Adrian’s hands on his jaw in the empty bar. Adrian’s mouth on his. Adrian walking out and the door closing and the silence after.
Milo pressed the name.
She picked up on the second ring. “Hey, you.”
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
* * *
Milo was on the floor of his apartment after. Back against the wall beneath the window, the city’s light through the glass above him in long rectangles on the hardwood. Phone in his hand, screen dark. Legs stretched out, socks on the cold floor, head tipped back.
His jaw was unclenched.
Not performing unclenched. Not the forced version where he made himself relax because the situation required it. Unclenched because what the jaw had been holding was out of his body. He’d said it. Out loud. To another person. His sister, on the other end of the phone, had answered. He didn’t need to replay her exact words because the words weren’t the point. The point was the sound of her voice after he said it: the same voice. Unchanged. The voice he’d known his whole life, warm and plain and landing in his chest where it stayed.
The silence in his family had lasted twelve years. His sister had ended it in about four seconds.
Milo sat on the floor and his jaw was loose and his chest was open and the apartment was empty and it didn’t feel like the apartment anymore. It felt like a place he was about to leave. Not the building. The version of himself that had lived here with white walls and no nail holes and a bed that was good for recovery and nothing else.
The hook by the door where Adrian’s jacket had hung was empty. The wall where Adrian had offered to bring a plant was bare. The counter where his keys sat held nothing else.
He picked up the keys and drove. Not to the Grotto. Not yet. First, he had something to do.
Adrian
The Milo canvas was turned to the wall. Adrian had done that three days ago and hadn’t turned it back.
Nina was on the wooden chair with her boots up on the rung and a mug of tea she’d made herself without asking, because Nina had never once in seven years of friendship asked before making herself at home in Adrian’s space. She was watching him work on the new canvas, the blue-black and umber he’d been laying down in patient foundational layers since the walk. She hadn’t said anything about the turned painting. She hadn’t said anything about Milo. She was just there, the way she’d been there every evening since it happened, showing up with her kiln smell and her clay-crusted nails and her silence that saidI’m not leaving you alone with this.
Adrian loaded the brush and looked at the canvas and the canvas looked back at him with the flat indifference of something that hadn’t decided what it was yet. He put paint on it. Blue-black in the upper register, the color building in the thin layers that would eventually hold whatever came next. The problem was that he didn’t know what came next. He hadn’t known for three days. His hands did the work because his hands always did the work, but the image behind the work was gone, or not gone, turned to the wall like the other canvas, facing away from him, waiting.
Adrian’s phone rang.
Not a number he recognized. He set the brush on the palette and wiped his right hand on the rag tucked into his waistband and looked at the screen. Detroit area code. His chest went tight because he knew the code and he knew who didn’t have his number saved and he picked it up before the third ring because if he waited any longer his hands would start shaking and he’d rather answer than stand here and shake.
“It’s me,” Milo said.
Two words. The same two words Milo had said into the studio intercom the first time he’d come to Adrian’s door, weeks ago, when the buzzer had sounded at eleven-fifteen and Adrian had pressed the button and Milo’s voice had come through the speaker low and plain and Adrian had stood in the hallway with his hand on the wall and his pulse in his throat.It’s me.As though there were only one person in the world it could be. As though Adrian had been waiting for that specific voice and Milo knew it.
Adrian’s hand tightened on the phone. Nina’s tea was halfway to her mouth. She stopped.
“There’s a game tonight,” Milo said. “I need you to come.”
Adrian looked at Nina. Nina looked at him over the rim of her mug. Her eyebrows went up. One eyebrow, actually. The left one. Seven years and Adrian had never mastered that.
“The arena,” Milo said. “After the game. The south service entrance. I asked my teammate to meet you and get you in.” A pause. Milo’s pauses were never empty. They were the spaces where the words he was building toward lived, the silences between the sentences where the real information traveled. Adrian had learned to listen to them the way he listened to the spaces in a composition, the negative space that held the image together. “Will you come.”
Not a question. The declarative register. The voice Milo used for things that mattered, stripped of the clipped professionalismhe wore for cameras and the careful flatness he used when he was holding himself in. This was the voice underneath both of those. Adrian had heard it maybe four times.
“Yeah,” Adrian said. “I’ll come.”
The call ended. Adrian stood at the worktable with the phone in his hand and the paint drying on his knuckles and the umber going tacky on his ring finger. Nina set her tea down on the worktable, the ceramic meeting the wood with a sound that punctuated the quiet.
“Go,” she said.
Adrian looked at the canvas. He looked at the turned painting on the east wall, its back to the room, the stretcher bars and the raw canvas visible, the image hidden. He looked at his jacket on the hook by the door.
“Adrian.” Nina’s voice, warm and firm in the way that meant she’d already decided something and was waiting for him to catch up. “Go.”
