Epilogue
Peter
They were not moving-in boxes.
They were moving-out boxes.
I stood in the hallway, the hallway that had become the most heavily trafficked twenty-two feet of residential carpet in Tampa Bay, and watched him through the open door.
He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a roll of packing tape and a system of organization that bore no resemblance to any system I would have designed.
This meant clothes were mixed with kitchen items, books were stacked beside shoes, and Princess Consuela was inside an open box grooming herself on top of what appeared to be a blender.
He hadn’t seen me yet.
So I leaned against the doorframe and didn’t speak.
Because sometimes the most important thing is to let a person arrive at their own decision.
And because watching Benji do anything, even pack badly, was still one of my favorite things in the world.
And because the sight of him surrounded by boxes in an apartment he was leaving hit me in a place that I wanted to sit with before I named it.
His apartment had become, over the past three months of separate living, a kind of elaborate fiction.
He slept in my bed five nights a week, sometimes six.
His toothbrush was in my bathroom. Biscuit the stuffed manatee lived on my nightstand.
His good knives (three, all better than mine, a fact I had accepted with the grudging respect of a man conceding a material advantage) were in my kitchen.
Half his wardrobe had already migrated to my closet.
Despite all of this, the hallway crossings had never stopped.
They’d slowed from the frantic forty-nine of the first week to a more sustainable rhythm, averaging eight to twelve per day—but they’d never stopped, because stopping would have meant accepting our separation as real, and neither of us had ever fully accepted it.
Our separation had been the correct decision.
It had been the healthy decision.
It had been a decision of two responsible adults who understood that a relationship built on proximity alone was a relationship built on sand.
The separation was also, and I had concluded this with the same evidentiary rigor I brought to clinical diagnoses, completely ridiculous.
We lived twenty-two feet apart and spent ninety percent of our time in the same apartment. We maintained two leases, two sets of utilities, and two kitchens, one of which (his) contained a stove whose light was never on and another (mine) whose stove light had been on continuously since the 1920s.
The notebook beside my whiteboard contained six months of data, including crossing frequencies, time-of-day distributions, duration of visits, and reasons stated versus reasons actual.
The data told a clear, unambiguous story.
We were two people who had tried to live apart and who had succeeded only in living together from a slightly different starting location.
“I’m not renewing,” Benji said without looking up.
He’d known I was there.
Of course he’d known.
He’d spent ten months learning my sounds the way I’d spent ten months learning his.
The sound of my shoes on the hallway carpet and the particular quality of my breathing when I was watching him without announcing myself were data points he’d catalogued and filed alongside everything else he knew about me, which was everything.
“I know,” I said.
He looked up. His face was doing that thing, that complicated thing he did when he was confused or perplexed or at a complete loss.
But the complications were different now than they’d been ten months ago.
There was less fear in the mix, less performance and more of the real person underneath, the one who sat on kitchen floors and held manatees and said, “I love you,” in crowded bars without rehearsal.
“The lease is up at the end of the month,” he said. “I could renew and we could keep doing this thing we’re doing.”
“You could,” I agreed without committing to a side.
“Or . . . I could not renew and could carry these boxes twenty-two feet across a hallway and put my stuff in your apartment and sleep in your bed every night instead of five out of seven nights. I could hang my curtains on your windows and put Princess Consuela’s carrier wherever we decide Princess Consuela’s carrier should go, which is going to be a negotiation, because you have opinions about carrier placement, and I have opinions about carrier placement, and our opinions are not the same opinions. ”
“Our opinions about carrier placement are fundamentally incompatible.”
“They’re incompatible, and we’ll figure it out.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“Because that’s what we do. We figured out the shampoo and the Post-it notes and the kitten binder and the coffee ratio and the stove light and the blue mug and the hallway. We figured out all of it. We can figure out where to put a cat carrier.”
“The cat carrier should go in the hallway closet. There’s a shelf at the correct height.”
“The cat carrier should go in the bedroom because Princess Consuela has separation anxiety, and she needs to be near her people.”
