Page 13 of Trust my Heart

The rain made the car small. It had been years since the two of us were anywhere this small together, and it was pleasant, and it should not have been pleasant, and both of those stayed true the whole way up.

The heat in the pool car had never really gotten ahead of the rain. My hands were cold on the wheel. I hadn’t said so. I hadn’t especially noticed it myself, past the general cold.

He was in the middle of a sentence when he reached over, without looking at me and without stopping talking, and turned the vent on my side so the heat came at my hands instead of at him.

He kept talking. The pound, the keys, the forms. The work.

I stopped hearing any of it.

He used to do that. Once, years ago, outside a building on a warrant that never came, at the coldest end of the night, without a word and without looking. And now he’d done it again, in the middle of a sentence about a tow pound. The same gesture. The same hand.

Or it was only a decent man who had turned a vent. It was a cold night. Anyone who had ever sat in a cold car with another person had turned a vent. He hadn’t paused to see whether it landed. There was nothing in it, or there was everything in it, and there was no way to know which. I had never in my life been comfortable with a thing I couldn’t rule in or out.

And under that, quieter, the real problem. Something in me had moved when the warmth hit my hands. Not wanting. I could at least say that plainly to myself, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. My body remembering what it was like to be looked after by him, that was all. And up until that vent I had been certain there was nothing left in me to move.

I drove the last blocks up Pape too aware of the heater and of him.

“You went quiet,” he said, near the top of the hill. Not pushing. Just noticing.

“Long day at court.”

“Court,” he agreed, like that explained everything, and let me have the quiet, and I sat inside it hating that he still knew to do that.

His building was an old brown mid-rise with the lobby light out. He gathered the bag and thanked me a third time, plain, nothing on it.

“Say hi to Detective Carlson,” he said, with the door open. And he got out into the rain. He didn’t hurry to the door, the same way he hadn’t hurried at the curb. I waited until the door closed behind him. Then I sat in front of the empty lobby a while longer than that took, with the engine idling, and then I drove home.

The pool car could go back in the morning. Nobody would miss it overnight, and I was done driving for other people.

I went over it the whole way down and got nowhere. A dead battery. A ride. Old names, old cases, one laugh I hadn’t planned on and one vent turned in the middle of a sentence. Nothing had happened. A review board made of saints could go over that evening minute by minute and find nothing to hold. And I was going to tell Ryan all of it, that was a given. I’d told him once that I didn’t want anything sitting between us that I hadn’t said out loud, and I’d meant it. If I said the strange small thing, I’d find out how small it actually was. I had the first sentence picked out before I crossed the Danforth.

The stairs of our building sounded the way they always sound under a tired man, and the hall light on three was out again, and none of it bothered me. The apartment smelled like clean laundry.

Ryan was on the couch with the basket at his feet, sleeves pushed up, folding towels his own way, in halves and then rolled, a method he had defended to me twice with a straight face. He was barefoot. The lamp was on beside him and the rain was on the window behind him, and there was a towel over one knee, half done, and the television was on with the sound off, some panel of people disagreeing about hockey in perfect silence.

“Hey,” he said, looking up. “How was court?” And then, because he never waits for an answer when he has news, “Before you say anything. I met Almeida in the laundry room. We’re getting a new dryer. Not repaired, Luke. New. He showed me the brochure like it was a car. I’ve never seen a man that proud of an appliance, and by the end of it I was proud too. It has a setting especially for towels.” He snapped a towel straight. Then he actually looked at me. “You’re soaked. Did they hold court outside this year? Sit down, there’s stew on the stove. My grandmother’s recipe, and I got it mostly right this time.”

I had the sentence ready. The whole evening was lined up in my mouth, the trial and the dead gray sedan on Shuter and the ride and the vent, all of it, in order.

And then I looked at him. Barefoot on our couch with his sleeves up and a towel over his knee, laughing at his own story, lamplight on him, rain behind him. The whole rattled drive stopped mattering at once. This was the real thing, right here, folding towels wrong under a lamp. Everything else was weather.

I crossed the room and took the towel off his knee and dropped it in the basket, and sat down on him.

“Okay,” he said, laughing, going backward into the cushions with my weight on him. “Hello. You’re enormous.”

“You’re in my spot.”

“I’m folding your towels.”

“You’re folding them wrong.”

“I’m folding them better,” he said, and then stopped defending the towels, because I kissed him.

It wasn’t a hello kiss. His mouth opened under mine and the basket went over the edge of the couch and neither of us looked. His hands came up my back, under the jacket, and I got the jacket off without leaving him for more than a second, and his laugh went low and then stopped being a laugh at all. He pulled me back down by the collar. I went.

“The towels,” he said against my mouth, not meaning it.

“Leave them.”