Worse, the same thing seems to be happening to Jake, meaning that between the two of them they possess not even one person’s worth of normal behavior. This dire circumstance keeps resulting in situations like the one just the other day, where Jake was behind the counter filming, Sam needed to put a stick of cheese away in the cooler behind him, and as he leaned the perfectly reasonable amount that was required into Jake’s personal space, meant to say,Don’t mind me, just putting the cheese away.
But instead he’d experienced an internal electrical fire the second he got within a few inches of Jake, abruptly unable to think about anything beyond how much closer he’d like to get. So what he actuallysaid, staring down at Jake’s mouth, was, “Don’t, uh. Cheese.”
And Jake, staring back up at him with wide, unblinking eyes, replied, “Oh. It—won’t,” as though either statement made any sense at all. There was a charged moment, one where Sam seriously considered demanding everyone get out of the deli so he and Jake could defile some tables, leaving undiscussed past traumas and the associated horrors to be solved for another day.
Of course, then Joey said, “Question: Is there like a joke here I’m not getting, or do you both need to go to the hospital? Those weren’t, like. Sentences?”
Sam, grimacing, had to suffer the indignity of rescue by little sister, as Luce took their arm, laughing, and said, “It’s your break now, right? Come out back with me and I’ll explain it to you.” They’d left, and he and Jake had exchanged a horrified look, which became a lingering, speculative look before, when they noticed this, becoming horrified again. Even Pastrami had seemed a bit embarrassed for them at that point, slinking away from them to hide underneath one of the prep tables with a whine.
It’s all starting to feel a bit…unsustainable, Sam thinks, is the word for it. He’s dreaming about the man most nights now, these sweat-soaked, sheet-twisting fantasies of Jake showing up in his bedroom half-dressed and wearing less by the minute, smirking at Sam’s surprise, climbing into bed to straddle him. The details vary delightfully from there, but it always ends with Sam pinning Jake to the mattress, which he knows because more than once he’s woken up to find himself grinding against his own. He’s not sure how long a person can sustain this kind of desire before something breaks dramatically, and they end up entwined, naked and touching frantically, in the middle of a public sidewalk.
On the other hand, to snap himself out of it, all Sam has to do is try, for the thousandth time, to figure out how to clear the dreaded conversational hurdles that stand between him and satisfaction. Even the thought of the accident is like taking a series of punishingly cold showers, and the idea oftalkingabout it is genuinely chilling, no matter what approach Sam considers.
So they carry on in limbo, leaning towards each other and away again, inching closer and closer to the critical moment of no return?—
—until it arrives, with little warning and even less fanfare, the night of Joey’s twenty-first birthday party.
THIRTEEN
NOW: JUNE
The night of the party, as a birthday gift to Joey, Sam lets the whole staff go early and promises to handle close himself. They’re all going out to dinner before meeting up at a popular West Sixth Street bar, and Sam had tried his best to beg off from the whole evening, but no one he talked to had been willing to listen. They all insisted that Sam hadn’t done anything for his thirtieth birthday, which was true, and that he owed it to himself to come out with them and make up for it, which was not. Sam felt that what he owed himself was a nice quiet night where nothing much happened and he was able to get really excellent sleep, but when he said as much to Eileen, she just slapped him on the back and said, “Jesus, you sound older than I do.” This, in particular, shamed him, and he had no choice but to agree to come out.
But while Sam was invited to both halves of the night, he knows he’s only really wanted at the second. It would have been different a few years ago, when Sam was just another employee; the footing would have been more equal, and the conversation, as a result, less awkward. But ever since Deb left him in charge, Sam’s The Boss, and it changes the dynamic. She’d warned himthat it would, not that her warning made it any less jarring when it actually happened.
Sam’s used to it now, though. He waves them off, knowing as they shuffle out that the best thing he can do for Joey tonight is handle the closing tasks, have dinner by himself, and then drop in to the party for an appropriate, but relatively brief, amount of time. That’s the professional way to approach this, even if it does put Sam in a slightly lonely position.
Or it would normally put Sam in a slightly lonely position. Instead, to his surprise and pleasure, he finds that after the staff have gone Jake is still lingering in the doorway, scuffing a shoe slightly awkwardly.
Sam raises a questioning eyebrow.
Jake grimaces. “Look, okay, it’s not that they’re not all lovely, right, it was so nice of Joey to invite me, I’m happy enough to stop in at the bar, but there’s only so much twenty-first birthday energy I can take? It makes me feel old, first of all, but secondly, my own twenty-first was such a mess I feel like maybe I shouldn’t get too close to theirs in case I jinx it.” He gives Sam a slightly pleading look. “Can I help you close up?”
