“You’re terrifying,” I said.
“I’m effective. There’s a difference, though I’ll admit it’s subtle.” She looked at Peter one more time. Her face did something warm and complicated that she usually aimed at me. It was something that said, “I see what’s happening, and I’m happy for you, and Benji and I are going to talk about this later in excruciating detail.”
When the door clicked shut behind her, Peter and I stood in the kitchen with a third grilled cheesebetween us and the quiet aftermath of a morning that had contained more laughter than any morning in this apartment since I’d moved in. Based on the evidence, it might’ve been more laughter than this apartment had heard in a couple of years.
“That was fun,” I said.
Peter looked at me.
His face was back to its usual state of careful neutrality, the walls rebuilt, the drawbridge up, but his eyes hadn’t quite caught up with the rest of his face. His eyes still had the warm, slightly dazed quality of a man who had laughed until he’d cried over a kitten riding a cat and who hadn’t fully returned from wherever that laughter had taken him.
“It was,” he said.
He pushed the plate with the third grilled cheese toward me.
“Eat,” he said. “You’re too thin.”
“I’m not too thin. I’m aerodynamic. There’s a difference.”
“Eat the sandwich, Benj.”
Unable to process this first nicknaming, I ate the sandwich.
It was, like the first one, perfect.
Chapter 18
Peter
The 3 a.m. kitchen became a thing, and I didn’t know how to stop it.
That’s not accurate.
I knew how to stop it.
I could have stayed in my room on the nights I couldn’t write, could have made my tea and brought it to my desk and sat with the insufferable blinking cursor and the unfinished manuscript and the particular loneliness of a man who had chosen solitude and was experiencing the consequences of that choice. I could have kept the kitchen as a pass-through, a functional space for coffee and feeding schedules and Post-it notes, rather than letting it become what it was becoming, which was the room where I told Benji Kwon things I hadn’t told anyone else in the whole damn world.
I could have stopped it.
I chose not to.
That distinction mattered, because it meant I was complicit in whatever this was. I couldn’t blame proximity or circumstance or the gravitational pull of a man who sat on counters and ate cereal from a mixing bowl at hours when decent people were asleep.
The pattern established itself without discussion. On the nights when the manuscript wouldn’t move and the cursor sat blinking like a, well, a curse, I’d give up around 2 a.m. and drift to the kitchen for tea.
Some nights, the kitchen was empty.
Some nights, Benji was already there, sitting on the counter beside the stove in his inside-out dinosaur shirt and his boxers, eating sugary, colorful cereal in the glow of the stove light I left on for Hiro.
We’d talk.
Or we wouldn’t.
Both were fine.
The not-talking surprised me more than the talking.
It always surprised me.
