Page 20 of Breakaway
"Not even to go home?"
"Minneapolis isn't home anymore. It's where I'm from. Home is wherever I've set up the coffee maker."
He considers this. His thumb runs along the railing. "I don't know what Bern is to me right now. It's not where I'm from the way it used to be. I was there for twenty years and then Seattle for one and now I'm here. I think the place I'm most from is wherever I was last."
"That's not a bad way to be."
"It's not a way to be at all. It's a way to keep moving so you don't notice you don't have anywhere to stop." He says it without the broadcast running. Just his voice, lower than usual, saying words he hasn't rehearsed.
"You have a place to stop," I say.
"I have a guest room."
"You have a guest room in a place where someone makes you coffee in the morning."
"That's not the same."
"It's close."
He turns his head. I am already looking at him. The foot of space is still there. His gray-blue eyes are dark in the low light and the expression on his face is not the one the locker room gets. It is not the kid who walked in on the first day and sold hisconfidence to a room of strangers before his bag was unpacked. This is the version underneath, the one I have been catching in pieces for weeks, in the kitchen at midnight, in the beat before he looks away, in the voice he uses when he stops running.
"Wes," he says.
"Yeah?"
"I haven't called my realtor."
"I know."
"I don't think I'm going to."
"I know," I say. "Roommates, then?"
"Roommates," he says. He turns it over once, like checking whether the label holds weight. Then the corner of his mouth moves. "Roommates who share a spreadsheet."
"Roommates who share a spreadsheet and argue about garlic."
"Roommates."
He hasn't looked away. I haven't looked away. The foot of space between us on the railing has been the same for weeks, and then he shifts his weight toward me, a degree, barely a lean, and I don't move back. His face is closer now. His mouth is closer. I can see the place where his lower lip is dry from the wine and the night air, and the balcony is high enough that no one can see us and that thought arrives out of old habit and passes through without stopping.
I lean in. An inch at most. Close enough that his breath is warm on my mouth and my breath is on his. His eyes drop to my mouth and come back up and his lips part and I can feel the heat of him.
We stay there. The ocean is underneath us and neither of us is listening to it. My hand is on the railing and my knuckles are white on it. Everything in me is in the last inches between his mouth and mine. My breathing is slower than it should be, controlled the way I control things, the way I have alwayscontrolled things, except the control is shaky and he can probably see that.
He pulls back first. Half an inch. Then an inch. Then enough that the air between us is just air again and not the charged margin it was three seconds ago. He looks at me and his face is flushed and his eyes are wide and steady but neither of us says a word.
He picks up his wine glass. Takes a sip. His hand is not steady. He turns back to the railing and puts both forearms on it and looks at the water, and I stand next to him and do the same, and the foot of space between us is back except it doesn’t feel the same.
"Buenas noches, Berger," I say, after a while.
"Buenas noches," he says. His accent is still wrong.
I walk inside and leave the balcony door open behind me.
I stand in my bedroom with the light off. The camera is on the nightstand. The novel is still open to page 212, the receipt from La Marea marking a paragraph I haven't moved past in a week. Through the wall I hear him come inside. The balcony door slides closed. His footsteps go down the hallway. His door shuts.
The apartment settles into the silence it settles into every night, except tonight I am standing in the dark with my hand against my mouth, and the heat that is there is not mine. In the morning, I’ll make two coffees and bring them to the table. He’ll come out of the guest room in my shirt, and we won’t bring up what happened on the railing. We'll sit, argue about bread scores, add a row to the spreadsheet, and the foot of space will be different, and neither of us is going to say why.
