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It had been Robby's idea to go to Squirrel Hill.
This, in itself, was probably a sign of improvement.
Three months ago, Robby would have called it pointless, indulgent, the kind of errand people invented when they had enough free time to waste it. These days, he had started letting the hours stretch a little.
He slept more at Jack’s apartment than his own, ate when food appeared in front of him, and occasionally remembered that wanting something small and unnecessary was not the same thing as falling apart.
They had done the grocery run first; the big weekly one, the kind that required a list and a cart and a certain amount of negotiating in the bread aisle. They had been twenty minutes from home with the bags in the back of Jack's car when Robby had said, in the tone of a man who had just remembered something he'd been meaning to do for three weeks, there's a record store on Murray, I just want to look, five minutes.
He had not been in there for five minutes.
He had been in there for closer to forty, which he knew because Jack appeared at his elbow in the jazz section at some point. Robby hadn't heard him come in over the music playing softly through the store speakers, and he stood there without complaint while Robby finished explaining why a particular bass line from a 1974 reissue represented something genuinely important.
Jack had nodded at the appropriate intervals and said hm in a way that suggested he was listening even if the specifics weren't landing. Robby appreciated the half-enthusiasm, and had kept talking because Jack was there and it was easy and the record was genuinely worth the explanation.
He left the store with the reissue tucked under his arm, satisfied that he had found what he came for.
Jack had said nothing. His expression said several things, none of them unkind, and Robby chose not to examine them too closely in the bright afternoon light of Murray Avenue.
By the time they got back to the car, it was half past two and the groceries had been sitting in the boot for the better part of an hour and Robby's stomach made a sound that required no interpretation.
"There's food at home," Jack said.
"There's food that needs to be cooked at home," Robby said. “I need something now. I'm hypoglycaemic."
"You're not hypoglycaemic."
"I could be."
"God forbid. Don’t walk toward the light," Jack deadpanned, turning a corner as the tick of the indicator filled the silence. "At least you know a doctor."
Robby was already looking at his phone, scrolling with one thumb, the vinyl tucked carefully between his knees. "There's a—no. There's a—hm." He scrolled further. He made a sound that suggested the options were not inspiring him.
"What's around here?"
"Not much," Jack said.
Squirrel Hill had excellent food so this was not a Squirrel Hill problem, but the particular stretch they'd found themselves on while Robby scrolled was not a culinary destination. Robby could see, from the passenger seat, that the route back was going to take them past exactly one fast food establishment before things improved.
"Taco Bell," Robby said.
He said it the way he said most things he'd already decided; not as a suggestion, not as a question, simply as a fact being introduced to someone who hadn't caught up yet. He didn't even look at Jack when he said it. His eyes were on the sign, his thumb still absently scrolling even though the search was clearly over.
Jack's hand tightened on the wheel. "No."
"It's right over there."
"I know where it is."
"Jack." Robby turned in his seat then, the vinyl shifting on his lap. One hand braced against the dash as he angled himself to look at him properly, with the full weight of his attention.
There was something almost gentle about it, the way he said it. It was the tone of a man presenting an argument he considered airtight and was giving the other party one last opportunity to reach the same conclusion independently.
"It's right there," Robby repeated, the signboard coming into full view.
Jack's eyes stayed on the road, the way they did when he was committed to a position and knew that making eye contact would cost him ground. His free hand, the one resting against the door, didn't move, but the fingers shifted slightly against the fabric — a small, telling thing that Robby clocked without comment.
"I can see where it is," he said, even and deliberate. "That's not the point."
"What is the point?"
"The point is we have groceries in the boot and I have a perfectly functional kitchen. I can whip you up carbonara in—"
"I'm going to become very unpleasant company," Robby said, very pleasantly.
He leaned back slightly in his seat now, one elbow finding the edge of the window, entirely at ease, like the outcome of this conversation was already settled and they were simply working through the formalities. He pressed a finger briefly to the corner of his eye, rubbed once, and looked at Jack.
He had nowhere to be and all afternoon to wait.
Jack glanced at him. He couldn't quite help it; a sideways look, quick, taking in the set of Robby's shoulders and the comfortable angle of his elbow. The complete and total absence of urgency in his face.
The corner of his mouth betrayed him.
"You're already—" He stopped. A breath, controlled and deliberate, flowed out through his nose. "Fine."
Robby faced forward as Jack pulled into the fast-food chain, and said nothing.
