Familial connections notwithstanding, in my mind she was still just Mrs. Barbour; too late to go back on old habits. Too late for any of us. Those final months I associated her skin with something paper-white as the sea of her breathing got more and more fragile, when it felt like I'd been holding her hand for months as it thinned and thinned down to the pronounced bone.
I was reading to her from one of her favorite novels—or I think it was one of her husband's favorites, something that eased her into that final paragraph with a refrain from the past—on the night that one of the hospice nurses advised we start upping her doses. One night after she'd gone far asleep I caught the nurse out on the balcony smelling like weed and asked him for a bit of a share. He could hardly say no after being caught out by one of his employers; we made a strange sort of small talk about where he'd gotten it, how cold it was, and inevitably, how she was doing.
"When this is over," Kitsey said later, her purse folded in her lap while I changed the channels on the living room television, "I'm going to need a break."
She was wearing white cashmere that whispered along your fingers and I kept brushing my hand at the edge of the long scarf without really thinking about it. When this is over. Her living and breathing of euphemisms would have been an obscenity if my pain was supposed to be anything compared to hers.
"I'm thinking the French countryside. At least a couple weeks." When I didn't say anything, she said, "I figured you'd have your own things to do."
I took a second to organize my tone. "What's his name?"
She was tense but not exactly high-wire giving a shit, not caught-out. Her pout seemed imploring to someone or something other than me. "Why do you have to ask that?"
I didn't quite shrug, just shook my head and went softer, even though something inside of me had felt hard as tin all day long. "I like this," I said, mock-conversational.
It took her a second, because she hadn't even noticed me touching her clothes. "Stop." I'd been winding it around my hand a couple times, and she was pulling it back, irritated. She looked down and a moment passed through us in freeze frame: the only movement was the tinsel catch of light from her mother's little Christmas tree twinkling against the loose helix of her carefully waved hair. There was some gray in it, premature for her years; I sometimes pinched them up as carefully as you'd lift a needle when she was sleeping next to me in the morning, but other than that the porcelain picture of her barely seemed to have aged much within the past ten or so years. Something about the clarity of her features made for the effect of being smudged instead of pronounced, like her appearance had the effect of a blinding headlight. I didn't understand how I had come to find her beauty, of all the problems I could have had about her, one of the most unnerving things of all.
Then she moved up, brisk and forgetful. I knew she'd take the cab to our apartment, get a few hours of sleep, and come right back around lunch the next day. She seemed to only spend the night here when I was already home. I said I'd see her then, stretching out on the couch. With her eyes still glassy with other thoughts, I was relieved of her annoyance enough for her to give me the briefest peck on her way out.
The nurse jumped me awake in the middle of the night when he dropped something in the bathroom. Briefly I got up: sleepwalker's urgent daze, somewhere I had to be, and then only seconds later I was lucid enough to not want to be and dropped down on the couch, shivering a little but too tired to get up to do anything about it.
In the end we'd gotten married without a guestbook. It had been almost a year after we'd rescinded as many of the expenses and invitations as we possibly could without necessarily giving implications about the future of our relationship and hoping to God that in the onslaught of concerned calls only the most innocent explanations for the indefiniteness of it all would get back to her mother. Finally we had it done at the courthouse, promptly and with a lot of privacy. Looking back on it now, I think we honestly were hoping that no one would notice.
While a part of me hadn't known what to expect from my mother-in-law's take on a wedding with no pomp whatsoever, I think it made her happier than ever. She was loving and grateful and grasping onto me for good, and I checked that the hinges were well oiled and slung back the dust rag: I'd sold my last fraud.
Years away from then and it doesn't feel as simple as that. I'm trying to come up with the right framework to explain how precisely Kitsey both was and was not my wife. We were never quite estranged but never quite trusting in that really solid way; it was a loose but sturdy rope, something in which passionless fights or passionless favors could spontaneously break out at any moment, though they rarely did. Younger people don't understand the sentimental traps, both good and bad, that become tied up with marriage and that it really can be its own completely separate entity of unsettling importance, its definition almost independent of tenderness. The parts of it you get a little too used to: even without much of anything going on between us that you could be sentimental about, there was time stitching and stitching on, the pallor of her having this bright panoramic effect that, in certain moments of astonishment for our mundane fixation with each other, seemed almost to change the weight of the air. I associated that whiteness which had once seemed sparkling and nubile with midnight frost, the little glass crackle you'd hear if you could hear the snow land, the wide eye of a full moon.
She was as politically careful around me as I can possibly describe without making it sound like it deserved that impression of coldness. Our apartment seemed to bend any dull moment of reflection through a prism until it looked like pure light. The crystal and pewter was arranged in the cabinets to its fullest shine and with a surreal symmetry I associated with pages out of the home and garden magazines, the type of vertebral decorating which somehow gave an end result of looking like we owned very little so that what we did was like something poised in a museum. We fucked sometimes, in strange toppled moods on one of the rare nights when she managed to make me genuinely laugh, or more recently when she needed some distraction from all the heavy news, but it was about as often as those Tiffany flutes touched each other in a toast, and she would often look around all demure and oopsy-daisy afterwards (Oh no, look, we made a mess!). Otherwise we were arranged on the couch or in bed, the distance as strict as chess pieces, our feelings having settled in equidistance some time after I hadn't heard anything about any other men for a while but never bothered to challenge whether we were being faithful.
When the terminal diagnosis came, we'd both been expecting a lot more time with her, though we really shouldn't have been. The last time I'd seen Mrs. Barbour really well was the day I'd left for Vegas. That night Kitsey and I had paused on our way into the cab, checking our numb gaze at one another briefly as if we'd both taken on some sudden physical transformation and noticed it just then with dull shock. She shook herself out of it with a bite on her bottom lip and an adjustment of her powder blue gloves, sat in and bent her Jimmy Choos up off the pavement, while I realized the waning light in the constellation that could mean far too many light years between just the two of us.
Later that night I checked my e-mail. Pippa was enjoying her new work with a concert hall in Nottingham. The familiar terse status of wellness made me think back on the last time we'd seen each other, when she'd come to help me finally clean out the last of Hobie's stuff I wasn't planning to keep and sat in the rented van with me all the way to a guy in Boston who wanted to take a lot of the furniture off my hands. She had reluctantly declined my invitation back to the hotel room where I was staying; "for a drink" was all I'd said and at a younger age I would have torn at every possible ambiguity for hours on end, but there had been some drop of any possible coyness from both of us; we knew what we'd both said. I was already thinking about how it would kill me if she came to the funeral, though that wasn't as much about what you'd think: I had a sneaking suspicion that time was rudely forcing me to begin to let her go, and somehow that in itself would need its own completely separate mourning.
