Chapter Text
Jack comes to bed late, four forty-one a.m., where, just past the winter solstice, the black is absolute and the dozen streetlights on their block only turn the darkness yellow as animal eyes. The night watches Jack turn the office lamp off. The light which fell in a prison column through the open doorway and across the king bed, over the folded covers on Jack’s side, over Sammy’s alarm clock, goes abruptly out.
Sammy can hear Jack’s bare feet on the carpet in the hall, shuffling in an indeterminate direction. The garish red numbers on the alarm clock glitch to four forty-two, and Sammy squints as he looks at it. Beyond him the wall, the window with its curtains half-open, trees between him and the sky. The space between his nose and the wall grows smaller every day, as Jack stays up later and doesn’t think to whisper Sammy’s name when he comes to bed, his eyes reeling with thought.
Sammy’s back is curved as though he expects someone to fold his body across it, and the space behind him is tundra-vast, the comforter Jack picked out pale in the dark and heavy.
The door scrapes across the carpet and Sammy twitches without thinking. Even with his eyes on the blinking clock, he can imagine the shape of Jack standing in the doorway, his eyes adjusting to the dark, looking at Sammy with that complicated expression, fingertips still on the door handle. Come in, Sammy wants to say. It’s cold. And he listens for the swishing of Jack’s feet as he tiptoes closer. He listens for the sound of Jack pulling his shirt over his head, of socks hitting the laundry basket. If Jack casts a shadow, he casts it away from Sammy.
The covers shift and a rush of cold air hits the small of Sammy’s back where his shirt has ridden up. He imagines Jack’s hand there, soft and warm, or soft and cold as ice-water. Instead, he feels only Jack’s spine, its sharp ridges and the swell of muscle rising to his shoulders, feels their spines slot together like playing cards shuffled by an amateur.
“Jack,” whispers Sammy, and he wishes he could whisper it softer.
“Did I wake you?” Jack whispers back, his voice blurred by the pillow and distant but warm. Almost warm. Jack shifts and the soles of his feet touch the soles of Sammy’s. With distance a breeze block in his throat, Sammy curls his toes to hold Jack closer.
“I can’t sleep if you can’t,” says Sammy.
“I can’t sleep,” says Jack.
“Try,” says Sammy. “Just lay here with me and try.”
But hours later, when Sammy stirs from a dream where he is chasing Jack on foot across a desert, he is face-to-face with Jack. In the pale dawn, the sun not yet bouncing off the windows of the house across the road, the light falls across Jack's face, highlighting its structure and softening him. His hair is growing out in little curls behind his ears. Sammy reaches out and brushes the ends of Jack’s hair, watching, with eyes half-closed, the way the light shifts as Jack breathes. Jack's mouth is open and his breath is warm on Sammy's nose.
For a second, Sammy's fingers brush Jack's jaw. He shifts closer and puts his arm around Jack’s waist. Without any change in his breathing, Jack closes a hand around Sammy’s arm and pulls his fingers to his heart.
When the alarm blares, he will lose Jack all over again, to his books and journals, web pages and newspaper clippings, to the library, to phone calls from his car, to the secrets he can’t see the sun through. He holds Jack with a space between their chests, as though his body alone could say, as he never could in the light, Come home. I miss you. It’s dark.
The house is as empty as the stare Jack levels at Sammy across the table at breakfast, preoccupied with whatever he read the night before, whatever he dreamed about. He doesn’t tell Sammy his dreams anymore, doesn’t run his mouth over breakfast about what they could mean while Sammy stares at him until he works his way to an aha! moment. He doesn’t fix Sammy’s collar from behind or bring in the newspapers and separate the sports section from the rest.
They eat the cookies from the cookie tin separately. Jack eats two before breakfast, and then, with one clamped in his teeth, he retreats to his office while Sammy flips pancakes. Sammy refills Jack’s glass of water from the filter jug once an hour. Jack startles when Sammy raps on the door, only glancing up when Sammy grasps the cup.
Jack gets up and paces down the hall, across the living room, his arms swinging, his face animated but not showing all his cards.
