitchen. It’s going to have separation anxiety.”
“Mixing bowls don’t have feelings.”
“This mixing bowl does, and it’s now offended that you see only an inanimate object rather than a fully sentient being capable of so much more than not dribbling milk all over the place. This mixing bowl has emotional significance.”
“Do you want the bowl or not?”
I took the bowl.
He was standing in my doorway in his socks and his evening T-shirt. His eyes were doing the thing they did when his walls were down, moving past me into the apartment that wasn’t his but that he was scanning anyway.
“You don’t have a stove light,” he said.
“I have overhead lighting.”
“Overhead lighting is clinical.”
“Overhead lighting is functional.”
“You need a lamp, something warm. When Hiro visits, he will seek warmth.”
“Peter. I have lived in apartments without stove lights for my entire adult life.”
“I’ll bring you a lamp.”
“You don’t need to bring me a lamp.”
His mouth twisted. “I have a lamp. It’s in the closet not being used. It will give you warm light. I’ll bring it over.”
“It’s been less than half an hour since I moved out.”
“Do you want the lamp or not?”
I surrendered. “Bring the lamp.”
He went back. He got the lamp. He brought the lamp across the hall with the purposeful stride of a man on a mission that he was pretending was casual and that was not casual at all. I set it on my end table, and the warm light transformed the corner from clinical to habitable.
I understood what he was doing.
He was installing a piece of himself in my apartment, a wattage-based claim on territory he wasn’t ready to release.
“Thank you for the lamp,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
“Are you going to bring me something every twenty minutes for the rest of the evening?”
“Possibly.”
“Peter. Go home. I’m twenty-two feet away. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to walk across the hall and make your coffee wrong and you’re going to tell me it’s overextracted and everything is going to be fine.”
“Everything is going to be fine.”
“Everything is going to be fine,” I repeated.
He went home, and I stood in my apartment with a mixing bowl and a lamp and the fading warmth of his presence and thought about how twenty-two feet had never felt so far away.
At 8:15, there was an odd lull at the bar. Finn was making the only drinks on order, Jacks was running food from the kitchen, and I had absolutely nothing to do. So, I snatched up my phone and texted Peter.
Me: The lamp is perfect. The apartment is weird without animals. Tell Hiro I said good night.
Barely a heartbeat passed before his reply appeared.
DrPostIt: Told him. He wagged once.
Of course he did. Exactly one wag. Hiro only ever gave one.
Despite a few of our regulars tipping Adrian ungodly sums on his first night shaking his groove thang at Barbacks, the bar crowd had thinned out early.
Finn sent Jacks and me home around ten. I wondered if he might regret that when the Saturday second wave hit around midnight, but I didn’t hang around long enough for him to change his mind.
At 10:30, I knocked on Peter’s door holding Princess Consuela’s empty food bowl, because I’d left her food in his pantry, and because the food bowl was an excuse, and the excuse was transparent, and I didn’t care.
“I left her food in your pantry,” I said. “It’s on the third shelf behind the oatmeal.”
“I know where it is. I organized the pantry.”
“Can you grab it?”
I stood in the doorway and looked past him into the apartment that had been mine for three months, at the stove light glowing, Hiro on his bed, and General Tso on the refrigerator. Everything was exactly as I’d left it—and completely different because I wasn’t in it.
“Good night, Peter,” I said after he handed me the cat food.
“Good night.”
“This is weird.”
“This is the correct weird,” he said, almost not sounding clinical.
“Both things are true,” I said, sounding far more clinical.
“Both things are true.”
After that, the crossings escalated.
By Thursday, a pattern had established itself with the inevitability of a natural law.
I didn’t track the crossings the way Peter did, because I didn’t track anything the way Peter did; but I was aware of them the way you’re aware of your own breathing, a constant rhythm that you don’t count but that you’d notice immediately if it stopped.
Peter, of course, was counting.
In fact, Peter was keeping a notebook.
I didn’t know this yet, but I would, because Peter’s data-collection habits had a way of revealing themselves in the wee hours of the morning over tea.
