“It was a frequent-flyer program with feelings, and you know it.” Wes didn’t even break stride. He was fully on offense now, looming over Finn the way Finn had spent four years looming, metaphorically, over me. “Four years, Finn. Four years of ‘when’s the last time you took a holiday, Mark,’ and ‘barely a date, Mark.’ You sat that man in the front row of a drag show to be devoured alive, and now look at you. Look at you. Red as your own head over an architect you’ve not even taken to dinner. You’re vibrating. You’ve gone the color of a stop sign.”
And he had.
That was the glorious part.
Finn O’Brien, who had made a four-year career of turning me purple at parties, who had narrated my every blush to entire rooms of strangers, who had once announced to a clothing-optional resort that I was covering a mark on my neck, was sitting at my kitchen island the precise shade of a fire engine, opening and closing his mouth, for once in his lifeentirely without words.
I lost it.
And we’ve established that I don’t laugh easy.
But this came up out of me like water through a broken main, helpless and huge. It was the kind of laugh that bends a man in half. I had to put both hands on the counter to stay upright, because in all our years, I had never once seen Finn caught flat. Wes had done it in under a minute with a single architect.
“Don’t,” Finn warned, pointing at me, going redder. “Don’t you dare, you great gray traitor—”
“You found a Mark,” I wheezed.
“I didn’t—”
“A smaller,IrisherMark.” I was gone, completely gone, tears in it now. “He’s Irisher. I don’t even know what that means, but it’s perfect! Ask him about his favorite beam, Finn. For me. On the date. Ask him—”
“I hate the both of you,” Finn announced to the kitchen, with enormous dignity, which would have carried more weight if he hadn’t been the color of a poppy. “I brought wine into this house. I brought my joy. And this is the thanks. I’ve been ganged up on by a falcon and a building.”
“A falcon and a building,” Wes repeated, savoring it. He looked at me, and that set me off again. Then Wes started laughing, too, and then Finn, who couldnever stay outside a laugh for long, even one at his own expense. He put his red face in his hands and started shaking with it, and the three of us stood in my kitchen and howled until the onions burned and we had to start the whole dinner over.
We had the real conversation later, after Finn had gone home flushed and threatening and beloved, promising to report back on the architect.
Wes and I sat on the back porch in the dark, his feet in my lap. He told me about his next job. A hotel chain wanted him on retainer. It was a real contract with a base, a center of gravity. He could still travel, would always travel. The wandering was stitched too deep to pull out, and I’d never want to, anyway, but it meant Tampa would officially be his home, not just the place his bags landed between flights.
It would become the place he actually, officially, lived.
“I’d keep the storage unit in Denver,” he said, turning his beer in his hands, looking out at the yard, which was how I knew it cost him. “For a while, just so I know it’s there.”
“Keep it forever if you want.”
“I might not want it forever.” He said it quietly, surprised by his own arithmetic. “For seven months I’ve been waiting to feel trapped, Mark, waiting for the walls to close in, because that’s what always happens. If I stay too long anywhere, the floor starts feeling like a held breath.” He looked at me. “But it hasn’t, not here, not with you. I’ve run out of ways to explain it except the obvious one. It’s not the place. It was never the place.” His mouth did the slow rearranging thing. “It’s the man standing in it.”
I wasn’t built for speeches, so I didn’t make one.
I took the beer out of his hands and set it on the rail and pulled him into me. He came easy, the way he’d come easy in a doorway at half past midnight a falcon’s lifetime ago.
“Take the job,” I said into his hair. “Bring the lenses and leave them in my sock drawer. Clutter up every system I’ve got.”
“You sure? It’s concrete, Mark. It’s the opposite of two bags. You’d have a man underfoot. Permanently.”
“I’ve spent my whole life trusting things I could measure,” I said. “And then a falcon landed on my arm and taught me that the only thing worth having is the thing you can’t run the numbers on.” I pulled back to look at him, at the weather and the good humor and the amber eyes that had snagged meacross a lobby full of strangers when I was the most armored man on an island. “You came back every time. I stopped bracing for you to leave a long time ago. Stay and I’ll spend the rest of my life trusting you to land.”
He kissed me then, on a back porch in Tampa.
A man who’d spent his whole life never staying put decided slowly, of his own free will, to stay. I held on to him the way I held on to nothing else in this measurable world, loosely, without bracing, the way you hold a falcon that has chosen the glove.
Finn’s date with the architect went, by his own breathless account, catastrophically well.
He told us over dinner three nights later, the three of us crammed around our table, Wes refilling glasses and me pretending to be put upon and failing. At some point, somewhere between the main course and Finn describing the architect’s unreasonable forearms, I sat back and looked at the two of them, my best mate gone soft and luminous over an architect, and the falcon who’d folded his wings in my kitchen. I thought about a raffle ticket, and a front row, and a span of warm water I’d been too carefulto cross.
“What?” Wes said, catching me looking.
“Nothing.” I picked my glass back up. “Just measuring something.”
