It involved his eyes more than his mouth, and it changed the geometry of his face in a way that I noticed and immediately wished I hadn’t.
“Peter?” He came around the bar, still holding the rag. “How long have you been here?”
“A while.” I reached into my pocket and held out his phone. “You left this on the counter.”
He took it and looked at the phone and then looked at me.
“You drove all the way here to bring me my phone?”
“It’s fifteen minutes.”
“You’ve been sitting here for hours . . . to return a phone?”
“Finn gave me whiskey, and Rod gave me sliders. Then Finn gave me more whiskey. It seemed rude to leave.”
He stared at me with that expression I was beginning to associate specifically with moments when I said something he didn’t expect.
“Thank you,” he said.
“It’s just a phone.”
“Yeah.” He was still holding the rag, still standingin the middle of the bar, still looking at me like I was a sentence he hadn’t finished parsing. “It’s just a phone.”
I stood, put on my jacket, and nodded at Finn. He nodded back with that knowing smile that I was starting to find mildly irritating.
“See you at home,” I said.
It was a normal thing to say to someone you live with, a practical statement about shared geography, nothing more.
Benji’s smile shifted again, going smaller and even more real.
“See you at home,” he said.
I drove back to my apartment in silence, replaying Rod’s words like a song I couldn’t get out of my head.
He’s better since you.
I parked, climbed the stairs, and unlocked the door. General Tso greeted me with ayowlof imperial displeasure at my tardiness. Hiro limped over and pressed his head against my knee. Potato, naturally, had not moved.
I hung up my jacket, made tea, and sat at my desk.
When I opened my laptop, the cursor blinked at me from the middle of a paragraph I hadn’t been able to finish for weeks. The chapter was about David’s last good day, the one where we’d drivento the coast and eaten fish tacos and David had said something about the light on the water that I’d been trying and failing to get right on the page for a month.
I needed to finish the chapter, but finishing it felt like—
I swallowed hard.
It was too much. I just . . . I couldn’t.
My face found my palms. They came away wet when I lifted my gaze to stare at the screen again. Why was this so hard? It was just a chapter. I’d written hundreds, if not thousands, of them.
My heart felt like someone with a merciless grip tried to wring it dry.
I stared at the cursor.
Reluctantly, my hands found the keys.
I typed a word, then deleted it.
