Page 82 of Breakaway
"I know." He picks the glass back up. Puts it down again. "I know it's done. I'm just saying…I don’t know."
I walk over to him, and pull him into my arms, still feeling how thin he is. He’s eaten more with me here and his appetite seems to be better.
Mouse finishes her food and crosses the kitchen floor and sits next to us, her tail curled around her paws. She looks up at me and then at him and then at me again, as if she is verifying that both of us are still in the room.
"Gwen is Thursday," he says. “Every Thursday. For however long she thinks I need to see her.”
“I think that’s up to you, Luca. You keep seeing her as long as you need to.”
He lets me hold him like this for a minute and then he speaks.
"I need to talk about us. With Gwen." His voice is steady but the steadiness is costing him something. "I don't think it will work unless I'm completely honest in that room."
It hits me. The sentence arrives and lands in the center of my chest. The space I made has been two people for two and a half years. Now Luca wants to talk about this in a room I will neverbe in, holding the thing I have spent fifteen years keeping out of every room I have ever been in.
He pulls back and looks at me. His eyes are the same blue-gray they have always been and the circles underneath them are still dark, though not as dark as when I first walked in four days ago. His face is thinner than it should be and he is standing in my shirt in a kitchen that is cleaner than it was on Monday. I watched him make the call. I heard his voice on the phone with Gwen, the sentences short, the pauses long, the effort of each word visible in his jaw. Whatever started in that call is not finished but it started. But it will never be finished if he has to hold back inside a room where the walls are supposed to come down.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
My hand is on his back. I can feel his ribs through the shirt. "I'm saying okay."
He searches my face. He is looking for the thing I am not saying, the cost of the okay, the part where the wall tightened and the tightening is still in my chest. He can see it. He has always been able to see it.
"It doesn't go further than Gwen," he says. "I'm not asking for more than that."
"I know you're not."
"But I can't sit in that chair and talk about my time here without talking about you. You're in all of it. The good parts and the hard parts and the distance and the reason I stopped picking up the phone. If I leave you out of it, I'm performing again just for a new audience."
The sentence is the truest thing he has said all week. I know it is true because I have watched him perform for three years and I have watched what happens when the performance runs out and I am standing in the aftermath of the performance running outand the aftermath is this apartment and this kitchen and the suit on the bathroom floor behind a closed door.
"Tell her," I say. "Tell her whatever you need to tell her."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He nods. He leans back into me and his forehead is against my shoulder again and I hold him and the wall is still tight in my chest and the okay is still true. Both of those things are in the room at the same time. Both of them are mine.
"Call me after," I say, running my hands along his back. "Thursdays. After your sessions. You don't have to tell me what you talked about. Just call."
"I'll call."
"And eat something."
"I ate breakfast."
"More than a protein bar."
"You're going to manage my meals from Miami aren’t you?" The corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Not yet but it’ll get there. “Wes, Thank you for coming."
"You don't need to thank me for that, Luca. I love you. I would do anything for you."
"Yeah, but you walked off a road trip and flew to Atlanta. You slept in my terrible bed for four nights."
"Your bed is not terrible. The mattress is fine. The pillows need work." I feel more of that almost smile against my shoulder.