He looked out the windscreen and let his expression do whatever it was going to do, which was probably smug. He felt it was entirely earned.
They left the groceries in the boot.
This was, Robby was aware, not ideal. He was also aware that Jack was aware, because Jack had paused with his hand on the car door after they'd pulled in. He had looked briefly back at the boot with the expression of a man doing a rapid and unhappy calculation, and said nothing.
This meant he'd done the calculation, weighed it against the alternative and arrived at a conclusion he wasn't going to announce out loud.
The frozen things would be fine.
Probably.
It wasn't that warm.
Robby held the door open and Jack came through it, and they stood just inside the entrance empty-handed, taking in the busy line.
"We probably should have gone home," Robby conceded.
Jack stopped at his shoulder, wearing the look of a man filing the groceries-in-the-boot situation under problems for later and moving on. "You said you were starving," Jack said now, without looking at him.
"I said I could eat."
"You said," Jack started, before stopping himself as a smile crept up his face, "well you basically threatened me so here we are. Come on, make it quick."
"Jesus, you're crabby," Robby huffed, a laugh escaping him. "The frozen stuff will be fine."
Jack's eyes cut sideways at him for just a moment, communicating efficiently and without malice, that Robby was wrong about that. He nodded toward the menu board above the counter. "What do you want?"
Robby looked up at it. The board glowed in that particular way fast food menus did, oversaturated and cheerful, the photographs of everything bearing only a theoretical relationship to what actually arrived on the tray. He already knew what he wanted. He always knew what he wanted. There was still some obscure compulsion to give the alternatives a courtesy look.
"The usual," he said. "No fries."
Jack's mouth did something at the corner, brief and knowing. "You always say no to fries and then steal mine."
"Because I know you will get fries," Robby said, with great dignity, "and then never finish. So we share. There's a difference."
"There isn't."
Robby opened his mouth to contest this, but Jack had already spotted something over his shoulder and nodded toward it. A two-top by the window, one of the small square tables pressed against the glass, miraculously unoccupied in the middle of the Saturday afternoon crush. Outside, the parking lot shimmered in the late heat, a slow procession of cars circling for spaces that didn't materialise.
"Go sit," Jack said. "I've got it."
Robby looked at the table. Looked at the line. Looked back at Jack, who was already angling toward the counter with the unhurried confidence of someone who had decided the logistics were handled and expected the universe to agree.
"You want the exit-facing seat?"
"Yeah, thanks," Jack said, over his shoulder.
Robby dropped into the plastic chair with the unguarded relief of a man who had been on his feet for two hours and was finally being permitted to stop.
The chair was orange and bolted to the floor and built entirely for function rather than sentiment. He stretched his legs out under the table, crossed them at the ankle, and looked out the window at the parking lot. Jack's car sat where they'd left it two rows back, the boot containing, among other things, two bags of frozen vegetables and a tub of ice cream that was, at this point, making its own decisions.
Robby was going to have to replace that tub.
The window was dusty at the edges, the afternoon light coming through it in a low sideways slant that turned everything it touched briefly gold. At the next table, a mother was conducting a quiet and patient negotiation with a child about the contents of his cup. Behind Robby somewhere, a tray scraped against a counter, followed by a burst of laughter and the sound of something not quite spilling.
He looked over at Jack at the counter.
It was, Robby had long since made his peace with, a very easy thing to do.
Jack was in the light henley and dark trousers he'd put on that morning, sleeves pushed up the way they always were, casually displaying his corded forearms. He wore his glasses that day, which Robby thought had made him unfairly more handsome than usual. He was standing at the counter with his wallet out and his weight settled on one hip, looking at the screen above the register with the focused, unhurried quality he brought to most things.
The grey at his temples caught in the overhead lighting. He'd let his hair grow out a little over the last few months and it suited him, which was information Robby had noted and filed away. He said something to the kid at the register, something quiet, something that made the kid glance up from the screen and laugh, surprised. People often were when Jack's warmth caught them off guard, and Robby looked out the window.
The car that had been circling the parking lot had given up and gone.
The tray arrived with two Crunchwraps, an order of fries, and a Coke Zero of a size that suggested the cup designer had at some point been issued a dare.
Jack set it on the table and folded himself into the opposite chair, which put him in the low afternoon light from the window and did absolutely nothing to make this easier.
"They gave us extra napkins," Jack said, nodding at the small stack on the tray. "The kid felt bad for us."
