"What do I do."
Not a question, quite. More the sound of a man who had arrived at the thing he'd been circling for the last hour and found it there, waiting.
Charlie was quiet for a moment. The real kind of quiet , thinking quiet, not careful quiet.
"Nothing yet," he said. "You give it a day. You let him land. You don't corner him and you don't disappear on him, you just," A pause. "Be Shay. You're very good at being Shay. Trust that."
"Being Shay is what got us here."
"Yeah," Charlie said. "It is. And Felix kissed you back."
The sock was definitely Felix's. It had that quality , a specific, practical grey, which was a very Felix color to have socks in. I was going to have to give it back. That was going to be a conversation.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Okay." I sat up. Dragged a hand through my hair. "I'm fine."
Charlie's pause had a shape. I knew its shape.
"Sure," he said.
"I am."
"I know."
"Don't sure me, Drayton. You've been spending too much time with Henry. You've caught his,"
"'Say nothing and be devastating' thing, yeah, you've mentioned." I could hear him smiling now, easy and warm and the real thing, the smile that Henry had given back to him. "Call me tomorrow."
"What if I'm worse tomorrow."
"Then call me tonight." A beat. "Shay."
"Yeah."
"He ran thirty extra minutes."
I looked at Felix's sock on my floor.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
We hung up. The apartment was quiet. The bag was still by the door. The sock was still on the floor. Outside, the city made its indifferent, ongoing noise, the same way it always did , unbothered, unhelpful, completely uninterested in the internal weather of one specific man on one specific couch who was in possession of one specific sock that was not his.
I was fine.
I was magnificently pretending to be fine, which was a different thing, and I knew the difference, and I was choosing, deliberately and with full awareness, to let the performance hold just a little longer.
Just until tomorrow.
Chapter Seven
Felix
The thing about Shay's apartment was that it had no system.
This was not a criticism. It was an observation. I had made it many times, in many configurations, across four years of being in this space with the frequency of someone who had, at some point, stopped noticing he was always here. The couch faced the wrong direction for the television. The kitchen had good knives , excellent knives, actually, which I had chosen not to examine too closely , and nothing else organized in any coherent way. There were skates by the door that were not the current season's skates. There was a throw blanket on the floor that had never, in my memory, been on the couch it presumably belonged to. There was a mug on the windowsill containing, as far as I could tell, a dead plant that Shay was either deeply optimistic about or had stopped seeing entirely.
