Note: Epicene is a fictional division/publication of the Responsive Male. It is not automatically turned on as a subscription when you subscribe to the Responsive Male. If you would like to add this publication to your subscription, unfortunately, you will have to do so manually by adjusting your subscription settings.
Instructions on how to do so can be found here: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/8914938285204-How-do-I-subscribe-to-or-unsubscribe-from-a-section-on-Substack
~ Penelope
I have a theory about Perry Mason, which is that it is not a courtroom show. It is a horror show for liars.
Nobody on Perry Mason gets away with anything. That is the entire premise of the program. Fifty-two minutes, a murder, a wrongly accused woman with excellent posture, and then Perry puts people in a chair under lights in front of witnesses and waits.
The mouth holds out for a while. The mouth is a professional. The mouth has been rehearsing since the opening credits. But the body has been wanting to confess the whole time, and the body always wins.
Somebody’s hands shake. Somebody’s voice climbs half an octave on the word never. Somebody stands up in the gallery — not even the defendant, some person from the edge of the story — and just gives themselves away, because that is what bodies do under observation.
They tell the truth. It’s the only language they have.
I found the show through the remake, the moody one, and then went back to the 1957 original the way you read the book after the movie, to see what everyone had been lying about.
Now the three of us are ten episodes into season three and I am possibly thinking about law school.
I say possibly because saying it plainly turns it into a fact, and facts can be held against you.
My mother thinks the binge is a phase. My mother thought the bookstore was a phase. My mother has been waiting for the real Hannah to arrive for nineteen years, like a package.
Meanwhile I watch a fictional attorney destroy perjurers in black and white and feel something in my chest that other girls describe feeling at concerts.
Anyway. That’s the theory. It matters later. Everything matters later; that’s the other thing Perry Mason teaches you.
We live over the bookstore now. All three of us.
I want to state that plainly, because when I say it sideways people assume I’m being metaphorical, and I am not being metaphorical.
There is a staircase behind the receiving room at McAllister Books, and at the top of the staircase there is a door, and behind the door there is an apartment with three bedrooms, a radiator that goes tink when it has opinions, and a lease with three names on it. The lease is in Brandon’s handwriting because Brandon has the kind of handwriting landlords trust.
Mr. McAllister used to rent it to a man who repaired clocks. Then the man retired to wherever clock men go, and Mr. McAllister mentioned it at the register the way old men mention things, which is to say at me while pretending to count fives, and I went up the stairs on my break and stood in the empty front room and felt the specific vertigo of a want arriving fully formed.
I had described this apartment out loud once, months before I knew it existed. I’m not going to explain that. Some facts you just carry.
We have lived here two months and we are still deciding what the rooms are for. That is not a complaint. Deciding what rooms are for is, as far as I can tell, the entire project of being an adult. I moved my desk chair to the foot of my bed three days ago as part of the deciding.
More on the chair later. The chair is load-bearing.
Brandon was at the kitchen counter when Tommy and I came up the stairs with the shopping bags, headphones around his neck, watching the same four seconds of footage over and over, listening for a false note. On the laptop screen, a mattress fell onto a bed frame in slow motion. Then it fell again. Then it fell again.
“It’s the mattress spot,” he said, without turning around. “They gave me the mattress spot.”
“Solo?”
“Solo.”
“Brandon.”
“I know.” He let himself grin at the laptop. “It’s thirty seconds of a mattress falling over and it is mine.”
Brandon edits video at Halloran & Peck, which is an ad agency downtown with exposed brick and a coffee machine Brandon describes with more reverence than he describes most people.
He got the job at nineteen with no degree and no connections, because he spent three years of high school cutting highlight reels for our school’s rugby team, taught himself the software off the internet, and turned out to have the one thing you can’t teach, which is knowing the exact frame where a thing becomes true. They started him on captions. Now they hand him thirty-second spots and stand behind his chair.
Brandon watches footage the way other people say grace. Patiently. Head slightly bowed. Like something might be revealed.
I handed him his frozen yogurt.
He looked into the cup. The chocolate had crossed the border into the vanilla some time ago and the whole thing had achieved a united beige.
