Page 41

“Eleven years is nice, though.” He said it without any bitterness at all, which was worse. He wanted that. He wanted eleven years.

So did I.

“Okay. Round two,” he said, sucking in a deep, steadying breath.

I sipped my drink and watched him wade back in, all that bare, furred bulk moving through the harnesses and the studs. I thought about how I could end all of this. I could set down my glass and cross that floor and say one sentence. It’d be maybe eleven words. I don’t want you to find anybody. I want it to be me.

Okay, thirteen words.

I’d read men their own hearts in fewer words than that. I’d talked frightened strangers down off worse ledges with less.

But I didn’t cross the floor.

The second man Mark found wanted to discuss his podcast. He didn’t enjoy one; he produced one. Mark, constitutionally unable to wound an enthusiast, stood there nodding through a quarter hour of downloadable content until the words “ground floor” surfaced, at which point he escaped with the face of a man who’d walked this exact fairground before.

“He had a card,” Mark said, returning.

“They always have a card.”

“Why do they always have a card? He’s wearing chaps and no shirt, and he still found somewhere to keep a business card.”

“Because the ones who lead with a card,” I said, “are the ones who’ve learned they’ve got about ninety seconds before you figure them out.”

He looked at me. “That’s grim.”

“You asked.”

“I did.” He turned his glass, arms prickled with cold. I sat on my hands so I wouldn’t offer him my shirt. “You’re very smart, you know that? You say about one thing an hour, and it’s always the smartest thing anybody’s said all day. Where do you keep it the rest of the time?”

Behind a wall I built specifically so I’d never have to feel what I’m feeling right now, I thought.

“I ration it,” I said instead.

He laughed again, and I nearly went over the top of the wall right there on the strength of that laugh.

Then the third guy arrived, and the third one didn’t want to talk at all. He emerged from the crowd like something off a runway, all cheekbones and oiled, muscular shoulders and a harness that fit him the way harnesses are advertised to fit and almost never do. He marched straight up to Mark, scanned him from head to bare foot with frank appreciation, and said, “Oh, no. No, no. You can’t be out here dressed like that.”

“Like—” Mark looked down at himself, at the nothing he was wearing. “I’m not dressed at all.”

“Exactly the problem, handsome. All this—”the man gestured at the whole gray-furred expanse of him like a curator presenting a piece—“and you’re just letting it walk around unframed? Absolutely not. Hold still.”

Before Mark could do anything but make a startled sound, the man reached up, unbuckled his own harness, slid it off his glistening shoulders, and started fitting it onto Mark. I watched this happen. I sat on my stool some feet away and watched a beautiful stranger drape his own leather across Mark’s chest. I watched him reach around the breadth of Mark to work the buckle at his back. I watched him step in close and run a thumb under a strap to check the fit against all that bare, warm skin, murmuring something about how the black brought out Mark’s gray. I held my glass and didn’t break it, which took more from me than anyone would ever know.

“There.” The stranger stepped back to admire his work. Mark stood there in a borrowed harness two sizes too small, the straps cutting lines across a chest that filled every one of them, looking like a barrel someone had gift-wrapped in leather. And he looked utterly, helplessly delighted about it. “Now you’re at the party. God, look at you.”

“I look ridiculous,” Mark said, but he was laughing, big and pleased and pink to the ears, turning to show me, holding his arms out. “Dante. Dante, look. I’m at the party.”

“You’re at the party,” I agreed, raising my glass in bitter salute.

The stranger was still touching him. He had one hand on the strap, adjusting nothing, just keeping contact. Mark, warm from the attention, lit up by finally being wanted after walking in braced for rejection, wasn’t stopping him. And why would he? This was the whole point of the night. This was the thing he’d changed his shirt twice hoping for. I’d told him, “Go get it,” and he was getting it.

I sat there being cooked slowly from the inside like something left too long over a low flame. I could have told the man the harness looked better on Mark than it ever had on him. It did. And that was the terrible part. It was true.

The stranger drifted off eventually, the way they all drifted off, leaving Mark grinning in a harness he had no idea how to remove. He strode back to our corner practically glowing.

“Did you see that? He just, he put his harness on me.”

“I saw.”