But I'd wanted so badly to talk to somebody. The loss carried potential consequences that made my heart speed up, my body still associating it with having nowhere to go. I descended into a bottle after Kitsey wasn't making any noise in the bedroom, disconnecting even further from the present. That orphan terror: you would think I hadn't realized that child services had nothing to do with me anymore.
And there were other things I managed to forget: I was on the phone to talk to Boris before remembering why I couldn't reach him. It would still be a few months after that before he was let out on good behavior. I'm not sure if it was good timing or not that this would end up being only a couple weeks before Mrs. Barbour died.
True to the form of commemorating the losses in the Barbour family in the most uniquely depressing ways, she'd wanted her ashes scattered in the ocean from up in Maine, of course.
Kitsey didn't hesitate to broach the reality of our "tight schedule" as my mind had just trailed off over my choice of necktie for the funeral. According to the forecast, it was just unseasonably warm enough to go ahead and make the trip within the next week, the sooner the better. She had her vacation in only five days, remember. I was about to ask her why we couldn't just wait until spring, but I knew she would have some answer that sounded too reasonable, so instead I said after only briefly thinking about it, "I think I'll invite Boris to come out there."
Her gaze blinked up at me in the mirror, looked back down. Then for some reason she thought to ask, "Why wasn't he at the funeral? He never met her, but for your sake, I mean..."
She had no idea about the time in prison, so I couldn't have explained that ever since he's been out he's been acting funny about the possibility of being around the type of high class he seems to think will be able to smell it on him. I messed with the fold under one of the ties, muttering, "I don't know. It just didn't feel right."
I never exactly missed Todd, but there was some relief in knowing he'd already be at the vacation home when any of us got there. I'd learned at the funeral that I could no longer handle Platt's smug modes of self-mollifying even when he needed them more than I did, and the brothers saw so little of each other that they tended to disappear with the airs of gentlemen blowing off to the smoking room in the aims of fulfilling some duty to appear that they were all that close. Toddy was warm but not nearly as talkative with Kitsey, and I could live with being caught next to him as the other living room spare if she and Platt decided to leave the old kid's table.
A few hours after we got there all I'd done was watch a film on TV while Kitsey went through some photo albums, and here in the reservedly rustic atmosphere of a house about ten times the size of what we had back home, I almost forgot what we were doing there. When we got to taking care of the ashes the next afternoon, it was a little chilly and there had been something off-putting about how fast and unceremonious we all were about getting through the morning: Platt pulling the car over to get a drive-thru coffee while Kitsey was half-committed to soothing Todd's humble worries about an upcoming promotion, and our frank explanation to the man managing the boat rentals about why we wanted out there on a cold day, all cautiously trying to beat the wind that was due in the early evening. I was so used to their family dinners run on the amounts of formality and preparation afforded to the weddings of lower lives and suddenly the affair of saying goodbye to Mrs. Barbour was conducted like a quick dusting of the house. Did they resent her choice of burial? I felt that Platt certainly did, but with the rest, I couldn't tell.
We did crack a wine, once we were far enough out. There was conversation about old Daddy, but Kitsey seemed to steer the subject back to home as soon as Todd mentioned one of his sailing ventures. The boat gave a downward rock at one point that sent my hand onto her lap while I was tipping up my glass; I almost took it away, but for a minute at least, she put her hand over my own and I let it stay.
"What's the matter, Kits?" Platt asked, with a tone that threw me, I'm not sure if because it was such a ridiculous question for the occasion or because I had no idea what had given away that something was particularly wrong with her.
She had a wistful but distant expression, preparing how to feel it less even as she expressed it. After a long moment she thoughtfully said, "I couldn't help thinking how I never gave her any grandchildren."
"That's fine, dear. Just fine," Todd said, reaching across to her knee. "She just adored Roy." Roy was Platt's kid, and a grandkid by the dear eldest hadn't gone less than revered, but I knew what Kitsey meant.
"It's just that I was the only daughter and...I think she always did want a granddaughter." There was no other talk for a good minute after that, which seemed a different kind of silence for every one of us. Then finally Kitsey unclutched the brassy egg of the urn from her chest, beginning, "Does anyone want to say anything?"
I had finally forgotten that Boris could arrive at any moment at about the exact time he did, late in the afternoon. Todd was on his way out and said something to the effect that some guy outside looked like he'd lost his way, and it still was Kitsey's covert nudge to my side that made me think that had to be him.
He had been just about to knock when I opened the front door, and something plucked at my stomach in the odd moment when I felt like I didn't even recognize him, some testament to how much he'd grown up behind bars considering I had already seen him since his release: His hair was just barely long enough to still be a bit unruly in how it hung in his brow and past his ears, thick still but strewn with whips of white, and the stressed lines of wrinkles were ebbing past the more subtle stage. He did look better this time, wearing his one sensible coat and a little more meat on the muscle; and I noticed this time that somehow the masculine angles of him had only been thrown into stronger relief by the years, but still I doubt anybody wants to look a handsome forty-five at thirty-seven.
I knew he'd caught my mind stalling: the jovial joke he would have greeted me with warmed over into something I could see, if only for a flicker, looked like fear. But then I opened the door wider to make room, shrugging in some ironic way at us meeting up at a place like this, and as if reading my mind he made a click with his tongue and said, "You didn't tell me if the digs were crap."
"Since when do you have standards," I muttered automatically. "Come on in here," I said, and the grin helped me wonder how I thought he'd looked so different as he threw an arm around me on his way through the threshold.
"So sorry for your family's troubles," he said, and though he meant it, it wasn't exactly what he would have said if he wasn't aware of Kitsey coming over my shoulder to dutifully greet the guest.
"Boris," she said, "I'll show you the guest room."
"Thank you so much for having me, is a...a beautiful place here, it's like magic!"
Her mouth twitched up a bit at that; I'd once been overwhelmed by the mere thought of introducing them, but in the minimal time they'd ever spent in the same room Kitsey had never really disliked Boris. She said, "It was sort of Dad's. We make do." Whatever that was supposed to mean.
Boris was in the shower when I went slack with the realization, mouth hanging open in the middle of some other thought. "Shit."
"Hmm?" Kitsey looked up at me from whatever reason she had for going through the flatware.
"Is there still wine in the cellar?"
Her brow creased for a second, and then softened in surprise as she turned to face me. "Is he trying to…?"
"Yeah," I said, not with full certainty.
"There's no wine, but there's all that liquor in the oak cabinet." She blinked at me, a short note of somber concern: "Would he get bad enough that he might go looking for it?"
I let out a sigh. "It's likely enough that I'd be worried to not be with him all the time."
"Lock it up in the trunk?" she suggested as she turned away to wash her hands.