“You brought me soup.”
“We brought you the memory of frozen yogurt.”
“Even better.” He drank it. He did not complain. He tipped the cup at us like a toast and drank melted dessert standing at the counter in his dress socks, entirely content, and I felt the familiar lurch of being in love with a man who has a genius for melted things.
Tommy set the other bags down by the couch. Not all the bags. Some of the bags had been delivered directly to my room on our way up, by me, with the door closed behind them.
Brandon noticed the bags that were there. Brandon noticed the bags that were not there. Brandon is an editor; he sees what’s been cut.
He looked at Tommy, and Tommy went faintly pink at the ears, and Brandon looked back at his mattress with the smallest smile in the western hemisphere, and nobody said anything, because it was six o’clock and we had all agreed, in a parking lot three weeks ago with the engine running, what tonight was, and there is a rule about naming a thing too early in the evening.
The rule is mine. Most of the rules are mine. This is a fact about our household that I am still deciding how to feel about.
“Spaghetti’s on,” Brandon said. “Episode at seven.”
Brandon cooks exactly one meal and he treats it like a title defense. There is a sauce. The sauce has a procedure. The procedure has stages.
Tommy and I are not allowed near the stove during the stages, so Tommy set the coffee table — plates, forks, the good napkins, which are the paper ones folded diagonally — and I lit no candles, because candles were for later and I didn’t want to spend them.
At seven we took our seats. The couch is ugly. It came with the clock man’s leftovers, it is the color of an avocado experiencing regret, and it seats three people in an intimacy that furniture stores would never dare suggest. The middle seat is Tommy’s. We don’t discuss it. Some case law is settled.
The episode was “The Case of the Lucky Legs.”
If you have not seen it: a promoter named Frank Patton runs a beauty contest through small towns — best legs in Cloverdale, Utah, ladies, step right up — and the prize is a Hollywood movie contract, and the contract is worth less than the paper, and the girl who wins ends up stranded in Los Angeles alongside the previous winners, who are also stranded, none of them stars, all of them measured and filed and forgotten.
Then somebody puts a wood-carving knife in Mr. Patton, which I am legally obligated to describe as a tragedy.
Brandon had the case solved by minute nine.
“It’s the boyfriend.”
“It is not the boyfriend.”
“He threatened the guy on camera. Hannah. He said you might be expendable. That’s a confession with a delay on it.”
“That’s a red herring wearing a sports coat.”
“Dishes for a week says it’s the boyfriend.”
“Define week.”
“Seven days, all meals, pots included.”
“Done,” I said, and we shook on it over Tommy’s lap, and Tommy held our forearms steady like a notary.
The thing about watching this show with Brandon is that Brandon commits. He does not hedge. He picks his man in act one and rides him to the verdict, and when the evidence turns against him he does not abandon his man, he gets louder about his man, and it is one of the most annoying and endearing things I have ever watched a person do twice a week.
Tommy is the opposite. Tommy watches the whole screen. Tommy watches the edges. Somewhere around minute twenty, during a scene in a hallway, he said, quietly, to his spaghetti:
“I don’t trust the quiet one.”
“Which quiet one?”
“The one who keeps almost being in scenes.”
“That’s not a suspect,” Brandon said. “That’s set dressing.”
Tommy shrugged the shrug of a boy who has said his piece and will now wait for history.
On screen, the contest played out. A stage in a grange hall, a line of women, a man with a microphone and a tape measure and the moral authority of a raffle. Cloverdale’s finest legs, assessed and ranked for the benefit of a contract that would be canceled within the week. I watched the previous winners pile up in Los Angeles like undelivered mail and felt my whole jaw organize itself.
“Every year he measures a new girl and pays her in paper,” I said. “The legs are real. The paper never is. That’s the entire economy, if anyone’s wondering.”
Nobody was wondering. I said it anyway. There was spaghetti in my mouth, which weakened the verdict, and Brandon said “objection, sauce,” and I threw a diagonal napkin at him, and that was the end of my address to the jury.
