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If you had asked Dora Sanchez what she thought of those two tall, good-looking men who’d bought tickets from her that morning to the Smithsonian National History Museum, she would have told you that they’d been really hot and really, really in love.
The tall and good-looking parts were, Dora would have admitted, a pretty big factor for her having remembered them. She didn’t normally go for dudes, but hell if those two hadn’t caught her eye. One of them—the taller blond one—had this kind of innocently sexy look about him, like he didn’t really realize that he was hot as fuck. It wouldn’t have been a stretch of the imagination to picture him shirtlessly saving kittens and babies from house fires. The other guy was a little darker somehow, but also, paradoxically, really fucking adorable. Dora thought he might be the kind of guy who bought you flowers before biting your neck so hard it bruised.
If Dora Sanchez hadn’t had such an amazing smoking-hot girlfriend to come home to, and if the two men hadn’t been so clearly head over heels for each other with their smiling and their laughing and all the small touches, she probably would have written her number on the back of one of their ticket stubs. Instead, she just handed them their tickets and told them she hoped they had a very nice day. They’d thanked her and wished her the same—fucking hell, they were polite, too—and walked down the hall, hands not quite touching. She thought they were one of the most adorable couples she’d seen during her time working for the museum.
If you had asked Alfred Williams about the two men in the Second World War exhibit who walked like twenty-somethings but whose footsteps seemed so much older, Alfred would have said they looked grateful. Not grateful like a starving kid with bread, or a rich man making good interest. They were grateful like they were living on borrowed time, and every look, every touch they got was unexpected. He’d seen them for soldiers the moment they’d walked in, just from the way they held themselves. Alfred was a soldier too—it took one to know one. He’d spent three years in Vietnam, and he’d been going back there in his nightmares ever since. These boys—because he could call them boys, since they didn’t look like they could be much older than his grandkids—these two soldier-boys walked as though they’d seen enough bad to stop expecting the good to be fair. They stared at the war relics like they knew them as more than pieces of history.
Alfred Williams had considered talking to them—asking where they’d served, when, for how long. In the end, he decided not to. He would have been intruding. This was their moment in the same way that going to read the names on that big piece of glossy black granite was his moment. It was about feeling the pain of the ghosts they carried with them, marveling that they were still there to feel it at all, and thanking God or the universe or maybe just fate that they could feel it together, side by side.
If you’d asked Brandon Owens, who was nine and a half years old, which was basically ten, he would have said that the blond-haired man and his friend looked sad but also sort of happy. They were looking at the Captain America section, which he was doing too, because his grandma had taken him to the museum for the day. Most of the stuff there was boring, because duh, it was a museum. But the Captain America stuff was cool. Everybody thought Captain America was dead for a real long time, but then they found out he wasn’t, and he helped fight against aliens in New York. That was pretty awesome. Not the aliens, though, they were scary.
Brandon told the blond-haired man and his friend all of this stuff, and they listened to him, which made him like them, because a lot of the time grown-ups only pretend to listen when they’re really thinking about work or getting groceries. But these two guys actually listened—Brandon could tell. The blond-haired one asked questions about Captain America, like what was his real name? And did Brandon know which city he was from? The other man—he had brown hair—he didn’t ask questions, but he was still listening. He listened to both of them, and when the other man was talking he looked sort of like he thought the guy was a pastor or something, he was listening so hard.
When Brandon was talking to them, they both had the sad-happy look. It was the sort of look that Brandon’s dad got when he talked about his grandpa, because his grandpa had died in September. Dad said that he was still sad about it sometimes, but he was glad that Grandpa wasn’t in any pain anymore. Brandon wondered if someone they cared about had died, and he almost asked, but he didn’t because his grandma would probably tell him it was a rude question.
Eventually his grandma gave him the One Minute Warning, which meant that they would have to go in one minute, and then the brown-haired man crouched down so that he was at Brandon’s level and asked him if he could keep a secret. Brandon said he could, of course. Then the man took off his left glove, and his fingers were made of metal! The man said that his whole arm was metal, and he had super strength in it because it was bionic. He let Brian touch his fingers and look at the places where the different metal pieces came together. Brandon told him he must be some kind of superhero. But then Brandon’s grandma came, so the brown-haired man had to put his glove back on. He said goodbye to them, and they said goodbye back. He thought they were really nice.
Jason Moore woulda said that the two men who put ten dollars in his can that evening were nice guy. There weren’t a whole lot of that type around anymore, he would have told you. Most folks would just kinda avoid eye contact, and Jason got it, he did, 'cuz he was a sixty-year-old homeless guy and his teeth were kinda crooked-like and his hair hadn't been washed in a long while. A lot of folks thoughts he was on drugs, too, but he weren't. He'd never used nothin' but alcohol his whole life, and he was six months sober from that, too.
