Two simple words.
And one massive door left open by a man who locked everything.
I turned them over in the dark, examined them from different angles, testing their weight. He hadn’t said, “No,” which would have been clean and survivable. Nor had he said, “Yes,” which wouldhave been terrifying and wonderful. “Not yet” was neither and both and left me suspended in a space I didn’t know how to occupy, a space where something was going to happen but hadn’t, and where the distance between Peter and me had been measured in an unfolded blanket’s width.
I gave up on sleep at 4:30 a.m., fed Princess Consuela, showered, and stood in front of the bathroom mirror examining my face for evidence that I’d been fundamentally altered by a man’s fingers on mine over a piece of fleece.
My face looked the same.
This seemed like a design flaw.
Peter’s door was still open a few inches when I passed it on the way to the kitchen. I could hear his breathing, slow and even. I kept walking because stopping outside his door at 4:30 in the morning to listen to him breathe was a line of utter creepiness I was not prepared to cross, even though I was apparently prepared to cross every other line, including the one where I might fall for my temporary roommate who communicates through refrigerator stationery and folds blankets into thirds.
Like a masochist.
Or a serial killer with a folding fetish.
The kitchen was dark except for the stove light.
I made coffee.
I stood at the island and drank it and looked at the fridge, where the Post-it notes had accumulated over the weeks, forming themselves into a layered history of two people learning each other’s rhythms. There was his precise handwriting and my chaotic loops, his dry observations and my sparkle emojis, a whole ongoing conversation that had started with milk placement and had become, without either of us naming it, the most honest relationship I’d ever had.
I wanted to write something.
Not a joke or a rebuttal or a negotiation about shampoo or shower schedules or the correct way to operate a French press.
I wanted to write something true.
Something that acknowledged what had happened over a blanket at midnight without the safety net of humor or deflection.
I pulled a Post-it from the pad, then uncapped the pen.
I stood there for a full five minutes with the pen hovering over the yellow square, unable to write a single word, because every word I considered was either too much or not enough, and the distance between those two things was exactly the width of the half second Peter had been living in for two years.
I understood now, finally, standing in his kitchenat dawn, that the half second wasn’t just his. It was mine, too. I’d been living in my own version of it since the night I’d sat on his floor with Hiro and felt something shift that I’d spent three years keeping still.
I put the pen down, and I drank my coffee.
The bar was closed on Mondays, but Tuesdays started early because Tuesday was delivery day, a day that required the kind of organizational focus that I was, on this particular Tuesday morning, spectacularly incapable of providing.
“That’s the third time you’ve counted that case,” Jacks said.
“I’m being thorough.”
“You counted it, wrote the number down, crossed it out, and started over. That’s not thorough. That’s distracted.”
“I’m not distracted. I’m applying a new level of rigor to our inventory process.”
Jacks set down the case of gin he was carrying and looked at me with the quiet, steady attention that always made me feel transparent. Jacks never pushed. He simply created space and waited for you to fillit. His waiting was more effective than any amount of questioning because it trusted you to arrive at honesty on your own schedule.
I lasted about forty seconds.
“Something happened last night,” I said. “After everyone left.”
Jacks leaned against the shelf and waited.
“We were cleaning up, folding a blanket, and our hands touched. We just, I don’t know, stood there holding the blanket and looking at each other. I asked if he was going to let go, and he said, ‘Not yet.’ Princess Consuela screamed, and the moment ended before either of us could say or do more. We went to our separate rooms, and I haven’t slept, and I can’t count boxes, and I think I might be losing my mind.”
