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The thing about living with Anthony Potero is that you never really knew when the bit ended.
That was something Coy had learned slowly, the way you learn most things that matter — not all at once, not with a dramatic revelation, but in pieces. A Tuesday. A Wednesday. A Tuesday again. The slow accumulation of Anthony saying I have an idea in that particular tone of voice, the one that sounded completely neutral but carried within it the kinetic energy of a car with no brakes at the top of a very steep hill.
Coy had been in the house for — officially, on the lease — two months. Unofficially, closer to five. There had been a period in the spring where he was technically staying on a friend's couch across town, but the friend's couch was thirty-five minutes away by train and Anthony had a habit of texting at 11pm with things like hey are you around and we're doing something come over and Coy, who had the self-preservation instincts of a golden retriever near a busy road, had kept coming over. And then staying. And then just… not leaving.
He had two drawers in the dresser in what was now technically his room. He had a shelf in the fridge with his name written on a piece of tape in Anthony's handwriting (COY (do not eat his yogurt will)). He had a hook by the door for his keys.
He had, it turned out, a home. It had just taken him a while to notice.
"Okay," Anthony said, from where he was lying on the living room floor with his laptop balanced on his stomach. This was his thinking position. Everyone in the house had learned to recognize it. "I have an idea."
Will didn't look up from his phone. "No."
"You haven't heard it yet."
"I don't need to hear it. You have the voice."
"I don't have a voice."
"You have a voice," Hanbon said, from her corner of the couch. She was cross-legged with her own laptop open, which meant she was either editing or doing something she would describe as editing if asked. "It's the voice you use when you've already decided something and you're narrating it to us so we feel like we're part of the process."
Anthony lifted his head to look at her. "That's — I don't do that."
"The Ben 10 video," Will said.
"The skateboard video," Hanbon said.
"The time you decided we were doing a 24-hour challenge and told us about it during the challenge," Will said.
"That one was time-sensitive—"
"Anthony," Coy said, from where he was sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, laptop open, streaming a playlist into his one functioning earbud, "just tell us the idea."
There was a pause. Coy could feel Hanbon shift behind him — he knew without looking that she was doing the small smile, the one that meant she was watching something happen and had decided not to comment on it yet.
Anthony looked at Coy. Something in his expression settled.
"Okay," he said. "So. Blind dates."
"No," Will said again.
"The concept of a blind date as a bit," Anthony continued, ignoring him. "We set everyone up. Strangers. Pulled from — I don't know, comments, social media, somewhere with a good energy. We film the date. We film the reaction. We film the debrief after. It's got, like, five different sections. Lots of content. Rich material. Emotional range."
Coy turned this over. "Who picks the strangers?"
"That's the part I'm still working on."
"Who picks us?" Hanbon asked.
"That's also the part I'm still working on."
Will finally put his phone down. This was a bad sign. Will putting his phone down meant he was engaging, and Will engaging with an Anthony idea was like two unstable compounds coming into contact — not always explosive, but never boring.
"There's four of us," Will said. "Four blind dates, four strangers, four bits. That's fine. But like—" He stopped. Something moved across his face. A grin started somewhere in the middle. "Actually. Actually, wait. What if we had a control group?"
Anthony sat up. "A control group."
"A control group," Will confirmed, looking extremely pleased with himself in a way that made the back of Coy's neck prickle.
"For what purpose," Hanbon said carefully.
"Scientific purposes." Will pointed between Anthony and Coy. "You two. You do the blind date together. As the control. Because everyone watching is gonna have opinions about whether the strangers are actually good matches, right, and to calibrate that we need a baseline — what a good dynamic looks like. What compatibility looks like."
The word compatibility landed in the room with the weight of something much heavier than it appeared.
Coy became very interested in his laptop screen.
"That's," Anthony said.
"That's actually kind of smart," Hanbon said, and her voice was so carefully neutral that Coy knew — he knew — she was doing the face again, but he refused to look up and confirm.
