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Six weeks. One last night. And then the dark.

But not yet.

Barbacks wasn’t quiet, not yet.

Chapter 32

Mark

The wake was tomorrow, and I wanted my own bed. I don’t fully know why. Dante and I had started rotating where we slept, and tonight was supposed to be at his place, but something deep inside longed for the comfort of my own bedroom.

We’d spent the whole day at the bar, all of us, stringing lights and fighting about the playlist and watching Rod prep food like he was provisioning a ship for a long crossing. Somewhere in the middle of it, a tiredness came over me that wasn’t about my body. I took Dante’s hand and said, “Come home with me.”

I guess some animal part of me wanted my own walls around me before a hard thing.

Dante understood without me explaining it. He just nodded and followed my truck across town in his car with his dog, who’d come to the bar to help with the preparations. We let ourselves into the house I still owned, and the quiet of it closed around us.

Dosty did his rounds. He checked the porch, confirmed the bed I’d built was where he’d left it, then dropped into it with a sigh.

I stood in my kitchen under the low light over the island and felt every one of my forty-eight years.

“Tomorrow’s going to be so hard,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know how to do a funeral for a building.”

“You aren’t doing it for the building.” He came around the island to me. “You’re doing it for the people. We’ve both attended more funerals than we’d like. We just don’t usually do them from behind a bar.”

That got something out of me that wasn’t quite a laugh. He had his arms around me, and I did the thing I still struggled to do, the hardest thing. I leaned and let myself put more weight on him than I’d have allowed myself back in September, back when I still thought love meant being the one who held everybody else up and never being held. He took it. He was built to take it, it turned out. All that time I’d spent being the rock for everybody else, and here was somebody who could be one for me.

“Hey,” he said, into my neck. “Come to bed.”

“It’s nine o’clock.”

“I didn’t say to sleep.”

We undressed each other slowly in the dark of my room, the window cracked, the December cool sliding in over us. It wasn’t like the frantic early times, and it wasn’t even like the tender night he brought the dog. It was its own time. It was two people reaching for the one thing that still worked when everything else had come apart in their hands.

He laid me down and took his time.

I let him.

That was the whole of it, by then.

That I could let him.

He knew me now.

He knew every nook and cranny.

He used all of it, slowly, until I forgot the wake and the money and the whole ruined autumn, until the only word I had left in the world was his name. I whispered it like it was the last one to ever be spoken.

“Dante.” I was already wrecked. “Dante, I need—”

“I know. I’ve got you.”

And he did.