"And what, handcuff the keys to myself? He'd go looking there," I said, in the vague span of knowing she'd only loosely treat this like it was in any way her problem. Nursing somebody's alcoholism was not exactly the standard Barbour brand of philanthropy.
But a moment later we heard the running water stop, and after kneading her hands through the towel with a prim distant look (reminding me a little there of her mother, way back when I was with Andy asking if we could use the blender to make milk shakes and she had to think whether we would wreak havoc in her kitchen) she finally broke the pondering by saying, "Most of them are unopened. I could stand a trip to that hotel up the road to see if they'd buy them off for the room service and bar, if we gave them a good bargain?..."
I made a grimace. "I don't think they're used to pushing Highland malts at that kind of place."
"It's worth a try. And it's not all top shelf; Daddy was such a sucker for a nice-looking bottle." We could hear Boris in the hallway, and she nodded an interruption. "I'll take care of it."
Suddenly catching up to being surprised by her at the moment she turned away from me again, I was just coming out of my stunned inertia to turn and leave when I heard her say my name and stopped.
She hadn't turned back to me. "So was he in prison?" she quietly asked.
I was so speechless that she had to look up, and her shrug was stiff, as if she was just as uncomfortable with this, and of course she had to hate it even if her curiosity had gotten her past looking the other way. I finally stammered, almost at a whisper in case Boris was sneaking around the corner, "How did you know that?"
"It wasn't hard to guess with all those years you never saw him. And then that time a couple weeks ago that it seemed so important that you go to meet him…"
"It was drug possession." I didn't know what she wanted me to say. "It's not like he's going to steal anything."
Her little laugh, frank and nervous, made my spine tense. She locked the rueful gray slate of her glance right through me, and she said, "He can take what he wants. What does it matter to me?"
We were out on the porch right when we could feel the season beginning to get somber and breathe its cool bite against the spruce trees. Boris had forgotten his cigarettes and I automatically handed over the one I'd lit in my mouth, and in a few moments I was talking enough that I forgot about it.
"I don't mean to say it like this," he was amending in his brief interruption. "I only thought that these things were treatable now, as long as you are careful."
"She wasn't careful," I muttered. "The brothers and Kits were always trying to get her to the doctor, but she could only stand it once every few years. Everything made her anxious. Except the idea of dying, apparently."
"Agh," he exclaimed. "Well..."
"She wasn't unhappy all the time, but it was so uphill, you know, she was having problems with her health long before this. She was totally drained sometimes, just emotionally."
Boris was pouting in the breeze, his attempted sageness somehow half-effective when he decided, "She was sick in her soul before then."
"It's not like it's good she's gone," I said, that slow-motion punch settling into me.
"Well, no," he conceded, something in him seeming to cross off the poetic approach.
"She wasn't even...you know, elderly, is what I guess I'm saying, though maybe I just wasn't ready to think of her as being that old." Something must have looked bad in my expression. Boris had shifted his foot the few inches over so that his knee touched mine in little idle bobs. "But it couldn't have ever been that much longer."
A silence exhaled between us. He picked up my pack and lit another smoke.
"Boris," I said.
"Hmph?"
I was staring down the horizon, calm but intent when I finally asked, "Why didn't you want me to visit you?"
"Oh, for fuck sake, Potter. I told you, is too much of a trip."
I shook my head at him. "So?"
"'So?'" he parroted. "Would have been worth the flight just to see me, sure. But not to see me in prison."
It was the third time I'd asked. I knew if I asked another time he would actually get mad, and that made me a little mad. I spread my hands out. "Did you just not want to see me? Huh?"
"Or it's I didn't want you to see me." He scowled, looking down, and I didn't know if that had been a lame defense or an irritated slip of the truth.
This was only the second time I'd seen him since he went to trial (beforehand, we'd been kind of pissed off at each other because I couldn't comprehend what he saw as his valiant refusal to reduce his sentence by disclosing where he'd gotten the drugs—a decision made all the more frustrating by the fact that this dealer I had only met a couple times started showing up at the shop making vague rambling promises about how he owed one to that Pavlikovsky, as if I was in any kind of business of managing who owed Boris what). The night after he'd been let out, I had a ticket booked to fly him to New York just for the off chance that he'd call, and so that when he did he wouldn't back out. I helped him get set up in his little temporary situation of an apartment, and the night we hooked up the TV and the fridge, he started looking miserable.
I remember noticing that the track marks had long vanished from his arms—the slammer's as good a junk detox as you can get—but other odd scars had appeared. He had an echo of a gash on his fingers that made it look like something had almost taken them off. I could have asked him what had happened but I didn't think I'd get some soothingly amusing story like the old anecdotes of his train-hopping adolescence. Maybe some of it would be funny in retrospect, some day, but I wasn't going to touch it now.
What he'd said, the second time I tried to ask him why he only wanted letters, and after a long spell of the buzz of the TV swamping out my expectation that he would ever give me any kind of answer, was, "I'm not good company." And then a minute after that he'd shocked the hell out of me by starting to cry, like he'd been taking pains not to all night. I'd pulled his boots off and roughed him into bed and murmured whatever came to mind, clueless and swallowing my dismay in gulps, until he managed to mentally numb himself into sleep. I never want to be around Boris like that but it was only after he was lightly snoring that I realized why it had been such an appalling thing: I'd seen him cry before, but never anywhere close to crying when he'd actually been sober.
"If you had told me about your mother-in-law, when she got sick," he was saying now, "I might have…"
"Yeah, but I didn't. I'd given up on you by then."
"And I don't know what I would have said to make it better," he went on. "It's life. What do you do?"
For a long moment I didn't know what to say, so I finally said, "You sent the letters, anyway."
'Well, of course."
My mouth twitched up at the side and I nodded. Sudden and rugged with affection, his arm clapped around my shoulders and he pressed his mouth to my hair, reached with his left hand to muss it up at the back. "Stop," I said, knocking my fist at his knee, then gesturing for him to hand me the rest of the cigarette.
The door opened just behind us and we quickly withdrew to make a hole for Kitsey coming through with a suitcase on its wheels. I caught a telltale chime of glass hitting glass inside, but nothing too obvious: she must have thoroughly padded a bunch of cloth between the bottles.
Looking over us, she said, "Oh, you boys don't have to come out here just to smoke."
"Just catching some air," Boris assured. "We don't mind."
"Well, I'm not crazy about the smell but it's a wide open house, so if you get too cold…"
"That's plenty kind, ma'am," he replied casually. I started to smirk a little.
"Oh, please, ma'am," she said, a playful flicker of lashes looking straight at him now. "I get that at parties and it makes me feel fifty."
"Who's even thirty?" Boris coaxed, almost obediently. "You're a teenager still, most people would think."
