Opened it.
Closed it again.
Hiro, who was now on his bed in the corner, lifted his head and looked at me with the patient concern of a dog who had been watching his human open and close a laptop for ten minutes and who was beginning to question the purpose of the exercise.
“I know,” I told him. “Daddy’s okay, buddy. I promise.”
He put his head back down. His tail moved once. It was an almost wag.
I didn’t make a decision to stand up. My body simply performed the action, the way it performedactions in surgery when my hands knew what to do before my mind had finished deliberating. I was on my feet and moving toward the hallway before the analytical part of my brain could intervene with objections. The objections were there. I could hear them assembling in the background. They were a well-organized queue of reasons why walking down a hallway toward the man whose hands I’d held over a blanket twelve hours ago was inadvisable and premature and inconsistent with the careful emotional distance I’d maintained between myself and literally everyone in the world since David.
The objections were noted.
But I kept walking.
The kitchen was empty and dim, the only light coming from the stove, which cast everything in that warm amber glow that had become, over two and a half months, the color of every honest conversation I’d had with Benji Kwon.
I went to the fridge and read his note.
I’ll make them whenever you want. You don’t have to ask. Just leave the light on and I’ll know you’re up for it.
— B
No sparkle emoji.No joke.
Just leave the light on.
The stove light was on.
It had been on for twenty minutes.
He would have seen it when he came through the kitchen. He would have known what it meant because Benji knew what everything meant. He understood every gesture and every silence and every light left burning in every empty room.
I stood at the refrigerator and read the note. I could feel the architecture shift. It wasn’t a collapse or a crumble, but a shift, the way a building shifts when the ground beneath it changes, when the foundation adjusts to accommodate a new weight that isn’t going away.
I could go back to my desk, I thought.I could open my laptop and try again and spend another hour deleting sentences about David while my brain refused to think about anything except the man in the foster room and the note on the fridge and the light on the stove.
I could maintain the structure for another night, another week, another month.
The structure would hold. It had held for two years. It could hold longer.
But holding wasn’t the same as living, and I was tired of the difference.
I walked down the hall, stopped at the foster roomdoor, raised my hand, and knocked twice. It was the same knock I used at exam room doors at the clinic. It was measured and professional, the knock of a man who was about to enter a room where something vulnerable was waiting.
The door opened slowly.
Benji was in his boxers and dinosaur shirt—inside out, as always. His hair was doing the thing it did in the evenings. His face, when he saw me standing in his doorway, went through a rapid sequence of expressions. I was an expert, a professional, in reading unspoken cues.
I couldn’t read his.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“Everything okay?”
“I can’t write.”