Then the legs montage came back, and Brandon — eyes on the television, fork in the air, entirely sincere —
“Tommy’s got better legs than the whole state of Utah.”
Tommy went pink. Not the pink of being mocked. The other pink. The one that starts at the ears and arrives at the mouth as a smile he tries to keep small.
“Thank you,” Tommy said, to his knees.
“I’d say it in court,” Brandon said, still to the television.
And I sat on my third of the ugly couch with my plate on my lap and had a feeling I will not be describing in full, because we would be here all night, but the abbreviation is this: there is a version of the world where a nineteen-year-old rugby boy cannot say that sentence, plainly, with a fork in his hand, without something in the room going wrong afterward. I grew up assuming I lived in that world. I don’t know exactly when I moved out of it. But the rent here is unbelievable.
The ending went exactly as advertised. Fifty minutes of evidence pointing at everyone in the cast with a motive and a jawline, Perry conducting the courtroom like an orchestra, and then — the gallery. A person stands up. A person I will not name in case you ever watch it, except to say that this person had appeared in the episode for a combined total of approximately four minutes, and confesses, fully, in front of God and Raymond Burr.
The quiet one.
The one who kept almost being in scenes.
Tommy did not gloat. Tommy does not have the gloating gene; it was traded at birth for the blushing one. He just breathed in through his nose, once, with his eyes very bright.
Brandon appealed to the ceiling. “He wasn’t even — you can’t — four minutes of screen time!”
“The confession never comes from the person you’re watching,” I said. “Everyone watches the defendant. The confession comes from the gallery. That’s the show, Brandon. That’s the whole show.”
“Dishes,” Tommy said, softly, to the middle distance.
“Seven days,” I said. “Pots included.”
Brandon lay back against the avocado cushions, nobly suffering, betrayed by 1957, and then he got up, and collected the plates, and went to serve his sentence.
Here is what I know about tension: it does the dishes with you.
Brandon washed. Tommy dried, because Tommy is constitutionally incapable of watching another person work; he’d dry dishes at a stranger’s house, at a crime scene, on the deck of a sinking ship.
I sat up on the counter and supervised, which is a job, and the kitchen filled up with the sound of water and the clack of plates in the rack and everything we were not saying.
Nobody said after. After sat on the drying rack with everything else.
Brandon washed the colander twice. The colander was fine the first time. The colander knew it, I knew it, Brandon’s shoulders knew it. Tommy dried each fork individually, tine by tine, like the forks were being prepared for surgery.
I watched my two men perform domestic labor with the focused calm of astronauts running a checklist before a launch nobody was mentioning, and I felt the evening lean its whole weight against the kitchen door.
The last pot went in the rack. The water went off. The apartment got extremely quiet, as rooms do when they realize everyone in them is breathing.
Brandon folded the dish towel over the oven handle. He is not a towel-folding man. It was the most beautifully folded towel I have ever seen.
Tommy looked at me.
Brandon looked at me.
And I understood — standing in the kitchen of the apartment I had once described out loud before I knew it existed, between the two people I had chosen and the thing I had chosen for all of us — that this was the part of the evening that belonged to me. Not because I’d claimed it. Because they’d handed it over, like a map passed to the only person in the car who can read one.
“Okay,” I said.
I had built the room over three days, in installments, so it wouldn’t look like construction.
The candles were from the mall, fig-adjacent, because a room should not argue with itself. I lit them and turned the lamp to the setting I’d tested Tuesday night — the angle that makes skin look considered.
The desk chair sat at the foot of the bed where it had been for three days, and I’d sat in it myself twice while the apartment slept, to learn what it would teach, which is that the chair sees everything and can reach nothing, and that this is either the best seat in the house or the worst one, depending entirely on what you’re made of.
Tommy came in first, in the lavender and one of his soft grey shirts, smelling like fig and neroli and spa-mint toothpaste.
Down the hall, the shower was running. Brandon showers before things that matter. He showered before his job interview. He showered before he met my father. The pipes in this building announce everything; the walls here are a rumor.
I took the silk pouch off the dresser.
