“Yeah.”
“You told me to use the wrong mug.”
He looked up.
“The blue mug,” I said. “You said, ‘Use the blue one.’ I poured your coffee in it and put it in front of you, because the blue mug is your mug. David gave it toyou. I’m going to drink from my mug, and you’re going to drink from yours, and David’s mug is going to stay exactly where it’s been, which is in your hands, where he put it.”
Peter looked at me.
Then at the mug.
Then at me.
“I was trying to—”
“I know what you were trying to do, and it’s the most generous thing anyone’s ever offered me; but you don’t have to give up David’s mug to make room for me. There’s plenty of room. There’s been plenty of room. You made room for me months ago, whether we realized it or not.”
He wrapped both hands around the blue mug, with the grip of a man holding something precious and irreplaceable.
“Okay,” he said, and his voice cracked.
“Okay,” I echoed.
“Your coffee is overextracted.”
“My coffee is perfect.”
“You left it in the press too long.”
“Peter.”
“It’s fine. The coffee is fine.”
The morning settled as we drank, General Tso resumed his post on the refrigerator, Potato wheezed on the dog bed, Hiro lay at Peter’s feet, and the apartment held all of us.
The quiet had a different quality now, a fullness, the kind that exists between two people who have stopped circling and started landing.
A Post-it appeared on the fridge that afternoon.
The coffee was overextracted. But the company was perfect.
— P
Below it, in smaller but no less precise writing:
The mug stays with me, but you stay, too.
Chapter 29
Benji
Iwalked into Barbacks on Tuesday afternoon to find a nearly naked man standing on the bar.
This requires context.
I had been gone for two days, two glorious days of Peter’s bed and Peter’s kitchen and Peter’s hands and a stuffed manatee named Biscuit who now lived on the nightstand beside Peter’s glasses. This was a placement I had not suggested and that Peter had not acknowledged but that I had photographed and sent to Mia with the caption, “He put Biscuit on his nightstand.”
Mia responded with seventeen exclamation points and a GIF of a woman fainting.