Robby looked at the napkins, then back at Jack without lifting his head. “Why?"
"I think we look tired."
"We are tired."
"Speak for yourself." Jack had already turned his attention to his taco, picking it up with the brisk efficiency of a man who did not anticipate problems. He then held it slightly away from himself as his expression faltered for half a second — the furrow arriving between his brows, his eyes narrowing just fractionally, his head tilting by maybe five degrees as he took in what he was holding.
It was the expression he wore when something wasn't adding up.
Robby had seen it across operative notes, across difficult conversations, once across a particularly contentious journal article that Jack had then proceeded to annotate in the margins for forty minutes.
He had not expected to see it applied to a Taco Bell taco, and yet.
"What is this?" Jack said.
It was not quite a question. It was more of an assessment.
"It's a taco," Robby said carefully.
"It's," Jack turned it slightly, and the lettuce shifted with a kind of ominous inevitability. "There's no structural integrity. If I lift this at the wrong angle the whole thing is just going to—"
"It's a Taco Bell taco," Robby said, pulling the fry basket toward himself and reaching in. "It's not load-bearing. Just eat it."
"I'm going to eat it," Jack said, with the air of a man committing to a course of action under protest. "I'm just noting that the engineering here is—"
"Jack."
"—genuinely substandard."
The taco folded.
The shell gave at the base, the filling shifted forward. Jack's hands moved fast to catch what he could, which turned out to be most of it and frankly a better outcome than it deserved. He held the result and looked at it, and his mouth pressed together in a line that contained, with considerable restraint, everything he felt about this.
Robby had turned away because he'd seen it coming and still couldn't quite hold his face together. A short helpless sound escaped him that he covered with the back of his hand.
Well, he thought. This would explain the napkins.
Jack's eyes were bright with it when Robby looked back, and he shook his head once, like it was a judgment, like the man in front of him had done this to him personally.
"Go on," Jack said, without heat.
"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to." Yet the corner of his own mouth had begun to lose the battle, a faint uneven curve appearing that he was clearly not going to acknowledge.
He began reassembling with the focused competence of a man who was going to salvage this and wasn't going to make it a thing. His hands worked with small, precise adjustments, and Robby ate a fry and watched him and felt something warm and uncomplicated settle in his chest.
"I looked up the health inspection rating," Jack said, without looking up from the reconstruction.
Robby stopped chewing. "You didn't."
"Out of curiosity."
"You did not look up—"
"It passed," Jack said. A beat, measured and deliberate. "Narrowly."
Robby pointed a fry at him. "You need to stop doing that before we eat somewhere. It changes the experience."
"It changes it accurately," Jack said, and took a bite of his reconstructed taco with the equanimity of a man who had looked the information in the face and decided to proceed anyway.
In that moment, Robby thought, was quite possibly the most Jack Abbot thing he had ever witnessed, and the bar was high.
"It tastes fine."
Robby looked at him across the table. Jack was sitting with his forearms resting on the edge of the tray, hands loose, the posture of a man completely at peace with his choices. The taco sat reconstructed and diminished on the wrapper in front of him, and he was looking back at Robby patiently, fully prepared to wait out whatever was coming.
"I know it tastes fine," Robby said.
"Better than fine, actually." Jack picked up a fry, unhurried, and ate it without needing to make a point. His eyes stayed on Robby, calm and steady, which was its own kind of provocation.
Robby reached for the Coke. It took him two attempts to get the straw, which he felt Jack notice and chose not to acknowledge.
He drank, before setting it back down in the centre of the table where it had been sitting between them all along; one straw, a shared cup and the unremarkable fact of it. He then looked at Jack, who looked like he had several things he could say and was selecting among them.
"You'd know this," he said, "if you ever let yourself have fun."
Jack's brows shifted, just slightly, the faintest lift. "I have fun."
"Your version of fun needs to be studied," Robby said in exactly the tone he would have used to file this statement alongside the structural integrity assessment and the health inspection. He reached into the fry basket, pulled one out, and pointed it loosely in Jack's direction — not accusing, just noting.
"We still need to talk about the SWAT thing."
Jack looked at the fry for a moment, and then up at Robby. His mouth softened briefly, a slow, reluctant curve arrived anyway in the way it always did.
"There's nothing to talk about," he said easily, closing the topic before it even had a chance to take off.
Robby lowered the fry and looked out the window.