I had been carrying it all day — through the mall, through the food court, through Tyler Becker — at the bottom of my purse like a fact. Now I loosened the drawstring and let it slide out into my palm.
A cage. A chastity cage — small, pink, resin, with a brass lock the size of a fingernail, and a ring at the base sized, after some research I will not be describing, for Tommy. It did not look like an object. It looked like a decision that had been manufactured.
“Oh,” Tommy said.
“Come here, sweetheart.”
He came. I put it in his hand, because a thing you have held is a different thing than a thing you have been shown.
“It’s not a punishment,” I said. “I want that stated up front, for now and forever. It’s the opposite of a punishment.”
I had rehearsed this part, and the rehearsed version had the word architecture in it, and standing in front of him I found I didn’t want the rehearsed version. I wanted the plain one.
“Here is what tonight is. You are going to sit in that chair, and you are going to watch me put my hands on Brandon, and you are going to get harder than you have ever been in your life. Harder than the fitting room. Harder than the wall has ever made you. And there will be nowhere for it to go and nothing for you to do about it, because your hands are staying on your thighs — and that is a great deal of holding for one boy to do all by himself, all night, alone in a chair.”
I touched the small pink thing in his palm. “This does the holding for you. You would just get to feel everything. Nothing to manage. Nothing to lean on. The door stays closed on its own.”
Tommy looked at the cage in his hand for a long moment. His breathing had already changed. I watched the words harder than you have ever been land on him and begin, immediately, to come true — because that is Tommy’s body: it hears a sentence and starts complying.
He touched the little lock once, with one finger, the way he touches things at the store that he already knows he isn’t buying.
“I can control myself,” he said.
He said it quietly and he said it standing all the way up, and I want to be fair to him here, because it would be easy to write that sentence down as the famous last words of every man since the invention of men, and that is not what it was.
What it was, was: Tommy wanted to bring his whole self to that chair. Unassisted. Un-held. He has spent his entire life being managed by rooms he didn’t build, and tonight, in a room built by someone who loves him, he wanted to sit in the chair on his own recognizance.
I understood it completely.
“Okay, sweetheart,” I said, and I took the cage back out of his hand, and put it in its pouch, and set the pouch on the dresser. Not hidden. Not offered. Present.
Part of me was relieved. Part of me had already imagined the key on a chain, and the chain warm against my sternum, and I did not investigate which part of me was driving, because there are questions you don’t ask a witness when you’re not ready for the answer.
“The water glass is on the desk,” I said. “You remember the rule.”
“If it’s too much, I drink.”
“And nobody asks.”
“Nobody asks.” He looked at the glass, full, sweating slightly in the candlelight, and then at me. “It’s a good rule.”
“I know it is. I wrote it in a parking lot.”
He laughed — the small one, the one that checks the room first — and sat down in the chair, and put his hands flat on his thighs, and it took my breath a little, because that was the posture. The exact one. Knees together, hands flat, spine easy against the chairback.
I had imagined him in that chair so many times that seeing it was less like an event and more like continuity, like the moment a signal you’ve been broadcasting finally reports back that it was received.
The shower shut off.
Brandon knocked on my bedroom door.
He has never once knocked on my bedroom door. He has lived here two months and dated me three years and he entered my room at my parents’ house through the window once, in a rainstorm, holding a burrito.
But tonight he knocked, two knuckles, polite as a suitor, and I said come in, and he came in with his hair wet and his grey t-shirt sticking slightly at the shoulders, and he stopped just inside the door — the stop you make at the top of a trail when the view arrives early.
He looked at me in the green.
The green set was Tommy’s pick. He’d held it up in the fitting-room hallway without a single word, and the not-saying was a complete review. Bottle green, which is a color I would not have chosen for myself because it seemed like a color that made claims, and Tommy had looked at it and looked at me and made the claim on my behalf.
“Okay,” Brandon said, to no one, to the room, to the management.
But he didn’t come to me first. That is the thing I want written down about Brandon, before everything else that happened. He crossed to the chair first. Host instinct. Two hundred pounds of it, in sock feet, going to check on the smallest person at the party.
