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I know this feeling.
I know the second my consciousness rises to meet reality that I’ve been dead to the world for some time. I keep my eyes closed for a moment, taking in what I can. A faint fog surrounds my thoughts, and while I feel no pain, there is a dull throbbing sensation in my right thigh, just above the knee. The unmistakable scent of hospital is the first thing to hit me, followed by the familiar texture of a cheap thermal blanket under my hands.
There’s someone else in the room—of course there is. He’s nearly always within arms reach; we’ve long since stopped denying the pull we feel toward each other. We’re a pair again. Gone are the days of other people wedging their way between us, gone are the days of being left behind.
I remember: A suspect, cornered. We’d expected a knife. Instead, a bloody revolver. One shot to the femoral artery. Should be dead. Hard to wrap my head around that just now. Wonder how long I’ve been dead to the world, dead to him. I wonder how he managed to save me.
I crack open my eyes.
He’s pushed a blue plastic hospital chair up to my bedside, as close as he can manage. Wrinkled white shirt rolled up to his bony elbows, hunched forward, dark hair in a tangle where he holds his head in his hands.
I’ve seen him like this before. Emotional, and overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all, tugging on his curls as though he can pull the pain right out of his head. I’ve seen it more times than I can count, through the last few years of chaos and our fumbling attempts to pick up the pieces of our lives. After all his claims and my unfortunate accusations. After a lifetime of pretending to be something he never was. I see it.
He is a man who cannot contain the complex passions that seethe within him. As long as I’ve known him, he’s channeled them into his work, into the puzzles he obsesses over and the mysteries he refuses to leave unexplained. He directs them, too, at my daughter—a bright light who has helped to hold us together through everything, and who he’s accepted so wholly into his heart.
More and more, though—gradually, timidly—he’s begun to direct them at me.
I reach out and let my palm fall to his shoulder. I think, finally, the time for this has come.
His head snaps up, pale eyes locking with mine as they always do, hypnotic and familiar at once. Something punches its way out of his chest, a sound that’s all anguish and relief. He starts as though he wants to reach out, but holds back. He’s always holding back. We both are.
He stares at me, eyes gleaming with a complicated mixture of affection and hesitancy and hope as I rub his back, palm pressing into the broad expanse of him, feeling his sharp planes soften under my hand. It’s a gesture I’ve never dared to attempt before. It feels familial, a token of closeness, of the intimacy we’ve slowly and silently begun to acknowledge.
He lets out an unsteady breath, barely blinking, asking unspoken questions as the moment hovers between us. He’s such a child, sometimes. In many ways, but especially in this sort of artless purity that shines through in our more intimate moments. Like he can’t quite believe he’s allowed to be close to someone. Like he doesn’t quite know what comes next.
“Come here,” I rasp, voice soaked in emotion. His unfaltering movements as he crawls into the narrow hospital bed tell me he’s been waiting for this for a very long time.
After everything, two words were all it took.
I pull him into me, shifting as he folds himself around my body, heedful of my newest wound and awkwardly unsure of where to put his head. I guide him to lie against my chest, curls brushing softly over my unshaven cheek. We breathe together, settle into each other, and all at once it hits me how close I’d come to missing this.
I kiss him. His forehead, his temple, the crown of his head. And it’s easy, instinctive. The pull is visceral and I cannot stop it. There’s no need to, anymore.
He threads his fingers through my hair and I begin to cry.
I cannot stop this, either. A reaction to the relief, to the release of so many years of repressed affection. A response to the intoxicating feel of his weight and his warmth pressed against me, holding me down to the bed, down to earth. It’s the comfort and the sense of rightness that rages through my body, amplified by the intensity of the experience we’ve just gone through.
It’s one of many close calls, near misses. But this time feels different.
The tears are silent, but he notices nevertheless. Of course he does. When he shifts to peer up at me, it’s like a gut punch to my senses. He’s always had a way of looking straight into my psyche, but now it feels like we’re of one mind, melded together by the potency of our emotions.
When he kisses me, one shaky hand sliding down to cup my cheek, thumb gracefully catching my tears, I feel whole.
There have been a few moments in my life where things have fallen together in a way that made me certain I’d managed to stumble onto the right path. Only a few. The one that sticks in my memory, that pops up regularly still, was the day I’d shed my unrelenting bitterness for a moment and followed an old friend into an unassuming laboratory.
The pale eyes that watch me now are the same as they were when I’d glimpsed them that day and felt my world narrow down around me. There are creases surrounding them that hadn’t been there then—lines caused by age and by (I’d like to think) so many years of irrepressible laughter and secret smiles. It’s hard to recall the hell we’ve put each other through when I see the brilliant light that still exists behind his eyes. It’s a beacon. For me, it always has been.
Time fades with his mouth open to mine, hot and needy and gentle and human. My hands hold on to sharp shoulder blades as I try to convince myself that this is real, that the depth of my affection could be so thoroughly matched. Every doubt I’ve had, every time I’ve questioned whether he wants the same things—all that has been obliterated now, banished into nonexistence. He is adept at communicating emotion like this—we both are, I think—in a way we’ve never come close to with words.
As we gradually calm, he returns his fingers to my hair and his head to my chest. Eyes closed and arms wrapped easily around his back, I try to record this feeling, to memorize every sensation from the lingering tingle in my lips to his heady taste in my mouth. The way our current level of entanglement makes it impossible to tell where his body ends and mine begins. The overwhelming urge to squeeze him until he understands all that I feel for him, all that he is to me. I can only imagine he’s doing the same—tucking these moments away in drawers of his mind palace, safe and waiting for him to return to whenever he needs them.
I suspect he won’t need them at all. There will be many more to come.