He follows. His hips stutter and his face drops against my neck and the sound he makes is quiet and broken and private, pressed into my skin, and I hold him through it until his body goes heavy against mine.
We breathe. His weight settles on me and I let it. His hand loosens on my hip but doesn’t leave. My fingers are still in his hair. The room is quiet except for us.
He pulls out careful. Handles the cleanup the way he handles everything, thorough and warm. Comes back with a washcloth. Wipes me down and I let him because letting him is part of what tonight is.
He lies down. I press into his side. His arm settles around me without negotiation, his body already knowing where mine goes.
Parker jumps onto the bed. Investigates the new geography. Settles between our knees with the certainty of a creature who has no concept of timing.
“Your cat has no boundaries,” he says into my hair.
“Your cat.”
“Our cat.” He says it without thinking, the way he says everything. I let the word sit.
His thumb traces my chest. Once. Twice. His breathing slows. His hand presses flat against my chest, over my heart, and holds.
“You’re still shaking,” he says.
“Different kind.”
He presses his mouth to the top of my head. Doesn’t say anything else. Doesn’t need to. His hand stays on my chest and I put my hand over his and press down and feel my own heartbeat against his palm.
We are bruised. We are not finished. Tomorrow we go back to a building where two men who look like us don’t get to be what we are in this bed. The math hasn’t changed. But we are in the room. Both of us. Neither of us leaving.
?
Chapter 26 — TEO
Zay’s street has one of those magnolia trees that drops its petals across the sidewalk like it’s making a point. I step around a pile of them on the way to his building, my bag over my left shoulder because my right one doesn’t need the accommodation anymore but my body hasn’t caught up to that information yet.
The last session was Thursday. Full range confirmed, strength within parameters. Zay wrote it in the chart and I sat on the table and watched him write it and neither of us said anything about what it meant, which is that the chart was the last professional reason for me to be in that room. One more follow-up. Then nothing on the schedule that puts us in the same space at the same time.
I knock twice. The lock clicks and Zay opens the door and behind him the apartment smells like cooking I know he didn’t do.
“Hey.” He’s in a t-shirt and sweats, barefoot, and his face is doing a version of steady that I’ve learned to read over the lastweek, the one where his jaw is set but his eyes are moving, running a calculation he hasn’t finished yet.
“Hey.” I step in. Then I hear the pan.
Oil and onion and the low steady sound of food being handled by someone who doesn’t need to think about what they’re doing. From around the wall of the kitchen, a voice.
“Isaiah, your butter situation is criminal. I need to know who raised you to keep one stick in the refrigerator.”
“You raised me, Nan.”
“Don’t remind me. I did my best.”
I look at Zay. He looks at me. The look holds long enough for me to understand that this was not planned. His grandmother is in his kitchen and I am in his doorway and neither of these things were supposed to happen at the same time.
She comes around the corner before either of us can negotiate. She’s shorter than I expected, solid through the shoulders, holding a wooden spoon and looking at me with the unhurried focus of a woman who finishes reading before she responds.
I have met families before. Parents and brothers and one extremely protective cousin in a bar in Boston. But I have never stood in someone’s grandmother’s kitchen and been the one who doesn’t know the room. In my family’s kitchen, Zay was the guest. Here, I am. The difference is small and obvious and I have never felt it from this side.
“Nan, this is Teo.” Zay’s voice is even. The effort in it is small, just the jaw holding tighter than it needs to. “Teo, this is my grandmother.”
“Matteo Marchetti.” I put my hand out because my nonna raised me to offer my hand first, and Nan looks at it the way she probably looks at everything that doesn’t meet her standards for greeting a person.
She sets the spoon on the counter. Takes my hand, but only to pull me closer, and then both of her hands come up to my face.