“Hey,” he said, and took Tommy’s wrist — the easy grip, the one he uses on shoulders when he’s being sincere, the how-we-doing grip — “if you need anything, or it gets to be —”
And then he stopped.
Because he had Tommy’s wrist an inch too close to his own face, and the fig reached him.
I watched my boyfriend lose a sentence. Watched it leave. His mouth stayed open around the shape of the next word, and the word never came, and he looked down at Tommy’s wrist like it had spoken to him.
“What is that.”
“Fig and neroli,” Tommy said.
“Okay,” Brandon said, and did not finish the first sentence, and never got it back.
I had predicted this exact event in a food court this afternoon.
I am not going to narrate all of it, because Vivian is right about doors and I have decided she is right about this too: whatever a person builds in the silence beats whatever you hand them. But you get the shape, because the shape matters.
Brandon came to me. We stood beside the bed and he kissed me, and here is a fact about Brandon that his agency gets for a salary and I get for free: Brandon kisses like an editor. Patient. Unhurried. Waiting for the cut. He has always kissed like there is no clock in the building.
Tonight he kissed like the client had moved the deadline.
His breathing went short against my cheek inside a minute. His hands, which are usually the calmest things in any room they enter, were asking questions in a rush.
I could feel his heart through his t-shirt going like something that wanted out, and I registered it, and I misfiled it. I thought: he’s excited. I did not think: he has been building this room in his own head for three weeks, alone, at an editing bay, with professional-grade imagination, and the room he built is now real and occupied.
The shirt came off him. My hands did that. The lamp did its work on his shoulders and I heard, from the chair, the smallest change in Tommy’s breathing, and I did not look — not yet, I was saving it — but I felt the look I wasn’t taking, like a window behind me.
Tommy has heard us through the wall before. Everyone has heard everyone in this apartment; I told you, the walls are a rumor. But hearing is radio.
This was television.
Brandon’s mouth went to my neck, to the spot where he always starts, the place where his breathing changes and mine changes with it, and his was already changed, it had skipped its own opening credits — and mine answered.
I want that noted too: three weeks of anticipation had not been his alone. My breath went ragged on the first pass of his mouth, and the answer arrived low in my body, prompt and total, and the green was already past pretending otherwise. His palms moved over the lace like he was reading it. His breath was loud at my ear now — in through the nose, out rough, in through the nose, out rougher — a man pacing himself and losing to the pace.
And then I turned us.
A quarter circle. Slow. My hands on his hips, like a step in a dance he didn’t know we were dancing. Brandon didn’t clock it.
The chair did. I heard the chair understand: one careful breath, held a half-second too long.
I looked over Brandon’s bare shoulder and finally took the look I’d been saving. My sissy sat in lavender in the candlelight with his knees together and his hands flat on his thighs, exactly where he’d put them, and his face was the least hidden thing in the room. I watched wanting move across it with nowhere to go. He was overwhelmed. Not the drowning kind. The brimming kind — present, eyes enormous, a boy receiving more signal than his instrument was rated for and holding, holding.
The water glass stood on the desk, untouched.
Good, I thought. Stay with me. Small doses. This is the dose.
Then I got my thumbs into the waistband of Brandon’s sweatpants and pushed them down off his hips, and his cock came free and stood up between us, and the room changed pressure.
I’m going to describe it, because tonight was built for the seeing, and you were promised a room with sightlines.
Brandon is big. I have three years of practice and my hand has never once closed all the way around him — this is a plain fact I have never gotten used to — and tonight he was harder than I have ever felt him. Hot. Heavy. The skin drawn tight and the tip already slick, a thing so entirely arrived that touching it felt like handling live cable.
From the chair: an inhale. Sharp, high, involuntary — “hh” — the sound of a boy seeing.
Because Tommy had seen it before. Once. Years ago, sideways, briefly, the kind of seeing you spend the rest of high school telling yourself didn’t count. He had never seen it like this. Never this hard. Never in candlelight. Never four feet away and aimed at the room, in a room built by someone who loves him for exactly this seeing.
And Brandon — here is the frame I will be studying for the rest of my life — Brandon turned his head and watched Tommy watch him.