"It's extremely smart," Will said. "I'm very smart."
"You're very lucky," Anthony said. "Those are different things."
"Okay but—" Will leaned forward. "Would you do it?"
Another pause. This one was longer. Coy watched a tiny spider walk across the carpet near his knee and thought about how it would be very reasonable to get up and leave the room right now. He could say he had to use the bathroom. He could say he heard his phone ring. He could say almost anything.
He didn't say anything.
"It would make sense for the video," Anthony said, slowly, like he was thinking out loud, which he was — Anthony was always thinking out loud, Coy had learned that too, had learned to recognize the difference between Anthony performing a thought and Anthony actually having one. This was the second kind. "It would be, like, a grounding element. A comparison point."
"Right," Will said. "A control group."
"You already said that."
"I know, I just like saying it. Control group. It sounds scientific."
"It's a YouTube video."
"Science can be a YouTube video."
Coy closed his laptop. He did it very slowly, so it wouldn't seem like he was reacting to anything. "I mean," he said, and his voice came out more even than he expected, which he was grateful for, "it's a video idea. I'd be down if Anthony wants to."
The room was quiet for one second.
"Yeah," Anthony said. He didn't look at Coy when he said it. He was looking at the ceiling, which was also where he looked when he was thinking about something he wasn't ready to name yet. "Yeah, it could work."
"Great," Will said, and picked up his phone again. "This is going to be my favorite video."
"We haven't made it yet," Hanbon said.
"I know. That's why I said going to be."
The planning stage took three days, which was fast for them.
It was fast because Anthony was the one planning it, and Anthony planned things the way he did everything else — by moving so quickly that the universe didn't have time to present obstacles. By the time Coy had fully processed that he'd agreed to a fake blind date with Anthony as a YouTube bit, there was already a shared Google Doc with a rough script, a shot list, a note that said Hanbon edits obviously (which Hanbon had already replied to with obviously in a different color, indicating she'd been added to the doc at some point without being told), and a location scouted — a slightly-too-nice Italian restaurant three blocks from the house that they'd been to twice before and where the owner, Mr. Carelli, had once let Anthony film a birthday video inside for forty dollars and a signed printout of his Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest certificate.
Coy read through the doc on a Thursday morning while Anthony made eggs at the stove.
The script was looser than he'd expected. Most of Anthony's video planning had a skeleton rather than a body — prompts, not lines. Coy arrives first. Anthony arrives late (by design? decide on set). Awkward hello. Order. Conversation — find out five things about the other person you didn't know. That last one made Coy stop. He read it twice.
"Hey," he said. "The five things thing."
"Mm." Anthony was focused on the eggs.
"Is that going to be easy to do? Like — we already know each other pretty well."
Anthony glanced over his shoulder. He had the spatula in his hand and flour on his sleeve from something earlier, probably pancakes, probably Will's pancakes because Will made pancakes every Sunday with the focus of a man preparing for battle and then always somehow ran out of batter before there were enough pancakes.
"That's kind of the point," Anthony said. "The audience knows we know each other. The bit is whether a date format makes you act like you don't. Like, does the framing change how you interact."
Coy looked at the doc again. "Does it?"
Anthony turned back to the eggs. "Guess we'll find out."
They didn't talk about it much before Friday. This was normal — Anthony's process was a lot of silence and then a lot of movement, minimal in-between. What was less normal was that Coy found himself thinking about it more than he usually thought about video prep.
He was aware, in the way you became aware of things when you lived somewhere long enough, of the particular ecosystem of the house. He knew which floorboards creaked. He knew that the bathroom on the second floor was always three degrees warmer than anywhere else. He knew that Will stress-cleaned, that Hanbon worked best after midnight, that Anthony got quiet when he was tired in a way that was easy to mistake for sad if you didn't know the difference.
He knew Anthony.
