#caramelcoffee

Bill called at eleven at night, which was how Paul knew before Bill said a single word that something was wrong. Bill did not call at eleven at night. Bill called at reasonable hours, scheduled hours, hours a person could prepare for. Eleven o'clock was an hour for emergencies, and Bill hated being an emergency more than he hated almost anything.

"I need a favor," Bill said, and his voice had that flat, careful quality that meant he was trying very hard not to sound like he was falling apart, which was somehow worse than if he'd just let himself fall apart. Paul could hear him not-crying. It had a sound.

"Okay."

"I have to be in Clivesdale tomorrow. The lawyer moved the meeting up and Carol's mother can't take Alice and I—" A breath, shaky at the edges. "I know it's short notice. I know you have work. I wouldn't ask if—"

"Bill."

"—if there was anyone else, but there isn't anyone else, and I hate asking you this, I know you don't do kids, I know this isn't—"

"Bill." Paul said it again, harder, because Bill was spinning and somebody had to stop the wheel. "It's one day. It's not like you're asking me to watch a musical."

There was a pause on the line. Then something that might have been a laugh, wet and surprised out of him, like it had escaped before he could stop it. "Right. Yeah. Okay." Another breath, steadier this time. "God, I don't know why that's funny. Nothing about this is funny."

"You laughed anyway. That's allowed."

"Is it?"

"I don't see why not."

Bill exhaled long and slow, the sound of a man setting down something heavy for just a second. "I keep thinking I'm supposed to feel a certain way about this and I don't know what that way is. Everyone talks about divorce like it's a specific shape. I don't feel any shape. I just feel tired."

"You don't owe anyone a shape."

"You'd know. You never give anyone the shape they're expecting."

"I give people the truth. It's not my fault it comes in a weird package."

Another laugh, better this time, less like it hurt on the way out. "I'll be there at eight?"

"I'll be there at eight."

"Paul." Bill's voice dropped, went serious in the way it did right before he said something he'd clearly rehearsed. "Thank you. I mean it. I know you didn't sign up for kid stuff when we started being friends."

"You're not asking me to sign anything." Paul said it flat, like a correction, because to him it was one. "You're asking me to watch Alice for a day. Different thing. I'm not doing you a lifelong favor."

Bill's voice had gone soft again, the good kind of soft. "I don't know what I'd do without you lately."

Paul didn't have an answer for that one that didn't feel too big to say out loud, so he said, "Go to sleep, Bill," and hung up before either of them could make it stranger.

---

Alice was seven, all elbows and a gap where her front tooth had been, and she regarded Paul with the deep suspicion of a child who had recently learned that adults left. She sat on the Woodwards' living room floor with a shoebox of Barbies and did not look up when Paul came in, even though her dad hovered in the doorway looking like he wanted to give forty more instructions than the situation required.

"She's had breakfast, there's a list on the fridge for lunch, if she says she's not tired she's lying, if the phone rings it's probably just the lawyer's office and you don't have to—"

"Bill."

"—answer it if you don't want, I just wanted you to know in case, and if she wants to watch something there's a limit, forty-five minutes, she'll try to tell you it's an hour—"

"Bill." Paul put a hand flat on the doorframe, not touching him, just present. "Go. You're going to be late, and she can hear you being anxious, and that's worse for her than forty-five minutes of TV."

Bill looked stricken for half a second — the specific, familiar Bill expression of a man realizing he'd overstepped a line he hadn't meant to walk anywhere near — and then, visibly, made himself stop. "Right. Okay. You have my number."

"I have your number."

"Call if—"

"I know, Bill. Go."

He went. Paul shut the door and turned around to find Alice watching him over the top of a Barbie's head with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral and mostly succeeding.

"Your dad talks a lot when he's scared," she said.

"Yeah. He does."

"Are you scared?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Paul thought about it, honestly, because that was the only way he knew how to answer anything. "Because there's nothing here that's actually dangerous. Your dad's scared of things that could go wrong. I only get scared of things that are actually happening."

Alice considered this like it was information worth filing away. "My mom says you're weird."

"Your mom's not wrong."

That got the first real crack of a smile out of her, small and reluctant, like she hadn't planned on giving it to him yet. "She says it mean, though."

"That's the part where she's wrong."

Alice went back to her dolls. Paul sat down across from her on the floor — not the couch, the floor, because sitting on the couch felt like putting a wall between them and he didn't see the point of that — and picked up the cereal box on the coffee table and read the back of it, because he understood, better than most adults seemed to, that a kid didn't owe you a conversation just because you were sitting near them. Some minutes passed. Alice built something elaborate out of a blanket and two throw pillows. Eventually she brought two of the Barbies over, without asking permission, and started narrating an entire dramatic storyline at him in a voice that shifted register for each doll.

