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Folk shoves it back without ceremony and studies me for a beat. Or maybe he’s studying himself before he answers. Either way, he keeps me waiting long enough that my thoughts start to drift to the house I passed on the sea front. The one with the dinosaur doormat and a dried wreath of herbs and wildflowers hanging from the porch. Even if I hadn’t walked Oscar home that night, I’d know he lived there.
I’d feel it.
Would I? And how? Oscar looks like a Norse god, but he’s human. And so am I.
Folk nudges me, drawing my attention back to him. “Where did you go?”
“Hmm?”
“I lost you for a minute.”
“No, you didn’t. I’m right here, like I’ve always been.”
Emotion rises in Folk’s eyes. Guilt, sadness, I’m not sure which. Just that he doesn’t deserve them any more than I deserve the hurt flaring in my bones. “It means something to me to wake up every morning and know you’re here,” he says eventually. “Even if we don’t see each other. It feels right, Po, and I like it.”
Feels right to me too, even before it dawned on me how close I’d be to the man I kissed at my brother’s wedding if I moved here. “I do want to see you. Know I don’t always show it, but I didn’t come here to live apart from you.”
Folk absorbs that, turning his gaze to the sea again. But I don’t drift this time. I wait for him to come back, and when he does, he has an answer to the question I’ve half-forgotten I asked. “I was a different man the first time I met Seth. I had priorities that don’t matter now and probably never should have. But he shifted something in me that night—something permanent, and I carried it for years before I saw him again.”
“Did you think about him when you were sick?”
“More than I can comprehend.”
“Did you know you loved him?”
“No, it wasn’t that coherent. I just…I don’t know. I felt him, I guess. And maybe I thought if I didn’t find him in this lifetime, I’d find him in the next.”
The few friends I have don’t have conversations like this with their brothers. But my parents raised us to be philosophical and kind, and Folk’s words wrap around me as if he’s said them before, and god, I wish I could hear him. And Oscar, and I know that means something. That I’m thinking of him in the same breath as Folk.
I rub my chest with my fist as the sensation of loudness hits from the pub behind me.
Folk steps closer and turns me around, so I can see it. “It’s band night in there.”
“What kind of band?”
“Pirate-funk.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, you’re not missing much. The fishermen might sing later, though. It’s a full moon.”
Makes sense to me, though I don’t know what specific lunar symbolism makes men of the sea want to sing. And I’m sad I can’t hear the pirate-funk band, even if Folk thinks they’re awful. I miss music too. “I better go. I need to see this fella before bedtime.”
“Floor-time, you mean.”
“Don’t start.”
Folk laughs. “I’m not starting. I didn’t have my own bed until I was thirty-five.”
“That wasn’t your bed, it was Seth’s.”
“He made it mine pretty quick.”
Folk isn’t talking about sex. Not to me. He’s talking about matters of the heart, but for all the empathy-laced philosophy our parents raised us with, I don’t get it. Not yet, if ever. And regardless, it’s time to go. Folk to wherever he goes at night when I know he’d rather be home, and me into the rowdy Joker to find my new employee’s long-suffering offspring.
I hug Folk again. Three in one night. No wonder he thinks I’m drunk. Perhaps that’s why he’s brave enough to reach up and muss my hair. “Do you remember the story I told you last Christmas?”
“The one about camels and sand farts?”