His thumb found the edge of the Coke cup and rested there, and he didn't say anything else. The silence between them had the quality it always had, just the particular texture of two people who had been in enough silences together that they didn't need to fill them.
They settled into the rhythm of it.
There was no particular effort required — the conversation picked up wherever it had last been and continued without seams, without needing to be restarted or tended to like a fire that might go out.
Robby stole fries at a rate that he clearly felt was subtle and which Jack tracked with complete awareness in his peripheral vision, saying nothing because this was the system and the system was not broken.
Somewhere behind them, a group of teenagers occupied a long table and conducted an extremely important conversation that teenagers conducted, their voices rising in bursts above the general noise of the room. The soda machine gurgled intermittently. Someone's order number was called twice before they heard it.
"Did you get the good coffee?" Robby asked, wrapping both hands around the enormous Coke and taking a pull from the straw.
Jack's eyes came up from his food. "I got the one you wrote on the list."
Robby narrowed his eyes at Jack, his hands tapping the surface of the beverage.
"It's the same coffee."
Robby set the cup down and looked at him with an expression that said, as plainly as an expression could say anything, that he disagreed with this characterisation and was prepared to explain why in detail. "The dark roast and the medium roast are not the same coffee, Jack, they are two different—"
"Brother."
"—roast profiles, which produce meaningfully different—"
"I got the dark roast," Jack said, unhurriedly, his hand already moving toward the fries again. His eyes met Robby's over the tray, steady and mildly amused. "You wrote medium on the list. I got the dark one because you'd write medium but you always mean dark. I'm not doing the whole song and dance again in my kitchen. Once was enough."
Robby's mouth, which had been open with the next part of the argument, closed. He looked at Jack for a moment. Jack ate a fry and looked back at him without expression, which was its own kind of expression.
"Fine," Robby said.
Something in Jack's face did a small, satisfied thing that he did not comment on, and didn't need to.
Just then, a woman in a Taco Bell uniform squeezed past their table with a tray balanced on one hand and a cloth in the other, navigating the narrow aisle between tables. The edge of the tray clipped the back of Jack's chair as she went past and she turned with an immediate, apologetic wince.
"Oh, sorry—"
"You're fine," Jack said, turning his head to look at her, easy and unhurried. She gave him a quick grateful look and moved on, and he turned back to the table and reached for a fry like it hadn't happened.
Robby watched him do this and ate the last of his Crunchwrap.
Outside, one of the cars in the parking lot had given up its circuit entirely and was now sitting stationary near the entrance with its indicator on, locked in a standoff with a shopping trolley that had migrated into the lane. The afternoon had shifted again, the light going longer and thinner, the gold of it stretching sideways across the table.
"I'll probably head back to my place tonight," Robby said.
He was looking at the window as he said it, at the parking lot and the thinning procession of cars, and he let his gaze stay there for a moment before drifting back.
Jack had gone still.
Not visibly, not in any way a stranger would notice, but Robby noticed, because Robby had been reading the particular vocabulary of Jack's stillness since they were in their twenties. Robby knew the difference between the stillness of someone who had nothing to say and the stillness of someone who had something to say and was deciding what to do with it.
Jack's hands were on the table, one loosely around their shared drink, and he wasn't reaching for any more fries, which was itself a tell.
"Tonight?" Jack said. His voice was level, eyes were on the tray.
"Yeah, check on the plants, make sure I haven't gotten any notices slipped under the door." Robby leaned back in his chair, folding his arms loosely. "You know how it is."
"Sure," Jack said. And then, after a beat that was a fraction too long: "Yeah." And then: "Of course."
Robby looked at him.
He could see it — the thing Jack was not saying, sitting there in the set of his shoulders and the careful neutrality of his expression, which was too careful, too neutral, in exactly the way that meant it was being maintained on purpose.
Jack looked up then, briefly, and there was something in the look that didn't quite match the tone of the previous several words, something that sat in the dark of his eyes and didn't belong to yeah, of course at all.
"I'll drive you," Jack said. "If you want to go tonight. Traffic's probably not—" He stopped. Something moved across his face, a recalculation happening in real time, and then: "Actually, there's a game tonight." He said it with more confidence now, as if the thought had arrived fully formed rather than mid-construction. "Traffic's going to be a nightmare coming back across the city. Probably easier to just—" He made a small gesture with one hand, a loose indication of nothing in particular, of the situation in general.
Robby looked at him for a moment.