"—and then she said 'I thought you were dead' and the other one said 'I'm not dead, I just went to get milk' and then they hugged for a really long time because they missed each other so much—"

"That's a lot of missing for a milk run."

"It's not really about the milk," Alice said, with the particular patience of a seven-year-old explaining art to an adult who clearly did not get it. "It's about how much they love each other."

"Okay. Fair."

The dolls hugged for a long time. Then they got married, on top of the couch cushions, foreheads pressed together, plastic mouths bumping in a kiss that Alice performed with total seriousness and zero self-consciousness.

"That's a nice wedding," Paul said, because it seemed like the correct response.

"They're best friends," Alice said, quickly, like she was correcting a mistake he hadn't made. "Best friends who live together forever and take care of each other and nobody else is allowed to make them sad."

"Sure."

"Is that weird?"

"No."

"My mom said it's weird when I said the same thing about my friend Diane at school."

Something in Paul's chest did a small, quiet thing he didn't examine yet — filed it, the way he filed most things, without opening the file. "It's not weird," he said, and he meant it as simply as he'd have meant it about anything. "People get married because they love each other and want to live together and take care of each other. That's not a weird thing to want. Doesn't matter who it is."

Alice looked at him for a second too long, like she was deciding whether to trust that. "Okay," she said, and went back to the wedding, and Paul went back to the cereal box, and neither of them thought anything more of it, because it didn't occur to Paul to think anything of it. She was seven. Best-friends-who-get-married was just the architecture kids built out of the only kind of love story available to them, borrowed and rearranged, and Paul had exactly zero interest in reading meaning into a Barbie wedding. He liked Alice fine. He was not going to analyze her.

By the time Bill got home, gray around the eyes and smelling like the inside of a lawyer's office, Alice was asleep on the couch with her head near Paul's arm, and Paul was still reading the same three sentences of a video game magazine he'd brought and not really absorbing any of it.

"How'd it go?" Bill whispered, standing over both of them like he wasn't sure he was allowed in his own living room yet.

"Fine. She's opinionated. I like her."

"She likes you. She doesn't like most people right away."

"I'm not most people."

"No," Bill said, and something in his face went soft and unguarded in a way it hadn't been in weeks, "you're really not." He looked down at his sleeping kid, and then at Paul, for a beat that went on slightly longer than it needed to. "Thank you. I mean it."

"You've said that four times now."

"I'll probably say it a few more."

"Don't. It's annoying." Paul said it without heat, and Bill, who by now spoke fluent Paul, heard exactly what it meant: I wanted to be here. Stop making it a transaction.

---

He came back the next weekend Bill had to drive to Clivesdale, and the one after that, and the one after that, and it stopped being a favor and became a thing that simply happened, the way Tuesday happened. Alice started keeping a specific shoebox of dolls at Bill's apartment that she called, without irony, "the Paul ones," because he was the one who sat on the floor with her instead of doing chores around her while she played.

Paul noticed things about Bill during those weekends that he filed without opening. Bill's hand on his shoulder, lasting a half-second longer than the gesture required, when Paul said something that helped. The specific, unguarded way Bill laughed at something dry Paul said — head back, eyes shut, a full-body laugh — like Paul was the funniest man alive instead of just a guy with a low tolerance for nonsense. The way Bill said his name sometimes, not Paul like an address but Paul like a small relief, the way you say a word when you've been holding your breath and can finally put it down.

"You're doing the thing again," Bill said one evening, halfway through making dinner, nodding at Paul across the kitchen.

"What thing."

"The thing where you go quiet and I can't tell if you're thinking or if I did something."

"I'm thinking."

"About what?"

"Doesn't matter." It came out sharper than he meant, and he saw it land, saw Bill's face do the small flinch it always did when he thought he'd caused something. Paul made himself soften it, because that flinch was worse than whatever discomfort he was trying to hide. "It's not about you. I get like this. You know I get like this."

"I know." Bill didn't push, which was its own kind of gift, because pushing was Bill's default setting with everyone he loved. He'd learned, slowly, painfully, that Paul was the one person in his life who required the opposite instinct. "I just worry."

"You worry about everything."

"Occupational hazard of being a father who just got left by his wife." Bill said it light, but it wasn't light, and Paul heard the whole weight of it underneath.

"You weren't left because of something wrong with you."

"You don't know that."

"I do, actually. I know you. You're not the reason it ended." Paul said it the way he said most true things — flatly, without decoration, because dressing it up would have made it sound less certain than it was, and he needed Bill to hear the certainty. "Some things end. That's not always about fault."

Bill looked at him for a long moment, something raw moving behind his eyes. "You always say things like they're just facts."

"They usually are facts."

---

The night it stopped being avoidable, Alice was asleep in the back bedroom and Bill was sitting on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinets because the divorce papers had finally, actually, irreversibly gone through that afternoon, and he did not have it in him to sit anywhere that felt like furniture. Paul found him there when he let himself in — Bill had started giving him a key, a fact neither of them had commented on — sitting on the linoleum in the dark with a glass of water he hadn't touched.

