slow sweet love

It’s been a few weeks since he quit the club. You’d had the fight — the same one as always, the one where you said I can’t do this anymore and he looked at you and didn’t argue. He never argues. He just goes quiet and still and looks at you with those eyes and it’s worse than arguing because arguing you could win. But this time he said okay. Just like that. And you’d won. You’d finally won.

He’s home and he’s yours and he’s got all this energy with nowhere to put it, so he puts it into the house. You come home one afternoon and he’s in the yard with his shirt off, hacking at the overgrown patch along the fence that’s been driving you crazy all summer. He’s got the shears in one hand and a cigarette in his mouth and sweat running down his back and you stand at the kitchen window and watch him for longer than you’d ever admit to anyone. The tattoos moving on his skin as he works. His shoulders. The way he shoves his hair back with his forearm because his hands are full. He catches you watching through the glass and raises an eyebrow and you look away too fast and he grins and you can see it even from inside.

“Looks good,” you say when you go out, meaning the yard, mostly.

“Uh huh,” he says, and he knows you don’t mean the yard.

He fixes the porch step. The one that’s been loose since you moved in. You’ve been asking him to fix it for months — you’ve been telling him, actually, because asking didn’t work — and he always said he’d get to it and never got to it because he was never here long enough to get to anything. Now he’s sitting on the porch with a hammer and nails and a piece of wood he got from somewhere and he’s doing it. Just doing it. No complaining, no putting it off, just his hands and the hammer and that focus he has, the one where the rest of the world goes away.

“You’re actually fixing it,” you say from the doorway.

“You asked me to fix it.”

“I asked you six months ago.”

“So I’m fixin’ it.”

“Should I make a list of everything else? Because I’ve got a list, Benny.”

“Don’t push it.”

You sit on the top step and hand him nails when he needs them and the afternoon is warm and easy and he finishes and stands on the step and bounces on it a couple of times to test it and it holds and he looks at you.

“Solid,” he says.

“My hero.”

“Don’t start.”

But he’s almost smiling and the step is fixed and the yard is trimmed and there’s sawdust on his jeans and he looks good. He looks really good. And you think: see? This works. He just needed something to do with his hands.

Except he runs out of things.

The yard’s done. The step’s done. He tightens a couple of hinges, fixes the drip under the bathroom sink, rehangs a picture that’s been crooked for a year. It doesn’t take him long to work through everything that actually needs doing, and then the house is done. Everything works. Nothing creaks or drips or sticks. And Benny is standing in the kitchen with nothing in his hands and nowhere to go.

He doesn’t wear his boots in the house anymore. You used to scream at him about those boots — the mud, the oil, the black marks all over the kitchen floor. He’d walk through every room like the house was just more road. You’d be on your hands and knees scrubbing boot prints off the tile and he’d walk right across the wet floor in them and you’d fantasise about murder. So the clean floor should feel like a victory. And it does. It’s just that without them his walk is different — that rolling, easy thing in his hips is gone, the way he used to move through a room like he was arriving even when he was just crossing the kitchen. Now he pads around in his socks and barely makes a sound. And his hair — you catch yourself staring at him while you’re watching TV and he catches you catching yourself.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

It’s not that it looks bad. It’s that it doesn’t look like anything. It used to have this tousled thing. Not styled, Benny never styled anything in his life, but it had life in it. Wind and speed and not giving a damn, and it all added up to this look that wasn’t a look, it was just him. Now he showers and it dries flat and he doesn’t touch it. Doesn’t push it back, doesn’t run his hand through it, doesn’t do any of the nothing he used to do that somehow made it right. It just sits there like it belongs to someone else.

You file these things away. You don’t think about them too hard. He’s here. That’s what matters.

But now that the house is fixed and the yard is done, Benny has nothing to do except be in the way. You’re trying to cook and he’s in front of the refrigerator. Door open, cold pouring out, staring at the shelves. You’re behind him with a pot of water and he is directly, geometrically, precisely between you and the stove.

“Benny.”

Nothing.

“Benny. Move.”

He takes out a beer, looks at it, puts it back. Takes out the orange juice. Puts that back too. Closes the fridge and opens it again.

