“Your date with Lauro. You coming home drunk and squeezing the hell out of me. Crying on my shirt.”
“Oh, God.”
“No, don’t be embarrassed. It’s my favorite. The best thing that’s happened to me in so long.”
“Why?”
“Because you were so grossed out about having gone on an accidental date…with someone else. Because…he probably thought he was making progress but you ended up inmyarms, asking for comfort fromme…You told me what you wanted…And it wasn’t him. And it was something I could give you.”
“I told you what I wanted?” I’m racking my brain, trying to remember when in my drunken state I told him to tear up the lease.
“I like getting called ‘baby.’ I like being told I’m delicious,” he quotes. “Look, we’ve been so beat-up this year…and after Raff moved out, you were fried. I thought that if I could just keep myself as…compressed as possible…If I could let you live your life however you were wanting to be living it…Then you would have some room to…get back to your old self…But it turns out you took that to mean I don’t want you. You’ll never know what I felt that night, watching you say that to me. That another man calls you ‘baby’ and tells you you’re delicious and it quenched something for you. Something I’ve been withholding. Roz…never again.Igive that to you.”
I sway toward him, handfuls of his shirt and his exhales on my face.
The boxes…are for Raffi. The lease…was a gesture of goodwill. The space…was a gift to me, not because he wanted it. The wrapped portrait…
“I wanna see this damn portrait!” I say, scrambling off his lap and across the bed to retrieve it.
“I’m not sure I’d call it a portrait. It’s a pretty crappy photo.” He looks very nervous.
So I pull the paper off all at once. Because we’ve all waited long enough, and because, frankly, I’m dying to see it.
The photo he’s chosen is revealed and I burst immediately into tender, stinging laughter.
It is, objectively, terrible.
The original photo—which I recall immediately—was too dark, a little blurry, a thoughtless composition taken by a careless hand. But this one has been further cropped in, so it’s extra blurry.
It’s immediately my favorite photo ever taken.
“St. Michel must have beenappalled,” I say in a watery voice.
Vin laughs. “He really was.” He clears his throat. I can feel his eyes on the side of my face. “Areyouappalled?”
“I love it, Vin.”
How could I not. It was the night we first met, Raff’s graduation party thrown at a fancy restaurant. I barely said anything to Vin that night, but then, right before we left, Raff made all of us squish in at one end of the table to document the occasion. I’m doing a passive protest at this mistreatment, crossing my eyes and pulling the sides of my face down in a deeply unflattering grimace. Vin, serendipitously seated next to me, is leaning back in his chair. In the original photo, it looks like he’s deadpanning the camera. But zoomed in, you can see that his eyes are actually on me. Zoomed in, you can see a softness in his expression. Zoomed in, you can see…
“Dang, you already had itbadfor me,” I tease him.
He chuckles and tucks my hair behind my ear. “I did. Still do.”
And then he leans in and takes one long sip from the newly exposed skin of my neck.
“Raff took this picture, you know.”
“I know,” he says quietly. “That’s part of what makes it perfect.”
And he’s right. Raff is an enormous part of our life. And always will be. Fixing us will never, ever be about extracting Raff from our lives, only about keeping him on his side of the table, where he probably wants to be anyways.
Either way, it’s just me and Vin here now. He carefully removes the picture frame from my hands and sets it on the floor. And then he does the most Vin thing ever. Namely he cups my cheek, tips my head to one side, and starts kissing me from my collarbone up to my ear and back.
You wouldn’t know that this is the most Vin thing ever because you’ve never had sex with Vin. But he’s got this way about him that just ends me. He’s gentle and bossy at the same time. He gets you all worked up and dying for him and bent into a pretzel and somehow it all ends up seeming like it was your idea in the first place.
For instance, right now, all he’s done is lace his fingers into my hair and lean me to one side so that he can walk his teeth over my throat and somehow I’m the one who ends up in his lap with my hands under his shirt. See? He’s the master of escalation.
His shirt is old and soft as a kitten. It used to be midnight blue but he went and used it so hard that now it’s dusky gray. I’ve had a crush on this shirt for as long as I’ve known Vin.
