Potato was on the couch.
Through the wall, Benji’s room was silent.
Something I’d been carrying for a very long time had just set itself down.
It wasn’t the grief. The grief stayed and would never truly be set aside. No, it was a shape that changed, from the clenched, airless thing it had been for two years to something with more room in it, a container that could hold David and the missing and the love without requiring that every other door remain shut.
I slept through the night for the first time in months.
The stove light stayed on.
Chapter 23
Benji
Iwoke up on the floor.
Not the bed.
Specifically, I lay slumped on the floor, where I’d apparently slid down the door last night after Peter left and then failed to complete the journey to any horizontal surface with a mattress on it. Princess Consuela was sitting in my lap, which meant she’d escaped her carrier at some point during the night. She was staring at me from approximately four inches away with the unblinking intensity of a creature who wanted breakfast and who considered the unconscious state of her human an obstacle rather than a boundary.
“He kissed me,” I told her.
She blinked once and bit my chin, a reminder that her needs existed independently of my emotional state, and that kibble waited for no man’s romanticbreakthrough.
I fed her.
Then I stood under the scalding water of a shower for twenty minutes while replaying the previous evening with the obsessive focus of a film editor reviewing dailies, scrubbing forward and back through every frame.
His hands on my face.
The tremor in his fingers.
The bump of his glasses against my forehead.
The way he’d said, “Since the night you sat on my floor with Hiro,” which meant two months, which meant that Peter Loupier had been thinking about kissing me fortwo whole monthswhile maintaining the most convincing facade of emotional neutrality I had ever encountered.
I had spent years in professional dance around people who performed for a living.
To play a part for two months? Peter had processed his desire to kiss me through what he described as a “larger situation,” as if wanting someone were a software update that needed to be installed in stages, and that kissing was just one patch in a comprehensive system upgrade.
I was going to lose my mind.
I got out of the shower, got dressed, and walked down the hall to the kitchen.
Peter was at the island.
He had coffee. His glasses were halfway down his nose. Peter Loupier had woken up after kissing his roommate and had decided that the appropriate response was to maintain his routine with meticulous precision, because routine was how Peter held the world together, and the world had shifted on its axis last night and routine was all that was keeping him from acknowledging that out loud.
He looked up when I entered.
His face was neutral and composed. The walls were back in place, rebuilt overnight.
But his eyes . . . His eyes hadn’t gotten the memo.
His eyes tracked me across the kitchen with an attention that was new, a quality of focus that I recognized from the moments at his desk when he was writing something that mattered. That recognition sent a current through my entire body that I managed, through what I consider a heroic act of self-control, to not visibly react to.
“Morning,” I said.
