Page 101 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“You’ll take it?”

“I’ll take it. Thanks.”

He stands there looking at the phone, then at me. His eyes fill. He wipes them with the back of the bad hand, the one where the fourth finger stands off the others. It never closed properly and never will. The transfer is already in my account. I know because my phone buzzed during dinner and I deliberately didn’t check it. Taking the money back is harder than finding it was.

“Right,” he says. “Well. That’s the first one.”

“It’s the first one.”

He hugs me in the doorway, which we don’t do, and then he gets out of there fast. I hear him swearing at the elevator on the way down.

The house is on Fennick Row in the port district, four streets back from the water, with a wall on one side and a view of the container cranes from the upstairs back window.

It’s not a good house. It has a roof that Fin says has eight years in it if he’s optimistic. The kitchen is from 1978. There’s a barn’s worth of work in the backyard. It cost less than a season’s salary in a market where nobody wants to live.

We buy it in both names.

The attorney’s office is above a shop on Corliss Street. It takes forty minutes. There are eleven places to sign. She turns the transfer around on the desk and puts one finger on the first line. She knows nothing about either of us.

Marek doesn’t move.

I take the pen and sign the top line. Then I hand Marek the pen. He signs under me. Eleven seconds later, we’re shaking hands with an attorney. At twenty past two on a Thursday, we walk into the rain owning the same house. Outside, the rain is cold enough to wake me up. The key is in my pocket. His name is on the same paper as mine. Nothing about it is temporary, borrowed, assigned, or being held on somebody else’s terms.

He stops on the sidewalk outside the attorney’s office. “Say it again,” he says.

“Say what?”

He shifts his weight. “What you said in the car.”

“I said the gutters are the first job.”

“Before that.”

“I said it’s ours,” I say.

He looks at a wet street in the port district he was born in. “Yes,” he says. “All right.”

The first morning in the house, I wake at ten past eight. I haven’t done that since I was fifteen years old. Sunlight is coming through the back window because we still haven’t bought curtains.

Marek is awake. He’s been awake a while; there’s a mug on the floor on his side that’s gone cold.

There’s nothing in the room but a bed, eleven boxes, a lamp on the floor, and a radiator that bangs.

“Don’t get up,” I say.

“I wasn’t going to.”

I pull the sheet off both of us and drop it on the floor. No blanket to hide under. No lamp to switch off. No darkness anywhere in the room. Morning light fills the whole place.

“Blinds,” he says.

“There aren’t any blinds. That’s the point.”

“There’s a house opposite.”

“There’s a wall opposite,” I say. “Marek. I want your mouth. Take your time about it.”

He goes very still.