“Morning.”
“Coffee’s ready?”
“Made a full pot,” he grunted.
I poured coffee into a not-blue mug.
We occupied the kitchen together in a silence that was different from every previous silence, chargedwith the knowledge that his mouth had been on mine eight hours earlier, and that neither of us had mentioned it yet. The not-mentioning was creating a pressure system that was going to produce weather eventually.
I looked at the fridge.
There was a new Post-it in our spot.
I finished the chapter, the one I’ve been stuck on. Wrote the whole thing last night. Thought you should know.
— P
I read it twice.
He’d finished the chapter.
The David chapter about the fish tacos and the car ride and the last good day that he’d been unable to write for months. He’d gone back to his room after kissing me, and he’d sat down at his desk, and he’d written the thing that had been stuck—and he was telling me this on a Post-it note. This particular truth, placed in our spot the morning after he’d kissed me, was saying something so much bigger than a finished chapter. I had to put my coffee down because my hands weren’t steady.
I wasn’t sure any part of me was steady in that moment.
“Peter,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me, too.”
We looked at each other across the island. Four feet of counter stretched between us, the same four feet I’d crossed last night, the same distance that now felt like both nothing and everything.
“I have to go to work,” I said.
“I know.”
“We should probably talk about, you know, the thing.”
“The thing.”
“The thing where you kissed me in the foster room last night.”
“I remember that thing.”
“Do you want to talk about it now?”
He folded his newspaper with the precise, unhurried movements of a man who was buying time, set it on the counter, and aligned it with the edge.
“I want to talk about it,” he said. “But I’d rather talk about it when we have time to do it properly, not in the fifteen minutes before you leave for work.”
“Properly. You want to have the conversation properly.”
“I want to have it in a way that doesn’t involve one of us standing by the door with keys in hand. This isa sitting-down conversation.”
“You’ve categorized the conversation. You’ve assigned it a posture.”