He knew Anthony, and that was the issue, probably. Because you were supposed to go on a date with someone you didn't know yet, someone who was still mostly future tense, and Anthony was the most present-tense person Coy had ever met. Everything about Anthony was happening right now. His ideas, his energy, his laugh — the one that started in his chest and climbed — all of it, insistently, immediately, here.
Thursday night, Coy was in the kitchen getting water at 1am and Anthony came in wearing a hoodie and his glasses and squinting against the light in the way he always did when he'd been in front of a screen too long.
"Can't sleep?" Coy asked.
"Brain's loud." Anthony opened the fridge and looked into it for a moment. "Want anything?"
"I'm good."
Anthony got out the leftover soup — Hanbon's soup, technically, but she made it in big batches specifically because everyone else ate it — and stood at the microwave waiting for it. Coy sat on the counter, which was a habit he'd developed slowly enough that he couldn't trace when it had started.
"I was reading the doc," Coy said.
"Yeah?"
"I was thinking about the five things."
Anthony leaned against the counter next to the microwave. He was close enough that Coy could see the mark on his nose where his glasses had been sitting for too long. "What about them?"
"I was trying to think of things I don't know about you. Like — real things. Not bit things."
"There's a difference?"
"There's definitely a difference."
The microwave beeped. Anthony got the soup, stirred it, got a spoon. He didn't move away. "What did you come up with?"
Coy had been thinking about this, actually. Which was maybe embarrassing in the daylight but it was 1am and the kitchen was too warm and Anthony was right there in his glasses like a person who didn't understand what he was doing to the situation.
"I don't know your middle name," Coy said.
"James."
"Okay. I didn't know that." He thought. "I don't know what you wanted to be when you were a kid. Before YouTube."
Anthony took a slow spoonful of soup. "Astronaut for a while. Then a marine biologist. Then a comedian."
"Classic trajectory."
"Very linear." Anthony looked sideways at him. "What did you want to be?"
"A theater kid who got famous on the internet," Coy said. "So I'm — pretty much on track."
Anthony's mouth curved. Not the big performance laugh, the small real one. "What else don't you know about me?"
Coy thought about this more carefully than he meant to. "I don't know what you think about when you're running."
This surprised Anthony — he could tell by the slight pause before he answered. "Running like — when I used to run track?"
"Yeah. You mentioned it once. You used to run long distance in high school."
"Eight hundred meters. Not that long."
"Still. You're alone with your brain for a while. What do you think about?"
Anthony was quiet for a moment, eating soup, looking at the middle distance. This was a real-thinking pause, not a performance pause.
"I used to think about what would happen if I just — kept going," he said. "Past the finish line. What if I just didn't stop. Like, I knew I wasn't going to, I knew where the track ended, but I liked thinking about it. Just. Going."
Coy looked at him.
"That's not weird," Anthony added, without looking back.
"I didn't say it was."
"You were thinking it."
"I was thinking it was actually the least weird thing you've ever told me." Coy paused. "Which is saying something, given the furry convention."
Anthony laughed. The chest-and-climb one. It filled up the kitchen and Coy felt it somewhere in his sternum, like a frequency.
"Okay," Anthony said. "That's three things."
"I've got two more. I don't know your favorite place."
Anthony considered. "My parents' backyard. When I was a kid there was this tree that — anyway. Your turn. Favorite place."
"The field behind my house in Illinois," Coy said immediately. "At dusk. When the light goes that specific orange color and everything's kind of gold and there are no cornfields in any direction. Well. There are cornfields in every direction, actually. But for like one minute they're golden and it's fine."
Anthony looked at him then. Not the quick-glance look, the full one. The one that made Coy feel, as it always did, like he was being read very carefully by someone who was very good at reading.
"I didn't know that," Anthony said.
"It's not on the doc."
"It should be."
Coy looked down at the floor. He could feel the warmth off the oven from earlier. He could feel the closeness of the space. "What's the fifth thing."
