He brings his hands up to my shoulders and starts to move along with me. I haven’t done this with anyone. Well, not anyone important anyway. I vaguely remember a school dance with a girl, but she didn’t feel like this in my arms. She didn’t feel so perfect and so new. My hands didn’t itch to feel under her clothing. My eyes didn’t want to drink in her features to forever keep.
I bring a hand to his face. He smiles, leans his head on my shoulder. And so that’s what we do: we sway together to the beats of the song that played the night I let him see my tears and he said he’d never let me go.
It’s true even now. At a soda fountain, by a jukebox, he’s still got me and I’ve got him. Neither one of us is letting the other go.
When the song ends, I feel as if I have to come back from someplace in the sky.
Just a gentle descent back down to earth; I pull myself together, bit by bit. His grip around me tightens, and I hold my breath. It takes me a minute to realize we’re still swaying a little, even though the record is skipping, and there’s not a sound but of him breathing, warmly against my neck.
Another minute or so goes by before he steps away from me, then he looks around, making sure no one could have seen.
Then his gaze falls on me.
That thread isn’t so weak now. I feel it. And I can see that he does too.
I place a hand on his chest, flat. I feel a soft and steadythud-thud-thudunderneath. I whisper, “This.”
He puts his hand over mine, fingertips soft. “This.”
That thread could be a tightrope that we both walk, that can hold us both. The record is still skipping. And so is my heart.
“Take me home,” he says.
My shoulders feel as if they’ve fallen to my feet. I lower my gaze. “Sure, pal.”
He tilts his head just so, a light in his eyes. “Your home.”
Just because he’s coming home with me doesn’t mean anything will happen.
As much as I want it to. I realize when we’re pulling up that even if nothing does, it’s not really the end of anything. I can maybe make myself a comfortable life, albeit empty. I can maybe keep myself busy with the garage and caring for this place. I can maybe find someone else, somewhere down the road, but it’ll never be him. I watch him as we walk into the cabin, hands in his pockets and his eyes cast down, as if nothing has just happened.
Nothing else and no one else can ever bethis.
Paul and I hover around each other after I light some lanterns and get another fire going. We hover around like we might embrace or we might not, or we might fuck or we might not, and so I wish and I hope on anything and everything that at least, at the very least, I’ll still get to see him. Would we be able to be friends? Would I be able to stand it if he started going with someone else? Because he would. Someone else will undoubtedly come along and love him for just who he is.
He’s stopped hovering, and I’m staring and unmoving as I think upon these things. He clears his throat and I blink.
I offer him a beer but he declines. He sits in an armchair, and I take a seat in the other. Outside, there’s a chilly wind whipping up, but inside the fire crackles and it’s glowing and warm. I light a cigarette and dwell on what it could be like. The coziness on nights like this. The companionship.
The love.
It’s a long while before either of us speak, and he eventually asks, “What if you get snowed in?”
I pretend to ponder over this as if I haven’t before. “I keep plenty of food, and there’s a generator if I need it. If worse comes to worse, there’s a store down the road I can walk to.”
He holds up his hands, palms facing the stove.
“And that diner,” I add.
He smiles wistfully at that. Then he gets serious. “What would we do, if I lived here?”
“I’d go to the garage. You’d go to the soda joint if you wanted to. Then we’d go home, but home would be us here, together.”
“What else?” he says quietly.
I take a drag. “Eat here, sleep here. When it’s warm again, get a boat out on the lake maybe.”
“What else?” His voice is hardly a whisper.