"Hey." Paul crouched, then sat, because standing over him felt wrong. "You didn't call."

"I didn't want to be a thing you had to drop everything for."

"I would have dropped everything."

"I know. That's why I didn't call." Bill's voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, just enough. "It's final. As of today. Twelve years and it's just — paperwork now. Filed. Done."

"I'm sorry."

"Are you? You never liked her."

"I didn't like how she talked to you. That's different from not being sorry you're hurting." Paul sat down on the floor next to him, matching his height, because that mattered more to Paul than his own comfort ever did. "I can hold both of those at once."

Bill let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something else entirely. "I keep thinking I did something wrong. Like there's a version of this where I noticed something in time and fixed it before it got here."

"You didn't do anything wrong."

"You don't know that."

"I do, actually," Paul said again, echoing himself from weeks before, deliberately, because some truths needed saying twice before they landed. "You loved her as hard as you know how to love anyone, which is too hard, honestly, you love everyone too hard, and sometimes that's still not enough to keep something from breaking. That's not a moral failure. That's just what happened."

"I don't know how to feel that and not feel like garbage at the same time."

"You don't have to stop feeling like garbage today. You just have to stop believing the garbage feeling is true."

Bill laughed again, wetter this time, and put his head down on Paul's shoulder — not dramatically, not like a movie, just tired, the way you lean on a wall because your legs have stopped being able to do the job. "You're a good friend, Paul. I don't know what I'd have done the last few months without you. I mean that. I don't think I'd have made it through this the same."

Paul went very still. Not because he minded. Because something in his chest had just rearranged itself violently and without his permission, and he needed a second to figure out what had happened to the floor beneath him.

He looked down at the top of Bill's head — soft dark hair, gone a little unwashed from a day he clearly hadn't planned to survive with dignity — and understood, with the clean, unwelcome clarity of a light switching on in a dark room, that he did not feel about Bill the way a good friend was supposed to feel. That the warmth sitting in his sternum right now had nothing to do with friendship's normal architecture, had never had anything to do with friendship's normal architecture, had just been very good at wearing that costume for a long time. He wanted, for one indefensible second, to turn his head and press his mouth to Bill's hair. He wanted to put his arm around him and mean it in a way that had nothing brotherly left in it at all.

"Paul?" Bill said, into his shoulder, not lifting his head. "You went quiet."

"I'm here."

"You always go quiet right before you say something important. Or right before you don't say anything at all." Bill's voice was muffled, exhausted, not accusing. "Which one is it tonight?"

"The second one," Paul said, and hated himself for the lie, and hated himself more for how easy it came out.

---

He did not sleep that night. He lay on his own ceiling and ran an inventory, the way he ran an inventory on everything, methodical and unsparing, because that was the only way Paul knew how to survive information he didn't want.

He catalogued: the shoulder thing, just now. The laugh thing, weeks running. A memory from two years back he'd filed under nothing at the time — Bill in a tight T-shirt doing yard work on a Saturday, sweat at his collarbone, and Paul's eyes lingering half a second past casual, and Paul telling himself it was just heat making him stare, nothing else, definitely nothing else. A memory from high school he'd buried under twelve years of not looking at it directly — a boy on the baseball team named Kevin Doyle, and a feeling in Paul's chest he'd squashed flat before it finished forming, because the guys on TV who felt that way were jokes, punchlines, a beat before the laugh track, and Paul had understood without anyone explicitly telling him that this was a thing that happened to other kinds of people. Not people like him. Not people from a house like his — not because his parents had ever hit him for it, or screamed about it, or even, technically, said anything about it directly. Nobody had ever needed to. His father made the same joke every time a certain kind of man came on the news, quiet and reflexive, the kind of joke you didn't even register as a joke because it wasn't trying to be funny so much as trying to be obvious. His mother had a specific tone of voice for men she called that type, delivered with the same flatness she used for weather. Nobody had to build a wall. The ambient temperature of the whole house did the job on its own, over years, the way water shapes stone without anyone ever picking up a chisel.

He had built an entire self on top of that foundation without once noticing he was building on sand.

And now Bill.

Bill, who was his best friend, who was newly, freshly, that-afternoon divorced, who had a kid, who trusted Paul more than he trusted almost anyone alive — and Paul had sat there on a kitchen floor wanting to kiss the top of his head like it was nothing, like it was normal, like Bill wasn't a person actively grieving a marriage he'd just watched turn into paperwork.

