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"I'm getting married on Saturday."

"I know exactly when you're getting married. It's the reason I'm—"

"Why are you here?"

He said it flat. Not really a question. Blaine had stopped at the bottom of the porch steps with his back to me and said it into the dark.

"You know why I'm here," I breathed.

"I don't. That's the problem, Gregory. I truly don't." He went up two steps. "Thank you for tonight. I mean that."

Then he went inside, and the screen door closed behind him without making a sound.

Chapter Thirteen

Blaine

I woke up alone.

That was the first wrong thing. Steven is awake before me every day of his life — he gets up in the dark and does something with a foam roller and comes back to bed to tell me about it — and his side of the mattress was cold enough that he had been gone a while.

The second wrong thing was the light. It was coming in the east window at an angle that made no sense, hot and high and directly onto my face.

I rolled over and looked at the clock.

Eleven minutes to noon. I haven’t slept until noon since I was in school. I’m not certain I have slept until nine since I was in school. I lay there doing what I always do, which is inventory — the approving the final menu, Benny, the seating chart, whether anyone had heard from the hospital.

Then I saw the piece of paper propped against the lamp, in Steven's handwriting, which is round and enormous.

Turned your alarm off. You were a HERO last night. Sleep!!! xx S

Three exclamation points. He had gone into my phone to find the alarm.

And what I felt was relief. Not gratitude. Relief. Pure, physical, and enormous — the specific unclenching of a man who’s been handed four hours in which nobody expected anything of him, and who did not have to ask for them.

It lasted about six seconds.

Then the other thing arrived, right on schedule. Steven had been kind to me. He turned off my alarm and wrote me a note and let me sleep. And my body's honest response to four hours of not seeing him had been to go loose all over with gratitude.

There is a word for a man who feels that, and it isn't a pretty one.

I got up. And on the way to the bathroom, with no warning and no invitation whatsoever, the memory of my mouth on Gregory's mouth in the dark came up out of the floor of me like something surfacing.

"No," I said, out loud, to an empty room.

I want to be clear about the mechanism, because people imagine repression is a species of forgetting and it isn’t. It's a filing decision. You take the item, you note that it exists, you place it in a drawer you have decided not to open, and you close the drawer. It takes about a second and a half and you can do it while brushing your teeth.

Then I heard voices outside. I went to the window.

They were coming up the path from the meadow. My mother had both hands wrapped around Zephyr Amaranth Aeolian's elbow like a woman being escorted into an opera. She was talking without any discernible pause for breath. Every so often he would incline his head about four degrees and say something that took under three seconds, and she would stop walking entirely in order to receive it.

He had gotten a hat from somewhere. A wide-brimmed straw thing. It worked with the linen outfit.

At the top of the path my mother let go of his arm, took his face in both hands, and said something I couldn't hear.

"Damn you, Gregory," I said, out loud.

And realized, about half a second later, that I was grinning from ear to ear.