“If you don’t move I’m going to pour this on your head.”

He shifts about four inches. You squeeze past him with the pot held high and your hip against the counter and he doesn’t even register it.

“We’re outta eggs.”

“They’re behind the milk.”

He moves the milk. Finds the eggs. Doesn’t take any out. Closes the door.

“I’m goin’ outside,” he says.

He goes outside. Sits on the step — the one he fixed, the one that doesn’t creak anymore — and lights a cigarette.

He picks a fight with you about the fan. The fan. The old green metal box fan in the window, rattling away on high, and Benny is standing there staring at it like it’s a personal enemy.

“You’ve got it blowing the wrong way.”

“It’s a fan, Benny. It blows air.”

“You’re supposed to point it out the window. Sucks the hot air out. You’ve got it pulling the street air in.”

“It’s fine the way it is.”

“It’s not fine. You’re tryin’ to cool the place with hot air. That’s not how it works.”

Benny, who once threw a chair through a window at a bar, who once rode home in a thunderstorm because somebody looked at you wrong at a gas station, is getting loud about which direction a box fan should face. His jaw does the thing — that clench that used to mean somebody was about to get hit. It used to mean the fuse was lit and you had about half a second before everything went sideways because Benny didn’t have a slow burn. He had a match and gasoline and nothing in between. Now the jaw clenches and unclenches and nothing happens. Like striking a match in the rain.

“Forget it,” he says, and walks into the bedroom.

You come home one afternoon and he’s taken the kitchen cabinet doors off. All of them. They’re leaning against the wall in a stack and he’s standing on a chair with a screwdriver. It looks like a bomb went off.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“This one was stickin’.”

“One was sticking. So you took them all off?”

“Figured while I was at it.”

“Benny, I was gone for forty-five minutes.”

He doesn’t look at you. He’s focused on the hinge with that same intensity that used to be reserved for his bike, for the road, for the split second before a fight when everything in him narrowed to a point. The cabinets were fine. He’s inventing problems because he’s run out of real ones.

“Can you put them back on.”

“When I’m done.”

“When will you be done?”

“When they’re fixed.”

You leave him to it. Two hours later the cabinet doors are back on. Every one of them swings perfectly. He opens and closes them all to show you. You say thank you. He sits on the couch and stares at the TV and you stand in the kitchen with your perfect cabinets and the something-wrong feeling is getting harder to ignore.

He kisses you goodnight — this soft, quick thing, his mouth on yours for half a second. Done. A stamp. A receipt. Transaction complete. You lie in bed afterwards thinking about the first time he kissed you. Parking lot of the Stoplight. He didn’t ask, didn’t hesitate, just walked you backward into the side of someone’s truck with his hand in your hair and his mouth on yours and the absolute certainty that you were in over your head and didn’t care. He kissed you like a dare. He doesn’t kiss you like anything anymore. He kisses you like someone honouring a deal.

He’s not sleeping. You know because you’re not either. You lie there and listen to him breathe and it’s all wrong — too even, too controlled. He’s awake and staring at the ceiling and performing sleep for your benefit. Sometimes at 2 or 3 a.m. he gets up and you hear the back door. You give it ten minutes and then you go out and he’s sitting on the step in his boxers, smoking, looking at the road. Not at anything on the street. At the asphalt itself.

“Come back to bed.”

He does. He always does.

You’re in the cereal aisle at the grocery store and it hits you. You’re thinking about the night you met him — the bar, him at the pool table, jacket and boots and that jaw, watching the room like it owed him something. He caught you looking and didn’t smile — just held your gaze until your stomach dropped and your friend grabbed your arm and said don’t and you were already walking over. That guy. You fell in love with that guy. And then you spent two years trying to put the fire out. And it worked. That’s the worst part.

He smiles at you across the kitchen table that evening and you see it. It starts in the right place. It’s heading the right direction. But it doesn’t get there. It stalls halfway, this effortful thing, like an engine turning over in the cold. He used to smile like breathing — easy, fast, real. Now there’s a half-second delay where the work shows and it hits you right there with the dinner going cold — this is what you did. You asked him to be something he’s not and he did it because he loves you and it’s killing him.