"That's pushing it," she demured, "but I still feel like I missed when I became a 'ma'am.' Since when am I a 'ma'am', Theo?" And she looked my way for just a second as if to make sure nobody was making fun of her. I just gave a stiff-mouthed little smile and a tilt of the brow, the kind of shrug without shrugging I was used to giving her across linen tablecloths in company that managed to bore the hell out of both of us, but there was something different to it then: I couldn't balance any intrigue with Boris between us, and just as soon as she'd looked away my place there seemed forgotten.
"No way," Boris said, "your girl looks not a day over eighteen, don't you think?"
"Stop," she laughed, the charm sticking.
"I mean it." Emphatic raise of his eyebrow while he lit another smoke. "Put on your little pink tutu and I'll spin you around."
Prissy edge on the game now as her smile sparkled: "Well, now you just sound like a creepy old man."
They both had a laugh, and then down in the driveway Kitsey achieved her sleight of getting the luggage brick so smoothly into the back seat that nobody would have paused to wonder what was in it. As soon as she'd shut the driver door behind her and put the car in drive I let out the grim little snigger I'd been holding. "So that's on, is it?"
Boris went innocent, and just maybe actually was as oblivious as he looked. "What?"
"Ah, come on." When you still couldn't melt butter on him, I said, "Jesus."
"What?"
"Do you—" Amazed gesture of my hands going up. "Do you wanna sleep with my wife?"
His mouth dropped slowly. "Potter. You're fucking with me."
"What the hell was that?"
"You're having the laugh, ha, ha, ha," he said in his superior tone which at the moment could have been dead funny. "I mean, hell. Almost it sounds like you're offering..."
"Oh, you noticed that part?"
"Fuck you..."
Bizarrely, I was smiling. I did find it funny. "First of all, it's not like she'd be mine to offer, if I'm not totally bullshitting. That...hasn't exactly been my business for a pretty long while."
"Is that so? You don't happen to think there's bigger problem?" His sarcasm was accented with expressive tilts of his head. "Pretty little Snowflake...remember how we used to call her that?"
"You called her that."
"After all, is very cold up in the atmosphere at the top of the skyscraper, you know what I mean?"
It took me a second, and then my laugh was casually grim. "She is way out of either of our leagues. Never kept her away from trash that makes me look like Man Of the Year...Then again, I wouldn't know who she's into now."
"It wasn't meant to be, with that old bastard you found out about…?"
"Apparently not." That was years and years ago now, dragged out for a bit after we were married but not for long. I only learned by osmosis that Tom Cable had smashed up her heart, but it seemed obvious from Platt's abrupt visits followed by long private talks that appeared to leave her feeling even worse than before; in her own way of showing it, of course. Sometimes I think I should have said something to her, but back then things didn't feel as negotiated, and even aside from that, I'm too proud.
"But I mean…" Boris considered, "All else being else, she is your wife."
I didn't know what to say or do besides the non-committal acknowledgment.
"You're not still in love with her?" he asked, and there was something in the too-affected levity of how he asked that threw me off, made it somehow harder to beat around it.
"...I guess I don't really think about that," I admitted. "But she might have another man, and I can't say that really bothers me, so maybe that's the answer."
Bending forward a bit, he stammered, "You do still...you still—?"
"Screw?...Sometimes." I amended for his definition, "Barely."
"Good? Bad?"
"Usually good. Not great."
There was a shift into curiosity that was somehow as clinical as it was mischievous: "When was the last time you went down on Snowflake?"
"What is this, a litmus?" Kitsey's interlude had clapped our mood right over on its head, turned it into something teenaged. I'd gotten more frank about this kind of thing over the years—an indirect extension of my armor of forwardness that had hardened around me after countless socialite evenings made me start learning to appear just witty enough to get away with being bluntly uninterested at the same time—but with Boris leaning in, eyes all jeering, I think he'd forgotten for the moment I wasn't going to get my shyness back and knock him away in embarrassment at the question. "Shit, I don't remember...Wait, no, I do remember. It was a little over a year ago, when we were in Florence." I'd had a paperback hanging off one hand and a cigarette in the other when she was trying on her shopping to take selfies, and there had been something about the Prada party dress, the way the fringe rained around on her thighs, that made me put them down.
"And, uh?" He made a curlicue of his pointer fingers in the air, whistling for effect.
"Vice versa?" I translated. "Same night...Why all the interest? It's not fascinating. We care about each other, for sure, but..."
I hadn't been looking at him closely. When the thoughtful pause started to catch some weight, I looked up to see him peering right into me, a barely serious frown on his face but one that caught me by surprise.
"What?"
"I don't know, I just…" He squinted a little closer at me in good humor, but waved his thought away. "You seem so much older in some ways, I keep forgetting how long it's been? Is strange, when I wouldn't have thought that possible."
"Quit talking like that," I said. "It's only been a few years."
"Yeah, I know, but still. You're different." His eyes shifted back behind us; we could hear Platt's ungraceful plodding around on the hard floors as he was getting ready to leave. Then he said, "I just wish you were happier. Not just alright, not just this weirdness...all halfway up and down all the time? I don't know…"
Many years back, in the exact same honesty, he had told me it would all be just fine, because I didn't love Kitsey so terribly much; I wondered if he even remembered that. "I don't know what you're talking about." My shoulders shivered one abrupt shudder.
"I did not say you weren't fine."
"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you." I hated the bitter note to it, but otherwise I was going to start bitching about just how did he think taking me off his visitor's list for three years was supposed to make my life into a picnic; then it occurred to me like something smacking into a windshield and dying: He might actually have some answer to that question. So I tried to steer the mood into some unmapped pasture by saying, "Let's go inside," and was grateful that we managed to keep out of the kind of trouble that would only make me feel worse for the next few hours at least: Boris had stories, he always has stories, and I told him about Pippa, I told him about going to see the painting again and the woman I'd slept with on a ferry up the North Sea the night after, about a few books I'd read about the end of the world, until his smile was sly with whatever picture of me he was putting together by the reckless snapping in the fireplace.
A bit after Platt took off I expected Kitsey to disappear into the upstairs room she always took, the one with the narrow cabin breadth but a wide open window that made you feel the trees poking holes up to your cozy hiking height without moving. She loved that room and for some reason I've always liked that she loves it; but after I got out of the shower later and went into the kitchen to absently grab a couple ginger ales, she was in the den with Boris. At first glance their heads were so close together that it was a late evening slam of what-the-fuck, but only a second later they both leaned back and I realized he'd just been showing her some picture on his phone. He was probably bragging about a few years back when he was in China and saw a guy take a jump off the Great Wall, I gathered from the snips I heard. Not the type of story that should have interested her, but she was exposing a white stretch of throat as she tossed her hair back to adjust it into a ponytail, fingers working ruggedly as she recalled some second-hand story I'd never heard before, about a public suicide attempt that happened in one of the subway tunnels last year.