His eyes narrowed by exactly one degree — a slow, deliberate narrowing that he wore when something had been said that he didn't entirely believe and was prepared to wait out.
"Is there a game tonight?" he said.
"There might be," Jack said. His eyes flickered to a group of teenagers standing in line. "Could be."
"You don't know."
"I think there's usually something on a Saturday."
"Jack."
Jack picked up a fry. Put it down. His jaw shifted slightly in the way it did when he was choosing between honesty and holding the line, the small muscle at the side of his face doing a thing he was probably not aware of. Robby was aware of it.
"There might be traffic, is all," Jack said, to the tray. "Doesn't matter, we'll go," he added, half shrugging.
Robby watched him.
The Taco Bell continued around them, indifferent — a new family settling into the booth across the room, the teenager at the long table laughing at something on a phone, the ice machine in the corner making a sound like it was thinking about dispensing ice and then deciding not to. The light from the window had gone fully horizontal now, slanting across the table and catching the rim of Jack's glasses, turning them briefly amber.
"You could just drop me at the T," Robby said, slowly, watching Jack's face as he said it. "It's just a short walk."
"That's not the point," Jack said, and then he seemed to hear what he'd just said — that he'd just confirmed there was a point, that the point was not the driving distance. The tips of his ears went a very specific shade of pink that Robby had exactly one other memory of seeing, from a different time and a different decade and a bar in New Orleans that neither of them talked about.
"Then what is the point?" Robby said, keeping his voice even, keeping his face easy.
Jack picked the fry back up, looked at it, and did not eat it.
"I just think," he started, and then stopped, and started again: "You've been — it's been good. Having you around. And I thought—" He stopped again. Set the fry down. Pressed his thumb into the side of the paper tray with more focus than it warranted. "The apartment's less quiet," he said finally, which was neither of the things he'd started to say, and they both knew it.
Robby let that sit for a moment, and when he spoke it was with the careful, half-amused gentleness of someone who had no intention of letting the other person off the hook. "Jack," he said. "Your apartment is never quiet. You have a neighbour on the third floor who practises bagpipes at 11PM."
"That's only on Tuesdays now," Jack said. "I talked to him. We came to an arrangement."
Robby pressed his mouth together. His eyes were bright. "An arrangement?"
"I brought him a very nice Scotch and told him someone very important from the emergency department is trying to sleep."
"Of course you did," Robby said, reaching for the Coke, turning it once between his hands before setting it back between them in the centre of the table.
"But yeah, I've been bumming at your place since Pittfest. What would the rest of the neighbours say?" he said, lightly. "A man my age basically living in someone else's apartment, mooching off."
"They wouldn't say anything," Jack said, with a certainty that was very slightly too quick.
Robby tilted his head. "No?"
"They know you." Jack's hands shifted on the table, and this time when he gestured it was with both of them, that particular animation that showed up when he'd moved past the point of choosing his words carefully and into the territory of just needing to make his point. "Mrs Petrova cornered me last week. Asked if you were coming to her granddaughter's birthday party."
Robby blinked, very slowly. "I didn't know she had a granddaughter."
"She has two. You went down there in October and fixed her thermostat when I was on a double, remember? Since then, she's been—" Jack gestured again, both hands this time, a small circular motion that encompassed the entire social situation. "She's adopted you. The whole building has. There's a birthday party next Saturday, you've apparently been requested. She gave me a very specific look when she said it, like she expected me to do something about it."
"She asked you to ask me?"
"She expected me to ask you," Jack said. "The distinction mattered to her."
Robby stared at him. Then he looked at the table, at the tray, at the Coke between them with one shared straw, and felt something move at the edges of his expression that he didn't quite suppress. "So the neighbours aren't scandalised," he said. "They're inviting me to children's birthday parties."
"You've been assimilated," Jack said, his voice dry, his eyes doing something different from dry. "It's done. You're part of the ecosystem, nobody is scandalized, nobody is talking. The only person who thinks there's anything remotely to comment on is you."
Robby smiled at that, and didn't try to make it smaller. It arrived the way real ones did — slow and crooked and a little too honest, pulling at the corner of his mouth before he could do anything about it. He looked at Jack across the table and Jack looked back at him, and for a moment the noise of the room fell away to the edges where it belonged.
"If only they knew," Robby said.
He said it lightly. He said it like it was the natural end of the sentence, like he'd just thought of it, like it wasn't a thing that had been sitting in him for thirty years occasionally pressing against the inside of his sternum like a stone. He watched Jack's face when he said it, in the way you watched for something you already half-knew you were going to see.
