I pull him down against my chest. We stay locked together, trembling, hearts hammering wildly against each other. His face is buried in my neck, breath hot and ragged against my skin.
He lifts his head. His face is a wreck — tears, sweat, hair stuck to his forehead, eyes so full they can barely hold it all. “Your body did that,” he whispers, completely shredded. “Everything worked. I can’t believe it.”
“Yeah. It did.”
He drops his forehead against mine, his thumb tracing my cheekbone.
“And you rocked my world, Benji,” I tell him. “Every day in different ways.”
“Was this way the best?” he asks.
I chuckle against his hair. “What do you think?”
Benji stays there for another heartbeat, before he eases himself off me. I slip out of his body with a low groan fromboth of us. He leans down and presses one last lingering kiss to my lips, then climbs off the bed.
He walks naked to the bathroom. A minute later he returns with a warm, damp washcloth. After cleaning us both, he drops the cloth on the floor and settles against my side. He curls into me perfectly — head resting on my chest, one leg draped over my thigh, and his hand splayed across my stomach. His soft hair tickles my skin.
His hand goes slack on my stomach. His weight gets heavier the way sleeping bodies do. He falls asleep on my chest and I hold him in the dark.
Three days of this. Three mornings waking up with him. Three nights in this bed. I want every day and night to be this. I want to be the place he comes home to. I want him to be the reason I fight for one more inch of ground every morning.
I don’t sleep for a long time. I lie there with Benji on my chest. My hand rests on his back. His ribs expand under my palm with each breath. I count them the way I used to count reps on the bench press — not because I need to, but because it steadies me. Counting means it’s real. He’s here. He’s breathing. He’s mine.
When I finally close my eyes, the last thing I’m aware of is his heartbeat against my ribs. Keeping time with mine.
The next morning he’s already downstairs when I come off the elevator. I can hear his voice carrying through the bar, talking to Tex about something that has him shaking his head while he pours coffee. I wheel through the doorway. He turns, his face splitting into the full-wattage grin that could power this building.
Benji has been here for three days and my space has already changed. Not structurally. But the surfaces have shifted. Frankie has been rotated to face the window light at what Benji calls “his optimal angle.” George has been moved two inches to the left because the afternoon sun was “causing a shadow conflict with the nightstand.” There are two throw pillows on the bed that weren’t there before. I don’t know where they came from. I suspect Benji manifested them through sheer force of aesthetic will.
The morning passes. Sheila arrives at eleven, and the bar starts the slow transformation from empty room to working restaurant. Tables get wiped. The jukebox gets turned on low. The door gets propped open and the salt air drifts in.
Benji is on the stool to my right. He’s talking to Sheila about the bar’s lighting. He thinks the overhead fixtures are too harsh and Sheila thinks they’re fine and they’ve been going back and forth for five minutes and neither one is going to win but neither one is going to stop. His hands are moving while he talks, and his nails catch the bar light when his fingers gesture.
He looks exactly like himself. Loudest thing in the room without making a sound.
A regular named Ernie comes in around noon. He’s been coming to Tex’s for years, a retired plumber who drinks draft beer and watches whatever game is on the TV above the bar and doesn’t bother anyone. He sees me and seems surprised I’m in a wheelchair instead of standing.
“Mickey,” he says. “Good to see you, brother. Heard you were back.”
“Good to be back, Ernie.”
Ernie’s eyes move to Benji. The eyeliner, the nails, the peach shirt. He looks for exactly one second longer than he’d look at anyone else and then he looks back at me and says, “You doing alright?”
One second. That’s all it was. Ernie decided Benji’s fine. Ernie’s a good man. The category he put Benji in was ‘none of my business’.
But my brain doesn’t stop at Ernie. Years of patrol and my brain is already running the next five people through the scenario. The next ten. The Saturday night crowd that fills this bar at eight o’clock, the mix of bikers, tourists, and men who drink too much and get loud.
Benji looked wrong to four men in this bar. Twenty feet from where he’s sitting right now. Wrong became a fist, a boot, a gun. That gun became my wheelchair.
If it happened again, I couldn’t stop it. I’m in a wheelchair. My legs don’t work. If a man decided that Benji’s eyeliner was a problem, if a hand reached for his shirt, if a voice called him a faggot, I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t step between them. I couldn’t do the one thing my body was built and trained to do.
The last time I did that, I lost my legs. I’d do it again right now. But my legs won’t let me.
“I’m getting there,” I say to Ernie. “Doing better every day.”
“That’s great to hear. Glad you’re home.” He takes his stool at the end of the bar and signals Sheila for a beer. The interaction is over.
But my hand has moved. It was on the bar top, one inch from Benji’s. Now it’s on my armrest. The reflex I’ve been running on for years in this county, the automatic adjustment that keeps us both safe. I’ve been doing it so long it doesn’t feel like hiding. It feels like normal.