Some time after I came into the room she faded into the background again, perusing more of the photo albums, as I attempted to balance her company with Boris' scratchy laughter, the way he kept messing with the leather tassel on her weekend bag that was sitting on the end table next to him. Of course it's occurred to me since, but it never could have then, that she just didn't want to be alone. I only know that it was hours after nightfall rolled in when Boris, in the middle of his anecdote about one of his strange days living with Xandra—it's not like I'd recall what he'd been saying a second later—pulled the flask out of his jacket, and I completely forgot she was there.
I can't say what the deal was, if he'd just forgotten himself and took it out without thinking, if the plan up to that point was to sneak it sip by sip in the bathroom? Of course he played it off like it was no issue. When I recovered from my speechlessness that almost made me forget to breathe for a moment, and said, "Tell me that's water," in a small thunder of understatement, his simpering look like I was the one getting full of shit here made me almost want to storm out to the car and leave.
"Don't get like this," Boris groaned. "I am not half so bad as my father was, come on, you know that. Like black-out drunk, every single night? I'm not some...incoherent boozer, look, this was all I brought!"
"That's not how it's gonna work. You'll be gone by morning looking for some more, now that you've started, it'll always be like this."
The sharp edge of resignation in me was startling to both of us, but he'd never show it. "Oh, I see I have a little babysitter now; and here I thought whole reason I came up here was to take care of you."
"Oh my God," I pleaded harshly, "get some new material."
"Theo," Kitsey said.
My alarm was flushed and blinking: my mind had thrown her aside and the interruption had me cornered.
In the next chair Boris shook his head. "So much overreaction, Potter, you've got to settle down. I won't go anywhere, I'll be fine."
"I don't care," I said. "I don't care. If you stay or go, fuck it. I'm not worrying about you."
"Oh, don't get hateful," Kitsey scolded.
My anger chomped onto her presence, pointing to where she sat: "We cleared out all of the alcohol in this goddamn house, Boris, because you told me you hadn't had a drink since you got out. Because you fed me this bullshit—"
"Honey—"
"—hundreds, maybe thousands worth in her dad's liquor cabinet and she had to get rid of it for your—"
"Theo, I didn't sell it," Kitsey sliced across my words. "I brought it back here and I hid it."
It clicked, and the effect of what she said was almost numbing. I had stopped looking for the signs of sorrow years ago with Kitsey, understanding abstractly that she felt it but circling around her with a resignation which had slowly transformed almost into a fear that she might someday startle me with it. The house had had no effect on her, I thought, but here she hadn't said she couldn't sell it and I felt strangely certain that she had driven halfway out there and then turned back simply because she couldn't bring herself to sell away her dead father's whimsy for a pretty bottle.
My wife of years and years, intimate and unknowable. In recent months she had, with no warning or explanation to me, begun introducing herself as Christine to new acquaintances. She'd changed her phone number some time ago, and judging by the slowing frequency of her ringtone going off I had privately wondered if some of her seemingly perpetual friends from college had been crossed off of a list. Days on end spent with her mother, then an equal number holed away from either of us in some hotel room where there may have been another man or maybe even total solitude. I always knew what she would do next, until I didn't, and it was enough to make me wish she could bore me to death.
But right then in my dismay, I loved her for it, because suddenly nothing seemed so deliberate anymore; it was the three of us tumbling around the rough sea trying to understand each other, and more than anything I realized that if and when Boris ever hid anything from me, it must have pained him far more than Kitsey was ever affected by her emotional organization; and unlike with her, I could always pick up the effortless trust that it had both nothing and everything to do with me instead of some formal declaration of somewhere in between.
Suddenly aware of the heat coming off the fireplace and some charge in the room, everyone's blood burning up under the treacherous stilling, I barely reacted to Boris for the first few seconds he was talking again. "See, now you are both my little nurses," he said, the mocking a little milder now. "And I don't even have enough to make me properly drunk."
I scoffed and swapped the flask out of his hand, knocking as much of it back as I dared before I lowered it to see him look, for a flicker of the firelight catching in his dark glance, just about murderous. If she hadn't been there, he very well might have hit me, or at least considered it more obviously, but she said, "Listen, Boris, would you like—"
Dangerously flippant: "Mind your own fucking cup of tea, Snowflake."
And her head did a confused flinching back at the nickname, and I said with my hand doing a firm shove at his shoulder, "Don't you talk to my wife like that, ever, asshole."
They both looked at me, thunderstruck. A couple seconds passed, and Kitsey was the first to laugh.
She granted a sporting smile at Boris, saying, "God, but he can be scary when he wants to be?" I could see in the way Boris began to snigger that this little kick was not the type of humor he would have given her credit for. The moment melted over into Kitsey laughing at Boris' pathetic abuse of idioms while he slid over the humongous ottoman that extended the compact Crate & Barrel sofa into more of a bed, sank back onto one side of it and kicked off his boots.
He'd bullshitted about whatever half-proof was giving the inside of that flask a spit-shine: definitely brisk enough to get drunk off of if you tried. I was bent over the kitchen sink trying to slow up enough to determine whether I was feeling sick when the two of them got out Mr. Barbour's records. He'd had tons that he had never listened to, probably plenty he never would have listened to: he used to go through estate sales and take whatever they had, if he was in that mood. Somebody put on side two of Bridge Over Troubled Water—a couple amateur match strikes of the needle jumping, and then the lulling sounds only somehow added to the restless gulping fever I felt taking over me.
There was more after that: Kitsey pulling up my arm to spin under it and pull me in a dancing step back to the couch, a discussion I only drowsily participated in, some reminiscing of our years as kids that Kitsey could barely remember but recounted in playful sparks for Boris's benefit. With my legs strewn out on the far side of the ottoman and the throw pillow nudged under my head, it was the gasps of the needle stalling at the end of the record that finally put me into some hypnosis at least resembling sleep. The fireside had started to die, leaving a bare hint of cold in the room, and as my attention passed off it felt like drifting to the water crashing behind my eyes, not a calm sleep at all.
In an hour or so, I came to halfway, cobwebs hanging over my mind, not quite opening my eyes.
"Why do you call him 'Potter'?" she was whispering, slight curl of a smile in her voice. She was snugly between us on the width of the couch, my head tilted into her shoulder. When she turned her head and I felt the movement of hair, I could have pictured the youthful catch of her, her effortless hold on this evening that made it somehow less strange than it should have been that she hadn't left us for her bed.
"Something that started in school. You know, those glasses he used to wear…"
"That's stupid."
"Well, I didn't come up with it."
"I've never heard you call him anything else."
"He has a real name, sure, but I don't know, I forget it now."
Whisper of a chuckle, and a pause. "No, please. You can't go."
