Chapter 3: Second Helping

He came through the hall in his socks.

Mrs. Alcott looked at the table, then past him at the stairs, and then at nothing. She stayed where she was, the napkin over her arm.

Nathaniel pulled the second chair out the rest of the four inches. The legs dragged on the wood and he kept his hand on the back of it.

“Sit down and eat.”

Ellis sat down and ate.

The chicken had been out long enough for the skin to go slack. He took a piece from the side nearest him. After a while he took another. He kept his head down and his elbows in and ate what was already in front of him.

Nathaniel’s hair had dried wrong where he’d pushed it back off his forehead. He ate across from Ellis and did not mention seven-thirty. Or the five minutes.

Halfway down the plate, the phone went off.

It was Nathaniel’s, face up by his glass. It lit and buzzed twice against the wood. Nathaniel turned it over without looking at the screen.

“It can wait,” he said, without looking up from his plate. He set the phone face down by his glass and left it there.

Mrs. Alcott came around with the pitcher and filled both glasses and took it back to the sideboard.

Ellis had a mouthful of chicken when Nathaniel said, “Where were you today?”

He chewed it. He swallowed it. It took about two seconds, and he used all of them.

“Watching basketball.”

He said it to his plate. He did not say which game.

“Every day,” Nathaniel said. “Do they ever let you play?”

Ellis looked down at his plate and kept eating.

Nathaniel didn’t ask it twice.

He finished before Ellis did. He set his fork down and pushed the plate back an inch, and Mrs. Alcott took it. Then he got up and served the soup himself, one bowl, and set it down in front of Ellis, and sat back down.

“Finish that.”

Ellis was full. He had been full since the second piece of chicken. There was a skin on the soup and he broke it with the spoon and ate it anyway, small mouthfuls, all of it, until the spoon rang on the bottom of the bowl.

Mrs. Alcott took the bowl and the spoon, and the kitchen door swung twice behind her and settled.

He had gone into the bathroom at twenty past nine.

The water went cold somewhere in the middle, and he ran it hot again, and stood under it until it went cold a second time. Then he turned it off and sat on the toilet lid with the towel around his shoulders and let his hair dry wrong. The clock on the counter said 9:44. It said 10:02. It said 10:12.

He had done the arithmetic on the way up the stairs. The flight, the drive up from the city, the day. A man who had been at it since morning would be asleep by ten-thirty.

At ten-thirty he opened the door.

The lamp on the far side of the bed was still on. Nathaniel was half-sitting against the headboard with a pillow folded behind him and his phone face down on the nightstand, and he was looking at the bathroom door.

“All these years,” he said, “and you still can’t ask for anything.”

The fan was still running in the bathroom behind Ellis. He stood in the doorway with the towel around his shoulders and one hand holding the edge of it.

Nathaniel reached up and worked his thumb under the edge of the patch at the side of his neck and peeled it off. He dropped it on the nightstand, on top of the phone.

The citrus came off him and took the room.

Ellis had never gotten much off anyone — a beta in a July locker room got sweat and nothing else. But he had slept in the same bed as one person for years. His body had learned that scent and would not give it up.

He breathed in.

It went to the back of his neck first, hot and tight, and then under his jaw. His breath came out of him uneven. His hand closed on the towel.

The lamp stayed on. Nathaniel stayed against the headboard and let him stand there.

Ellis stayed where he was, in the doorway, the towel bunched in one hand. His breath came shallow and stayed shallow.