“I know,” Adrian said. “And I can’t give it to you. Not because I don’t want to. Because I know what happens to me when I wait.”
Adrian breathed.
“I already know what waiting does to me. I’ve done it. Three years of it. I learned what happens when you let someone turn you into a secret long enough.” He pressed his palms against the bar. “I put this life together on the other side of that. The bar, the studio, all of it. And I promised myself I would never go back.”
Adrian came around.
The end of the bar, the gap where the rail opened, his hand on the wood as he passed through. The room reorganizing around him. Milo had turned on the stool to track him, his eyes not leaving Adrian’s face.
Adrian stood in front of him. Close enough for the turpentine and the heat underneath to be present, the scent of the studio on his hands and the warmth of Milo’s body radiating through the space between them. He put his hands on either side of Milo’s face. His palms against the jaw, his thumb at the hinge where the muscle had been clenching all night and for months before that, and the muscle jumped once under his thumb and went still. The paint on his fingers against Milo’s skin, the blue-black and sienna leaving faint marks on his cheekbone where Adrian’s thumb pressed.
Adrian held the jaw in his hands. The jaw he’d painted. The jaw he’d held in this bar and in his bed and at two in the morning when the only light was the streetlamp through the studio windows. He held it and looked at the face above it and the face was looking back at him with everything visible, every wall down, the man behind the armor standing in the open with nowhere to go.
Adrian kissed him.
Not the hard terrified thing from the first night across the bar when Milo had grabbed his wrist and closed the distance like a man jumping off something. Not the tender thing from the studio mornings when the light was good and neither of them had anywhere to be. This kiss was both of those and neither.Adrian’s mouth found Milo’s and the kiss was slow and full and carried the weight of what they’d built and the ache of the form ending. He kissed Milo the way you kiss someone when you know it’s the last time for a while and you want them to feel it in their body for days after, thorough and unhurried and devastating.
Milo’s hands came to his forearms. Both of them, fingers closing with the hold-on grip Adrian knew, the pressure that saidstayin the only language Milo’s hands had ever learned. The grip tightened when Adrian pressed in. Tightened again when Adrian’s thumb moved against the hinge of his jaw, and Adrian felt the sound Milo made against his mouth, low and involuntary, the sound of a man holding on to something he could feel leaving.
Adrian pulled back. His hands stayed on Milo’s jaw for one more second, his thumbs tracing the line of the bone as he released it, and the releasing was the hardest thing his hands had done since the last time he’d let go of something he loved, and his hands remembered that too.
“You know where I am,” he said. His voice was steady. His hands were not. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not giving you a deadline.” He stepped back. One step. The cold air filling the space where his body had been. “But I can’t sit on this side of the bar and pretend this is enough.”
Adrian picked up his jacket from behind the bar. Not looking at the stool. Not looking at the glass. Not looking at Milo’s face because if he looked at Milo’s face he was going to stay and staying was the thing that would kill him slowly the way it had killed him last time, not all at once but in increments, one accommodation at a time, until the person doing the accommodating forgot what shape he’d been before he started bending.
Adrian walked to the door and pushed it open and the cold came through and he walked out into it and the door closed behind him and he stood on the sidewalk for five seconds with his keys in his hand and his chest doing the thing it did when the breath wouldn’t come all the way in and he walked to his car and got in and sat with his hands on the wheel and his forehead on his hands and breathed until the breathing worked.
* * *
Milo sat on the stool in the empty bar.
The turntable was off. The silence was total, the kind of silence a room holds when the thing that filled it is gone and the room hasn’t figured out how to be a room without it. The bottles on the back rail caught the light and held it. The bourbon glass in front of him, untouched, two fingers at the same level as when Adrian had poured it. His hand on the bar, the one that had been reaching for Adrian, palm down, fingers spread against the lacquer in the exact spot where Adrian’s hands had been pressed a minute ago.
His jaw ached. Not the ache of clenching but the ache of release, the muscle remembering Adrian’s thumbs at the hinge, the pressure of being held by someone who knew every line of his face and had decided to let go of it anyway.
The cold from the door was already fading. The bar was holding its heat the way it always held its heat, the warmth that came from the wood and the years and the man who had just walked out of it. Adrian’s cloth was on the bar where he’d set it down, folded once, the damp mark underneath it already drying. His glass was in the rack. His jacket was gone from the hook. The vinyl was off and the room had no sound except the cooler’s hum and the tap dripping once into the drain, and the silence was notthe old silence that had felt like peace. This was the silence of a room that had been emptied on purpose.
Milo sat on the stool. His jaw was unclenched. His hands were flat on the bar. The bourbon glass sat in its ring, full, untouched, and he understood with a clarity that felt like something breaking that the ring in the lacquer was permanent and he had made it by showing up and sitting in the same spot for months and never once saying out loud what the showing up meant.
He sat in the bar where Adrian had kissed him and Adrian had held his face and Adrian had let him go and Adrian had walked out into the cold, and for the first time he understood that the thing he was most afraid of wasn’t being seen.
It was this.
Milo
Milo didn’t go to the Grotto.
He went to the rink. He went to practice. He drove home on the route that didn’t pass the bar, the one that added twelve minutes and took him through the industrial stretch of Michigan Avenue where there was nothing to look at and nothing to feel and the road just went. He went to the apartment and sat in the kitchen where the garlic smell had been and wasn’t anymore and the granite counter held nothing and the refrigerator hummed its one note into rooms that had never felt empty before because he hadn’t known what full looked like. Now he did. Adrian had cooked on that stove and the kitchen had smelled like a kitchen and someone had lived in this space for one night and now it was gone and the gone was everywhere.
He sat on the counter where he’d sat while Adrian cooked. The hook by the door was empty. The counter was cold. The building’s heating system cycled through its walls with the low hum he heard every night and had never once thought of as loneliness until someone else had heard it too.
Three days. Four. He lost count because the days ran together when the only structure was the rink and the apartment and the space between them where the bar used to be. He ate what he found in the kitchen, which was protein bars and the frozen meals the team nutritionist recommended and one container of leftover rice from a restaurant he didn’t remembergoing to. He slept on the side of the bed he’d slept on when Adrian had been in the other side, which was stupid because he’d slept in the middle for years before that and the pillow on the left was just a pillow and it didn’t smell like linseed oil anymore and there was no reason to avoid it except that moving back to the middle meant admitting it was over and he hadn’t decided yet whether it was over or whether he was going to do something about it or whether doing something about it was even a thing he knew how to do, given that every meaningful action in his adult life had been performed inside a rink and everything outside the rink was a series of habits designed to prevent exactly this kind of problem.
* * *
His game went flat.
Not bad. Flat. The anger that had been fuel for eight years was gone and what replaced it was nothing, which was worse because anger moved and nothing just sat there. He ran the drills. The puck went where he put it. The timing was clean. He took his shifts and backchecked and won the board battles his body knew how to win and none of it carried any heat. The game against Columbus was a 2-1 loss and Milo logged eighteen minutes of ice time and zero points and no penalties and the only remarkable thing about his performance was how unremarkable it was. He could feel Strand watching him from behind the bench, the coach’s attention landing and pulling away, and Milo knew what that attention meant because he’d been in the league long enough to know what a coach looked like when he was considering whether a player’s problem was tactical or personal and deciding how long to wait before asking.
