Like he’s always known me.
I respond with his name, and his hand lands on top of mine, holding it tightly.
He’s close, I can tell. I know the signs now. The noises he makes, the way he moves. I can predict it. Sense it.
But he’s holding out, waiting.
“Do you think you can?” he asks. “Again?”
And as good as this feels, as much pleasure as I’m finding in this, I know I can’t. And I don’t need to.
I want this.
Exactly like this.
“Let go, Jacob,” I say. “Let go.”
And he does, my name on his tongue as he comes apart.
—
We sleep, and wake to find each other, then fall asleep again.
We laugh, whispering stories about the time he broke his leg climbing a tree, how James had to carry him home, how both his mother and Maggie yelled at the two of them for being so reckless, how they both cared for him as he got well.
I tell him about my mother, how we used to spend Friday nights on the couch, a sacred tradition of takeout and a movie that continued into my teen years, my preferred way to start the weekend even when my peers asked to hang out and do something else instead.
We spend the rest of the night doing everything we’ve been imagining, making the most of this time. Repeating the things we like until we’re both too exhausted, our limbs too heavy to move.
And when the morning comes, we’re both awake. Lying on our sides, facing each other.
I lift a hand, running it over his cheek, the texture rough, his stubble grown in.
“You’d look good with a beard,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yes. It’d be very professorial.”
He laughs, a joyful but tired sound. Neither of us got enough rest last night, but I wouldn’t change a second of it for anything.
“Why poetry?” I ask him. “That’s what you teach, right?”
“Yeah. I—” He stops, his brows creased in thought. “I never planned on it, really. I just—I had a hard time expressing myself as a kid. I didn’t talk much, and my mother, she worried about that.” He rolls onto his back, lifting his hand and placing it under his head. “Until James, I didn’t have very many friends, and I think it was actually Maggie who suggested it. James was signed up for football at the local community center, and Maggie saw there was a creative writing class there and told my mother about it. She signed me up, and…after that, I never considered studying anything else.”
“You write?” I imagined him in rooms of dusty textbooks, poring over old poems, writing papers, analyzing and finding meaning. I didn’t imagine him producing work of his own.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Poetry?”
He nods. “And short fiction, but I haven’t done that in a long time. It’s mostly poetry these days.”
My brows rise, and when I don’t say anything for a long moment, he looks over at me. “What?” he asks.
“Nothing. It’s just…I don’t understand how you didn’t lead with that.”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “What do you mean?”