I felt it arrive under my palm, where my hand lay flat on his chest. His heart hit once, out of rhythm, hard, like a fist on a door. Brandon liked being seen. Liked it somewhere old and preverbal, somewhere that had never once in his easy, sunlit, team-photo life been asked the question.
Three weeks of building this room in his head at a professional editing bay, and in all that imagining he had never imagined the part where the watching would go through him like current.
“Hannah,” he said. Low. A warning label, read aloud.
I got my hand around him. Barely. That is not a figure of speech — my fingers did not meet, and all three of us could see that they did not meet.
I squeezed. Once.
“Hannah—”
I want the causation on the record, because believing it matters more than admiring it.
It was not the hand. The hand had barely introduced itself — one squeeze, half of one slow stroke, the mechanics of a handshake.
It was the chair. It was being seen, and catching himself wanting to be seen, two facts that touched like bare wires. The hand just completed the circuit.
He came.
He came with a sound like a breath being punched out of him — “hh—ahh” — and his whole body went courtroom-still except for the part of him that didn’t, pulsing thick and hot in my half-closed hand, lashing my fingers, my wrist, the green at my hip, three weeks of a built room arriving all at once and in full view of the chair, and there was nothing to be done about any of it and I didn’t try.
I held on. He shook. The candles did not care.
Silence. Three full seconds of it.
And in those three seconds, in the chair, Tommy — who had held, who was still holding, whose hands had never left his thighs — watched a cock finish for the first time in his life. Not on a screen. Not through a wall, in audio, deniable. Four feet away. Real. Lit. Still half-wrapped in my fingers. And above it, Brandon’s face gone helpless — and Brandon’s eyes, even then, even mid-ruin, still on him.
Tommy made a small broken sound that I knew.
His hands pressed down flat, obedient to the last, like a man keeping a door closed, and it did not matter, because the body does not negotiate.
His head tipped back an inch. His mouth came open. And his little guy pulsed untouched inside the lavender — once, and again, and again — while the sound came out of him in pieces, and he was coming, quietly, helplessly, completely, at the sight of what had just finished four feet in front of him and the knowledge, arriving in the same instant, that it had finished partly because his eyes were on it.
Nobody had touched him. He confessed on his own recognizance.
Somewhere in my head, a title card slid into place. White letters on black.
The Case of the Two Confessions.
Brandon started laughing first.
That is the fact I will be telling at whatever anniversary this becomes. Before the embarrassment could arrive and find seating, before anyone could decide what this meant, Brandon — forehead down on my shoulder, still catching his breath — started to laugh. At himself. From the bottom.
“Oh no,” he said. “Oh no. I had a plan. Hannah. I had a whole — there was a plan.”
“Brandon.”
“There were stages.”
“Like the sauce.”
“Like the sauce,” he said, wrecked, delighted, and lifted his head, and looked over at the chair — and this is the moment, this is the one I’d have missed if I’d blinked — his face, going to Tommy, carried nothing in it but fellowship.
Tommy had his eyes shut. Ears past pink, into the deep color. Hands still flat on his thighs like a boy waiting outside a principal’s office.
“Tommy,” Brandon said.
Nothing.
“Tommy. Look at me.”
Tommy looked at him.
“That,” Brandon said, “was a team result.”
Then:
“And nobody even touched you. Honestly? That’s the more impressive stat.”
And Tommy broke. The laugh came up through him from the chest, the kind that surprises its owner, and then he had his hands over his face and he was laughing into them, and Brandon was laughing at the ceiling, and the two of them set each other off in rounds like church bells, and I stood between my two men in the bottle-green set that Tommy chose, the only person in the room still holding her testimony, absolutely soaked and entirely unfinished and laughing anyway, because what on earth is the alternative.
The tension we had carried up the stairs, through the episode, through the twice-washed colander — it didn’t break so much as it paid out, all at once, like a slot machine. This was not the night any of us had drafted.
It was so much better than the plan that I almost couldn’t stand it.