Sammy has long since stopped asking What are you thinking? He has stopped thinking, What are you afraid of? He has stopped whispering it into the crook of Jack’s neck in the dark.
How many times has Jack answered I’m not afraid with his heart thudding under every patch of skin Sammy touched? Yes, Sammy has held him halfway to tears and wide-eyed and shaking with information he wouldn’t speak of. Now, he doesn’t speak much and doesn’t cry and doesn’t look at Sammy like he’s looking at Sammy.
Not long ago, or maybe too long ago to measure, Jack would stop midstride and put his hands on Sammy’s shoulders, take Sammy’s hair down and run his fingers along the skull from the neck. Now, when Jack pauses behind him, Sammy holds his breath. Jack would stand behind Sammy with a fact on his tongue Sammy had no context for, his hands in Sammy’s hair, and run his latest discovery past Sammy in a voice so full of enthusiasm it must take his whole body to contain it.
Sammy holds onto that, the Jack he used to have.
Christmas morning, Sammy wakes before Jack and turns the alarm off. In his pajamas, he tiptoes downstairs to the kitchen to start the popovers. The midmorning is still and quiet, but he can hear wind shaking the trees outside. His breath is louder than the oven preheating, than the clatter of measuring cups.
He plays carols softly from the living room CD player, because last year, Jack came downstairs humming along, singing Mariah Carey in his clear, sweet voice. And they were home, the two of them, waking up to their first Christmas together in a house with a yard and windows on all sides. Jack could sing as loudly as he wanted.
This year, he is sitting at the kitchen island, studying his hands in the light from the window and watching the timer, when Jack comes down. Jack is fully dressed, as though planning on going out, but he wears cozy socks. Sammy swivels his head to watch him cross the kitchen, pass the island and open the fridge.
“Good morning,” Sammy says.
Jack props a hand on the counter and grins the way he does when he’s ill at ease. The span of the kitchen island sits between them, and Sammy is aware of his legs crossed on the stool, the light through the windows falling across the stove between them, the space beside him where Jack isn’t. The air is warm with the smell of rising dough and cold with distance. “Let’s not make a big deal of today.”
Sammy says, “What, the holiday, the—the gift giving?”
“Sure. That, and, well, everything.”
Sammy glances down and realizes he’s spinning the ring around his finger. “It hasn’t been a big deal. It’s up to us, both of us, to decide how we want to make traditions. It’s our life, our family, and just because, well, because we were so excited last year… Jack, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” Jack looks at him and looks away, chewing on his lip. Sammy stares at his lips, at his white teeth. His eyes look past Sammy.
“If there’s something you want to say, you can say it.”
“There isn’t,” says Jack, so flatly Sammy knows it’s a lie.
Sammy sighs and slides off the high stool. “Jack. You know I support you in everything, but this—”
“Then don’t say you support me.”
Sammy hears the strain, the plea, rise in his voice. “I do.”
“Oh, yeah? Then what were you going to say? This isn’t like me? Sammy, you know me better than that. This isn’t what you wanted? I’m close. I’m close. It’s almost over.”
“Come on, Jack. This obsession’s never going to be over.”
“But the search will. I’ll… I’ll know. That’s all I need, I need to know." He is a shadow, hair dark as the slope of his shoulders beneath his t-shirt, his hand flat on the counter.
It takes everything in Sammy to keep his voice level, to not snap. “How should I know what’s going to end and what’s going to go on for another six months, another year? You never let me in anymore long enough to find out.”
“It’s all almost over. It’s the next chapter of… everything. Sammy, don’t you see? It’s the next chapter of everything.” Compared to his tense, tight body, Jack’s voice is grandiose with revelation.
Sammy stares at Jack for so long Jack blurs in his vision, and then he says, so soft he’s not sure he says it at all, “Isn’t this enough?”
Jack runs his other hand through his hair and laughs. Sammy can't tell if it's nervous. “This isn’t about you or me or our life, it’s about something bigger than I’ve ever imagined. But it’s, yes, it’s tiring, it’s a lot of work and I’m… Sammy, okay, just let me talk, don’t—don’t shut me down. But I’m not really up for Christmas this year.”
