Page 136 of Hushed

He sits down at the table and, to my surprise, he takes my hands. His hands are warm. When I try to pull back, he closes his fingers on reflex. I go still. “There’s no need to be nervous. Jesus Christ, Bastien, you’re freezing. Why is it always so cold in this place? Did you turn down the heat again? Baby boy, we talked about this.” He stands up and goes to the thermostat, swears at it, and turns it up again. I hear the system crank to life. “I swear to God, if I have to do that one more time, I will bolt a fucking cage over it.” Even now, he can’t hide his disappointment in me.

“I’m going to have to get used to a little more cold than this. The insulation is better at home though.” I try to make it a joke but I can’t.

He slams back into the chair. “Stop it.”

“Why? Will that change the outcome tomorrow?”

“They can’t just rule against you. The facts are clear.”

My jaw drops, and I don’t think I’ve heard him right for a second. It’s like he’s listing a supply problem. Like there is a correct form and we have filled it out and therefore the outcome is owed to us. He believes that. He believes it the way he believes a door holds if you build the frame square. I love him for it and I cannot stand it at the same time.

“The facts don’t matter.” I hear my voice go flat. “They’ve already made up their minds.”

“Don’t be like that. I mean it, Bastien. We’re together, and they have a clear protocol—”

“That I screwed up!” I try to pull my hands back, but he tightens his grip just a little bit, like he’s warning me. “I should have declared you to Molly Baker on that first day. I should have recused myself from your grading. I’m asking her to lie on my behalf, and the only reason she’s doing it—the only one—is to spite the powers that be.”

“She’s doing it because we’re in the right, and she wants to see you exonerated. This is not the crisis you imagine it to be, baby boy. Nobody’s dead. Nobody’s bleeding out.”

I look at him and I understand, the way you understand a language you didn’t know you spoke, that he means it. That, to him, this is the whole answer. He has watched men lose things they don’t get back. He has a scale for catastrophe and my career is not heavy enough to move the needle on it. He doesn’t know that I can see him deciding that I will be all right, because all of this is too fucking petty to be something that destroys entire careers.

“You just don’t get it, do you? I don’t come with a name and a rank. I come with a reputation, and that one is gone.”

His lips thin in anger. “Because of me. Go on, you can say it.”

“Well, I didn’t say it. Because of decisions we made together.” I emphasize the we extra hard.

“Which is why you should have told me the date and the hour yourself,” he presses.

“And what would that change? How would our conversation be different? How would this day be different?”

“Well, I’d make you get up and take a shower, for one thing, rather than wallowing in self-pity.”

“I genuinely hate to be the bearer of bad news for you, but the fact that ‘nobody is bleeding’ doesn’t mean that something bad isn’t happening.” I’m aching to use air quotes for it, but I still haven’t recovered my hands from him.

“You think I don’t fucking know that? I live with you. And I don’t even know you anymore. Everybody else gets Sébastien Saint-Jacques. Oh, he’s great. I wish I were married to that guy and not Bastien. Because Bastien sucks. Bastien is the dregs left over when Professor Saint-Jacques gets done doling out his kindness to the worthy poor.”

“That’s not true! You know that’s not true.” My voice cracks. “I’ve given you every kind and good thing I have. Every one of them. And it’s never going to be enough for you.”

“You don’t get bad news and go quiet. You come back and debrief me. You’re my team, you don’t run solo ops for two goddamned weeks like I’m some—”

“And what would you have me do once I come crying to you about every little insult so you can be the big strong man for me? Hide in these four walls embroidering pillows like a good little wifey?”

“Every stranger who has taken me aside to tell me how lucky I am, how kind you are, what a catch. Lucky fucking me. I allegedly married someone warm. I don’t know. I’m still waiting to meet him.”

And I think: now. He’s finally said the true thing out loud. I drag in the air and feel it scraping across my raw, unprotected insides. “Then say it.” My voice isn’t steady. “The thing under all the rest of it. I’m not the man you were promised. I am a disappointment. So, fine then. Divorce me. That’s where this is walking, so just take the door. Don’t be a fucking coward. Just do it.”

He leans back against the chair like I’ve just hit him. His face is a cold mask of pure contempt. He releases my hands and crosses his arms over his chest. “Is that what you want me to do?” he snarls at me.

I want to scream no, of course not. I want to tell him that I know what’s going to happen, and tomorrow, when it’s all over, I want to step inside the circle of his love so he can go to war for me and make it all better. “Why not? What have you lost?” I say instead, because the hurt is outrunning me now. I can’t make the bleeding stop.

“Aside from a marriage I genuinely wanted.”

Wanted. Past tense.

“I gave everything I had to this research. Every year since I was eighteen. Two visas. A dissertation. A field nobody wanted me in that I clawed my way into anyway, and it is gone, all of it, in an afternoon, and you keep telling me that it doesn’t matter, because we are together now. What have you lost? Tell me. What has this cost you, Levi?”

“You think it hasn’t cost me anything?” He is out of the chair now. “I found out on Thursday, Bastien. Thursday.”