Chapter 64 THE WORD GETS USED

Chapter 64 THE WORD GETS USED

POV: Reese Calloway

His bag hit the floor inside my door at six in the evening and Cole sat down on the floor beside it without taking his jacket off first.

Not the couch. The floor, directly in front of the wall where the magazine prints were pinned, his back against the side of the armchair and his legs stretched out and his eyes going across the photographs the way they went across things he was taking in properly.

I sat down beside him.

The ceramicist's hands in the north window light. The muralist twenty feet up the scaffold. The trumpet player from the L platform. The community garden woman with ninety years of opinions about soil. Eight prints from the first two weeks of the contract, pinned in the order I'd taken them, the work that was mine in the full unqualified sense.

Cole looked at them without saying anything for a minute.

Then we talked.

His games, three away in eight days, the interim coach's approach to the power play that Cole had opinions about which he delivered with the flat certainty he brought to things he'd thought through completely. My shoots, the muralist session that had run three hours over schedule because the light had changed twice and each change had been better than the one before it. Tommy's advocacy position, formally accepted, the league's welfare program having sent the paperwork through already.

June had been promoted at the PR firm, director level, her first solo project a player wellness initiative that had Tommy's fingerprints on the design.

DeShawn had been working on his crossover step for two weeks and had achieved something that might generously be described as sixty percent of a crossover step, which Cole said was better progress than most kids his age and I said I'd take his word for it.

Cole said: "I love you."

In the middle of the crossover step conversation. Just like that, dropped into the space between one sentence and the next, in the same even register he used for everything he said that he meant completely.

I looked at him.

He looked back. His hands were loose in his lap and his back was against the armchair and his eyes were on mine, unhurried, not pushing the wait into anything.

"I know," I said.

He nodded once. The nod of someone who had heard what they needed to hear in the word that was said rather than the word that wasn't.

I looked at the trumpet player photograph on the wall. The man sealed inside his music on the platform with the city moving around him and none of it interrupting what he was doing.

"I'm not." I stopped. Started again. "I'm working on the part where I say it without my chest going tight."

"I'll wait," Cole said.

"You shouldn't have to."

"I want to." He said it the same way he said everything that was completely true, without building toward it or away from it. Just the fact, placed in the room.

I looked at the wall.

The prints from the first two weeks of the contract on the right side, the documentary work on the left, all of it mine and on the wall and visible and not filed away in a folder on a hard drive that nobody had opened in three years.

We stayed on the floor until the room got dark and I got up and made dinner and Cole stayed on the floor looking at the wall until I called him to the table and we ate and talked about the interim coach's power play opinions some more and neither of us mentioned the conversation again that evening.

I gave him the couch.

He took it without comment, which was its own kind of answer about what the couch meant and what it didn't mean, and I went to my room and lay there for a while before I slept.

I woke at six and the apartment was quiet.

Cole was asleep on the couch, his back to the room, the blanket I'd left out pulled up to his shoulder. The specific stillness of someone in deep sleep, not the half-sleep of an unfamiliar space but the real kind.

I went to the kitchen and started the coffee.

The machine ran its cycle and I stood at the counter and looked at the wall through the kitchen doorway. The prints visible from this angle, the trumpet player in the corner catching the early light.

I said it to the kitchen.

Quietly, the way you said something you were testing before you said it properly, the way my father had practiced the same three bars of the same song for weeks until they were exactly right.

"I love you."

It came out differently than I expected. Not a practice run. Not a test of whether my chest would tighten or my voice would do the thing it sometimes did.

Just real.

I stood at the kitchen counter with the coffee running and the apartment quiet and Cole asleep on the couch and the morning light coming through the east window and the word sitting in the kitchen exactly as real as everything else in the room.