“It’s Christmas,” Sammy says, and hates the pleading way his voice sounds. The space between the kitchen island and Jack is a Florida hurricane.
Jack says, “I know last year was different. Maybe you had different expectations of me.”
Last Christmas, Jack fell off the sofa back into Sammy’s arms trying to put the star on the tree. Last Christmas they discovered they’d only brought one apron and Sammy got cookie dough all over his ugliest sweater. They had gone out and bought tinsel to string up above every window. They talked about buying yard art.
Sammy knew better than to expect that first-time enthusiasm this year, knew it the first moment he looked into Jack’s eyes and saw only black holes.
Sammy uncrosses his legs and speaks haltingly. “No, I know. It was new to us. But it’s still new to me, and I wanted to share—I wanted—some time, Jack, I wanted this to share with you. This one day.” One day to have him, and to have him look back at Sammy without clouds in his eyes. One day to make him smile. “Or maybe until New Year’s.”
The oven alarm pings behind Jack.
Jack says, “And you do. Have me. I’m here.”
Jack doesn’t turn when Sammy comes up behind him, but neither does he startle when Sammy’s hands fall on his arms. Sammy slides his hands down Jack’s biceps to his forearms, and as he does, Jack shifts. Jack reaches across to hold his fingers, to hold Sammy close to his heart. Jack is warm, and Sammy steps in close.
Sammy could almost let himself forget the distance, the apathy, the way he is living with Jack’s obsession as much as with Jack himself.
The silence goes on and on, but Sammy can feel in his ribs the rising and falling of Jack’s. Sammy presses his cheek against Jack’s hair and says, “But you’re not happy.”
“How can I be, when I know there’s something bigger than anything, waiting for me?” The frustration is sharp in his voice. “You don’t understand. I have to.”
The oven beeps again. Over Jack’s shoulder, Sammy can see its prison lights, the popovers browned and bulbous.
“I love you,” says Sammy into the tangle of Jack’s hair, and kisses him there. “I love you. Today can be as quiet as you want. All that matters is that you’re here, and that I see you smile, at least once, before we go to bed.”
Jack laughs that breathy laugh reserved for when he’s pleased somewhere deep inside and squeezes Sammy’s hands, but Sammy still has to imagine his expression. “Yeah,” says Jack. “That sounds doable.”
“Doable?”
“Perfect.”
The next morning, Sammy reads at the dining room table with Jack in the other room and the television running news anchors’ staccato voices or documentary narration, considers planning Shotgun segments so he doesn’t have to glance up, helpless, at the glass doors. He can see neither Jack nor the television, but the doors hang open and he can hear Jack when he gets up to pace the room.
Jack wanted to retreat into his office, a room almost as big as the master with white walls and an industrial desk with its screens and array of equipment, but over leftover popovers, both of them reading the paper and meeting each other’s eyes in a way that was once comfortable, Sammy said, “Can you stay close today?”
He is waiting for the new year to fall like rain over Jack and clear his eyes. He is waiting for the new year to let Jack rest, to let both of them rest, to let them hold each other in the dark and know the shape of each other’s minds. There are so many things that Jack does not say, words like shadows under his tongue.
Sammy can’t let the distance spread out between them like a black carpet, can’t sit with his work and not imagine the slope of Jack’s spine on the sofa, the twitch of his hands in the air when his shadow falls across the doorway.
Abruptly, the TV goes silent. Jack pushes open the glass doors and approaches the dining room table with purpose, remote swinging at his side. Sammy looks up, pushing hair out of his eyes, and tracks Jack’s movement.
Jack pushes the newspaper aside in a furious motion and retrieves a checkered notebook, its pages dog-eared and decorated with sticky tabs. Jack flicks through it possessively, brow furrowed. Every movement is tense from fingertips to shoulders, and he keeps the notebook tilted away from Sammy.
“Did you read this?” he demands.
“No,” says Sammy, surprised and indignant. “I didn’t even know it was there.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I’m not out to get you. Jesus.”