“Benny.”

“Yeah?”

“I uh —“

“What is it?”

“Jesus.” You shake your head. “I never thought I’d say this, but — I think you should start riding again.”

The smile — the wrong one — drops off his face.

“I’m serious. You’ve fixed everything in this house. The yard, the porch, the sink, the cabinets — Benny, you’re running out of things to take apart.”

“But you told me to quit. This is what you wanted.”

“I know I did. And I was wrong.”

That sits between you for a second.

“You were wrong,” he says. Not mean. Careful. Like he’s checking.

“Yeah. I was wrong. I was worried about you and I was tired of fighting, and I love that you did this for me Benny, but it was wrong. This isn’t you, it’s like something’s died. And it’s my fault.”

He looks at the table. Looks at the front door. Looks at you.

“You sure?”

“No,” you say. Because you’re not. You’re terrified. You’re terrified of the 3 a.m. door and the cold sheets and the bruises and the sirens and the phone call you’ve rehearsed in your head a thousand times, the one that starts with ma’am. You’re scared of all of it.

“But I’d rather be scared than watch you disappear.”

He gets up. Grabs the boots from the front door — the dirty old black ones that haven’t moved in weeks — and sits on the step to pull them on. You lean in the doorway and watch him lace them and his hands are quick and sure and something in his shoulders is already different. Straighter. More like him.

“I’ll see you later,” you say.

He looks at you over his shoulder. Nods once. Finishes lacing up and walks down the street and the walk is already different — that rolling thing coming back into his body like it was just waiting — and you watch him until he rounds the corner.

You grab a beer. You sit on the front step — the one he fixed, the one that holds solid.

He’s not coming home tonight. You know that. He’ll get the bike and he’ll ride and he’ll find the guys at the bar and fall right back into it like the last two months didn’t happen. He’ll be out all night and tomorrow night too, probably, and he’ll come home when he comes home, if he comes home, because that’s the other thing — Benny has always told you he might just go. Maybe I should just go. He’s said it standing in the doorway with the keys in his hand. He’s said it flat on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling, like he’s reminding himself it’s an option. He’s said it enough times that you’ve stopped being able to tell whether it’s a threat or a promise or just the truth.

Maybe tonight’s the night he means it. Maybe he rides out and keeps riding. Maybe you’ll sit on this step tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, waiting for a sound that doesn’t come.

And you know what? You’d rather that. You’d rather the worry and the cold sheets and the not-knowing than one more day of the version of Benny who smiles at you like it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.

You go to bed. You leave the window open.

You don’t sleep. You lie there and listen and every car that passes isn’t the right sound.

It’s almost four when you hear it.

Blocks away. That low rumble. Your body knows it before the rest of you catches on.

Closer.

The engine cuts. The front door opens.

He doesn’t take his boots off.

You hear them on the floor — heavy, real, tracking in dirt and road and God knows what — and you laugh into the pillow because there is mud on your clean kitchen floor and it is the best thing you have ever heard.

He comes into the bedroom windblown and grinning — the real grin, the full one, effortless — grease on his forearms, his hair wrecked from the wind, alive and tousled and exactly right. His whole body is loose and easy, like someone opened every window in a room that’s been shut for months.

He kicks the boots off onto the carpet. Thud. Thud. Dirt and all. Drops his jacket. Gets undressed and gets in beside you, warm from the ride, smelling like engine oil and summer night air, and puts his hand on your face and kisses you.

Not the goodnight kiss. His hand in your hair, his mouth hard and warm and sure — the dare, the whole dare, the one from the parking lot, the one that says try and stop me.

“Where’d you go?” you say against his mouth.

“Bar. Then rode out. Then back.”

“You smell terrible.”

“You love it.”

His arm goes around you, warm and heavy and loose, and he’s real and solid and him. The happy ending was never him quitting. It was always this — the 4 a.m. door and the warm hands and the mud on the floor and the kiss that isn’t careful. The going and the coming back. The coming back was always the point.

There’s going to be boot prints all over the floor in the morning.

Thank God.

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