“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know? You’re a man who owns tongs for candy. Youalwaysknow.”
“I don’t know what happens after kissing my roommate in the foster room while a hairless cat watches. This isn’t a situation I’ve prepared for. There’s no whiteboard or manual or YouTube for this.”
“There might be a YouTube. There’s a YouTube for everything. If not, we could make one. Or we could make a color scheme. Green for kissing, blue for talking about it, red for—”
“Go to bed, Benji.”
“I’m just saying, a system could be adaptable—”
“Good night.”
“—we could add a purple category—”
“Good night, Benji.”
He grinned.
The real one.
The one that was too wide and too bright and that did something to the whole structure of his face and made it impossible to look away. It was the grin that I’d been pretending for months didn’t affect me and that I was now, standing in his room with the taste of coffee on my lips, done pretending about.
“Good night, Peter.”
I walked to the door, stopped at the threshold, and turned back.
“The stove light stays on,” I said.
“I know.”
“It’s not for Hiro.”
“I know that, too.”
“Good night.”
I went to my desk and opened my laptop. The cursor blinked from the fish taco paragraph; but this time, for the first time in months, the next sentence was there, waiting, as if it had been ready all along and had simply been waiting for me to catch up.
I wrote the car ride home.
I wrote David falling asleep against the window.
I wrote the streetlights moving across his face, the knowing that came not as a single moment, but as a slow, steady accumulation of evidence that a body I loved was leaving, and that the leaving was not something I could operate on or schedule or organize into color-coded rows on a whiteboard.
It was a knowing that was plain and terrible and true.
I wrote the last good day, the whole day, from start to finish. I wrote the morning coffee and the fishtacos and the car ride and David saying, “I’m sorry,” and me saying, “Don’t be,” and him saying, “Peter, I need you to know that you were the best thing,” and me saying, “You still are.”
And I wrote him closing his eyes.
I saved the file and closed the laptop.
The apartment was quiet.
Hiro had moved to the foot of my bed.
General Tso was on the refrigerator.
