Chapter 13: I'll Be Home for Dinner

They had been kind to him at the house, and he still didn’t know what to do with it.

Kind wasn’t what he’d dressed for. He’d dressed for the other version — the long table, the careful questions with the answers already written in, everybody getting through the meal the way people get through weather. He’d had his own answers ready for that. He’d given them, and they’d come out fine, and nobody had flinched.

That was the part he couldn’t get past. Nobody had flinched.

There’d been a question from Adrian’s mother, and then a second question about his answer, which is how you can tell that somebody is listening to you and not just being well brought up. He’d been braced for the other one. Everybody very polite, nobody asking him anything, dessert coming around while you work out that you are a piece of information being handled carefully by people who have already handled it. He could do that version. He’d had years of practice at it.

He’d been around that family long enough to know how the arithmetic worked. There was a plan. People like the Hales always had one; it was most of what they were. And the plan had a wife in it for Adrian — somebody with a father and a name and a guest list, somebody who’d bring the family a merger, and then grandchildren, and then the right people at the funeral. Milo had been on the wrong side of arithmetic like that his whole life. He wasn’t in the plan. He was the thing the plan had been written around.

And nobody, all afternoon, had acted like anything had gone wrong.

Which left the greedy part.

He kept it folded up small, and he wasn’t going to take it out in this car, but it was there: he wanted more of it. Not the house, and not the food. He wanted Adrian to look at him again the way he had at the table. He wanted it two or three more times. He knew how that sounded, and he was never going to say it out loud to anybody, including the man sitting a foot and a half away with both hands on the wheel.

He was doing fine with all of it until the ride got short on him and there was nothing left to turn over but where it ended.

At the corner, Adrian slowed early and brought the car in against the curb. Milo didn’t move.

He was gone again — chin up, eyes on the windshield, fixed on something out past the glass that wasn’t there. It had been going on all afternoon. It had been going on for a month.

Adrian had felt the looking the whole way in: half a second at his shoulder, a full one at the light, then nothing for six blocks, then the weight of it again, steady, while Milo sat there watching the road like a man minding his own business. He’d given one second of it back at the light. Milo hadn’t noticed.

What it did to him, somewhere under the ribs, he put down and left where it was. It didn’t have a name yet. He had no plan for it.

He could have said, We’re here.

The car had stopped and he hadn’t noticed. He was still inside the afternoon — the table, the arithmetic, the look — when a hand came across him.

It brought him back all at once. A forearm laid along his chest, a shoulder in front of him, Adrian Hale’s face a hand’s width from his own — close enough that Milo stopped breathing and didn’t notice that he’d stopped.

He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. His heart was going hard, and for one very clear second he thought something he was going to be embarrassed about for the rest of his life.

Then something clicked, low down at his hip.

The belt. The strap that had been holding him into the seat for the last hour — and Adrian’s hand was on it, and then Adrian was sitting back with one hand on the wheel, on his own side of the car, and the whole thing was over.

“Oh,” Milo said.

“We’re here,” Adrian said.

If there was something under that, Milo didn’t hear it. He was busy.

“Sorry.” He already had his hand on the handle. “I was — sorry. Thanks for the ride. I’ll get out of your way.”

“Wait.”

He turned back with the door half open. “What?”

“I’ll be home for dinner.”

Milo blinked at him. “Okay. I’ll tell Walter.”

It wasn’t even a decision. In that house, anything to do with a meal went through Walter.

“No,” Adrian said. “That’s not what I said.”

He was looking at him straight on, the way he looked at things he’d already made up his mind about.

“I mean the two of us. You wait for me. I’ll finish up and come back as soon as I can. That’s what I meant.”

For a second Milo was sure he’d misheard. Not vaguely sure — sure the way you’re sure you’ve read a word right when you know perfectly well you haven’t.

He looked up.

He could feel his own face doing it — everything open at once, eyes wide, the way a cat looks at a sound it can’t find — and he couldn’t stop it, and Adrian didn’t move, and didn’t help him. He sat there and let the sentence stand on the seat between them.

“Okay,” Milo said.

He got out. He shut the door before he could think of anything to add to that, and walked.

He walked up the block with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the pavement. Behind him the car didn’t move.

He heard it not moving — the idle, low and patient, a car at a curb with nowhere in particular to be — and he didn’t turn around.

Then it pulled out, and went down the avenue past the light, and he kept walking.

He got ten steps past the corner and stopped. He turned around and looked back: a light changing for nobody, and that was all.

He put his fingers on his mouth without deciding to. Then he took them off again, because he was standing on a sidewalk.

Because he’d thought it — for about a second and a half, in the passenger seat of his husband’s car, Milo had thought Adrian Hale was going to kiss him.

And it wasn’t as if he’d had nothing to work with. The man had eyes you couldn’t get to the bottom of and a jaw that belonged on a coin, and he sat in a car like the car had been built around him. Milo had been married to him for a month and had spent most of that month not thinking about any of it — daily work, sustained work — and he was tired, and it was fine, and he was going to keep not thinking about it.

But here was the strange part. He wasn’t sorry.

He stood there with the last of the daylight going down behind the buildings and waited for the bad part to arrive — the part where he felt ridiculous, the part where he went upstairs and had a long talk with himself about reading things that weren’t there. It didn’t arrive. What came instead, going around and around, was the sentence, and the piece of it that kept catching was the middle.

The two of us.

He was smiling.

Then he turned and walked the rest of the way up the block, and let himself in, and started waiting for dinner.