Jack went very still.
"Robby," he said, almost a warning, the word having a shape to it. A different shape from all the other times he'd said it in the last two hours.
"What?" Robby said, easy.
Jack's jaw moved. He busied his hands with the tray before looking back up. His eyes were dark, and there was something in them that wanted to say several things at once and hadn't yet worked out the order. "You can't just—" He stopped.
"I'm just saying," Robby said, watching him carefully, watching the way his hands had come flat to the table on either side of the tray, watchful and still, "that Mrs Petrova might have a different perspective. If she knew the history."
"There's no—" Jack started, and then he heard himself and stopped, and the colour deepened and moved toward his ears. "Sorry that's not what I—"
"Did you ever think about it?" Robby asked, cutting in.
The question arrived simply, without embellishment, without any of the lightness he'd wrapped the last few sentences in. He sat forward slightly as he said it, elbows finding the table, and he looked at Jack straight on, and the question sat between them in the open air of the Taco Bell on a Saturday afternoon and did not apologize for itself.
Jack studied the fries like they required analysis.
The pile of them, cooling now in the low afternoon light, a few slightly bent from the last half hour of being stolen from absently. He was quiet for a moment that was not a comfortable quiet, it was edged now. His thumb moved against the corners of the tray, slow and thoughtful, and he blinked once, the way he did when he was arriving at something rather than just thinking around it.
"What are you—" He stopped himself. He glanced up at Robby, briefly, just a flick of his eyes, and then back at the fries. "What are you referring to?" he said, and it was not quite a question. That told Robby everything he needed to know about what Jack already understood he was referring to.
"Joe's on Cleveland?" Robby said.
Jack blinked again, and this time he didn't look back up for a moment, and when he did his face was doing something complicated that he wasn't quite successfully containing. The muscle at the corner of his jaw, the particular set of his mouth, the dark quality of his eyes.
He looked at Robby, and he looked around the room very briefly, a quick and almost involuntary survey, like he needed to confirm that they were in a Taco Bell on a Saturday and not somewhere that required a more composed version of himself, and then he looked back.
"Yeah," he said, quietly. "Sometimes."
The word fell into the space between them and stayed there.
The ice machine in the corner made its thinking-about-it sound. At the long table, someone laughed. The mother at the next table over was now engaged in a different negotiation, this one about going home, and her voice had acquired the patient, inexorable quality of someone who was going to win and both parties knew it.
"Sometimes," Robby echoed quietly.
Jack's thumb pressed a little harder into the edge of the tray. "More than sometimes," he said, to the fries, and the correction was almost reluctant, like he hadn't planned to make it, like it had arrived without asking.
Robby felt that settle in him, low and warm and very still, and held onto the surface of the moment rather than moving toward it or away from it.
"But," Jack said.
"But?" Robby agreed, because there was always a but, had always been a but. He knew the shape of this one before it arrived.
Jack exhaled slowly through his nose and finally pushed the fry basket to one side, clearing the space between them in a way that felt like a decision. He looked up and his expression was open in the way it very rarely was in fluorescent lighting. Robby had seen this look only a handful of times over the years, and each of those times had stayed with him longer than they should have.
"I don't think I have the right to," Jack said. His hands turned over on the table, a small, unfinished gesture.
His hands always gave him away when he was trying to make a point.
"I'm just glad to be here. To be in your life again. I'm not—" He stopped, and his jaw shifted. "I know what I walked away from back then. And I know what it did to you, and I would never—I'm not going to ask you for something I gave up the right to ask for."
The afternoon light from the window had shifted while they'd been sitting there, going from gold to something thinner and more horizontal, a last effort before the evening. It lay across the table between them, catching the rim of Jack's glasses and the grey at his temple and the open, careful, complicated expression on his face.
"We were kids, Jack," Robby said.
"I know."
"You wanted to serve. That was real."
"I know."
"I wasn't—" Robby paused, the old shape of the thing sitting in him the way it had sat for a long time, worn smooth now, no longer sharp. "I wasn't angry about that part. I want you to know that, if you don't. I was never angry about you going. The life you went to live was yours to live."
Jack was looking at him, very carefully, like he was listening for something underneath the words and making sure he heard it correctly.
"The part where you stopped calling," Robby said, even, unhurried, "when you stopped responding, yeah that one took longer to make sense of."