After: towels, and the ordinary mercy of cleanup. I directed traffic lightly and mostly let them handle themselves, because there is a version of me that would have swooped in with wipes and management, and I am learning — slowly, against my instincts — which moments are mine to run and which ones a man needs in order to put himself back together with his own hands.
Tommy, changing by the dresser, stopped.
The pouch sat where I had left it. Not hidden. Not offered. Present.
He looked at it. Two seconds. Maybe three. He didn’t touch it. Then he pulled a clean shirt over his head and the moment sealed over.
I saw it. I said nothing. Some evidence you don’t enter yet.
“Is it ruined?” he asked, later, quietly, when Brandon was down the hall. “The night. Did we —”
“Keane.”
“We ruined it.”
“Nothing is ruined. The room worked.” I took his face in my hands so he could see I meant it under oath. “The room worked so well it blew a fuse. That’s not a failure, sweetheart. That’s a load rating. Now we know the load.”
“Now we know the load,” he repeated, and his shoulders came down half an inch, and half an inch is a lot when it’s Tommy.
Brandon reappeared in the doorway in fresh sweatpants with my laptop under his arm like a settlement offer.
“For the record,” he said, “that has never happened to me before. Ever. In my life.”
“I know.”
“I’ve decided to be impressed with us.”
“You would be.”
“There were three people in this room and a hundred percent of the men in it —” he stopped, considered the math, let it stand. “I’m just saying. Chemistry like that, you can’t teach.”
“Get in the bed, Brandon.”
We watched another episode, the three of us in my bed with the laptop on a pillow — we went back to the one about the stolen bikini designs, because the boys had earned it and I wanted to see 1959 attempt swimwear.
Tommy in the middle, because the middle is Tommy’s. Brandon’s arm reached across the top of both pillows, a bridge over everyone. The boys were asleep before the second act, Tommy’s head gone heavy on my shoulder, Brandon’s breath slow and even on the far side, the two of them rising and falling out of rhythm and then, occasionally, drifting into it.
I lay awake between my two confessed men with Perry Mason arguing softly in black and white on the screen of my laptop, holding more unspent evidence than both of them combined, and I thought: everyone in this apartment told the truth tonight except me.
I closed the laptop.
My testimony is coming. I just haven’t been called yet.
The bookstore, the next morning, smelled like old paper and new coffee, and I ran the register on four hours of sleep, which I had obtained in the demilitarized zone between two large, warm, unconscious men.
Breakfast had been eggs at seven. Brandon made them like a man with no memories — whistling, flipping things unnecessarily — and on his way out the door with his laptop bag he stopped behind Tommy’s stool and squeezed his shoulder, two pats, the universal rugby semaphore for good game, and Tommy sat there looking lit from inside for a full ten minutes afterward, eating eggs like they were an award.
Tommy had the late shift. I had the morning, the register, and my thoughts, which is always a dangerous staffing arrangement.
By ten I had sold two paperbacks, recommended a birthday gift for a nephew nobody seemed to like, and explained to a man that we did not buy back books from other stores, no, not even “in this economy.”
At ten-forty the bell over the door went ding and Tyler Becker walked in holding a smoothie.
Tyler travels with smoothies the way other men travel with opinions. I don’t know where he gets them at that hour. I suspect they issue them to him at midnight, like ammunition.
“Hannah,” he said. “Hey. Wow. This place is —” he looked around at forty thousand books — “cozy.”
“Tyler.”
“Is that bad? Cozy?”
“It’s a bookstore. Cozy is the business model.”
He drifted to the front table while I helped a customer. He picked up a novel and put it down without reading the cover, which is how you can tell a browsing customer from a man on an errand. Then he did a small circuit — new fiction, staff picks, the spinning rack of maps that has never once sold a map — and arrived back at the register with studied casualness, the kind you rehearse in the car.
“So do you guys have, like… poetry?”
“We have, like, poetry.”
“Something short.”
I looked at him. He looked at the counter. And I understood, with a sinking feeling that had some respect mixed into it, what had happened. A room after someone beautiful left it.