"I don't know what you're scared of," Anthony said. "Not the bit answer. The real one."
"We're swapping now? This is my question."
"I'm making it a shared question. What are you scared of?"
Coy pulled at the hem of his sleeve. A habit. "That I'll be the least interesting person in the room and nobody will notice for a while and then they'll notice and it'll be somehow worse than if they'd noticed right away."
The quiet that followed was not uncomfortable. Anthony had a rare talent for quiet — for sitting in a moment without immediately filling it.
"Coy," he said.
"I know. It's not logical."
"That's not what I was going to say."
"What were you going to say?"
Anthony looked at his soup. "I was going to say you are — demonstrably, factually, in a way that I can measure — not the least interesting person in the room. In any room. That you have been in."
Coy stared at him. "That was a very thorough sentence."
"I wanted to be precise."
"You're never precise."
"I'm precise when it matters."
The kitchen felt smaller, suddenly. Not oppressively — more like it had arranged itself into a shape that contained exactly the right number of things and no more. The sound of a car outside. The hum of the fridge. Anthony's glasses catching the light at a slightly wrong angle.
"Okay," Coy said. "Your fifth thing. What are you scared of."
Anthony put the soup down. "That I'll spend so long making the thing that I'll miss the actual moment."
Coy knew exactly what he meant by that. He wasn't sure Anthony knew that he knew.
"Okay," he said again.
"Okay," Anthony agreed.
They stayed in the kitchen for another twenty minutes, not talking about anything in particular.
Friday.
The restaurant was warm when Coy arrived, which was by design — his design. He was supposed to be there first. This was in the script: Coy arrives first. He'd sat with that for three days and decided that actually, strategically, being there first was the move. Knowing the table. Having a moment before Anthony walked in. Ground to stand on.
He was wearing a dark green button-up that Hanbon had looked at, said nothing about, and then said "that's a good color on you" in the tone of voice she used when she meant something slightly more than what she was saying. He'd kept it on.
The camera was already set up in a corner. That had taken a full hour the evening before — Miguel, who ran sound for their shoots when Will wasn't doing it (Will was the backup, Miguel was the primary, this hierarchy had been established after what everyone referred to only as the audio incident from the beach video), had dressed the camera to look like a decorative element, tucked between a plant and an architectural column in a way that Mr. Carelli had approved with great enthusiasm. A second camera would be on Anthony when he entered.
Coy ordered water. He looked at the menu even though he already knew what he was getting. He pulled at his sleeve.
At seven-twelve, Anthony came in.
He was wearing the grey shirt. Coy had seen Anthony in the grey shirt probably forty or fifty times at this point. It was a completely unremarkable piece of fabric. There was no reason for it to register. It registered anyway, the way things registered when you had stopped pretending you weren't paying attention to them.
Anthony looked around, found the table, and his face did the thing — the relaxation, the small shift, the thing it only did when he saw someone he was genuinely glad to see. He did it with Hanbon too, and with Will sometimes when he thought Will wasn't looking. He was doing it now, at Coy, while walking toward him, and Coy had just enough time to remember that there were two cameras in this restaurant before Anthony reached the table.
"Hey," Anthony said, and it sounded — normal, and completely weird.
"Hey," Coy said back.
Anthony sat down. He looked at the menu the way Coy had looked at the menu — aware that this was a bit, aware that they were supposed to be treating it like an unfamiliar situation, trying to calibrate.
"So," Anthony said. "You come here often?"
"I've been here twice," Coy said. "Both times with you."
Anthony smiled. "That's not an answer."
"It's a very truthful non-answer."
"Better than a very untruthful answer."
"Is it? Sometimes an untruthful answer is more charming."
Anthony looked at him over the menu. "Are you trying to be charming?"
"Little bit. Is it working?"
A beat. "Little bit."
