Page 57 of Trust my Heart

I wasn’t ready. I’d known it for hours and hidden it well.

“Do a last pass with me,” Luke said. “Before we load.”

“We have everything.”

“Then it won’t take long.” He held out his hand.

I took it.

We walked it slow, in no hurry to finish. It didn’t take long. Forty square meters, four small rooms and the strip of kitchen, the green tile in the bathroom, the metal desk in the second bedroom that had held my suits and nothing else. There wasn’t a foot of it we hadn’t lived hard in.

None of it should have worked. Two men a bad week from getting fired, put in the same apartment and left to sort it out, and the Service had bet against us in writing before we ever unpacked. We turned into this instead. The counter we’d fought at and made up at more times than I could count. The couch where he told me the truth about his life. The door he slammed exactly once and never again. I didn’t stop and take any of it apart. I didn’t need to. By the end the whole place was just him to me.

I reached for his hand again on the way through. I’d been reaching for it every chance I got. He let me every time.

He caught me at the bathroom door and kissed me, for no reason except that we were leaving, and I kissed him back and let the schedule wait. Then he tipped his head down the hall and we kept moving.

We finished the pass without much talking. There wasn’t much left to see, just bare rooms and clean corners and the shapes our things had left in the dust.

At the door of our bedroom Luke stopped. The bed was stripped to the mattress, the closet standing open and empty, the window bare. He looked at it a while, and I watched him.

“Strange,” he said. “Smaller with everything gone.”

“Bigger to me.” I didn’t know why I said it. It was true anyway. “More room to miss it in, maybe.”

He found my hand without looking. We stood in the doorway of the room we’d slept in and didn’t go in. His thumb moved slow across the back of my hand. He never talked to fill a quiet. He just stayed in it with me until it stopped being lonely.

I kissed him for that, both hands in his shirt, until he made a low sound and eased back an inch.

“We’re never getting out of here,” he said.

“That’s the idea.”

“Boxes first.” But he took his time letting go, and pressed his thumb to the inside of my wrist before he did.

Back in the living room I took the new keys out again. Fourth time, maybe fifth. Two of them, bright, the cut edges still sharp. Nobody had slid these across a desk at anybody. We had stood at the hardware counter on Parliament and paid for them ourselves.

Our new place was ten minutes east, the third floor of a walk-up with south windows and a fire escape wide enough to sit on. A real kitchen, one two people could stand in without fighting over the single square of counter. A bedroom door that locked, for whatever that was worth to two men who’d stopped needing one to. Both our names on the lease, in that order and then reversed, because we’d argued about whose went first and settled it by writing both.

Luke had already decided which wall the couch would go on. Our couch, the first one either of us had bought on purpose, coming Thursday. He’d stood in that empty living room for a while and had opinions about where the morning light fell. I’d never once heard the man have an opinion about light. I’d agreed to all of it on the spot. I would have agreed to a houseboat if he’d stood in it and looked like that.

Luke took one key off the ring and threaded it onto his own, next to his car key, like it had always lived there.

“You didn’t even hesitate. You stood in that kitchen twenty minutes and signed a lease. What made you so sure?”

“Nothing made me sure.” He pocketed his keys. “I’m trusting my heart this time.”

He said it plainly, no ceremony, and picked up the cooler like the subject was closed. To him it was. I stood there a moment longer with my key in my hand, and then I put it away carefully. I planned to keep it a long time.

And then there was nothing left to do.

I stood in the middle of the living room, in a furnished apartment that had already stopped being ours, and it caught up with me all at once. I had been fine all day, fine with tape in my hand and a list to work through. Now the tape was done and the boxes stood in their line by the door, and I did not want to go.

It didn’t make sense. The new place was better in every way a person could put on paper. We had chosen it ourselves. I stood there anyway, not wanting to walk out.

“Ryan.”

Luke had stopped by the door with the cooler. He looked at my face and set the cooler down.