Page 44 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

June

Both of you.

He says it holding my hands in his kitchen, and my knees nearly give out. We end up at the table — our table, the confession table, twelve hours old in its new job. He sits me down and pulls his chair around to my side of it. Close. Knees touching mine. Hands staying.

“Now,” he says. “Go ahead and ask me. You’ve been wanting to ask all day.”

“This morning you said you couldn’t hear the answer yet.”

“That was this morning. I’ve had my day to think.” His thumbs move over my knuckles, slow, steady. “Ask me.”

My voice comes out smaller than I’ve ever heard it. “Do you think you bought me?”

“No.” No pause, no air in front of it. “I spent the whole day taking that question apart, and here’s where it ended. I tried for fourteen months to get that woman to accept something. Anything. She wouldn’t take a tip without turning it into a joke. She wouldn’t name one thing she wanted. The single thing she ever let me give her was a typed-out description of a hotel breakfast.” He shakes his head. “I know what being a customer feels like, June. This never felt like that. It felt like luck.”

“You couldn’t have bought it, because I never sold it,” I say, and I need him to hear every word. “The site sold photos and videos. That was work, and I’m not sorry about it. But the conversations were never part of the product. In two years, out of hundreds of subscribers, you’re the only person I ever talked with that way. The only one. It happened because you asked about my day and actually wanted the answer.”

“And I didn’t know you,” he says. “You didn’t know me. Whatever we were to each other back then, we were it without names, without faces, without money mattering. Nobody was rich. Nobody was famous.” He turns my hands over in his, palms up, and holds them. “So here’s where I’ve landed: you were never for sale, and I never bought you. I’m not going to wonder about it again. I wanted to say that in this kitchen, where the big things get said.”

“One question back,” I say, because tonight is for all of it. “August. When I turned the page back on, Velvet sent a notice to every old subscriber. JUNO is back. That’s how the site works — I knew it the second I hit restore. And then I spent nine days down the hall from your phone, waiting to find out whether you’d seen it.”

He huffs — half a laugh, at himself. “The account lived under an email I made in an airport eight years ago, built so nothing about it could ever touch my real life. No phone, no alerts. I checked the page by typing the address, every time, like I told you. I never once opened that inbox.” He shakes his head slowly at the table. “It’s probably still sitting there. JUNO is back, in a mailbox nobody will ever open again.”

“Nine days,” I say. “The site emailed every old subscriber the night I restored that page. If you’d opened that inbox even once, you’d have known who I was back in August.”

“Then I’m glad I have discipline,” he says, “and a terrible relationship with email.”

The clock over the stove hums. Upstairs, two kids sleep in a house whose air weighs half what it did yesterday.

“I don’t know what happens next,” I say.

“Nothing happens next. Not tonight. Tonight there’s no next.” He stands, and doesn’t let go of my hands, so I come up with him. “Tonight I’d like to take you to bed, if you’d like that. My bed. And I’d like the lights on.”

I’ve never once been in his room at night. Months of hallway goodnights, of the furnace rule, of my narrow bed under the slanted ceiling — his door was the one door in this house I never touched. “Gus—”

“I’ve been two people in the dark for years,” he says. “So have you. I’m done. Lights on. Come see where I live.”

* * *

His room is plain, which I knew it would be. Good bed, old dresser, a chair with a sweater over it, a stack of books one deep. He turns on the small lamp, then, deliberately, the second one, and stands there in all that light looking at me like the looking is the point.

We undress each other slowly, and for once neither of us is performing patience. We just have it. There’s nowhere to be. There’s nothing left to guard. When my shirt comes off he traces the line of my shoulder like he’s never seen one. When his comes off I put my palm flat over his heart, the old habit, and he covers my hand with his and keeps it there.

“Hello,” he says quietly, ridiculous, perfect.

“Hello.”

We lie down face to face on top of the covers, in the light. For a while we don’t do anything but look and touch and say true things — small ones we never let ourselves say before. That I love the gray at his temples. That he noticed my laugh got louder and easier around Halloween, and wondered what had changed, and didn’t let himself hope it was about him. It was — that’s about when I stopped planning my exit from this house. And that his habit of pushing his shirtsleeves up his forearms had been a genuine problem for me since my second week on the job. That the night I fixed his tie at the gala, he drove home planning the next time he’d need a tie.

“I have one,” he says, against my collarbone. “One I’ve been keeping.” His mouth moves lower as he talks, unhurried. “The morning after the wine. You stood at my stove in the daylight, and I looked at you and decided: whatever trouble this turns into, I want it anyway. I knew it could go wrong. I chose it with my eyes open. I just didn’t know yet how good it was going to be.”

“That’s the difference,” I say. “Choosing something isn’t buying it.”

“Choosing isn’t buying,” he repeats, slowly, like he’s filing it away somewhere permanent. “There she is. Three a.m. in person.”

Then the talking thins out into something better. He kisses his way down my body with no destination and no clock, and where his mouth goes his hands follow, and where his hands go I light up. He spends whole minutes in places that never earned minutes before — the inside of my elbow, the crease of my hip, the mole. Especially the mole.

“You’re thinking something,” I say to the ceiling. “I can feel it. Say it.”