Page 75 of The New Place

“I don’t remember Pat ever bringing anyone home, when Ned lived with him and I was over there,” Abbot starts. He’d have noticed that, even in those heady weeks of Ned’s last semester at Callahan, when Abbot’s focus had been wholly, entirely absorbed with him. “And he’s never introduced anyone else to me, nor mentioned anyone. The other night was the first I heard of anyone he’s dated.”

Is it better or worse that Pat’s been largely single? Abbot has no idea. Ned intimated Pat had never had a serious long-term relationship. Perhaps that’s the red flag Claire is watching for?

But what is a bad sign in a partner, really? That Ned is divorced? That Abbot spent far too long with Louis, and before him, there was a revolving door of men Abbot was interested in who never had the time for him, Reto among them?

“Is he a jerk?” she asks.

“Pat?” Abbot asks and he doesn’t need to because there’s only one topic at hand here, but the idea of applying that word to Pat is just too odd. “No, not at all.”

“You like him?”

“I do.”

“What’s the worst thing about him?”

The worst thing about Pat? Nothing, he’s sure, but Claire is looking at him like she’s going to wring an answer out of him, so he searches for a moment, trying to land on a time he was irritated with Pat. It’s not easy, and when he does come up with a complaint, it doesn’t seem very fair. “Really nothing.”

“There must be something.”

“There isn’t.”

“Everyone has a thing,” she presses.

Abbot sighs. “He can be a bit…loud.”

“Loud,” she repeats.

“When he and Ned—well, when they watch baseball. Or when Pat is playing with Peggy. He’s…energetic.”

“Energetic,” she says like she has to think it over. “Okay. I can live with that.”

“Just a fair warning, as baseball season approaches,” Abbot says hurriedly.

“Am I going to have to get into the Sox?”

“We can come up with something else to do, while he and Ned are busy with the games,” he ventures.

She answers with a smile. “I could get behind that. And thank you. Really. Sorry to put you on the spot, but it takes a while to get to know someone, and early on it’s all just fun and exciting, you know?”

Yes. Abbot knows. Because thinking of Pat has lifted him back to last autumn with Ned, when they spent more time in bed than out of it, when they saw each other all day, every day, except when Ned was in Boston. That would leave Abbot with strangely empty time to fill, but then Ned was back so quickly that they could fall into each other once again. Abbot had known it was the heady, impossible joy of a new relationship, a joy that would eventually shatter with a disagreement or the distance between them when Ned moved, or it would simply lose its luster, but that hadn’t at all marred how fun those months had been.

And they have mellowed. They get a lot more work done now, but also their relationship has shifted from desperate toward comfortable. Stable, in its own way, a steady, constant presence in Abbot’s life this past year, part of his mind on his days in Portland and at Callahan, and the rest focused on Ned. He’s been happy, perhaps even happier than last fall. More content, certainly, though the distance has been a stone in his shoe, one that grows as the months tick by.

“Yes,” he says. “I certainly understand that.”

“And it’s one thing to have fun and another entirely to build something together.”

Abbot looks down at Baxter. Yes, he understands that too. More than ever before.

“Have you ever been with someone and it’s great, but there’s no future?” she asks. “My ex, it started just like this with Pat, and I’m too old to fall for another man-child.”

“I don’t think he’s that, at the very least,” Abbot says. No, not Pat. Abbot knows a long list of men who fall into that description, but Pat’s different than that, and Ned is too.

Right?

“What about a purported professional, capable adult who comes across as put-together but when you look under the hood, you realize he’s living in a perpetual state of dragged-out adolescence with absolutely no movement toward a functional life?”

Abbot clears his throat. That is a colorful description, certainly. Louis, he can’t help but think. A professional with an upward career by all appearances, but he’d balked at any…commitment. That had been the word, hadn’t it? Not the one they’d used, their conversations mostly French, but the translation sits there in his mind.