“Probably.”
“It can’t — Theo, it can’t be a thing. There’s two hundred and twenty thousand dollars and my mom and the government and a divorce on the other end of this, and if it gets — if we get attached and it goes bad, it doesn’t just hurt, it costs her her treatment, it costs you your status—”
“I know the math,” Theo said. “I know it better than you. I built it.”
“So we agree. It was nothing. Steam. We don’t do it again.”
A long silence. The parking-lot light through the curtain. The slow, even quiet of Theo, the maddening calm back in place, except Shane had seen behind it now, had heard the Swedish word, and he’d never be able to believe in the calm again.
“We don’t do it again,” Theo agreed, in the dark, in the flat voice, and Shane lay there and listened to the man he’d married lie as badly as Shane had ever heard anyone lie, and recognized it, because it was his own lie, in a Swedish accent, and he closed his eyes.
* * *
Shane woke to gray light and the sound of the resistance band.
One second of nothing, the warm undifferentiated dark of deep sleep, and then it all arrived at once, no staggering, no mercy: the dive bar, the club soda going warm in his hand, the kitchen, the word coward in his own mouth, the bed, the bruise on his ribs and Theo’s mouth on it, deliberate and soft, an apology neither of them had earned. What Theo had said into his skin about who’d taught him he was only worth what he gave.
Shane lay very still on his back and stared at the ceiling and his whole body ached, muscle and bone and the floated rib and the place on his inner arm where the ice pack strap had left a red mark, and he waited for the regret he’d promised himself before he fell asleep.
The ceiling didn’t move. His hands were flat on the mattress. He noticed, distantly, that he’d slept on his half. His half, because somewhere in the last eight weeks he’d started thinking of it that way, the left side mine, the right side his. At some point in the night he’d moved to the center, and he was still there, and the sheets on the right side were cold.
He made himself get up. Made himself be fine about it: feet on the cold floor, thirty seconds in the bathroom, a face he didn’t look at too hard in the mirror. His ribs ached the deep inward ache of a healing bruise and he pressed two fingers to it and remembered the shape of Theo’s mouth there and had to put his hand down on the sink and breathe.
No regret. Still none. He’d checked.
The coffee was made. Two cups, because Theo made two cups now without being asked, had started doing it sometime in week three and never mentioned it, and the left one was on the left side of the machine, in reach, exactly where Shane put his hand every morning, and that small routing of a habit that wasn’t even his yet, that Theo had learned without announcement and without credit, sat in Shane’s throat for a second before he swallowed it.
Theo was on the floor in the gray light, the resistance band around his wrist, the slow pull and release of his shoulder rehab, the same as every morning, the same twenty-three reps, the same counting Shane had learned to hear from the other room, and Shane stood in the kitchen doorway with his coffee and watched him and couldn’t make himself move, and in his chest a pressure built, too big and too soft, the thing he’d been calling nothing for four days, and he shut his eyes against it.
“You are awake,” Theo said, not turning around. “I can hear you panicking. It is very loud.”
“I’m not panicking.”
“You are doing the breathing. The shootout breathing. In through the nose, hold, like you are about to take a penalty shot.” The band released, slow and controlled. “We said it does not have to mean anything. So it does not. You can stop taking the penalty shot.”
The out, handed over, the permission to call it nothing, and Shane stood there with his coffee and looked at the back ofthe man offering it: Theo expected to be left. Expected this to be the morning the loud American came to his senses, was already making himself small and easy to leave. I’ll make it cost you nothing, the same move as the money, the same move as everything. Take it and go and don’t feel held.
“What if I don’t want it to not mean anything,” Shane heard himself say.
The band stopped.
Theo didn’t turn around for a long moment. When he spoke his voice was very careful. “Then it is more complicated. And more dangerous. And there is still a call-up coming and a divorce in the deal.”
“Yeah.” Shane stared at the ceiling. “I know.”
“So we should be smart.”
“Yeah. We should.” Shane got up, and crossed the cold floor, and crouched down next to his husband on the living room rug, close, and Theo turned to look at him, pale eyes wary as a stray, and Shane didn’t kiss him, just looked, just stayed. “We’ll be smart on Tuesday. We’ve got a game Tuesday. We’ll be smart then.” And Theo looked at him, the wary eyes going wide and quiet at once, looking at what he’d been told his whole life wasn’t there, and didn’t say anything, and they were not smart, and they had a game Tuesday, and they did it again on Sunday.
Chapter 7
Theo Lindgren had spent his entire life building rules, because rules were how you survived being a thing other people needed. Rules told you what you were for. He had said too much in the hotel, the shoulder, the singing, all of it, and had been building back around the breach ever since, mortaring it shut with silence and routine, so that by the time what was happening with Shane became undeniable, not once, not steam, but a pattern, a habit, a Tuesday and a Thursday and the long Sunday, Theo did what he did with everything that frightened him. He tried to write rules for it.
“We should have terms,” he said, the third night, both of them sweaty and wrecked across the disordered bed, the sheets a ruin neither had the will to fix.
Shane laughed, breathless. “Oh my god. You want to draft a new napkin.”
“I want to be clear. So nobody is hurt.” Theo stared at the ceiling. “We do not — talk about it. Outside this room. We are the same in the room, in the barn. Cold. Roommates. Enemies, if you like. And here we do this. And it does not mean—”