He paused for a moment and took a breath in.
"But we were young and you were far away and you were building something. Then you came back and you were someone's husband and there wasn't a version of that conversation that made sense to have." He reached for the Coke, wrapped his hands around the cup without drinking it, just holding something. "And then you came back to the Pitt."
"Yeah," Jack said. Low and full and simple.
"And then she got sick," Robby said.
"Yeah."
Jack looked at him for a moment without speaking. The expression on his face did something that Robby recognised from the night of the call, from the hospital corridor, from the three days he'd spent on Jack's couch afterward and the long quiet evenings they'd sat through together without needing to fill them.
It was the expression that lived underneath all the others; the one that didn't belong to the doctor or the colleague or the careful, composed version of Jack that existed in public spaces. The one that was just him.
"You were there before I was," Jack said. "I still don't know how you knew."
"Dana called me," Robby said. "She knew I'd want to know."
Something moved through Jack's face at that; gratitude and something older than gratitude, something that didn't have a clean word for itself.
"I'm always going to be there," Robby said. "That's not a negotiation. That's just what it is."
Jack nodded once, carefully.
"So if you're grateful," Robby said, and the lightness came back into his voice now, the easy familiar warmth of it, the tone he used when he was going to say something true and wanted to make sure there was room to receive it, "and you're not taking anything for granted, and you've apparently been thinking about this more than sometimes," He raised an eyebrow, slow and deliberate. "What is it that you think you walked away from the right to say?"
Jack looked at him.
The Taco Bell hummed around them — the kitchen, the conversation, the particular frequency of a lot of people in one space on a Saturday — and none of it touched the table by the window.
"You know what I mean," Jack said.
"I do," Robby said. "I'd like to hear you say it."
Jack's mouth parted as he looked around the room, taking in the noise and the families and the Saturday afternoon ordinariness of the Taco Bell. Then he looked back at Robby with an expression that sat somewhere between incredulous and resigned.
"Really," he said flatly. "You want to have this conversation here?"
Robby kept his eyes on him as he reached for the Coke, got the straw, and took a long, slow pull, holding eye contact over the rim of the cup the entire time. When he set it down, he nudged his chin forward, just slightly and raised one eyebrow.
Jack breathed in through his nose, a controlled, deliberate breath. His hands were on the table, turned over now, open. Robby looked at him and waited, and did not make it easier, because Jack didn't need it easier, he needed it real.
"I would," Jack said, before clearing a lump in his throat. "Prefer not to just be roommates."
"Okay," Robby said.
"I don't want to—" He stopped. Started over, something cresting in him. "I'm not grateful. I mean—I am, obviously I am, you know I am, but that's not—" He exhaled, a short effortful sound, both hands lifting from the table, gesturing the whole inadequacy of language in general.
"I'd be fine if we stayed where we are," he said, the lie of it landing between them immediately. His jaw tightened, frustration at himself rather than anything else. "But since you're arm-twisting a confession out of me,"
This genuinely pulled a laugh out of Robby. "Wow, arm-twisting. Really?" He narrowed his eyes, lips pressed into a smile.
"I do want more, with you," he said, and then, like the first version hadn't been right, like he'd heard it land and adjusted: "I've known for a long time." His eyes were on Robby's face, steady now in a way that was different from before. "And if you are on the same page, I'd like it if you'd—" He stopped. His hands came down flat on the table again, deliberate.
"Stop sleeping in the guest bedroom and maybe move into mine."
The words settled between them without apology, and the space around them in the crowded, noisy, unremarkable Taco Bell went very quiet in the way that spaces sometimes did when something that had been waiting a long time finally arrived.
Robby looked at him.
"How long?" he asked.
Jack blinked. His expression shifted. "What?"
"You said you've known for a long time." Robby tilted his head by a fraction, and something in his face was warm and patient and terribly fond. "I want to know when that started. Because I have a guess."
Jack stared at him for a moment, and then something in him recognised what was happening. He recognised that Robby was not moving away, was not deflecting, was not shutting the door. The expression that crossed his face was something Robby hadn't seen in thirty years and had spent most of that time telling himself he didn't miss.
"I don't know if I ever stopped," Jack said, finally. "I put it somewhere I didn't have to look at it."
"After she passed, you never left me. Hell, you picked up whatever that was left of me, and I don't know if I'd still be here today if it wasn't for you. And after all that, it wasn't— I don't think sometimes is the right word for it."
