Page 76 of Graceless

He looked at me for a moment. I did not mention the Post-it, and I told myself that a power flicker wasn't a term-one item, and I almost believed me.

He stayed between me and the basement door the rest of the night.

The next morning the strangeness had nowhere to live — the coffee was terrible, Donnie's television came through the ceiling, the world had its ordinary weight — and by Friday what was left was mostly this:

Living with him is a strange education in small things.

He makes the bed. Military-flat, corners like a diagram, every morning, before I'm done with my first thoughts — and then he stands looking at it for a second, and I have started to understand that the looking is the point. He made a bed. In a house. Where he lives. Some mornings I catch him touching things on his way through a room — the doorframe, the back of Nonna's chair, the St. Anthony magnet — one finger, light, the touch you use on something you're confirming is still there.

Friday I closed the studio early. The letters could keep. He'd said don't hurry, and for once in my working life I was taking the note.

"Come somewhere with me," he said, when the light started going.

"Where?"

"Up."

Being carried by him is nothing like being carried.

His arm came around my waist on the stoop, and he looked down at me with the streetlight in the burning blue, and his mouth did the eighth-of-an-inch thing.

"Hold on," he said, in the voice that isn't a suggestion.

"Wait — hold on for what⁠—"

The ground excused itself.

The stoop dropped away. The front of my house poured past my face — my windows, my gutter, my roof, gone — and my stomach stayed somewhere around the second floor while the rest of me went up into the dark.

The sound that came out of me I will deny to my grave.

We came down on the Espositos' roofline like a thought landing. One step. And then the roof edge was there and past, and we were over the gap — the alley below us, four stories of dark air and one astonished cat — and I did the only human thing there is to do at altitude in the grip of a fallen angel: I locked both arms around his neck and swore in two languages.

He laughed.

He laughed — I felt it happen in his chest, low, real, unbanked, a thing I could count on one hand — and the next roof took us and gave us up, and the next, and somewhere over the third block my body stopped filing objections and started paying attention.

Because it was — God forgive me — glorious.

The rhythm of it. Down soft as a held note, up like the ground was a suggestion he was declining. Water tanks pouring past. Chimneys. A pigeon coop, a man's forgotten undershirt on a line, the el sliding its bright windows through the dark below us. The whole borough turning over under me like a page, and his arms around me the entire time — iron holding porcelain.

The cold couldn't reach me. The fall couldn't reach me. Nothing in this world or under it could reach me.

I opened my eyes all the way, and I started to laugh.

I laughed over three blocks of Brooklyn rooftop, into the wind, like a lunatic, like a girl, and I felt him hold me a fraction tighter every time.

We landed on the warehouse roof.

"Again," I said, before my feet even settled. "At some point. Not now. But that's a thing we do now. I'm telling you, not asking."

"Noted." He set me down and kept one hand at my back until my knees signed off. And then, looking at me with the whole flight still in his face: "That's basically flying," he said.

My words. Handed back across the kitchen table, across the cold that had come down on them the first time.

"No," I said, careful, watching him.

"No," he agreed. And the grief was still in it, all the way down — but it wasn't only grief this time. I'd been laughing in his arms thirty seconds ago, and I let myself take the credit. "But it is the closest the word has come since the fall."