I looked at the book in my hand. Put it back. Found the couch.
Fine. This was fine.
Dinner was obscene in the way Henry's dinners were always obscene , not lavish, justcorrect, everything exactly at the temperature and seasoning and texture it was supposed to be, as if the food had been briefed. Charlie had opened something good and I was on my second glass and I was performing beautifully. I had a story about the Tuesday road trip logistics and the hotel that had given Mivo a room with a window that opened onto another room, and the table was good , Charlie was laughing, Henry had the expression that meant genuine amusement suppressed to thirty percent, Felix had the mouth thing going, the almost smile, the one that...
I was looking at the table.
I was telling the story and looking at the table and I was not looking at Felix, because I had learned in Chapter Three of my own life that looking at Felix in the middle of a story was a liability, and I had removed the liability from the equation, and I was fine.
"And then," I said, "Mivo, this is the important part , Mivo decides the wall is load,bearing."
"It wasn't load,bearing," Charlie said.
"It was absolutely not load,bearing. It was a partition. You could see the light through the gap. But Mivo has decided, structurally and emotionally, that the wall is load,bearing, and this means he can't tell management, because if he tells management they'll fix it, and if they fix it they'll find out that he's been using it as a shelf."
"For what," Henry said.
"His protein supplements. He has a system."
Felix made a sound. An actual sound , brief, involuntary. I felt it land somewhere in the vicinity of my sternum.
I kept going.
Charlie was watching me, I noticed. Not the story , me. With the expression he'd developed since Henry, the one that meant he was looking at the thing underneath the performance with the calm, unhurried attention of a man who had learned to wait.
I finished the story. The table settled. Henry refilled the wine.
I did not look at Felix.
The dishes happened the way they always happened , gradual, collaborative, the table clearing itself by unspoken consensus into the kitchen. Henry had a system. Charlie was the second part of the system. I had been drafted into the system at the third dinner and had stayed drafted because there was something about standing at a sink with Charlie that made the things I wasn't saying easier to carry, and I was aware that Charlie knew this, and neither of us mentioned it.
The balcony door opened.
Henry said something to Felix , low, unhearable , and Felix glanced toward the balcony with the expression of a manreceiving information he was going to have to stand in. After a moment, he followed Henry outside.
The door closed.
The kitchen was quiet except for the water and the dishes and Charlie handing me a glass to dry.
He didn't say anything for a while. Just , the water, the glasses, the quiet.
Then: "How bad is it?"
I dried the glass. Set it down.
"It's fine."
He handed me another one. He didn't say anything. He didn't do theokaything, the strategic agreement that meantI'll wait. He just handed me the glass and let the silence have its shape.
"Shay," he said. Just my name. The way he said it when he was done waiting.
I held the glass.
Outside, through the door, I could see them , two figures on the balcony, side by side, the city spread below. Henry with his drink, not looking at Felix. Felix with his, looking at the city. The same configuration as the last time, except that this time I knew what had happened since then and the balcony had a different weight to it.
I looked at the glass in my hand.
"He keeps pulling me in," I said. Quiet. The same volume I'd use for something I wasn't sure I was ready to say out loud yet. "And then looking at me like I'm the most terrifying thing he's ever seen." I stopped. Started again. "And I don't know how to stop wanting him to choose me."
