His hand had not moved.
He’d sat there with Adrian’s finger against his knuckle and had not moved. Adrian lifted the glass away. Milo put his hand in his lap. Neither of them said anything. Milo had left the bar eleven minutes later with his jacket held in front of him and his jaw locked and his body carrying something it had never carried out of that building before.
He sat in the car. The heat was running and it wasn’t helping. His jeans were tight and his skin was too warm and the parkingstructure was cold and empty and none of it was fixing the problem, which was that a man’s finger had touched his knuckle for less than a second and Milo was sitting in a parked car at midnight hard enough that his hands were shaking.
He put his forehead on the steering wheel.
He undid his jeans.
Not a decision. The same way the laugh hadn’t been a decision. His hand moved and his brain caught up three seconds later and by then it was too late to stop because stopping would require a version of him that was in charge and that version had left when Adrian’s finger touched his knuckle.
He kept his forehead on the wheel. Eyes closed. The parking structure was empty and the windows were fogged and nobody was here and he hated that the first thing he thought wasnobody can see,hated that the thought was a relief, hated that relief was the thing that let his hand move faster.
Adrian’s hands on the bar. The paint in the creases. The way he’d leaned forward on his palms after the laugh, face open, glasses catching light, fingers spread on the mahogany. The forearms. The cloth stopping. Paint thinner and soap and skin.
His grip tightened. His breath came in short pulls through his teeth and the fogged windshield gave him nothing back, and when he came it was with his jaw locked shut and Adrian’s name in his throat where he held it.
He sat there after. Hand wet. Chest heaving. The car fogged to the edges of the glass.
He cleaned up with a napkin from the console and sat with his hands in his lap and stared at the windshield. No category for this. No file. No system that accounted for jerking off in a parking structure to the memory of a bartender’s hands.
He drove home. The apartment was cold and the bed was empty and he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling and his body was spent and his brain was not and the last thing hethought before sleep came was not the goal horn or the overtime win or the score.
It was paint thinner and soap and skin.
And the cloth stopping.
Adrian
Nina walked into the Grotto at quarter past ten, unwound her scarf in three loops, and read the room. She always read rooms. It was her thing. Seven years of friendship and Adrian had never once seen her walk into a space without taking inventory of what was where and what it meant.
She’d done it the first week of their MFA program, standing in the doorway of his studio and saying, without preamble,you’re in love with the color blue and you’re terrified of it.Accurate, resented for four days, then admitted. That was Nina. She saw things and said them and you could either deal with it or get out of the way.
She came to his end of the bar. Her jacket smelled like the ceramics studio two blocks over, kiln heat and something mineral. She had clay under her nails. She pulled out the stool two down from the third-from-the-right and sat and looked at him.
“Hey,” Adrian said. He was already reaching for the gin.
“Hey.” Her eyes moved to the stool on her right. The third one. “Is that his?”
He set the gin bottle down. “You want tonic?”
“Adrian.”
“Lime or cucumber?”
“Lime.” She watched him cut the lime, glasses low on her nose, hands flat on the bar. “You texted me back in under aminute tonight, which means you were bored, which means he’s not here yet.”
He set the glass in front of her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh.” She picked up the glass and looked at him over it. “The third stool. Nobody’s been sitting in it all night, have they.”
Adrian picked up the cloth and wiped the rail.
“People sit where they sit,” he said.
“There’s a ring on it. Glass ring. Same spot. You wiped everything else.”
He looked at the stool. The ghost ring, the faint mark of a glass set and lifted and set again in the same spot, had been there the whole time he’d been cleaning tonight. He’d wiped around it without noticing he was doing it.