“Sure,” Sam says, grinning at him, “if you tell me what happened when you turned twenty-one,” and Jake groans and pantomimes being shot by an arrow and dying an ignominious death, but then grins back.
Really, Sam is the one who should be offering thanks. Jake seems to gravitate naturally towards the tasks Sam most loathes doing, like wiping down counters, wrapping the meats, and tallying inventory. This leaves Sam to tackle the stuff he enjoys more, like dealing with the floors and ovens, and the things hecan’thand off, like entering the day’s take into their tracking software.
As it turns out it’s pretty wonderful to take what Sam thinks of as the Solo Close of Kindness—something he’s done manytimes over the years—and make it a Dual Close of Camaraderie. He doesn’t have to hover around and make sure Jake knows what he’s doing in an unfamiliar area, because Jake has been documenting everyone’s daily deli tasks for weeks. He doesn’t have to worry that he’s asking too much, being a pushy or overbearing boss, because he’snotJake’s boss, and also, he’s not asking. Jake just cheerfully turns to the next thing that needs doing every time he finishes something up. He even runs Pastrami out when she starts scratching at the back door while Sam’s in the middle of drain duty.
And they talk the whole time they’re working, shouting to each other to keep the conversation going while they’re in separate areas. They revisit the shared memory of Sam’s seventeenth birthday, which involved them both being thrown out of a double feature at a movie theatre after Sam had laughed so hard at Jake’s increasingly hysterically whispered defense of the film’s supposed villain that he’d spilled an entire large fountain drink over not only the two of them, but also the irate couple in front. This part of the discussion, at least according to Jake, is meant to act as a grounding counterbalance to the story of about his own twenty-first birthday: an evening that he apparently spent at an incredibly high-end party that had nothing to do with him, drinking more Lemon Drops than one person should ever consume, and eventually collapsing into a bush in front of a wildly famous celebrity. Jake won’t tell Sam who said celebrity was, so this diverges into a sort of guessing game, with Sam yelling things like, “Russell Crowe!” and “Meryl Streep!” across the restaurant, and Jake calling back, “Nope!” or, “Hah, I wish, it would have been worth the embarrassment to meet her.”
And then, suddenly, they’re laughing together in the kitchen, and everything is done except the stove, which Sam left for last because?—
“Oh, right,” he says, suddenly sheepish, putting a hand to the back of his neck. “I was going to, uh. Make dinner? If you want some?”
“Oooh, sure. If you don’t mind, that sounds great.” Jake doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the offer. After all, why would he be? Sam has been feeding him for weeks now.
But, as he gathers ingredients from the fridge and freezer, Sam is intimately aware that this is not like all the other meals he has prepared for Jake. And that’s because every other time, they haven’t been meals he preparedjustfor Jake. It was always family meal, or something off the line, or the occasional thrown-together sandwich, but that didn’t count. Anyone could slap corned beef on bread and spoon a mound of potato salad next to it on a plate—that wasn’t the same ascookinga wholemealspecifically forone person, let alone sharing that meal with them.
Sam is…nervous, he realizes, a little shocked by it. About cooking dinner! In the Silverman’s kitchen! It’s absurd, that’s what it is, that Jake can manage to wrest that out of him just bystandingthere, patting Sam’s dog and looking pleased by the idea of eating.
Nothing to do but brazen it out, so he continues to guess celebrities as he toasts and sears and poaches. It’s not a complicated dinner, but something he’s made for himself many times before. Hollandaise sauce is fast enough to make, and Eileen’s fresh Kaiser rolls are always around, and combined with thinly sliced pastrami, they become something greater than the sum of their parts. It’s not exactly eggs Benedict, because eggs Benedict is on an English muffin with ham, not pastrami, and served open-faced instead of as a closed sandwich. But it hits in a similar strike zone, and honestly Sam thinks his version tastes better than the standard, which is why he’s been making it for years.
The celebrity guessing winds up being a fruitful line of conversation: Sam doesn’t land on the right one, but Jake has, separately, met a number of the ones he mentions, and those stories carry them through Sam poaching the eggs, toasting the buns, searing off the pastrami, and finishing the hollandaise with a pinch of cayenne pepper.
He has a moment of panic as he’s plating. Should he ask Jake to join him out in the dining room? Pull down two of the chairs from where Sam put them, twenty minutes ago, on top of their table for the night, and sit down to properly eat together? Like a?—
“Here,” Sam says, shoving the plate awkwardly towards Jake, who blinks and takes it, looking slightly baffled.