Jack looks up from the notebook, his eyes red and wild. “It’s not—” His voice shifts and he is Jack, the Jack Sammy knows, the Jack who told Sammy, with the sun in his eyes, We could make a home, a real home, just us, something wonderful. The Jack who said, Yeah, it’s Lily, but this isn’t an end; we’re just getting started. “It’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it?” says Sammy.
“It’s not,” says Jack, enigmatic, and turns on his heels. He pulls the doors shut behind him.
“Jack, you’re not okay,” Sammy is saying. He is making the bed and Jack is pulling on jeans, both of them looking at each other while the other is looking away.
“I’m fine.” This is a conversation they have had many times. Sammy folds hospital corners with angry hands, him at the foot of the bed and Jack at the full-length mirror. Shadows of tree branches fall over his hands, tumble off the bed to race across the floor to Jack’s feet.
Beside Jack the swivel chair piled with books and sweaters; beside him the hamper, against which Jack is removing his slippers; beside him the drawers they share with its stacks of coins, photographs, vials of cologne, Sammy’s wallet left open but Jack’s nowhere to be seen.
“You know I don’t want to do anything you’re not okay with, but, Jack, you’re not all right.”
“I’m not sick,” says Jack, shirtless, combing his hair with his fingers.
Sammy glances over and meets eyes with Jack in the glass. The blankets are heavy and cold in his hands. “That’s not for me to decide. But you’re… I see you every day, and every day it’s harder to look at you, because you’re hurting.” Sammy smooths the bed, pulls down the covers on Jack’s side to invite him home.
“That’s not for you to decide? Sounds like you’ve already decided, doesn’t it?” If Jack weren’t standing between Sammy and the door, Sammy would be running.
“Goddamn it, Jack, look at me.”
Jack stops. He looks at Sammy in the mirror. His hair is tousled from the shirt, and the bags under his eyes look like black holes in his skin. He looks at Sammy like he is afraid of the looking. “What?”
Sammy breathes and it shudders. He says, “When are you coming home?”
“I am.” Jack’s voice is partly puzzled but mostly blank.
“You’re in our home but you’re not home. You’re not home, Jack. You’re mine but I’m losing you.”
Jack breaks eye contact but doesn’t turn around. Sammy follows his gaze up to the ceiling fan. “I don’t need you telling me that I’m broken. Not you, too.”
Lily’s laughter ringing in Sammy’s ears, derisive. Jack cursing her out in Sammy’s car after a particularly rough show, slamming the dashboard with a fist until Sammy reached out to catch his wrist, until his hand softened against Sammy’s. Until Sammy rested his fingers under Jack’s chin and said You’re all right.
“I’m not,” says Sammy. “I’m just saying you’re in a bad place.”
“It’s not easy to do what has to be done. So screw that, screw… your delusions of helping me.”
“I’m not. You don’t let me help you,” Sammy snaps.
“Always wanting to get something out of it,” Jack sneers. “Wanting confirmation that I’m worth the hassle.”
Helpless against this pointed, less-uncharacteristic-every-day cruelty, Sammy says, “I don’t… You know that’s not true. You’re my fiancé. We’re in this together. I want what’s right for you.”
“You don’t know what’s right for me.”
“I want you to get help. See someone. Come home.” Sammy runs his hands through his hair and tugs until a headache blossoms. He is looking at Jack and Jack is looking at nothing in the glass. He is saying I’m losing you, I’m losing you and Jack is saying I’m everything I need to be.
He is saying Come home, and Jack is saying I’m trying. And they don’t mean the same thing.
He goes to the window and pulls the curtains half closed. The room falls dark enough that the overhead barely lights it, though it still glitters in Jack’s hair. He puts a hand on the glass. “Please. It’s a new year. It can be a new start.”
“It is.”
Sammy stays by the window, beneath which a middle-aged woman walks a Pomeranian and cars hurtle paston the way to work. “Forget about all of this. Please, can’t you? Put it aside, put it down forever, and be mine. It doesn’t have to be like this, you don’t have to lose yourself, it can be enough.”