"I didn't say anything about it."
"But you're thinking about it. I know. Is it so bad? Are you going to have some big seizure if you don't…?"
"No, is not like that. But by morning the headache will kill me."
This personal stuff was contractual; somehow I knew I was at the center of it even before it went clearly that way, but even now I can't say from what I heard how much of an actual confrontation this was. Kitsey sighed, a long dutiful regret. And finally she said, "How long were you even planning to stay? He needs you to stay. I'm leaving in the morning."
With the tone of his response, I realized this point had been badgered a couple times already. "Oh, maybe I'm not his wife or the family friend, you know, but I don't think I need you telling me how to be good to him."
Something slow and intent freezing still in the air. "Meaning?" Kitsey demanded.
"You know exactly what, don't be like a little girl. All these years, using your mother's unhappiness to make him do whatever you want, and now you must love that I'm the no-good crook, but that doesn't mean you get to babysit the both of us."
After the pause, her frank, almost friendly surprise was genuine: "Was it so much like I made him miserable?"
"...No," he muttered, sounding disarmed. "And without you, maybe he would have had almost nobody. But—"
"If I could have made this marriage make either of us as happy as it made my mother, if I could have done anything to fix it—but it's just unbelievably stupid to think about it." Her talk went well above a whisper for a second, then dialed down again. "Do you think that I was, what, threatening to tell Mommy about all his drugs and things if he up and left me? I would never. Not just because of what it would have done to her; there's no point causing anyone that kind of trouble. And Theo and I go back a long way."
"But there's so much you don't even know about him."
"So? That's okay. People don't have to share everything." A moment. "And anyway if you think so little of me, what does your hand think it's doing?"
And I suddenly understood the tone of this, the lazy-hot noise of their breathing, a little bit better.
Boris said, "I just want to see if you have some of that Stoli hidden up your skirt."
My bet is that this was mostly just a game, for Kitsey, until he took the dare. I've seen Boris kiss girls: confident form, even back at the age when most boys have no idea what they're doing. He did it to prove he would, and why not?—if all she was going to do was drop the tease and call him a pervert with a forced smile and dart away to her room, he'd probably never have to deal with her again, and in all likelihood that's probably what she told herself she was about to do, until his head darted in boldly and caught her mouth. I could hear it, the moment when the flirt turned from feckless to reckless and they both really wanted it.
After a moment: "Shouldn't we…?"
"He's out," Boris whispered. "We'll be quiet."
"If he woke up—"
"No, I'm not going to sneak off like that." This was slightly louder, pronounced with insistence. "It would be like I have something to hide from him, and I don't."
The briefest of heavy pauses, and then she said, "Nobody's that close," and the pick of pain in her voice was clear as a crash, enough to pull me out of the hazy trance in which this wasn't real and now I was feeling it, not just hearing it.
A sound through the night like he was pushing at strands of her hair, his voice consoling and somber when he spoke again. "You are stunning. You could have almost anyone. What are we doing?"
"Nevermind," she said. "I don't care what you do."
A shifting of something, the ottoman dipping enough for my left foot to feel it: He'd taken that as a no, but then the other movement, her trying to pull him back.
"No, no, please. It's just that I feel like I'm in the middle of nowhere with no reason to sleep and...I don't want to have to just go sit on my bed all by myself. Would you keep going?" He did, and a moment later I heard the funneling depth of their mouths joined and joined and joined.
Was I indifferent? I could only say that as some average of the dissonant ways in which I both did and did not want it to happen. I kept thinking lately about how her mother's personality had whirlwinded and crystallized into something as troubling as it was lovable in the wake of her life's greatest tragedy, wondering if I was watching Kitsey for any sudden movements, and was it wrong, I still wonder, to let her think I didn't give a single damn even for old times sake? But there was also Boris and his old eyes and his crying on his new couch because he wanted a drink so bad he would have scraped himself inside out into some wholly other person but had somehow become ashamed to admit it in front of me; the phrase "good behavior" had resonated like a bad omen these last couple weeks and I knew there was no hope for sobriety, even less than the nearly fuck-all, if he went about it like a shamed puppy, all safe and polite.
By the time they were committed enough to their rutting to take less of a breather to make sure they were quiet, I'd pretty much forgotten I was there. The fringed edges of the throw blurred in front of my lashes but if I opened my eyes I could get more than a slight idea what it looked like: he slipped his hands far up her sweater dress, brought her leggings and panties slowly and smoothly down the pale hills of her knees, sloped back to remove his t-shirt while she grappled for a condom from her bag. The unzipping of his jeans and her legs curving around him to push them farther down, one movement and then another and then their gasps changed in a way that made my teeth begin to clench.
It wasn't long before the mindless sporadic nature of it brought them right up to the plateau; they could get this over very quickly if they wanted to, but his rhythm never went quick with it, never sloppy like the drunken mindlessness it could have been even if the mood seeped over the evening had that same effect. I watched, forgetting, forgotten. I was transfixed by the almost identical paleness of them set off by the tattoos that weren't there the last time I would have seen him quite this naked, by her hands roaming and squeezing at his arms and back and how she was going to be touching them as he finally bucked and pulsed inside of her and suddenly—just as I felt the weight of a glance and rolled my eyes up to his dark brow rising, him all startled out of his ecstasy and then right back into it with the smallest flinch of a sneer as we just looked at each other—the dizzy seasawing in my gut swayed decisively to the side of how much I wanted it to stop.
Before I even realized what I was doing, I'd flinched up and pushed at him until he pulled out of her with a teased grunt, and grabbed wide-eyed Kitsey, her laughing a trill of surprise that went higher as soon as I'd wrapped her legs up over me and started doing what I hadn't done to her since Florence. My heart was pounding such a frantic march, all I knew to do was overcompensate to get this good and over as quickly as possible, giving her the nervous enthusiasm that did the job well enough for her to pet along my hair and moan. One shifting movement of sliding her closer to my side of the couch rode up her dress far enough for Boris to help her get it off, and the one moment my view rolled up, he'd cupped one hand over one breast, just his thumb tucking underneath the gauze-thin lace of her bra while he nuzzled a biting kiss at that milky patch just where the cloth ended at the curve of her ribs. If I kissed a woman there she'd just be ticklish, but Kitsey seemed to purr along her entire body, hips hinting me on, and even though I was trying to get her done she pushed me off in only a minute: I was gasping and dizzy as she rolled me on my back and pulled down at my sweatpants, dazedly tightening up as her mouth took over.
I just floated back, eyes burning into the ceiling when I didn't have them squeezed shut, feeling like some frantic imposter. I wanted it over, but my blood was still mesmerized into the deliberate lapping rhythms set by how he'd been fucking her and she was too fast, clumsy in her firmness.