“Cats don’t have separation anxiety.”
“Princess Consuela absolutely has separation anxiety. She has been formally diagnosed with separation anxiety by me, her primary caregiver, using a diagnostic methodology that I developed independently, that you would likely describe as ‘not science,’ but that I would describe as ‘knowing my cat.’”
“It’s not science.”
“It’s knowing my cat.”
I crossed the room, stepping over a box containing what appeared to be cocktail shakers mixed with socks, and sat down on the floor beside him.
My back pressed against his couch, which was a couch we were going to have to discuss because my apartment didn't have room for two couches, and his couch was objectively inferior to mine in every measurable dimension except the one that mattered, which was that Benji loved it and had been sleeping on it since college and it was where he sat when he filmed Princess Consuela. It was also where we’d lain tangled together during the brief, sweet period when his apartment had been the place we came to instead of the place we crossed a hallway to leave.
“I’m keeping the mixing bowl,” he said.
“It was always yours.”
“And the lamp.”
“The lamp was always yours, too. I gave it to you.”
“And the pillow.”
“The pillow was stolen from my couch during movie night.”
“The pillow was liberated from your oppressive, dictatorial couch during a period of emotional transition. Its current legal status is settled and may require intervention by the International Criminal Courts.”
“The pillow’s legal status remains disputed.”
“The pillow’s legal status is settled, Peter. It’s been in my apartment for three months. The statute of limitations applies.”
“That’s not how statutes of limitations work.”
“It’s how pillow statutes of limitations work.”
I took his hand.
His fingers laced through mine with the automatic precision of a gesture that had been performed so many times it no longer required conscious direction.
His hand was warm. His hand was always warm.
“Move in with me, please,” I said.
“I’m moving in. That’s what the boxes are for.”
“I mean officially, not as an extension of the hallway situation or as a continuation of the temporary arrangement caused by a plumbing malfunction. Move in, put your name on the lease, your curtains on the windows, your shampoo on the shelf, which is already on the shelf, which has been on the shelf for six months. I want it there officially, as a documented element of the apartment’s permanent configuration. ”
“You want to document my shampoo?”
“I want to document everything. I want to update the whiteboard. I want your name on it. In green.”
“Why green?”
“Green is the color I use for scheduled events and planned things. It’s the color for intentional things.”
“You’re going to put my name on your whiteboard in the color that means ‘planned and intentional.’”
“You were not planned, but you are intentional. You are the most intentional thing in my life. Everything else happened to me, but you’re the thing I choose.”
His hand tightened on mine, and I swear his eyes glistened with moisture. Then they did that thing, that twitch that was mine. It was an expression that belonged to no other moment and no other person.
“Peter Loupier,” he said.
“Benji Kwon.”
“You just said the newest, most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me, and you framed it as a whiteboard update.”
“The whiteboard is the appropriate medium. It’s where I put the things that matter.”
“I know. That’s why it’s romantic.”
He leaned over and kissed me, right there, on the floor of an apartment he was leaving, surrounded by boxes packed wrong and a cat in a blender box and the accumulated evidence of a life that was about to merge with mine.
The kiss tasted like packing tape and afternoon coffee and the specific sweetness of a decision that had been made months ago by two people who had needed six months of hallway crossings to admit it.
“But I do have one condition of your moving into my apartment. It’s important and non-negotiable.”
Benji tensed. I saw it in the skin around his eyes and the way his shoulders rose slightly.
“You’re not teasing anymore, are you? This is a real condition.” His fingers tightened against mine.
“Yes, this is very real and very important. I am not teasing at all.”
Benji drew in a deep breath and held it. After an eternal moment, his lips puckered and he slowly exhaled.
“Okay, I’m ready.”
“I don’t want to renew my apartment lease either. When it’s done, I don’t want to live here anymore.”
Benji did the golden retriever thing with his head, cocking it sideways as though I’d used words he could almost understand, just not quite.
“I have six months left. I want us to use that time to shop for a house. Together… for our house… like a real adult couple who doesn’t want to rent anymore.”