There was a thing that happened when the cameras were on that Coy had noticed about himself — not stagefright, more like stage-awareness. The consciousness of being seen. For most people, he suspected, this created a kind of performance mode, something extra and a little louder than the real thing.
For Coy, it had always done the opposite. It made him quieter. More careful. More precisely himself.
He wondered sometimes if this was because he'd started creating content so young, before he'd figured out who he was, so the camera had become a place where he worked it out. The camera as laboratory. The audience as the condition the experiment ran under.
He thought about that now, with the soup course and with Anthony talking about something that had happened to him at Rutgers, a story Coy had heard fragments of before but not the full version, and found that he was leaning forward in his chair.
"—so I told him," Anthony was saying, "I said, look, I can get you the Chalamet certificate, I have them in a box, but I need you to understand that it's not a legal document."
"It's not a legal document," Coy confirmed.
"I know it's not a legal document. He wasn't entirely sure."
"Who was this person?"
"The man at the DMV."
"Why were you trying to use the Chalamet certificate at the DMV."
"I wasn't trying to use it, it just fell out of my bag and he picked it up and was reading it very seriously and I felt like it would be wrong to not explain."
Coy put his face in his hands. "Anthony."
"I know."
"This man was just doing his job."
"And I told him the truth! That's the right thing!"
"You told him the truth about the Chalamet certificate. You could have just taken it back."
"I couldn't just take it back, he was already invested."
Coy lifted his face. "He was invested in a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest certificate."
"He was a fan, Coy. I could tell. He had the energy."
"You cannot tell someone is a Timothée Chalamet fan from their energy."
"I absolutely can. There's a specific quality to it."
The waiter brought their entrees. There was a moment of rearranging, thanking, the small choreography of a table resetting. When they were alone again, Anthony picked up his fork and looked at Coy with something that was halfway between amusement and something else, something that looked like attention.
"Tell me something I don't know about you," he said. "Five things, remember? I've used about one and a half."
"The field counted."
"The field counted but you said it to me, not — for the bit. So it's different."
"How is it different."
"It just is." Anthony tilted his head slightly. "Tell me something."
Coy thought about this. There was a temptation, in this framing, to give a bit-answer — something performance-shaped, something designed. He thought about what he'd said in the kitchen, about the least-interesting-person fear, and how Anthony had listened to that the way he listened to real things, not YouTube things.
"I used to want to do musical theater," he said. "Like, seriously. College level. I had a moment where I almost applied to programs."
"Why didn't you?"
"Streaming was already going. It felt like — why redirect? But I still think about it sometimes. What it would've been."
Anthony nodded. Not in the dismissive way, in the receiving-information way. "You'd be good."
"You don't know that."
"I've heard you sing. The streams."
"That's not—" Coy stopped. "You've watched my streams?"
There was a half-second. Very small. Barely there.
"Sometimes," Anthony said. Like it was nothing. "When I was up late. You'd be going and it was — good background noise."
"Good background noise."
"Good content. Background noise implies I was ignoring it."
"Were you?"
"I knew you did Rent covers in October. The month before you moved in, full Rent phase. You did six songs."
Coy was quiet for a moment. Anthony had watched his streams. He'd sat with that for approximately five seconds before his brain took it somewhere it shouldn't go, which was a habit he'd been trying to break for months with limited success.
"That was a good month," Coy said, finally. "What's something I don't know about you."
"I took piano for four years as a kid and I can barely play anything now. Like maybe 'Clementine.'"
"That's so sad."
"It's extremely sad. I resented the lessons and now I'd kill to have the skill back."
"Life is irony."
"Life is completely ironic." Anthony looked at him. "What's another thing."
They stayed for two hours.
This was, Coy thought later, longer than they'd scripted. The script had said forty-five minutes, one hour tops, and he hadn't really tracked the time going. The waiter came with the check and Coy looked at his phone and was genuinely surprised.