After a moment, the hand anchoring on my hip made my glance flinch down with a thud of my heartbeat: He was leaning his head over the plane of my thigh, I realized just to whisper something into her ear, some improvised mix of dirty and sweet I couldn't hear, and she made some humored little hum; but then the entire personality of her motions changed. My hairs stood up in the sudden tremble riding up from my abdomen when she slowed to not quite teasing, all careful determination that was so good, so good—almost like that time—?
He was checking for my reaction when I looked down in shock and then smirking a whisper into her ear again and I shoved my fist into my teeth, biting my knuckles harder as I moaned and blushed, hating the speed of my keening over after that, of how fast my vision went white.
I was bruising back into reality some handful of seconds later in time to pick up the friendly gesture of Kitsey's kiss on my chin with something less startled than the quivering I still felt, her not bothering to roll off of me before Boris was slipping back inside of her, fast. Her head rocked down into my collarbone, and then as she rested her ear there after a swerving moment had passed, Boris finally caught the tumultuous noise my mind was making: His eyes caught my face, and whatever he saw there made him go still, his expression falling to the childish remorse I knew too well, Oh shit, oh shit, please don't be mad, and even though I was furious—that I couldn't rely on him, that he couldn't rely on me, at his dishonesty, his audacity, for thinking it's no big deal to walk into the life he's been out of for years and start telling my own wife how to suck me off—I knew that if I didn't do anything Kitsey would notice something was wrong, or he'd just open his damn mouth and ask if he should stop; so when my fist came up it just coiled in the hair at the back of his neck and pulled him into a kiss.
I had somehow meant it as some punishing action more than the result, but he made some long-pent-up and sort of pained groan and I forgot everything except for surrender, his thrusts quickly resuming into the irregular cough of pleasure I felt coming off of him in waves as he seemed to be bringing his entire body into the rough open thing that was going on with our mouths, with the harder motions that brought Kitsey to gasping. It was only some clutch of brazen seconds but it felt longer, and he finished with a grasp coming up to tangle in my hair, his head rocking down into her neck in the hard sudden curve of his orgasm.
I caught a glance at a scar I hadn't seen before, what looked like a cigarette burn next to one of his ribs, and I rolled away from under them as soon as I could because I couldn't stand to look anymore, because I wanted us to just be something like kids again, because I needed him so much that I felt completely alone.
I woke up alone in the guest room. The walls were hushed and braced around me as I sat up and noticed the couple inches of snow collecting outside the window, the comforter wrapped in a whirlwind around my middle and not enough against the sneaking chill. I thought of the remaining embers that might be hissing in the fireplace as I drew my legs up and wrapped my sweater around me, and I got up to see what I had.
I meandered into the kitchen where Kitsey was a discrete rush of packing up, and when she saw me there was a blank moment of something a little chagrined passing between our eyes, before she said, "There's some coffee left if you want any," and got back to looking like she couldn't find something.
I was leaning my back into the counter, arms crossing under a slow yawn and watching her for a minute before I said, "Your cell is on the little table, you know, over the umbrella stand…"
"That's right, I always…" She trailed away for a moment while I stood there wondering what the hell I was going to do for the rest of the day. When I finally got myself out of the kitchen I was surprised to find her in the sun room, and even though I hadn't been looking for her, I sat down in the next chair across the card table. She must have been watching for her cab. She had everything in order except for her bare feet; her shoes were strewn just next to her, forgotten in some distraction.
She was the first to say something.
"Remember that trip you were supposed to take with us up here? Before your dad came and...stole you away?" she finished with a wry edge on the question.
"How could I forget?" I gave a weak shrug as I slouched back, burying my hands into the pockets of my sweats. "Your mom talked about it all the time."
"You'd think it was a national tragedy, that you had to move away from us, the way she talked." I was a little struck by this, the clarity of regret and grief in her eyes, as controlled as it was. "I think she couldn't let go of the idea that everything would have been better for all of us if you'd never left."
She meant Andy and her father, of course, but even if it was something other than that, I couldn't help wanting to ask if Mrs. Barbour had ever had much to say about me before all of that loss happened. But I couldn't ask that; I never had been able to ask it and I never will. Maybe it doesn't matter.
A silence descended for a minute, and then her shoulders moved in a sigh. "His name is Sebastian," she admitted.
It took me a moment to catch up enough to realize what she was telling me. And then when I thought about it, my brow crinkled. "One of the nurses?" I remembered.
"Yes, but Theo, I swear it wasn't like that. I've known him over a year, since before Mom was…" She bit her bottom lip. "When we met he was doing rounds at the cancer ward at Morgan Stanley."
It took a second for me to realize how that must have happened. She would help organize funding for events they had over there, usually for families that had to be there through Christmas; she must have met him when she was doing some kind of recon mission to make sure the place would allow this or that. I could just picture some romantic comedy scene, her slipping on her high heels to get out of the way of a stretcher and fraying the nerves of the very handsome and very serious practitioner who nonetheless was not immune to her charms. The reality was probably somewhere to the left of that, but I remembered Sebastian; he didn't seem too bad. "Was he even sent by the hospice?"
She looked down and that was when she started to put on her left shoe, considering whether she should lie for long enough that there was no point.
"Kits," I groaned.
"Well, he was qualified. And we didn't even pay him. I just wanted him around, and...he came, and he helped take care of her."
I caught a sliver of color moving up through the trees; her taxi was arriving. But she had an expectant hesitation about her, and I wondered if she was going to make the driver wait out there until I figured out what I needed to say. But I sat up, slipped my hands out of my pockets and leaned over to pick up her other shoe, and all I could think of to say was, "Okay."
Her eyes dropped in a sigh as she finally stood up. "Oh, Theo."
I had her shoe up on my lap and I just nodded a motion for her to lift her foot in. They were metallic strappy little heels, the kind of shoes that only a New York girl would insist herself into in this kind of weather. The buckle that fastened the strap up above her ankle was a cumbersome little jewel, the shine of it winking as I got the strap cuddled in around the prong. Then my hands tightened at her ankle so that when she tried to take her foot back she swerved and teetered, gasping in a smile as she grabbed my shoulder for balance, our teasing childhood rapport leaping out of the past in my smirk, until I let her go.
I leaned into the threshold of the front door as soon as the driver had come up to grab one of her suitcases and she'd turned to look at me. She stepped back up to the door and I was fluid in the movement of ducking my head a little to get her kiss at my cheekbone, firm and then a little slow, like she became different right in the middle of it. She backed off, frowning, and in that very second I remember wondering for the only time if she'd been just as surprised that I stayed the night as I had been that she'd stayed.
Her mouth curved slightly into a smile. "Don't be a stranger," she murmured as she slipped her gloves on, walked away.
