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Avery walks up behind him, and for a moment doesn’t know where to put his hands. To have Ryan so close after spending so much time imagining him close…Gently, he moves his arm under Ryan’s arm, moves his hand across Ryan’s chest. Then he presses his own chest against Ryan’s back, peeking over Ryan’s shoulder so they can look at the snow together.
Neither one of them says out loud how beautiful it is, but both of them think it is quite beautiful.
Avery feels Ryan tense for a second, then realizes why. Mrs. Parker from across the street is coming out of her house, as she has every twenty minutes for the past two hours, to spread salt on her path. It is the same motion she uses to scatter seed for birds in the summertime.
She is not looking up, but Ryan is tensing at the idea of her looking up. Seeing them. Taking this moment that is theirs and making it into something else in her head.
Avery knows she wouldn’t care, might even find it sweet, to see the blue-haired boy and the pink-haired boy entwined like journal and clasp. But there is no way for Ryan to know that.
Ryan turns. Avery loosens his grip, to allow another hold to form. Now they are face to face, moving back into the hallway, blocked from the outside by the door.
“I’ve missed you,” Ryan says.
Avery leans in and kisses him. Once, but lingeringly.
“I’ve missed you, too.”
Ryan and Avery talk every day, and text nearly every hourthey’re awake and allowed to have phones out. They chat for long spells each evening, a running commentary that often ripples into digression. But none of that can cure the missingness they’ve felt; if anything, it makes the missingness more acute. As Avery put it to Ryan late one night, long after they were supposed to have gone to sleep:What we’re doing right now is watermelon-flavored. When we’re together, it’s watermelon.This made sense to Ryan then, and it makes even more sense to him now. Kissing Avery is watermelon. Having his arms around him is watermelon. Being able to see the look on his face as he talks is watermelon.
“What do you want to do?” Avery asks.
And Ryan thinks,This. Watermelon.
Here, in the fifth date, another precious inkling of a truth about love: That there is a point you reach when it doesn’t really matter what you do, that the question of what to do becomes beside the point for long stretches. The answer reduces to the smallest, most important words:
You.
Here.
Us.
This.
All so easy to fit into the equally small wordNow,and the slightly longer wordLove.
But Ryan is sixteen. He doesn’t realize that any of these small words are worthy answers, just as Avery at the same age doesn’t know it’s alright to not have a plan for what to do next.
Not knowing what the answer should be, Ryan replies, “It’s your house. You lead the way.”
Avery would love to stay right here, kissing Ryan for a few minutes more. But there is always the risk that his mother will remember another flavor of muffin in the kitchen, and will return to tell them about it.
“How about my bedroom?” he proposes. Then, blushing, he feels compelled to add, “Not because it has a bed, but because it’s, uh, my room.”
Ryan smiles. “Sounds good.”
—
This is thegeography of a house, at five in the afternoon on a fifth date:
In one room, a mother types. Every now and then, she stops to think about what she’s typing, but her thoughts rarely stray farther than that. In the kitchen, the refrigerator and the clock have a barely audible conversation. The garage waits like a sleeping whale; when a father comes home in an hour, it will open its mouth with a bellow that everyone else in the house will notice. For its part, the family room gently offers some spilled lamplight to the growing night. The front hall is damp with footprints; a pair of sneakers waits by the door. In the hallway, two boys walk single file, both in socks, both looking at one another far more than they are looking at their steps or anything lining the walls. Ahead of them, a bedroom waits for the flick of a switch to bring it to life. Beyond that, there’s another bedroom, currently resting.In the bathroom, a faucet drips, as if trying to imitate the precipitation outside. A toilet seat has been left up. Three toothbrushes stand at attention; since they aren’t speaking, we must assume they are listening to everything else that goes on in the house.
All of this is surrounded by snow. The roof is now covered. The truck in the driveway is as white as the driveway. Were you looking from above, you would have to look closely to see a house at all.
But you are not looking from above.
—
Ryan examines Avery’sroom with an affectionately curious eye. The posters on the wall belong to artists, not bands. The bookshelves have been arranged in stripes of color—blue then red then blue then red then green then red then green then yellow then green, and so on. The bed is in the corner, the room’s single window at its head.
