Page 97 of The Art of Drowning

Damien lived in a condo not far from where he worked. He had the unit on the end, so he only had to deal with neighbors on one side of him. It was a cute building with white siding and blue shutters and everyone had a fenced back yard. The yards were the size of a postage stamp, but Damien hated lawncare anyway. I wondered if his allergies still plagued him.

Damien took the six-pack from me, removed two, and put the rest in the fridge.

“I can’t believe you’re here.” He cracked his beer open and took a long swallow.

“Can we sit down?” I asked. “Pizza is a lot easier to eat if I don’t have to hold the boxes. And the flowers.”

“Right.” Damien’s cheeks turned a ferocious shade of red and he grabbed the flowers from me, finally registering that they existed. They’d been an impulse, but seeing the way his eyes softened when he looked at them made me wish I’d bought him flowers a long time ago. And that made me wish I’d done a lot of things a long time ago.

“Just, uh… the living room is through there. I’ll be right in.”

Damien’s front door opened up into a small boot room just off the kitchen. The cabinets gave away the age of the building, or at least the last update, which would have happened sometime during the ‘90s. But it was clean and cute and walking inside of it made my heart race.

I’d never seen Damien’s room when we were teens, so this was the first time I’d ever seen him in his own environment. His home was tidy. Counters that were clean of clutter except a knife block and a few mushroom-shaped canisters. Damien even had a fucking vase to put the flowers in, which I was surprised at, to be honest, but I kept my mouth shut and wandered into the living room.

His living room was bright. The back wall was basically all windows, and it drenched the room in the fading sunlight. Mushrooms made another appearance in his decor choices. His large sectional couch had a few throw pillows on it, and all of them had the same red-capped mushroom art. An unfolded blanket was draped haphazardly on the back of the couch like he’d been burrowed under it until just a few minutes ago.

The television was paused, and I had no idea what he’d been watching. I set the pizzas down on the coffee table, sat down, and opened my beer. That first sip went down so nicely, and I thought about draining the entire beer and asking for another.

Nervous? Me?

Yeah, okay, probably.

Damien sat down next to me, hit play on his TV show, and flipped open a box of pizza like it was a regular Saturday night and we’d done this a million times.

God, how I wished that were true.

“What are we watching?” The pizza had cooled a bit on the way over, but I still blew on it before taking a bite.

“Sons of Anarchy.”

“I’ve never seen that one.”

Damien paused and looked over at me, then reached for the remote. “Well, then we have to start over, don’t we?”

The butterflies in my stomach did a fucking swan dive and my whole chest emptied out. The way he spoke gave those words weight.

“Yeah, I guess we do.” I fucking smiled at him because how could I fucking not.

I can’t say that by the end of the first episode that I knew who was who or what was happening because I’d been paying more attention to Damien than anything else.

After he ate half a pizza and drank two beers, he leaned against the back of the couch. His legs were spread and he had one arm resting in his lap. The other was on the back of the couch, a beer dangling from his fingertips. He appeared to be watching the show, but I had an uncanny feeling that I was the one being observed.

I did my best to follow the show. I really did, but I knew that I was going to have to go back to my apartment and sit among my boxes and rewatch these episodes as I unpacked.

The night Damien had driven away, I knew what I had to do. What I wanted to do. Making the decision had been the easy part. Getting my shit together had taken weeks. I had to convince my job to let me go fully remote, then I had to sell my house. I decided against buying a house here, only because the next time I bought a house, I hoped Damien would be involved in the process, that maybe we could start to make all those old dreams come true. Or maybe we’d make new ones. I wanted to leave those options open.

“How did you get Bowie to agree to tell you where I live?” Damien paused the episode and turned to face me on the couch.

“A lot of nagging. Weeks of nagging. He’s protective. And stubborn.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. I like that you have someone like him in your corner. Anyway, when I sent him screenshots of my rental agreement, he finally cracked.”

Damien’s eyes narrowed, then went wide as he took in what I said. “Rental agreement?”

“I sold my house. I’m renting a two bedroom over at Cedar Court Apartments.”