Page 68 of Puck You Both

I WAKE UP feeling like a parade.

Sore in expensive places, delighted with myself before I even remember why, and then I remember why, and the delight requires some actual effort to manage so I don't wake the entire floor.

Beside me, Patrick is answering email.

In bed, at 7:40 in the morning, like a sociopath. The attachment on his screen is called FINAL_VENDOR_COMPARISON_v8.

"There's a v8 now?" I ask into the pillow.

"The florist revised."

He’s unbelievable. "Patrick. The earth moved for three separate people last night and you're versioning documents?"

"The florist doesn't know that."

I surface far enough to look at him. There's a mark on his throat that I'm proud of, and the stubble on his jaw has grown visibly overnight.

I let him have two more minutes with tablecloths. It's a personal record of mine, and I spend it staring at the ceiling, listening to the heating unit hum, while last night reorganizes itself in my head into something that needs a label and doesn't have one.

"Sooo." I walk two fingers across the comforter toward his laptop. "The chair guy."

He gives me a, "Mm?" eyes still glued to the screen.

"The chair guy, Patrick."

"I was there."

"Were you, now? Because a man who was there would not be CC'ing a florist right now. He'd be lying in the wreckage like me, thinking about how the chair guy thanked us for our hustle—" Patrick's mouth twitches, there and gone "—which I've been quoting in my head since I opened my eyes, by the way. Best post-game review of my career, now that I think about it.”

He types three more words and stops. I watch him decide something, and then he closes the laptop. "Say what you're overthinking."

"I don't overthink."

He waits. I overthink.

"Last night." My hands get involved, describing a shape that includes three people, the chair, the bed, and the general concept of Wisconsin. "Did it feel like we had… You know. Audience?"

Patrick does me the courtesy of actually running the tape in his mind before he answers, eyes somewhere on the dead TV. "No."

"Right? Right? And it should have. That's a whole extra man, Patrick, that's a lot of extra man, and I've had audiences—" his eyebrow moves, and I ride straight past it "—so I know what an audience feels like. You perform, they receive, everybody goes home. Last night I looked over at him and it didn't feel like a show having a viewer. It felt..."

I run out of words, which happens to me roughly never. Patrick picks it up off the ground where I dropped it. "He didn't visit," he says. "He fit."

The two words he budgeted knock the air out of me.

"Yeah." My voice comes out small. "That."

The heating unit buzzes. Somewhere down the hall a door closes on somebody's ordinary morning, and I say the next part to the ceiling, because the ceiling doesn't have blue eyes that see everything.

"If we do this… If this ever becomes a thing we're actually doing. It's not us-plus-guy, Patrick." My heart is moving quicker now. "I've been the plus-guy. I know what the guest bed feels like. You get invited to everything and you're on the lease for none of it, and everyone's so nice about it, and then one day you're a great time somebody used to know." An old wound puts its hand up. I let it talk. "I'm not doing that to him. I'd rather stop now, while it would only break me a little."

Patrick has gone completely still beside me. "No," he says after a long moment. "He's not a guest."

I turn my head. He's already looking at me, and there's nothing managed in his face now. For a second the room feels very full for a place containing two people and a chair.

"Okay," I say. My eyes sting a bit, which is nobody's business. "Good meeting. I'm putting it in the minutes."

"Theo."