Sammy closes his eyes and listens for Jack, for his feet, and when he hears nothing, he turns. Jack sits on the bed, one leg tucked up and the other stretched out across the carpet. It is an invitation, and Sammy stops beside the footboard. Then he sees Jack’s hand tying his laces on the bedspread. He pulls up the other foot, props it against the footboard, and looks up at Sammy. Maybe it is the light that keeps Sammy from seeing the pupils in Jack’s dark eyes.
Jack opens his mouth, pauses, touches his tongue to his top teeth, closes his lips. He says, “I don’t know how to explain it to you in a way you’ll understand.”
The space between them stretches like the view from their old apartment with Jack’s sister, the way the sea would come in with Jack when he finished his morning runs, uncrossable and constant. The unguarded door calls Sammy.
“Can you try?” says Sammy.
“Honestly? I don’t think I can. If you were going—if I were going to make any sense to you, it’s a bridge that would have been crossed a long time ago. Admit it.” His head is still in his notebook, in words he’s just realized he hasn’t written down yet. Sammy tells himself this.
“That’s not fair. Babe, I want everything about you, I want to know everything.”
“Even this?”
“I’m trying to be here for you.”
“Sammy,” says Jack, as though he does not want to be saying Sammy’s name. As though he is talking to a Sammy in his head and not the one in front of him.
“You must be exhausted,” says Sammy, and what he means is, I am.
Jack rises and doesn’t look at Sammy. “I’ll be home before dinner. Don’t wait for me.”
“But,” says Sammy.
The door swings shut behind Jack and the shadows left behind him fall, pooling around Sammy’s feet and reaching for him. In the silence of Jack’s absence, Sammy sinks onto the bed, his hands empty in front of him.
Sammy doesn’t know how little time he has left, but Jack shrugs off Sammy’s hand on his shoulder, the back of his hand, in his hair, as though he doesn’t notice Sammy at all, his eyes on the ceiling or the sky, Sammy’s presence as mindlessly insignificant as lint on a freshly-dried shirt. He is always turning to do something more important, to flip his laptop open or read a text notification from somewhere Sammy has never heard of or drag his notebook along the dining room table, thudding, heavy with thought.
Jack wakes in the night, clutching at the comforter, scrambling back until he hits the headboard. He wakes Sammy. They are both disoriented in the dark, rising bodies at odds with each other as Sammy tries to hold him, to take his hands, and Jack tries to push himself as far back against the headboard as he can.
“Jack,” Sammy says, over and over, his voice low. Jack blinks but doesn’t see him. The room expands from the pinpricks of light in Jack’s eyes to the shape of his body in the dark, soft and luminescent in the streetlights’ glow, overlaid by tree branches.
Jack’s wide eyes don’t see Sammy, but he calms when Sammy strokes his hand.
The Jack of a year ago would get up and take a run, but the Jack Sammy has now pulls a clean shirt on and paces the house. Sammy lays back down and puts Jack’s pillow over his head, but then he’s left with Jack’s scent.
Fingers still wet from cooking, Sammy crosses the house looking for Jack, vegetables simmering on the stove, the smell of garlic chasing his heels like the puppy they’d talked about adopting. He finds Jack spread out across the sofa, neck bent the way it bends only in sleep, the sunset orange across his skin. He is beautiful, fingers relaxed in empty air, mouth parted, chest swelling with breath.
Sammy stands in the doorway and takes him in, and slowly he becomes aware of his own smile. Dinner can wait. The whole world can wait for Jack.
Sammy wants to wake him to kiss him, to kneel on the rug and be part of everything Jack is a part of. Instead he says Jack’s name softly, to test if Jack will rouse.
Jack makes a sound like he’s deep in thought, but he doesn’t stir. So Sammy pulls the coffee table away and crouches before the sofa. His shadow falls over Jack, cutting through the sunlight.
Carefully, he lifts Jack, drapes Jack’s arms over his shoulders. He carries Jack through the house, up the stairs. He pushes the bedroom door open with his shoulder.