These two guys, they were different though. The blond one came up and gave him the ten, and then he asked him how was he doing? What was his name? Did he have a place to stay that night? He told 'em he had dinner and a bed at that homeless shelter down past 50th, but the ten would help him get breakfast and lunch the next day. Then the other guy—the not-as-tall one—said that they hadn’t come from a lot of money, and that he got it. He didn't say no bullshit about things lookin' up eventually which made Jason believe what he said 'bout the growin' up poor thing. Jason told them that he appreciated the help. The guys left after that—said they had to make a dinner reservation. They wished him a good evening and some good luck, too.
Christa Chang would have talked about how totally well matched the two guys had been—Mr. and Mr. Barnes, according to their reservation. Maplewood Bar and Grill didn’t usually get people asking for reservations, especially not, like, a week in advance. She’d been staring at their names for days now, trying to decide what they might look like. Shanice had been convinced that they were going to be, like, completely flamboyantly gay—“Why else would they reserve as Mr. and Mr. Barnes? They could’ve just said Joe Barnes, or whatever.” Christa had been less sure. Maybe they were just newlyweds, or maybe they weren’t even married at all. “They could be brothers,” she’d told Shanice. “Or like, father and son.” Shanice had just rolled her eyes and made a lewd gesture with two of her fingers to tell Christa just how completely gay she thought Mr. and Mr. Barnes were.
In the end, they’d both been wrong—well, Shanice had been right about the gay part, probably, but not the flamboyance. They looked pretty ordinary, if she was honest. Aside from being a lot taller and more athletic-looking than the average person, there was nothing about them that would have set them apart from the crowd. But then, what had she been expecting, really?
What eventually caught her eye about the two guys didn’t have anything to do with their appearance. The way they acted around each other was just… crazy. She couldn’t put a finger on why, but it was obvious that they belonged together. Maybe it was the way they moved: perfect unspoken coordination, like they were gravitating around each other. She saw it when they walked in, one holding the door open behind him as the other walked through (cute!) and then immediately moving to the left so that they could fall into step. She saw it when she walked them to their tables, too—the blond one pulling out the chair for the brunette on his way to his own seat (totally cute!) while the brunette accepted menus for both of them. It was the kind of harmonized movement she’d expect from an old married couple, not two guys in their early thirties.
As she walked away from seating them, she heard the blond say, “Mr. and Mr. Barnes? Really?”
“Well, I wasn’t about to tell them Mr. and Mr. Rogers, now was I?”
Even the banter sounded balanced.
Mrs. Thompson would have said the two people sitting at the table across from hers were sweet young men—handsome, too. It made her glad to see young people so happy together, especially since there seemed to be such a fuss in the news nowadays about who was allowed to love who. They reminded her of the way she and Henry had been back in their day. Mrs. Thompson had almost been sorry when the two boys left, because the love in their voices had been so nice to listen to.
The residents of the apartment complex on the corner of 21st and Johnson would have said that the men who lived in apartment 302-A were good neighbors. Of course, Mr. McNally in apartment 207-B would always complain that people “like them” were destroying the sanctity of the family unit, but Mr. McNally also grumbled about the uneven sidewalks and hung a confederate flag from his window, so no one really liked him anyway. Mrs. Richardson would have made a point to talk quite a lot about how the two boys always helped her carry up her groceries, and one of them had even helped her change the lightbulb in her walkway (“What a gentleman!”). In fact, Mrs. Richardson had seen the two boys that night as they were coming home. She’d been downstairs in her nightgown picking up her mail when they came in. They exchanged hellos, and then they asked her how she was doing that evening. She said she was well, though her hip was bothering her again. After that they asked if there was anything she needed help with, but she told them no thank you, it was quite alright. They wished her goodnight as they went upstairs. Although it was true that they mainly kept to themselves, no one (besides Mr. McNally, that was) had a bad word to say against either of them. They were kind and courteous and in love, and no one could complain about that.
(If you had asked the two men, they wouldn’t have known what to say. They would have looked at their feet, and then at each other, grinning bashfully all the while. One of them might have said they’d know each other forever, or that they’d always been friends, or something similarly dismissive of the rarity of the bond they shared. Even so, they both knew that what they had was special. You’d see it in their eyes. They would go through hell and back for each other, die for each other, stay with each other until the end. That was just who they were.
Fate fights for some people to be together. And fate sure as hell fought for them.)