I don’t sit up. I stay in the bed. I watch Damián become Damián-in-public. The careful posture. The controlled breath. The half-second of panic that arrives and gets managed before it finishes arriving.
He’s up, looking for his clothes. Shorts on the floor. Shirt in the hallway where it landed. He pulls them on at a speed that suggests extensive experience in leaving places quickly, and I file that observation away with mild amusement and zero jealousy because the person he’s rushing to leave is me and I know he doesn’t want to be rushing.
He’s in my bathroom with the door open, washing fast, his face in the mirror. The shower he doesn’t have time for. The cloth instead.
“My hair,” he says. “Tobík. My hair.”
“What about your hair?”
“It’s…Look at it.”
“I’m looking at it. It looks like a man who just had sex. Which is accurate.” I smirk at him from the bed.
“This is not funny. I have to sit in a room with your brother in twenty-five minutes.”
“It’s a little funny,” I say as I shrug.
“Find me a brush.”
I get out of bed. I find the brush. I hand it to him. We’re standing at my small bathroom mirror, him in his shorts trying to get his hair into the bun with the urgency of a man defusing a bomb, me in my briefs watching him fight his own curls, and thecomedy of it is so complete that I lean against the doorframe and let myself enjoy it.
“You’re enjoying this,” he says to the mirror.
“I’m not enjoying this. I’m observing this. There’s a difference.”
“There’s no difference. You’re smiling.”
“My face does what it does, Damián. I have no control over my face. This has been established for many years.”
He gets the bun. It holds. He checks the mirror. He checks again. He turns to me.
“Do I look like I just…?”
“No. You look like you went for a run. Which is what you told them.”
“Okay.”
He walks to the front door. Dressed, hair fixed, mostly composed. He pauses with his hand on the knob.
“I have to go.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to do this, Tobík. I don’t know what to do with the fact that I’m going to sit next to him for three hours and I just left you in a bed where I...” He stops. “Where we...”
“I know. I’ve been thinking about that for three years. You’ve been thinking about it for two days.”
He stops. The three years lands.
“Two days,” he says.
“Two days. And I’m just saying. Tomáš is hard. I know he is. We don’t have to figure it out today.”
“We have to figure it out at some point.”
“I know. Some point. Not now. You have film in twenty minutes.”
He kisses me. Quick. His hand at the back of my neck for one second. Then he’s gone.