We both knew I couldn't promise that I wouldn't be. She walked, looking taller than she was in those heels, down to where the cab swallowed her pristine silhouette and left the snow swirling as it took off, and I had known her for so very long; I didn't want her to go but I couldn't really bear for her to stay, so I watched the car disappear, hoping she'd get as real a thing as she could find. Boris must have been right. I have gotten older.
This cat showed up only a couple minutes after she'd gone, just when I'd been coming out of the frozen state she'd left me in. A plump marmalade coat made me blink out at the blinding blanket of snow in the back yard to where it was approaching at a brisk walk. I'd been filling up a glass of water at the kitchen sink and I wondered if we had anything it would eat.
A minute later I was using one hand to keep a blanket wrapped around my shoulder, the other to hold a plate with a few scraps of lunch meat. As soon as I shut the sliding door behind me, the cat was flinching and then turning tail. "Dummy," I muttered, considering the freezing deck for a couple seconds before just stepping onto it in my bare feet to go far enough to set the plate out in front of the downward steps. The glint of something made my glance slow up in the middle of what would have been a quick turn back into the house.
Frowning, I stepped down into the lawn and saw behind the raised wood, and then after a perplexed stilling, I cracked into a low grim laugh.
It was the fact that she'd arranged the bottles in such a neat row against the deck there, like it had any business looking neat, like we were setting up to tend bar for the rodents, or something. But I just kept laughing for a moment, until my breath caught sharply and I stuffed the blanket up to my mouth because I was afraid I was going to cry. I went very still, not daring to move enough to let in the feeling I would much rather let pass over. Sooner or later it was the cold that forced me to go inside, and all I knew to do then was to go into the den.
It was when I was at the door and could see the landscape of his white spine emerging from the quilt that I realized I'd been almost expecting he would have somehow taken off. What Kitsey had got us talking about, how our lives would have been so different if my dad had never gotten wise to my uses, had struck at me harder than she could have possibly realized. When I'd been living with her family the ability to sleep alone had seemed a relief, with the psychological shape I'd been in, but with Boris it was always wholly different, no feeling that I ever needed to apologize for or even explain the grief and terror that came knocking in the middle of the night. Their house was cold wood all around me and he was the one fickle hearth it contained, only I had to decide to go to him, to lean my life on his like that again.
The one time Boris and I ever went to Florence, we'd gotten the house to ourselves—I can't remember why now, but it must have been one of the times my dad and Xandra stayed out all night at one of the casino hotels, back when she was still looking for excuses to not be at home with "the kid"—and we had put all of my mom's Velvet Underground on shuffle some time after discovering where Xandra kept her cigarettes and sharing ten of them. I was just coming up a bit from the bad wine—we'd run out an hour ago and Boris already looked restlessly sober again—when there was some teasing from him about how I'd practically sported a hard-on for Ms. Huckley, the youngish substitute teacher we were lucky to be graced with a couple times. This was followed by some attempt at comeback that amounted to him apparently not knowing what a fucking boner looks like, and I got a fuck-you with his insistence that he could fucking sport one on command, etc. I don't think even our exceptionally spontaneous youth helps me to translate or even specifically remember how this ended up with me taking him out of his pants and performing the act, but I am positive I am the one who did it first. I remember being so hard that it felt like the obvious outlet, my total lack of expertise in the area somehow not even occurring to me, and being urged on by the cracking little glaciers of Polish sliding around at the top of his seething gasps.
This is the part that I think is the reason I remember it happening at all: As soon as it was over with, Boris got up, just like that, so that for a second I was left blushing and floundering in the same mood that had been harmlessly heady a second ago. Only with one hand busy adjusting himself back into his pants, all he did was lean to make a straight line for the dock stereo to hit the track button back a few songs to the one he wanted to hear again, and then in the same breath he'd turned back to start unzipping my jeans and the misunderstanding just made me laugh, happy and affectionate even as he bowed over my erection and I gasped at the first tremble of what it felt like.
Of course I had asked him at some point what it was that had made him finally want to quit. He'd talked before prison about losing the other habits, but cutting himself off of the drinking was never considered and the thing is, he'd explained, jail wasn't exactly good rehab on that front: You wouldn't want to know how it's made and it would never be enough, but you can get alcohol in some prisons if you really want it. So there had to be some other reason, and he tried to explain to me that it was how much slower time went by behind those walls, and how he wanted as much of it back as he could possibly get. And here I was remembering how there had to be little oddities and accidents and laughter that made for constellations of moments you could actually remember years and years down the line, and how we'd spent so much of our time after we'd met damaging the analog inside of our heads, and how it was that laugh over Boris getting up to change the music that made me remember what had come before and after even when there was a time I would have rather forgotten about it. They always say youth is wasted on the young, but it's my memories I never would have trusted to that terrified teenager, and I was wondering, whether he really would manage to quit or not, if this kind of thing was exactly what Boris had been talking about.
I took a seat at the edge of the ottoman, pawing the blanket up higher to cover him at the shoulders. He stirred.
I was returning to the couch with a couple painkillers in my palm, holding them out to him as I sat down again.
"Is she gone?" he asked, pinching one up.
"...Yeah."
Careful, hesitant glance up at me. "You're alright?"
"What do you mean?" I asked in avoidance, then said, "Are you chewing on that? God, that's so bad for you."
He crinkled up his expression in amusement. "Sure, you used to do that too."
Quick with wryness, I said, "You know, I was just thinking that's what we should do today? Repeat everything we did when we were fourteen?"
He muttered some creative obscenity, dismissive.
"Your internal organs are going to murder you in your sleep."
"And? Come on, give me the other one, Potter."
When he held it up to his mouth, I watched closely, and he held his brows high in suspense, swallowed down the pill.
"See?" he said, after a silence. "I can be a good boy."
My eyes were still caught at his throat for some reason, considering the shape of his collarbones, until he noticed and his look gathered just a bit of heaviness, as if in question. That look referred to the night before, and I was too exhausted to panic. "Well," I finally replied, and there was a nervous thinness to my voice I couldn't help, "don't be too good."
He chuckled softly, reached around me to get a pull off the cigarette he'd set on top of a jar lid on the end table, and after putting it down again his skin brushed mine closely enough for him to exclaim, "The fuck, Potter, you're freezing."
"I was outside."
"Why?—co'mere," he muttered, lifting up the quilt for me to roll in under. As soon as my head met the soft landing and his warm skin hit me I couldn't help pushing myself into him even further so that his chest was snug against my back. He toked his cigarette, put it out, and then his chin came in close and he was blowing a steady stream of hot air into my neck. Somehow this gesture made the unshed tears from earlier spring back to my eyes, made my breathing falter in a crack; he held me and said, "It's okay. Go to sleep."
I guess it was. I guess I did.