Shane didn’t know what he’d expected. Not romance, obviously; there was nothing romantic about a Tuesday off-day and a fluorescent room that smelled like printer toner and a clerk named Donna who’d seen stranger things than two enormous men in their good flannel shirts shuffling toward her counter. But he hadn’t expected beige. He hadn’t expected it to land so much like getting a license plate renewed.
“Photo ID, both of you,” Donna said. “And the witness?”
They didn’t have a witness. They hadn’t thought about a witness. Theo and Shane looked at each other with identical expressions of low animal panic, more in sync than they’d been all season, and Donna sighed the sigh of a woman who’d seen this exact moment four hundred times and called over her shoulder, “Reggie. Need a body.”
Reggie from records came and stood with them, bored and kind, and so the only person who watched Theo Lindgren and Shane Novak get married was a man named Reggie who was thinking about lunch.
It went fast. There were forms. Shane’s hand shook signing the real one, the legal one, the pre-shootout shiver, when the building goes quiet and it’s just you and what you have to do. Theo’s hand did not shake. Of course it didn’t. Theo’s hand had never shaken at anything; he met every disaster with the same flat Nordic calm, like the world was a drill he’d already run.
“You’ll want rings, eventually,” Donna said, not unkindly, sliding the certificate across. “For the photos. People always forget the rings.”
“We’re getting rings,” Shane said before Theo could speak.
“Then by the power vested in me,” Donna said, with the enthusiasm of a woman reading a cereal box, “I now pronounce you married. Congratulations. Next.”
They stopped at a pawnshop on the way to the apartment. Theo found it on his phone without being asked, which annoyed Shane in a way he couldn’t articulate. The man had a plan for everything, a contingency for the contingency, even the rings, even the part that was supposed to mean nothing.
The shop sat on a block between a laundromat and a check-cashing place. A woman behind bulletproof glass sold them two plain tungsten bands for thirty-eight dollars. Theo put his on in the car, without ceremony, and it settled onto his left hand like it had always been there. Shane put his on too, and it didn’t fit. Tooloose. It spun when he made a fist. “We will get it sized,” Theo said. “It’s fine,” Shane said. “It’s not like it means anything.” They drove the rest of the way in silence, Shane turning the loose ring with his thumb, the cheapest thing either of them owned and the heaviest.
Shane Novak stood in a parking lot and was somebody’s husband, and the somebody was the guy who’d told him that morning he announced his diet. The toner smell was still in his nose. Outside, it was four degrees and starting to snow. Theo held the door for him, which he’d never done before, and Shane walked through it into the rest of his life without the faintest idea what he’d done.
* * *
Theo’s apartment was exactly what Shane would have guessed if he’d ever wasted thirty seconds guessing about Theo’s apartment.
It was clean to the point of accusation. One couch, gray, that did indeed look about a foot too short for the man who’d just claimed it. One bookshelf, half books in Swedish and half a regimented row of protein and supplements, ordered by function. A kitchen with exactly the equipment a person needed and not one item more. A framed photo on the windowsill of a woman with Theo’s exact pale eyes and none of his stoneface. She was laughing, mid-laugh, head back. Shane looked at it a second too long and Theo crossed the room and turned it away from him, which told Shane everything and nothing.
“Bedroom,” Theo said, opening a door. “Yours.”
The bed was a queen, made with the tightness of a man who’d learned to make a bed somewhere with rules. There was only one bed because there had only ever been one person, and Shane stood in the doorway with his two duffels, everything heowned that mattered, two duffels, that was the sum of Shane Novak, and he looked at the bed and the duffels and the bed and couldn’t find where he fit in either of them.
“This is weird,” he said. “This is really weird, Theo.”
“Yes,” Theo agreed, from behind him.
“We hate each other.”
“Yes.”
“And now we live here. Married. In your apartment with your weird supplements and your one couch.”
“Yes.” A pause. “There is a story you should know, before it comes up. I keep the thermostat at sixty-three. This is not negotiable. My body recovers better cold.”
Shane turned around. Theo was standing in the little living room holding the marriage certificate, looking for somewhere to put it, the giant unsmiling man with a document that bound them, hunting for a spot on a counter that had nothing on it, and the laugh came up before Shane could stop it, the first real one in a month, and it surprised them both.
“Sixty-three,” Shane said. “You’re going to freeze me to death and collect the — wait, is there insurance? Did I marry you into a life insurance situation?”
“You are worth more to me alive,” Theo said, deadpan, and set the certificate down in the exact center of the empty counter, squaring its edges to the edges of the laminate, and Shane laughed again, harder, and hated himself for it, because the deal was clean and cold and nothing else. He’d written it down. He’d pressed the pen so hard it tore the napkin. And here he was on day one laughing in the kitchen of a man he’d sworn to keep at the length of a hockey stick.
“I’m taking the bed,” Shane said, to cover it.
“It is in the agreement.”
“I’m taking all the hot water, too.”
“There is not much.” Theo went to the closet and took out a blanket, folded into a perfect square, and laid it on the too-short couch. He sat down on the edge to test it, and his knees came up almost to his chest. Shane stood in the doorway of the bedroom that was now his and watched his enemy try to fit his enormous body onto a piece of furniture that would never hold him, all so Shane could have the bed. There was no name for it, no room for it in the agreement. He went into the bedroom, shut the door, and stood in the cold with his two duffels and his mother’s secret and his ring-shaped future, and thought: this is going to be a problem. It was going to be such a problem.
* * *
