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“I know.”
“What the fuck is wrong with me?”
“Nothing.”
“Something has to be.”
“No.” I grip the back of his neck harder. “Something happened to you. That isn’t the same thing as something being wrong with you.”
Briggs cries into my shoulder. A year’s worth of humiliation comes out of him without order, every slap, kick, insult, and apology collapsing together until he can no longer make the sentences complete. I don’t force them into shape. I listen to every broken piece he can give me and hold him through the ones he cannot say.
The pasta grows cold behind us. Bread burns faintly in the oven until the smell reaches me, but I don’t move. Milwaukee darkens beyond the windows while we remain on the floor beneath its reflection.
Eventually, Briggs’s grip weakens against my shirt. He reaches blindly for the bottle sitting beside my thigh, and I pass it to him without pretending either of us needs another drink. He takes one, coughs hard enough to jostle us both, then rests the mezcal against his chest.
“I wanted you to be okay first,” he whispers, dragging the words together.
“I know.”
“You’re not.”
“Nope.” The p receives considerably more emphasis than the rest of the word, and yeah, I’m fucking shitfaced.
Briggs lifts his head enough to squint at me through one swollen eye. “You made the end of that word aggressive.”
“It knew what it did.”
“You should be allowed to fall ’part too.”
“I will.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
Briggs frowns with drunken concentration. “That’s what people say when they mean never.”
“Then you’ll make me.”
His face is destroyed, the bruise around his eye nearly black beneath the tears, but he still manages to point the mezcal bottle at me like he intends to enforce this shit personally.
“I will,” he says, though the words appear too heavy for his mouth. “I’m gonna make you have feelings.”
“Threatening.”
“All of them.”
“That seems excessive.”
“You have years of back feelings.”
I focus on one of the two of him I see. “You too.”
“Same shit.”
“It absolutely isn’t.”
Briggs thinks about that before giving up and dropping his forehead against my shoulder again. “You know what I meant.”
