It was a low brick place down a side street with a karaoke machine in the back and eleven customers, none of whom recognized us. Varga walked into the room as if he owned the deed to it, and I followed. We sat in a corner booth and drank cheap beer.
Two hours in, he got up. He put a dollar in the machine and picked “Islands in the Stream.” He did the Dolly part in falsetto, working the room like a Las Vegas lounge act.
The other customers loved him. And then he held the second mic out to me.
I don’t sing, and I rarely cheer. I’m the man who sits in the corner and lets the room happen around him. Varga already knew that about me. He held the mic out anyway, grinning.
I looked at him standing in a bar where nobody knew us, with the wind whipping the snow into a blizzard outside. I accepted the mic and sang the Kenny part—badly. Varga busted a gut and nearly missed his own line.
The eleven strangers clapped, and one woman laughed so hard that she cried. That was the night I understood Varga could undo all my rules if he chose to. For five years, he didn’t ask.
I poured the hot water into a mug and dunked one of the Hungarian tea bags.
While it steeped, for one moment I wondered what it was like to be Heath. How would it feel to wear a ring in the locker room and have it be uninteresting to the rest of the team? What would it be like to sit next to Varga on a plane while he stole the cashews from my bag of mixed nuts?
Standing there in the kitchen at four in the morning, I let myself call the sensation what it was.
Envy.
I sat with it. Heath and Kieran were a couple, out and public, because somewhere along the way, one of them asked for it.
Varga had asked me for one thing in five years. He asked me to stay, and I bought us a house with a garage. It was a life without seams. Somewhere in the process, he’d stopped asking me for anything else because I answered before he could.
Last night, he’d asked me an important question, and I deflected. Then he saidokay.
The clock said 4:26. I left the tea on the counter and walked back up the stairs.
Varga had turned in his sleep. He lay flat on his back with one arm above his head. I climbed in on my side and slid up against him. He didn’t wake up .
***
I was three steps down before I heard Varga in the kitchen. He started talking before I even appeared. ”—the thing about a duvet, Rook, a real duvet, is the tog rating, and ours is a four-season tog, which is a compromise tog. It’s wrong eight months out of twelve, and I have said this from the day we bought it—“
He was at the espresso machine in his shorts and nothing else, hair flat on one side, seating the portafilter. The machine hissed and spat.
I raked my fingers through my hair. “You bought the duvet,” I said.
“I bought the duvet under duress. You stood in that store and did the thing with your jaw, and I folded, and now I sleep under a compromise three hundred nights a year. Someday a documentary crew is going to ask me the great regret of my life, and I’m going to look into the camera and say the tog,Rook. The tog.”
There was nothing from last night in him. He was back to his usual morning narration. It could have been avocados or free-range eggs, but for this morning, he chose duvets.
He pulled the shot and turned, looking at me.
“There he is,” he said. “You look like hell. Did you sleep?”
“Some.”
“Liar.” He set the cup down, stepped around the island, placed a hand on my jaw, and kissed me. I reached for the back of his neck and pressed my T-shirt-covered chest against his bare one.
He broke the kiss and smiled. Then his phone went off on the island, face-up, buzzing itself in a slow half-circle. He glanced at the screen, then at me, and thumbed the speaker on without picking it up.
“Rafe. You’re alive. I had you dead over Pennsylvania.”
”—Varga?“ The kid’s voice came out of the phone thin and careful. “Sorry. Is it early?”
“It’s never early for you, you farm animal. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I just, the road trip. Coach has me on your wing for the back-to-back, and I wanted to ask about the weak-side forecheck, the thing you do where you—“