On Monday, I crossed the hall four times.
For the cat food and a charger I’d forgotten, to check on Clementine (who was in his apartment and who I could have checked on via text but whom I needed to see in person because seeing Clementine meant seeing Peter’s kitchen and seeing Peter’s kitchen meant being in the room where everything important had happened).
And once at 10 p.m. for a glass of water, because my apartment had functional plumbing, but I didn’t care.
On Tuesday, I knocked at 6 a.m. because I heard a sound. The sound was Potato breathing, which Potato did at all hours at a volume that could reasonably be mistaken for an Abrams tank crashing into a wall.
It was not an emergency. Peter opened the door anyway.
On Wednesday, Peter came to my apartment at 1 a.m. to return a single Post-it note I’d left on his fridge. It could have waited until morning. He brought it anyway.
On Thursday, there were fourteen crossings between us, including one at 2 a.m. when I showed up at his door claiming Princess Consuela was “acting strange.” Princess Consuela was sleeping normally.
“We’re not very good at living apart,” I said at 2:47 a.m., sitting on his counter with tea.
“We’ve been apart for four days. We’ve crossed the hallway forty-one times.”
“You’ve been counting?”
“I’ve been observing a pattern.”
“You have the exact number.”
“Forty-one. Approximately sixty percent initiated by you, forty percent by me, with an average interval of three hours and twelve minutes during waking hours, decreasing to ninety minutes after 8 p.m.”
“You’ve calculated an interval?”
“The data presented itself.”
“Peter Loupier has a spreadsheet of our hallway crossings, and I’m obsessed.”
“It’s a notebook. A spreadsheet would be excessive.”
“A notebook.” I had to cover my mouth to keep from laughing. “Handwritten, no doubt.”
“No doubt.” He nodded, his face the picture of professional objectivity.
“I’m tracking a pattern. The pattern is relevant, because the separate living spaces are generating more combined foot traffic than the shared space did, which means the separation is producing more proximity, not less. It’s a counterintuitive outcome.”
“You find our inability to stay in our own apartments interesting as a data point?”
“I find it interesting and also—” He paused. This was “the Peter pause,” the one that meant his next words required an honesty his clinical framing was designed to avoid. “And also reassuring.”
I set my tea down.
“Reassuring how?” I asked.
“The frequency suggests the connection isn’t dependent on proximity. We’re choosing to cross the hallway. Repeatedly, at inconvenient hours, and for fabricated reasons. This means the thing between us isn’t a product of sharing an apartment. It’s a product of us.”
I looked at him across the kitchen, this man who had just told me he loved me using hallway crossing frequency data and foot traffic interval calculations, and who had framed the most romantic observation of our entire relationship as a pattern analysis.
His face in the stove light was open and steady and completely unaware that he’d just said something that was going to live inside my chest for the rest of my life.
“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” I said. “And you framed it as a data analysis.”
“The data is romantic. I’m merely reporting findings.”
“The findings are that we can’t stay away from each other.”
“The findings are that we don’t want to.”
I kissed him on the counter in the stove light at 2:47 a.m.
The kissing was different now, less tentative, more fluent, the kisses of two people who had learned each other’s rhythms and were going to keep learning for a very long time.
Friday night, the kittens escaped.
For the record, this was Peter’s fault. I say this with love and with the understanding that Peter would describe it as “a latch failure caused by insufficient door-closing force during a time-sensitive hallway crossing.”
Both descriptions were accurate.
The new litter, four tabbies I’d named Scary, Sporty, Posh, and Ginger despite Peter’s explicit instruction not to name fosters (Baby had been adopted the previous week with considerably less trauma than the Destiny’s Child departure, which I was choosing to interpret as personal growth), had been secured in the foster room behind a latched door.
Peter had verified the latch before leaving his apartment at 9:45 p.m. to cross the hallway for the forty-seventh time that week. In his haste to reach me, he did not pull his door fully shut.
The latch did not engage.
The door drifted open.
And four kittens, who had spent their entire lives looking for exactly this kind of structural failure, found it.