“Sammy,” mumbles Jack. He shifts, and his lips brush Sammy’s neck, almost like a kiss. Sammy closes his eyes until Jack’s head falls and his nose brushes along Sammy’s skin. It sends shivers through Sammy’s body.
“Shh. Just sleep.”
“Sammy?” Jack struggles in his sleep. Sammy sets him back on the bed, keeps his hands against Jack’s cheek.
Sammy takes a blanket from the closet and drapes it over Jack. He clears the chair of its sweaters and books, pulls it close, and keeps guard. He says, “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, always. I promise.”
Sammy says I love you into every crevasse of the house. He leaves his I love yous for Jack to find in his midnight wanderings, in his sleepless, blue-stained nights. He leaves them warm as his breath under Jack’s planner, beside his car keys, in the dip of his pillow. In whole meals refrigerated for days when Jack barely eats, in worried texts throughout the day, in wiping Jack’s coffee rings away and kissing the top of his head.
And still Jack slips away.
Still Jack with eyes vacant and dark. Still the early-evening jogs giving way to hours of blue light and fingers loud on the keyboard. Still the nightmares, still the tangled bedsheets, still Jack’s bare feet burning up in the dark.
Burning up to run.
On New Year’s Eve, Sammy runs to the liquor store for champagne, and when he returns, when he opens the living room door, Jack rises to kiss him. Jack’s mouth is hot and quick and Sammy’s opens for him, a warm sound escaping. Sammy wraps his arms around Jack’s neck, the neck of the bottle cool in its paper bag. He closes his eyes to feel every crevasse of Jack’s lips.
It feels like home, the only home he has ever known.
And it feels like nothing has changed since Sammy promised himself to Jack and Jack promised himself back.
“A little birdy told me you were hoping for something special,” says Jack, sweet and maybe a bit self-conscious. “Big day ahead of us. I’ll pour.” He slides the bottle out of Sammy’s hand and disappears into the kitchen.
The living room is tidy for the first time in months, magazines stacked in the corner of the coffee table, the houseplant in the corner freshly watered, not a trace of Jack’s research anywhere.
He should have known. Sammy should have known then.
Instead he takes the champagne glass from Jack with a smile and settles on the sofa. Jack tucks his head under Sammy’s chin and talks with his hands, liquor spilling over the rim of the glass and neither of them caring. If Jack’s eyes grow cloudy with sleep, with preoccupation, Sammy cannot see.
They leave the television livestreaming Times Square, NYC, adjusted for Pacific Standard Time, but neither of them are watching the newscasters’ drone. It is not always this easy to talk to each other these days, to be in the same room and try to remember how to reach each other, to come home. But Sammy knows this: Jack is home, Jack, Jack, and no matter what comes, it will always be Jack.
Early in the morning, the bedroom black but tinged with grey, Sammy feels the bed shift. He reaches out, seeking Jack’s warmth, and for a second Jack’s fingers stroke the back of his hand.
“Shh,” Sammy thinks he hears, but the champagne is still heavy in his body and he doesn’t fight it. And Jack has spent the full night in bed for the first time in weeks.
The bed grows light under Sammy, and he slides into the dip left by a body, warm and close. In sleep, he mumbles, “Jack.”
“I’m sorry, Sammy,” comes the voice, a whisper or a dream. It could all be a dream, the rustling of clothes in the closet, of a bag soft with clothes and papers hitting an unyielding back, the bag sliding along the hallway walls. Feet pacing back and forth through the bedroom, hesitant, pulling open dresser drawers to scrape cardboard along the bottom. The bedroom door swinging open, the pause, then the swinging shut.
In the silence that follows, Sammy pulls Jack’s pillow against his body, aware for half a second that if he fills the space, there will be no space for Jack to return to.
The front door opens, and the sound of wind shaking palm trees rushes through the house, stirs the blankets around Sammy’s shoulders. If the night air is warm, it cools by the time it reaches him.
A car stirs softly in the driveway, and Sammy blinks his eyes open once. It is cold, and, still clutching the pillow, he turns away from the door.