“And you liked Rod in your kitchen even though he moved your cutting board—yes, I saw that, too—and brought a blowtorch.”
“He put the cutting board on the wrong side of the sink, and nobody should travel with a blowtorch. It’s not natural.”
“You liked Dante in the armchair. And you liked Chase with Potato. And you liked the fact that there were people in your home and dogs on your floorand noise in your rooms and nothing broke.Nothing broke, Peter. Everything held. Even you.”
He was right.
Everything had held.
Even me.
The structure I’d built for solitude had absorbed an evening of seven people and three dogs and Milk Dud tongs and a blowtorched pizza and the entire catalogue of social interaction that I’d been avoiding for years.
Magically, the walls were still standing.
The rooms felt larger than they had that morning.
Not emptier.
Larger.
As if other people had stretched something in my apartment that had been contracted for too long.
“David would have loved tonight,” I said without thinking. “He would have been the one organizing it. He would have known everyone’s drink order within five minutes and fallen asleep during the movie and woken up for the discussion with the best opinion in the room.”
“He sounds like he would have been a great addition to movie night.”
“He would have been the reason for movie night.”
Benji let the sentence sit.
He didn’t try to fix it or respond to it or move pastit, and the letting-be was a kindness I recognized and was grateful for.
We finished the dishes.
I did a final sweep of the living room, straightening cushions and retrieving a Milk Dud that had rolled under the bookshelf and checking on the dogs.
Benji carried recycling to the bin by the door.
I picked up a blanket that Mia had used and left crumpled on the couch. As I began to fold it, Benji came back from the door and reached for the other end.
Our hands met in the middle of the fabric.
Fingers overlapped on fleece.
His landed on mine with the warmth and weight of a hand I had watched make cocktails and cradle kittens and hold a three-legged dog’s head with a gentleness that didn’t match anything else about its owner. It was a hand that had spent all day making pizza dough because he’d wanted tonight to be good.
We both froze.
The blanket hung between us, suspended by hands that had found each other in the most ordinary way, in the middle of the most ordinary task, in an apartment that still smelled like pizza and popcorn and dog fur.
I should have pulled away.
That was the safe response, the one consistent with the boundaries I’d maintained since . . . that I’d maintained.
But I didn’t pull away.
My fingers stayed where they were.