Robby nodded once, quiet.
"You should know," he said, "that I have been, in the interest of honesty, not subtle about this for years." He watched Jack's eyebrows rise and continued before he could argue. "You just have a very sophisticated system for not seeing things you're not ready to see. Which is your problem, not mine."
"You were not—" Jack began.
"I drove four hours in a snowstorm on a Tuesday to be at your wife's bedside and somehow got there before you did," Robby said, gently and without mercy. “I have eaten more shitty overnight takeout with you at three in the morning than any human being reasonably should. You've watched me cry more than a dozen times, and apparently I'm now also going to a child's birthday party next Saturday."
He paused.
"How is any of that subtle?"
Jack's mouth had opened at some point during this and had not yet found cause to close again. He looked at Robby, and his expression moved through several things in quick succession — surprise, the beginning of an objection, the objection encountering evidence, the evidence winning. It finally settled into something simpler than all of them and had the quality of something long held finally being put down.
"Hm," he said.
"Hm," Robby echoed, tipping his head in silent recognition. "I think it's fair to say I want more too."
The toddler from earlier had reappeared in Robby's peripheral vision, escaping from somewhere and making determined progress toward the soda machine before being intercepted by a parent. The light from the window was the colour of late afternoon now, long and amber, the last of it before it went blue.
"So," Jack said.
"So," Robby said.
They looked at each other across the table, across the wreckage of their respective lunches and an enormous Coke Zero. Across thirty years of history compressed into a Saturday afternoon in a fast food restaurant, and the absurdity of it was present and real and not one thing about it felt small.
"I'd like you to stay," Jack said. "Not that you can't check on your apartment—" He stopped, and for just a moment the careful composure slipped entirely. Underneath it was something very simple and very old, the face of a man who has been holding onto something for a long time and is only now putting it down.
"I want—" His voice went quieter. "I want this. Weekends. Record stores and terrible tacos and you stealing my fries."
"You steal my fries," Robby said, but his voice had gone rough somewhere in the middle of it, had arrived somewhere that had nothing to do with the fries.
"That's what I meant," Jack said, and his mouth curved, finally, unsteadily.
Robby looked at him for a long moment.
"The succulents," he said.
Jack's expression went blank with confusion. "What?"
"I have twelve succulents at the apartment." Robby leaned forward, elbows on the table, watching Jack's face with something in his eyes that had been there all afternoon and was no longer making any effort to be somewhere else. "If I'm relocating properly, they're coming with me."
Jack blinked. "You have twelve succulents."
"They were on sale," Robby said, shrugging like it made sense.
"Twelve is—that's a significant number of succulents."
"They're small," Robby said. "They stack. I'll bring shelves."
"You'll—" Jack looked at him, and then the look changed. For a moment, they were thirty years younger again, in a different city, certain of entirely too little.
"Fine," Jack said, very quietly. "Bring your damn plants."
"Thank you," Robby said.
Jack breathed out slowly, and it was not quite steady. "Yeah," he managed, after a moment. "Okay."
"And for what it's worth," Robby said, quieter now, leaning in across the fry basket and the Coke and everything between them that had been there for thirty years waiting to finally become something they were allowed to say, "you didn't give up the right. You had to go. You lived your life. You were a good husband and I know that and I'm glad you were." He paused.
"We just had to find our way back."
Jack looked at him for a moment without speaking.
Then his hand moved across the table without ceremony, stopping when it reached the edge of Robby’s hand where it rested against the plastic surface.
An asking rather than a taking.
Robby turned his hand over.
Jack's fingers closed around his, and they fit the way they always had when they were younger and the world was different, the way things fit when they are not new at all, just returned to.
"The dark roast better be worth it," Robby said, after a moment.
The corner of Jack's mouth gave up its last resistance. "It's the same coffee."
"We will see."
"It is objectively—"
"Jack," Robby said, and his voice had the warmth of thirty years in it, all of it, the distance and the return and the Tuesday in the snowstorm and the thermostat and the birthday party next Saturday and every quiet evening on a couch they hadn't needed to fill. "Stop talking about the coffee."
Jack closed his mouth.
Outside, the parking lot was thinning in the long amber light, the cars finding their way home one by one. The last of the afternoon sat on the window glass like something held.
Robby didn't move his hand, and neither did Jack.
And the Taco Bell chaos continued around them, indifferent and ordinary and entirely unremarkable, which was, as it turned out, exactly the right place for something like this.