Outside, in the fifteen feet between the restaurant door and the car, where Miguel was getting the last shot of the evening, Anthony said—
Well. He said something that was for the video, a sign-off line that they'd workshopped, and it was fine, it was good, it was the right energy. Coy said his part. They wrapped.
In the car on the way back, Hanbon was in the front seat — she'd been in the restaurant for the last half hour, doing audio checks with Miguel from a corner table — and Will was driving, because Will had designated himself the driver for any shoot involving going somewhere in the car on the basis that it was the only thing that made him feel in control of the situation.
"How'd it go," Will said, eyes on the road.
"Good," Anthony said.
"Yeah," Coy said.
There was a pause. Hanbon turned around from the front seat and looked at both of them with an expression that communicated, very efficiently, that she already knew everything but was deciding not to say it here.
"I think we got it," she said. "Good stuff."
"Great," Will said, with the specific brightness of someone who had not been at the restaurant for two hours and therefore had a lot of energy to spend. "I knew it was going to be good. That's why I suggested it."
"The control group," Coy said.
"The control group," Will confirmed, pleased.
Anthony, in the seat next to Coy, didn't say anything. He was looking out the window. In the orange light of passing streetlamps, his profile looked like something you'd photograph without thinking about it.
Coy looked at the road.
The thing was — and this was the thing, the actual thing, the thing that Coy had been living alongside for approximately four months without naming it — the thing was that Anthony was not a simple person to know.
He seemed like one, sometimes. The energy was big and immediate and you could watch one of his videos and come away thinking you understood him. He was funny. He had good ideas. He did chaotic things with a kind of wholehearted commitment that was almost innocent in its completeness. He cared about the bit.
But the bit was never just the bit. Coy had figured this out early, in one of those first weeks when he was staying over and not calling it anything. He'd been watching Anthony edit one night, just sitting in the room reading while Anthony worked, and he'd watched Anthony cut a version of himself saying something that was technically funnier than the version he kept. He'd cut the funnier one. He'd kept the real one.
"Why'd you cut that," Coy had asked.
"It was performance," Anthony had said, not looking away from the screen. "That's not what the video's about."
Coy had filed that away. He'd added to the file over the months. The way Anthony called his parents on Sundays and was a completely different person on the phone — softer, more careful, slightly homesick in a way he'd never perform for a camera. The way he remembered things people mentioned once and brought them up three weeks later, casual, like he always knew. The way he could be in a room full of people making a lot of noise and still somehow make you feel like he was paying attention to you specifically.
These were the things that weren't on the YouTube channel. These were the things Coy knew, and had been carefully not thinking too hard about knowing.
Saturday morning, Hanbon knocked on Coy's door.
"I'm starting the rough cut," she said. "I wanted to ask you something before I got too far in."
Coy was still in bed. He sat up. "What."
Hanbon leaned in the doorway with her laptop under her arm and the expression she wore when she was doing something that required more tact than her default settings. "There's a moment. At around the hour mark. Right when you were talking about the theater thing."
Coy knew exactly what moment she meant.
"What about it," he said.
"I want to know if you want me to cut it."
He thought about this. "What does it look like."
"It looks like—" Hanbon paused, choosing words with care. "It looks like the camera caught something you might not have meant to say. Not in the words. Just the—" She made a small gesture with her hand. "The face."
Coy rubbed his eyes. "What face."
"The face you make when you're not performing."
"I make that face a lot."
"You make it specifically when Anthony says something directly to you. When it's not for the camera." Hanbon's voice was completely even. This was her most dangerous mode. "I can cut it. It'll still be a great video. I just wanted you to decide."
The room was quiet. Coy looked at the ceiling, which had a water stain in one corner shaped vaguely like a boot. He'd looked at it a lot.
"What does Anthony's face look like," he said.
Hanbon was quiet for a moment.
"I was going to ask him next," she said.
"Ask him first," Coy said. "Then we'll decide together."
