I’m easy to find.
I’m the largest thing in most rooms, and these days I’m usually the one grinning like an idiot, which is strange, because I’d never been a grinnerbefore Wes and our cove.
What I hadn’t expected was that he kept coming back.
The first few months I’d donned my armor and braced for the one where he didn’t, where the open sky won out over the fixed point in Tampa, where the falcon decided the glove was a cage after all.
I’m good at bracing.
I’d built a life out of it.
But he never stopped coming back.
And somewhere in there, without either of us announcing it, the bracing stopped, and the armor was set aside.
Coincidentally, that’s roughly when Finn started inviting himself over for dinner three nights a week.
“He’s here again,” Wes said, not looking up from the onions he was chopping. “I can hear his car. He drives like a man being chased by his own decisions.”
“He brings wine,” I said, in Finn’s defense. “And amusing stories of those decisions.”
“He bringsonebottle of wine and drinks most of it himself.” Wes pointed the knife at me fondly. “I love him. I want that on the record before I say the rest. I love that man like a brother, but he’s eaten in this house more times than you have this month, and you live here.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Finn had taken to Wes the way he took to everyone, instantly and completely. Except that with Wes, there was an added layer, because the two of them had discovered within about a week of meeting that their shared favorite hobby in all the world was making me suffer. They pursued that hobby like a priest does his calling.
The door banged open without a knock.
“I brought wine,” he announced, holding up a single bottle.
“He’s brought wine,” Wes drawled into the onions.
“And I’ve news.” Finn dropped into a chair at the kitchen island with the gravity of a man about to deliver a State of the Union. “I’ve a date, a real one, on Saturday.”
I set down the pan I was holding.
This was, in the four-plus years I’d known Finn, a rare and precious event. It was something like spotting a comet, or him offering to carry luggage. “A date?”
“A date . . . with a man. He’s a whole man, Mark, with a job and his own teeth and everything.” Finn was glowing, the way he glowed when a plan was coming together. “I met him at a bar. He’s an architect.”
And that’s when Wes, my beautiful falcon,swooped down. I watched the way I’d once watched him see the gold light coming over a headland, a man recognizing the exact instant a thing becomes worth capturing. He set the knife down, turned around slowly, and leaned back against the counter with his arms crossed. He wore the lazy, dangerous grin of a man who had waited seven months for the tables to turn.
“An architect?” Wes asked.
“An architect,” Finn confirmed, oblivious to the danger approaching, as he poured himself wine.
“So let me see if I’ve got this.” Wes tilted his head. “After four years of torturing this man”—he nodded at me—“about his terrible taste in workwear and his inability to relax and his great tragic loneliness, you, Finn O’Brien, have gone and fallen for a man who designs buildings for a living. Said man will, on your very first date, almost certainly want to talk about load-bearing walls.”
There was a silence.
I watched it slam into Finn the way a clothing-optional sign had once smacked me in the forehead—slowly, then all at once.
“That’s . . . no . . . that’s different—”
“You’ve found yourself a Mark,” Wes said, delighted, advancing now, scenting blood. “A smaller, Irisher Mark, another man obsessed with structure.Tell me, does he have a favorite type of beam? Has he mentioned his feelings about drywall? Because I have to tell you, Finn, the last time someone in this house got excited about a man who reads blueprints, it ended with him giving the least romantic speech in recorded history in a doorway at midnight.”
“It was a good speech,” I objected.