The sentence had gotten him too. Of course it had. That was the kind of sentence that ruins everyone in a ten-foot radius, and Tyler had been standing at point-blank range, and now here he was the very next morning in a bookstore at ten-forty asking for poetry, something short, like a man who’d been shot and was only now checking for the wound.
I walked him to the poetry section. I did not editorialize. This cost me an amount you cannot imagine.
He picked out a slim Mary Oliver, which, honestly — growth.
Back at the register, while I rang it up, he did the throat-clear.
“Is Tommy working today?”
“Later.”
“Okay. Cool. Because I — there’s a thing Thursday. Downtown. A night, it’s low-key, it’s mostly just — good people. I thought he might like the people.”
“You thought he might like the people.”
“And me. He might like me.” Tyler took a breath and set the smoothie down on the counter, which for Tyler is the equivalent of laying down arms.
“I don’t fully know what I mean by that yet. I know what I got wrong at the mall. I looked it — I looked some stuff up. I’ve been thinking about it. I’m not trying to put him anywhere. I’d just like to know him, and I’m being honest right now, which is new for me, so be gentle.”
Here is what I had ready. I want to show you the sentence I had loaded, because the sentence is the whole story:
He’s not interested.
Three words. Clean. Protective. Mostly true, even — Tommy has never once mentioned Tyler since the food court, and Tommy mentions everything, Tommy narrates his sandwiches. The sentence was accurate, efficient, and delivered from a place of love, and it was sitting in my mouth with the safety off.
Mostly true is how control gets dressed for work.
And then Tyler — who has no idea, who will never know what he did — reached over and picked his smoothie back up and said:
“You can vet me first, obviously. I figured you’d want to vet me.”
There it was. The sentence from the mall with its shoes off. Is this your thing? You answer for him?
Except this time offered politely, as a service, because yesterday I had taught Tyler Becker that the road to Tommy runs through a checkpoint, and Tyler had learned it, and was now presenting his documents.
She doesn’t answer for me, Tommy said, in the food court, with his voice shaking and holding. She just answers faster.
I looked at Tyler Becker for a long moment.
“Give me your number,” I said. “I’ll give it to him. What he does with it is his.”
I handed him one of the shop’s bookmarks to write on — cream card stock, MCALLISTER BOOKS across the top, a little woodcut of an owl that Mr. McAllister’s late wife designed in 1988.
Tyler wrote his number under the owl in surprisingly careful digits, the handwriting of a boy who wanted, for once, to be legible.
“Tell him no pressure,” he said.
“There’s always pressure.”
“Tell him it’s friendly pressure.”
He took his Mary Oliver and his smoothie and the bell went ding and the door closed behind him, and the store was quiet again except for the radiator and the low hum of forty thousand books minding their own business.
I stood at the register with the bookmark in my hand.
Yesterday afternoon I carried a silk pouch through a shopping mall with Tommy’s name on it. This morning it’s a bookmark with a phone number.
I have apparently become a courier of small dangerous objects, all of them addressed to the same boy.
The difference — and I stood there at the register making myself say the difference plainly, because if you can’t say a thing plainly you don’t get to claim you know it — the difference is that I chose the first one for him.
Nobody chose this one. This one arrived. The world had looked at Tommy in a food court, past me, around me, and wanted to know him, and the world was now a phone number under an owl, being patient.
My phone buzzed. Tommy.
we need milk. also brandon sent me a video of a dog wearing a raincoat. also I love you.
I stood in the empty store and read it twice and felt the two objects of the last two days arrange themselves on either side of that text message like counsel.
I hadn’t decided when to give him the bookmark. Whether tonight, over dinner, casually, a message relayed like any other. Whether to sit on it a day. Whether the sitting would be for his sake or mine, and whether I would tell myself the truth about which.
I put it in my apron pocket, against my hip, where it stayed for the rest of the shift, doing the one thing bookmarks are built to do — hold somebody’s place in a story until they come back and decide whether to keep reading.
I would have to decide.
Unfortunately, deciding things is how they get me.
This is beautiful and kind and true. Love this arc.
You are incredibly talented. I find myself rooting for the characters and I stop reading when I don’t want it to end too quickly. Thank you 🙏