Hanbon nodded once, efficiently, and left. She closed the door behind her with a gentleness that was more commentary than the words would have been.
Coy lay back down. He stared at the boot-shaped water stain. Somewhere in the house, he could hear Will doing his morning routine, which involved what sounded like a podcast, a blender, and at least one dropped item per session. He could hear, below that, the sound of Anthony's door opening.
He heard Hanbon's knock.
He heard Anthony's door close again.
He lay there and looked at the ceiling and listened to the house settle and thought about the field behind his parents' house, at dusk, the light going gold.
Sunday.
The group chat was called "bof (no berto)" because Berto had a separate group chat they weren't in. This was equitable.
The bof group chat had been quiet since Friday, which was unusual. Will usually kept it running like a radio station — constant low-level content, a stream of things that made you go okay and then immediately forget. The quiet was noticeable.
At 11am Sunday, Will sent a voice memo.
Nobody listened to it for four minutes because voice memos required more commitment than a text and this was understood by all parties. Eventually Coy, who was making coffee and had his phone on the counter, pressed play.
"Okay so I watched the rough cut—"
Coy almost knocked over the coffee.
"—Hanbon sent it to me this morning for feedback, and I just want to say, for the record, for history, that I was right. The control group was correct. I am a genius. I'm putting this in the chat because I want evidence. Screenshots welcome."
A pause in the voice memo.
"Also Coy you're literally so obvious dude oh my god. Hanbon you owe me five dollars."
The voice memo ended.
Coy stared at his phone.
Three dots appeared under his name in the chat. Anthony was typing.
The dots disappeared.
They appeared again.
Then: han u were betting on this
Hanbon: only five dollars
Hanbon: technically it was less of a bet and more of a structured disagreement about timing
Will: she said it would take longer. i said it was already happening. hence five dollars
Coy read this. He put his phone face-down on the counter. He picked up the coffee. He put the phone face-up again.
His side of the chat was empty.
He typed: what does "already happening" mean
He didn't send it.
He deleted it.
He typed: that voice memo was really annoying will
He sent that one.
Will sent back a thumbs-up emoji which was his way of being completely insufferable while maintaining deniability.
From upstairs, Coy heard movement. The particular weight of Anthony's footsteps — he'd learned the footsteps, everyone's, it was impossible not to in a house this size — crossing from one side of his room to the other, then to the door, then down the hall.
The stairs.
The kitchen.
"Hey," Anthony said.
"Hey," Coy said.
Anthony looked at the coffee situation, assessed it, and reached past Coy to get a mug from the cabinet. He was wearing the grey shirt again. Of course.
"Did you listen to the voice memo," Coy said.
"I read the chat."
"But did you listen to the voice memo."
"Yes."
They were both looking at the coffee maker. This was a position they'd been in before — side by side at the counter, not quite looking at each other, talking to the kitchen.
"Hanbon showed me the moment she was talking about," Anthony said.
"Oh."
"The face."
"Right."
"She said she was going to show it to you."
"She described it." Coy poured his coffee. "She didn't show me."
Anthony was quiet. "I told her to leave it in."
Coy looked up from the mug. Anthony was still looking at the coffee maker.
"Your face," Anthony said. "I told her to leave it in. If—" He paused. "If that's okay."
"What does your face look like," Coy said. The question he'd asked Hanbon. He hadn't gotten an answer.
Anthony turned from the coffee maker and looked at him. Just — looked. Straight on. In the Sunday morning light in the kitchen, with the grey shirt and the glasses he hadn't taken off yet and the look that Coy had spent four months filing away under don't think too hard about this.
"Probably about the same as yours," Anthony said. "According to Hanbon."
Coy thought about this for a long time. Four seconds, maybe five.
"The field," he said.
Anthony blinked.
"I want to show you the field," Coy said. "Not now, I don't mean — eventually. When the light does the thing. I want you to see it."
