Evan dried the dishes while she washed them. They’d been doing this since he was tall enough to reach the counter. Hot water, steam, the clink of plates, the same sequence every week for decades. He dried each one and stacked it in the cabinet and tried not to think about how Finn had stood in this exact position in Evan’s kitchen, leaning there with a coffee mug in both fists, and had looked at Evan’s alphabetized bookshelf and saidof course you dowith a grin that hit Evan somewhere behind the sternum and stayed there.
Evan blinked hard. Kept drying.
In the driveway his mother hugged him. She held on longer than usual and Evan let her, his chin on her hair, his arms around her shoulders, and a noise came out of his chest that wasn’t a word. She held tighter. She didn’t ask. She just held on, and the December air was in Evan’s lungs and the porch light was on and his mother’s arms were around him and he hadnot been held by anyone since Finn, and the recognition of that cracked something in his ribs that he was going to have to drive home with.
“Whatever it is,” she said.
Evan drove home.
* * *
Evan couldn’t sleep in his bed.
The left side smelled like Finn. Soap and skin and sweat. Finn had slept there once and his scent had soaked into the pillowcase and Evan had not washed it because washing it would mean admitting it was over and he was not ready to admit it was over even though it was, definitively, over, because Finn had opened the door and Evan had walked through it without saying a single word that mattered.
Evan slept on the couch.
The second night he stripped the bed and put on new linens and lay there looking up at nothing and it was wrong. The last time he’d been lying here Finn had been next to him, talking about his sister’s terrible taste in men, and Evan had laughed. Not the polite exhale he used at department functions. An actual laugh. And Finn had rolled onto his side and looked at him and saidyou should do that more.And Evan had saidwhat.And Finn had saidlaugh like nobody’s grading you on it.
Evan got up and made coffee at three in the morning and drank it standing in the unlit kitchen and the house was so motionless he could hear his own pulse. The tap dripped. The refrigerator hummed. The coffee tasted like nothing. Evan stood at the counter and pressed his thumb into the ceramic and thought about Finn standing in the same position the morning after, his shirt buttoned wrong, the collar crooked, and the way Evan had catalogued the crooked collar and held onto it becauseit was evidence that Evan Tremblay was a man who could fail to notice something about his own appearance, and Finn had wanted that evidence the way Evan wanted data: as proof that the person he was looking at was real.
* * *
Work was work. Evan sat at his desk and took calls and wrote confirmation numbers and opened scout reports and closed them and could not have told you a single thing he’d read. He kept picking up his phone. The reflex was running, the one that wentFinn would laugh at thisortell Finn about the ventilation meetingor justFinn,his brain pinging the name like a search with no results. He’d pick up the phone and his thumb would hover and then the rest of him would catch up and he’d put it down. Nine times on the first day. Evan counted because counting was what he did. By the third day he stopped counting because the number was going up.
Evan ate standing at the counter. Frozen things, heated and chewed and swallowed. He turned on the TV and turned it off. He sat on the couch and thought about Finn burning toast in his kitchen, backwards cap, bare feet on the tile, smoke coming off the toaster, sayingI contain multitudeswith that grin, and Evan had laughed until his ribs ached and Finn had looked at him through the smoke and Evan had known, right then, with total clarity:this is it. This is what I’ve been looking for.
And then he’d taken that person and said his name in a list.
Fuck.
Evan said it out loud. Nobody heard it. It didn’t help. Evan said it again, louder, and gripped the edge of the sink until his knuckles went white and his arms shook and his breathing went ragged and short and ugly. The guy who never lost control. The guy with the systems and the calendar and the clipboard.Standing in his own kitchen at eleven at night, shaking, because he had been so goddamn guarded for so goddamn long that the one time it actually mattered, the one time someone stood on the other side of a door and needed him to be different, the reflex had fired before he’d even known it was loaded.
The shaking lasted until it didn’t. Then Evan wiped his face. Poured the old coffee out. Went to bed. The new linens smelled like detergent and absolutely nothing else.
* * *
Evan came around the corner in the hallway, and Finn was at the other end.
Fifty feet. Full afternoon lighting, everything visible, nowhere to hide. Finn in team sweats, hoodie unzipped, hair damp from practice. Walking toward Evan with the same easy stride he used everywhere. Finn didn’t slow down.
Evan’s fingers twitched at his side.
Finn looked at him. Those brown eyes. The same ones that had looked at Evan across the kitchen table and saidyour voice didn’t change.Except now there was nothing behind them. Not anger. Not hurt. Nothing. Like a window somebody had closed.
Finn nodded. Chin up, chin down, gaze forward.
The professional nod. The one Evan had been giving Finn in the hallways for months. The one that meantI see you, but we don’t know each other here.Finn had learned it. Finn was giving it to him, flawless, like a drill he’d practiced.
Finn walked past. Close enough that Evan could smell him. Soap, cold air, and under both, the scent that had lived in the truck and on the pillowcase and in every corner of Evan’s life for months. Finn’s stride didn’t break. He was gone.
Evan stood in the hallway. His lungs wouldn’t work. Evan made it to his office and closed the door, put his forehead on the glass panel and breathed until he could breathe again.
* * *
Late. Building empty. Laptop screen glowing in the unlit office.
Evan’s calendar. Blue for operations. Gray for meetings. Green for travel. The system that had organized his entire professional life for fifteen years, the system that meant nothing got lost, nothing was forgotten, nothing slipped through the structure he’d built around himself like armor.
