Page 60 of Breakaway
"I don't know yet."
He nods but doesn’t push. He walks to the couch and picks up his laptop and opens it, because that is what Luca does when the ground has moved and he needs a fixed point. The spreadsheet is where he left it with the conditional override.
A year and a half ago Kyle called me and asked me to be a friend to a kid who didn't know anyone in Miami. I said yes and meant it. I offered the guest room. The guest room became the story and the story held because nobody had a reason to look.
Kyle walked down a hallway on his way to the bathroom and the door was open because the door is always open. I stopped thinking of that room as a bedroom over a year ago. I did not think to close it. That is the part I am going to carry out of this morning. Not that he saw it. That I forgot there was anything to see.
?
Chapter 21: Wes
The penthouse is the temperature it was when I left for Aruba. I dropped the thermostat because I always drop the thermostat before a trip, and the apartment held it, the way the apartment holds everything I set and leave. The camera bag goes on the counter. The suitcase stays by the door. I stand in the kitchen with the overhead off and the ocean steady through the glass and the apartment is exactly what I left and nothing in it has changed and I cannot breathe for a second, which passes.
The balcony is warm. January in Miami. The water is flat and gray and the light is wrong, overcast, the sky pressing down on the surface. I bring a coffee out and lean on the railing and the railing is the railing and the water is the water and none of it is Aruba.
The water in Aruba was a different color. It was clear and shallow near the shore, and the sand felt warm beneath my feet. He walked ahead of me on the beach, his shoulders bronzed from three days in the sun. His voice had that familiar cadence it takes on when he’s performing for an audience, but there wasno audience here. Just the beach, the ocean, and me. He was performing for me.
I did not say anything about it on the island. I noticed it the first morning when he rated the lime in the water glass and the verdict was right and the voice was right and the timing was a half-beat late. He rated the ceviche and the bread and the shower pressure and the sand. He rated it all lower than last year.
I take the coffee inside. The laptop is on the desk in the bedroom. I plug in the camera's memory card and the import window opens and three hundred and nineteen photographs load in a slow grid across the screen.
Luca on the balcony. Luca at the fish place with a fork in his hand. Luca walking the beach road with his face turned toward the water, his jaw set, his mouth closed. Luca asleep on the second morning with the sheet at his waist and the light from the window across his shoulders and his face soft.
I took these. I stood two feet from him with the camera and he let me take them because he has always let me take them, because the camera is the one way I have of saying what I do not say out loud. I took three hundred and nineteen photographs across five days and in every one of them he is beautiful and in twelve of them he is actually there.
The twelve are the ones where he forgot. Where his face dropped the broadcast for a second because he was looking at the ocean or because I said his name from behind the lens and he turned before the performance caught up. In those twelve his eyes are the eyes I know from two years of sleeping next to him and the eyes are tired and the not from the sun and beach.
I scroll through the grid slowly. A photograph of his hands on the railing. The restaurant at night, the ceiling fans turning, the table where we sat. His hand was alone on the tablecloth and my hand was alone on the tablecloth and the camera saw bothof them and I am sitting here in Miami looking at the distance between them.
The phone buzzes on the desk. His name on the screen.
home
One word. I pick up the phone and call him.
It rings four times. He picks up.
"Hey."
"Hey. You’re home?"
"Yeah. Just got in." His voice is flat. Travel-flat, maybe. Or the other flat, the one that has been getting louder for weeks.
"How was the flight?"
"Long. Charlotte layover again. The coffee was worse than last time."
"Worse than a three-eight?"
"Probably."
I hold the phone. He didn't rate it. I file that next to the ceviche and the lime and everything else I started to notice on the trip.
"How's Mouse?" I ask.
"Good. She's on the counter. I think she's mad at me."
"She's a cat. She's always mad at you."
