Milo’s hand came out of his pocket.
His fingers found the back of Adrian’s hand. The warmth of it. Paint-roughened knuckles, the temperature of a body in cold air, just warmer than the cold around it. His fingers curved. Almost closed. The near-contact sending a current up through his wrist and into his chest. Adrian’s fingers began to open, making space, making room.
A man came out of the restaurant two doors ahead, holding it open for someone behind him, interior light spilling across the sidewalk and the voices of other people’s evenings pouring through the gap, and Milo’s hand went back into his pocket.
The cold where the warmth had been.
Adrian’s stride didn’t break. His hand stayed open at his side for a beat, the fingers uncurling from a contact that had left, and then it went to the wine glass. They walked. The restaurant door closed and the street settled back into its earlier quiet, the voices gone, just the two of them and the sound of their shoes on cold sidewalk.
“I saw that,” Adrian said. Without changing his pace. Without looking at Milo. His voice carrying the same level tone he used when he was telling you a fact he’d decided not to have an opinion about.
Milo kept his eyes forward.
“Okay,” Adrian said.
They walked to the corner. The distance between them the same as before and not the same. The streetlight overhead turned their breath into something visible, two columns of white that rose and dispersed and did not touch.
“Cold,” Milo said.
“Yeah.” Adrian’s voice had the evenness of a man choosing not to say the next thing.
They turned and walked.
* * *
Two weeks later, Adrian came to Milo’s apartment for the first time.
It wasn’t planned. Milo on the phone from his car, the parking lot emptying around him, saying he was twenty minutes away and had eaten nothing since the morning skate. Adrian saying he’d make something. The ease of that,I’ll make something,as if making food for someone were just a thing a person did. The logic of the exchange arriving at the conclusion that somewhere had to be where the making happened. Adrian’s building was farther in the opposite direction. The choice settled the way the left turn on Michigan had settled.
He pulled into the parking garage and sat with the engine off. Concrete and fluorescent light and his own breathing. He went up.
Adrian was in the lobby studying the decorative sculpture near the elevator, which Milo had never once registered as an object with qualities. His head was tilted. The painter’s inventory at work.
“Nice building,” Adrian said.
“It’s fine,” Milo said.
He unlocked the door. Went in first.
Adrian came in behind him. Set the canvas bag on the counter, the clink of glass, the thud of something wrapped in paper, and then his hands stopped on the granite.
His eyes moved from the counter to the living room to the ceiling and back. Not the objects. The space between them. What was there and what wasn’t.
Adrian moved through the apartment. Into the living room where the furniture was arranged correctly and the shelves held one book and nothing else. The couch was gray. The coffee table was glass. He looked at the walls. Bare. Eggshell white. Not a single nail hole. He opened the refrigerator. Two bottles of water, pre-made protein, condiments from a delivery order. He closed it.
He turned around.
“You don’t live here,” he said. Not cruel. Just true, the way he’d sayit’s rainingorthat’s blue.
“I sleep here,” Milo said.
“That’s not what I said.”
He turned back to the canvas bag and started taking things out.
Adrian moved through the kitchen the way he moved through every space he decided to occupy, which was like it already belonged to him. He found the utensil drawer on the second try. Pulled the largest pan from the lower cabinet. Tested the burners and chose the left because the gas caught faster. He’d brought real ingredients: things in paper bags, loose herbs, a head of garlic with the skin on.
Olive oil into the pan. The first sizzle. Then garlic, his thumb splitting the clove, the papery skin falling, the knife going through it in three quick rocks, and the smell that followed was the smell of every kitchen that had ever been a kitchen. It went into the oil and the air changed and the apartment that had never held the smell of cooking began to fill with it.
