Jacks considered this for a moment. His lips twitched as though they wanted to form into a smirk or a smile or something, but he kept them neutral. I was fairly certain the effort had cost him something.
“What did ‘not yet’ mean?” he asked.
“I don’t know what it meant, Jacks!” I threw my hands into the air, though for what purpose, I couldn’t say. “That’s the problem. It could mean, ‘Not yet, but soon.’ It could mean, ‘Not yet, and possibly never, but I’m being polite about it.’ It could mean, ‘Not yet because I’m holding a blanket and my hands are occupied.’ There are multipleinterpretations, and none of them came with footnotes or IKEA instructions. For once, IKEA instructions might’ve been clearer than reality—and never, in the history of furniture assembly, has that been a true statement.”
Jask snorted, his lips giving in to a small smile.
“Which one do you think it is?”
“I think it’s the first one. I think he meant soon. I think he was standing in his kitchen at midnight looking at me with a face that didn’t have any walls on it and telling me that he’s not ready but he’s getting there—but I’ve been wrong about people before, Jacks. I’ve been spectacularly wrong. I once thought a guy was flirting with me for three weeks. It turned out he was just Canadian.”
Jacks’s brow furrowed. “Canadian?”
“They’re very friendly. It makes flirting very confusing. Mounties are the worst with their swarthy shoulders and broad smiles and horses and shit.”
Jacks snorted again.
“Peter’s not Canadian.”
“No, Peter is a man from Austin, Texas, who folds blankets into thirds and uses tongs for Milk Duds, which, for the record, is fucking weird. He’s also a man who looked at me last night with an expression that I have been replaying on a loop for approximately eight hours and that I am going to continuereplaying until my brain either resolves the ambiguity or catches fire, whichever comes first.”
“Have you talked to him today?”
“I left before he woke up.”
“You left before he woke up?”
“Yes! I left before he woke up because I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to stand in the kitchen making small talk about the weather while we both pretended that we didn’t hold hands over a blanket twelve hours earlier.”
“You could try sayingto himwhat you just said to me.”
“To Peter? Come on, Jacks, the man communicates through Post-it notes, for Christ’s sake. His emotional bandwidth is allocated to quarter-inch yellow squares. I can’t just walk into the kitchen and say, ‘Hey, about last night, when you saidnot yet, did you meannot yetin a hopeful way ornot yetin a gentle-rejection way, because I need to know so I can calibrate the rest of my emotional life accordingly?’”
“Why not?”
“Because . . .”
Jacks stared . . . and blinked. Fucking football player and his level head.
“What if . . . I mean . . . but really . . . he might . . . or he might instead . . . fuck me.” I ran my hands through my hair and pulled so hard I thought halfof it might come out. “Jacks, what if he says it was just gentle rejection, a Texas-sized ‘hell no’ packaged in kind words?”
The words landed on the stockroom floor between us. They were twisted in the way I twisted most words, but they were also true. They were the words underneath all the counting and the rambling and the Canadian anecdote. They were . . . the fear.Myfear. They didn’t represent the fear of Peter saying, “No,” exactly, but of Peter saying, “No,” and me having to continue living in his apartment, sleeping twenty feet from his bedroom, hearing him breathe through the wall, and sharing the stove light and the Post-it notes and the 3 a.m. kitchen. They summed up the fear ofall of itcontinuing exactly as before except with the knowledge that “before” was all it would ever be.
“Benj,” Jacks said in the voice he used when he was about to say something he’d been thinking for a while. “That man drove to this bar on a weeknight to bring you your cell phone. He sat in a corner for two hours watching you work. He kneeled on the floor of this bar and talked to a scared little girl because it was the right thing to do, and then he told you she reminded him of his sister. He cooked you dinner for weeks without being asked. He left his door open at night. When you touched his hand, he said, ‘Not yet.’ He didn’t say, ‘No.’ He didn’t pull away. He stood there and held on and told you the truth about where he is.”
Jacks paused.
“That’s not a man who’s rejecting you. That’s a man who’s getting ready, preparing himself, possibly steeling his own courage to jump off his own terrifying ledge.”
I stood in the stockroom holding a clipboard I’d forgotten I was holding and tried to breathe around the thing in my chest that Jacks’s words had just cracked open.
“When did you get so wise?” I asked. “Football players aren’t supposed to be wise.”
“I’ve always been wise. You just talk too much to notice.”
“That’s fair.”
“Go count the gin, Benj, and count itoncethis time.”