Anthony looked at him for a moment longer. Then something shifted, settled, clicked into the position it was supposed to be in.
"Yeah," he said. "I want to see it."
The video went up the following Thursday.
It did numbers. Good numbers, by their standards — great numbers, by anyone's standards. The comment section ran long and warm and chaotic, the way comment sections did when something landed. There were compilation clips made within hours. There were tweets. There were, Coy was informed by Will at dinner via an unsolicited report, "multiple fan cams already up, the girlies are moving fast."
There was a moment at the fifty-eight minute mark of the restaurant footage, right after Coy talked about theater and Anthony said you'd be good and Coy said you don't know that and Anthony said I've heard you sing — there was a moment there where the camera on Coy caught something, just a second, two seconds, where he was looking at Anthony with an expression that was not a performance of anything. That was just — him. Looking at Anthony.
The comment section found it within the first hour.
the way he looks at him (55:58)
i've seen that face before it's called being in love sweetie
"good background noise" anthony i am begging you
CONTROL GROUP MY FOOT they were literally just on a date
the control group was a lie from the beginning and will planned it this way on purpose
the control group is an act of warfare and i will never recover
Will screenshotted the last one and sent it to the group chat with the caption: recognized.
Hanbon sent back: give me back my five dollars.
Will sent back: never.
Anthony sent: guys
And then, after a pause, a second message. To the full group, four people, all of them in this house or adjacent to it, all of them in this thing together:
thank you for making me do the video
Will sent: you're welcome (i did this)
Hanbon sent: you're welcome (i did this more)
Coy was sitting on the floor of the living room, back against the couch, reading the comments. He read Anthony's message. He looked across the room, where Anthony was on the couch pretending to scroll through his phone, and he knew — the way you knew things you'd been circling for a while, when the orbit finally ran out of distance — that Anthony was watching him read it.
He typed: thank you for coming to the restaurant.
He sent it.
Anthony, across the room, looked at his phone. His face did the thing. The settle, the shift, the thing it only did when he saw someone he was genuinely glad to see. He looked up at Coy.
Coy looked back.
The house made its sounds around them. The upstairs pipes. The hum of Hanbon's computer from her room. Will, in the kitchen, doing something with the blender that was probably not productive but would certainly be announced.
"Hey," Anthony said.
"Hey," Coy said.
In Illinois, in a few months, when the light went gold, Coy would text Anthony and say the field is doing the thing.Anthony would be on a plane in four hours. He would not tell Coy this in advance. He would simply appear at the end of the gravel road behind the house at dusk, slightly windswept, holding a gas station coffee that had long since gone cold, and Coy would say how did you get here and Anthony would say I drove from the airport and Coy would say that's three hours and Anthony would say I know, you said dusk and Coy would have absolutely no response to that.
The light would be the right gold. The cornfields would be gold too. Everything would be, briefly and correctly, gold.
But that was a few months away.
Right now there was just the living room, and the comment section, and Anthony looking at him across the distance of about eight feet of carpet with the expression that Hanbon had left in the video because she was, as it turned out, extremely good at her job.
"The video's doing well," Coy said.
"Yeah," Anthony said.
"Will's going to be impossible about it."
"Will is always impossible."
"He's going to bring up the control group for the rest of our lives."
"Probably," Anthony agreed. He paused. "Worth it though."
Coy looked at the comments still open on his phone. i've seen that face before it's called being in love sweetie. He closed the app.
"Yeah," he said. "Worth it."
[the video's thumbnail for who's wondering #forBlindToSee: two people at a table in a slightly-too-nice Italian restaurant. one is leaning forward, elbows on the table. the other is looking at him with an expression that no thumbnail should be able to catch but this one did. below the thumbnail, in the title:
we went on a blind date (as a bit)
in the top (more specifically: in the right corner of the video), at 55:58, there is a moment. ..
the comment section will never let it go.]
Fim (The End)
. @yournarrator / @seunarrador .