Page 59 of Take the Fall
He came back down, slow, careful of himself and gentle with me, and fit himself against my good side, his head on my shoulder, and I felt some of the tension go out of him by degrees, the way it goes out of a man who’s been braced and decides, against his training, to stop.
“There’s no right way to do it,” I said into his hair. “You wake up. You’re here. I’m here. That’s the entire technique. I’m not going to grade you.”
“You’d give me a low mark anyway. Out of spite.”
“I’d give you full marks and make you think you’d earned it. It’s the only kind thing I know how to do.” I felt him huff a laugh against my chest.
He went quiet and warm and heavy, and the gray light came up a little at the window, and for a while neither of us did anything but lie there and breathe and be two men in a bed on a morning that didn’t want to start yet.
It was the calmest I’d been in a long time. Him dozing again against my shoulder. The city coming awake three floors down. My own wrecked body not mattering at all. I knew what it was even while I had it. I just didn’t know how little of it was left.
We got up because his stomach made a noise loud enough to wake itself, and he announced he was going to feed me whether I liked it or not, and I let him walk me to the kitchen with a hand on my back like I might tip over, which, getting out of that bed, I half might have.
For a while it was only the small machinery of a morning. He filled the kettle and got the mugs down without looking for them, easy in a kitchen we’d shared as roommates for so long it had stopped being anything at all. I leaned on the counter and watched him and couldn’t get my head around it. Same kitchen. Same man, barefoot, hair every which way, moving around it the way he had on a hundred ordinary mornings. Except he was mine now, and that turned the whole picture over. I let my eyes go down him the way I’d never let myself before, the long line of his back, the notch of his spine disappearing into the waistband of the sweatpants he’d taken off me, the easy shift of his shoulders as he worked. So long spent pretending not to look at this man. Now there was nothing stopping me, and I didn’t look away.
“You’re staring,” he said, not turning round.
“I’m allowed. New rule.”
“I like the new rules.” He looked back over his shoulder, and the smile he gave me was one I’d never been on the end of, private, unperformed, pitched at exactly one man in the world. He gave the rest of the world a brighter one. It wasn’t worth a tenth of this. “Careful, Hawley. You don’t get to make me blush forever. It’s a limited-time offer.”
“Noted. For the record, I plan to abuse it.”
He went soft at that, the banter dropping off him for a second. “Yeah,” he said. “Do.”
So I did. I crossed the kitchen and wrapped him up from behind, slow, but wanting it more than I minded the pull of them, and put my mouth to the back of his neck, to the warm skin under his hairline. He smelled of sleep and, under that, faintly of me. He went still, then tipped his head and gave me the side of his throat, and for a second I felt him forget he was meant to be doing anything else.
Then he laughed, low, and reached back and swatted my hip.
“No. Off.” He was grinning, I could hear it. “I’m feeding you first. You don’t get to derail the whole morning by being. That.” He flapped a hand back at me, vague, taking in all of me at once. “Go and sit down before you fall down. You can maul me after you’ve eaten something that isn’t painkillers.”
Daylight is honest in a way lamplight isn’t. He turned round from the counter then, in the flat gray morning coming through the one window, and actually looked at me, shirtless, in the cold light, and went still.
“Luke.”
“It looks worse than it is.”
“It looks worse than last night. That’s the thing. It’s gotten worse overnight.” He crossed to me, and his hands came up and hovered, not touching, mapping it from an inch away. The rib bruise had spread and gone the colors they go, black at the center bleeding out to a sick green at the edges, bigger than it had been. The road rash on my shoulder had crusted dark. There were marks I hadn’t catalogued in the mirror, a boot-shaped one over the kidney, fingerprints on the bad forearm where someone had gripped to swing me. “This is. Luke, this is a lot.”
“Bruises come up over a couple of days. It’s the body doing its job. It looks the worst right before it looks better.” I caught one of his hovering hands and put it flat on my chest, on the good side, where there was nothing but me under it. “I’m not made of glass. You can touch me. I’d rather you touched me.”
He spread his hand there, and then leaned in and set his forehead against the same spot, careful of everything, and just stood there a second breathing me in, and I put my arms around him and we stood in the kitchen tangled up while the kettle climbed toward a boil.
“I keep doing the math,” he said, into my chest. “Three of them. I keep getting to three of them and stopping.”
“Ryan.”
“Just let me explain it once and then I’ll drop it.” His arms tightened, careful of the ribs even now, even angry. “Three men did this. On a street three blocks from here. And took nothing. And you came home and told me to manage my expectations, and I’ve spent every hour since trying not to think about how it would have gone if there’d been four. Or if they’d had more than a bat.” He pulled back enough to look at me, and his eyes had gone bright and hard. “What were they actually there for. Because it wasn’t your wallet.”
There it was again. He’d circled back to it the way he circled back to everything, patient, certain, a man who’d built a career out of asking the same question until the room got tired and gave him the truth.
And I did the thing I’d done the night before and would keep doing, the thing that was going to cost me everything before the week was out. I lied to the person I loved with the steadiest face I own.
“Wrong street, wrong hour,” I said. “Some people do it to do it. Not everything has a reason that makes the world make sense. I’ve stood over enough of it to know that’s the worst part, that sometimes it’s just bad luck wearing boots.”
He looked at me for a long moment. The kettle clicked off behind him and neither of us moved for it.
“You believe that,” he said. Not quite a question. “Or you’ve decided to. I can’t always tell with you which one it is.”
