I turned onto my back again and let my arms rest naturally. I stopped trying to arrange my body into a shape that communicated something it wasn’t and let it be what it was, which was the body of a man who had taken off his clothes because he wanted to be seen by someone and who was scared of the wanting but was doing it anyway.
Little Peter remained unimpressed.
Little Peter had, if anything, retreated further into his turtleneck. He had assessed the ambient conditions and concluded that the current environment, characterized by leather upholstery, feline surveillance, and an aggressive AC vent, did not merit his full participation.
“It’s going to be fine,” I told Little Peter.
And then, because the absurdity of the situation had reached a critical mass that my dignity could not survive without acknowledgment, I added to the rest of me, “You’re lying naked on a couch talking to your shriveled penis while your cat watches. David would be howling.”
David would have been howling. He would have been on the floor, tears streaming, gasping, because David found my discomfort with vulnerabilityendlessly funny and endlessly endearing. The mere idea of me arranging myself on a sofa like a nervous centerpiece would have provided him with material for years.
The feeling that washed over me next was stranger than all those that came before, because the thought of David laughing didn’t hurt the way it would have three months ago. It settled into my chest with something warm, an affection that had found its placealongsidethe grief instead of buried beneath it.
“I’m trying,” I told the empty room, meaning David and myself and whatever part of me was still standing at the edge of the half second, trying to decide.
I glanced at the clock mounted to the kitchen wall, the one on the far wall that did not require eye contact with General Tso.
Fifteen minutes.
That was my estimate, based on Benji’s typical drive time from the bar. It included the high probability that he might sit in the parking lot for a few minutes processing, because Benji processed by staying still before he processed by moving.
I lay on the couch and breathed. I let the stove light do what the stove light did, which was to make everything warm and soft and a little more forgiving than it deserved to be.
General Tso jumped down from the refrigerator.
This was unexpected enough to make me turn my head.
He padded across the kitchen floor, entered the living room, and stopped beside the couch. He looked at me. I looked at him. Twenty pounds of orange fur evaluated his naked human on a leather couch with the detached interest of a health inspector visiting a restaurant he fully intended to shut down.
“Don’t youdareget on this couch,” I said.
He jumped onto the back of the couch, settled behind my head, and began grooming himself with the aggressive nonchalance of a creature who had chosen his position for maximum psychological disruption and was content to hold it.
I was lying naked on my couch with a cat behind my head and uncooperative anatomy and my glasses slightly crooked and absolutely no idea what to do with my hands . . . and the sound of my own heartbeat filling the room like a second clock.
This was, without question, the least smooth romantic gesture in the history of human intimacy.
But it was honest, and it was me, without the walls and the routine and the careful layers. It was Peter Loupier, stripped of everything except the wanting. It was Peter Loupier with a willingness to be seenwanting, and if that wasn’t enough, if the glasses and the cat and the reluctant biology and the leather couch and the trembling in my hands added up to something that fell short of whatever Benji deserved, then at least it was true.
I’d promised him true, and true was what I had.
I heard the elevatording, then the muffled sound of metal doors opening and closing.
Then I heard the specific rhythm of Benji’s walk, which I could identify from a floor away because I’d been listening for it for months without admitting that listening for someone’s footsteps was something people did when they were falling in love.
The word arrived without permission.
I let it stay.
The key turned in the lock, then the door creaked open.
There was a pause.
A long, electric pause, the kind that has a sound of its own, the sound of a person’s breath stopping and their brain recalibrating and their entire understanding of an evening reorganizing itself around new information.
I couldn’t take the silence any longer, so I said the most romantic thing I could think of.
“Hey.”