He felt sick with himself. Not because he thought being attracted to men was wrong — if you'd asked him, cold, in the daylight, whether some other guy being gay or bi was a problem, he'd have said no, obviously not, why would it be, and meant it completely, because Paul's convictions about other people were built on fairness and logic and didn't have twenty years of laugh-tracks sitting underneath them like they did for himself. It was different when the person in question was him. That was where the old wiring kicked in, quiet and vicious and completely disconnected from anything he actually believed: this is wrong, this is a betrayal of him, you are a bad friend for feeling this, fix it, hide it, bury it the way you buried it before, you know how to do this, you've done it before.

He didn't have the word bisexual yet, not really, not as something that applied to him instead of to other people he had no problem with. He just had the disgust, sharp and old and instinctive, and the wanting, sharp and new and undeniable, tangled together so tightly he couldn't get a hand between them to pull them apart.

---

He was strange around Bill for two weeks after that. Shorter on the phone. Left faster after babysitting. Answered questions about his day in single words that weren't rude, exactly, just — sanded down, all the texture removed, careful.

Bill noticed. Bill noticed everything about the people he loved, which was usually a liability, the overprotective instinct that made him hover and grip too tight around Alice — and for once his instinct to fix things ran headlong into Paul's absolute refusal to be handled.

It came to a head on a Thursday. Bill showed up at Paul's apartment without calling first, which he never did, holding two coffees like a peace offering he hadn't been asked to make.

"Did I do something?" he asked, standing in the doorway, not stepping in, like he was bracing for a no you can't come in.

"No."

"Paul, you've been—"

"I said no." It came out harder than he meant, a flare he didn't manage to catch in time, and he watched it land on Bill's face like a slap. Paul closed his eyes for a second, recalibrated, made himself try again, because Bill deserved the effort even when the effort was hard. "It's not you. It's — I have some stuff going on. Something I'm dealing with. I don't want to talk about it."

"Is it about the divorce? About me leaning on you too much? Because if it's too much, if I've been putting too much on you, you can tell me, I know I do that, I know I don't always—"

"It's not about you leaning on me."

"Then what is it?"

"I don't want to talk about it, Bill." Paul's jaw was tight. "That's an answer. It's a real answer. It doesn't need a follow-up question."

Bill flinched, visibly, and Paul saw him do the thing he always did when he thought he'd overstepped — the fast mental scramble to figure out which wire he'd crossed, so he could avoid it next time, so he could be better, so he could fix whatever he'd broken. "Okay," he said, quiet. "Okay. I'm sorry. I just — I don't like not knowing how to help you. It's not a normal feeling for me, being the one who doesn't know what to do."

"You don't have to know what to do. Nobody's asking you to fix this."

"Then what are you asking me to do?"

"Nothing. I'm not asking you to do anything. That's the whole point." Paul heard his own voice go thin, stretched, and hated it. "You'd tell me if you were mad at me?"

"I always tell you when I'm mad at you. You know that about me."

"I do." Bill's shoulders dropped an inch, some of the fight going out of him, replaced by something more tired and more honest. "I hate this. I hate feeling like there's a door and I don't know which side of it you're on."

"There's no door."

"There's absolutely a door, Paul. You built it two weeks ago and you've been standing behind it every day since." Bill wasn't yelling — Bill never yelled at him, had learned a long time ago that yelling made Paul shut down entirely rather than open up — but his voice had an edge Paul didn't hear often, hurt trying to disguise itself as patience. "I'm not asking you to tell me something you don't want to tell me. I'm asking you to stop pretending the door isn't there."

Paul didn't say anything for a long moment. The silence stretched, uncomfortable, and Paul let it, because he needed the time and didn't know how to ask for it out loud.

"There's a door," he finally said. "I'm not ready to open it. I don't know when I will be. Maybe not for a long time. I need you to be okay with that, because I can't give you a different answer right now."

Something in Bill's face shifted — not satisfied, not fixed, but landed. Real. "Okay," he said. "I can be okay with that. I don't like it. But I can be okay with it." He set one of the coffees down on the little table by Paul's door, an offering he clearly wasn't sure would be accepted. "For what it's worth — whatever it is, I don't think it's going to change how I feel about you. I want you to know that. Whatever's behind the door. I don't think it changes anything."

Paul looked at him and felt something crack down the middle, quiet and total, because Bill had no idea what he was actually promising, had no idea the door had his own name written on the other side of it in Paul's handwriting.

"You don't know that," Paul said.

"I know you," Bill said. "That's usually enough for me."

---

He didn't have a plan after that, not really. He couldn't just say it, and he couldn't make the feeling stop, and he couldn't figure out how to be near Bill without also being aware, every single second, of the specific shape of Bill's hands, the specific sound of Bill saying his name like relief instead of address. So he did the only thing that felt survivable: he stayed. He kept showing up on the babysitting weekends. He kept sitting on the floor while Alice narrated Barbie weddings he now understood a little too well not to flinch at, quietly, privately, never where she could see it. He got better, slowly, clumsily, gracelessly, at being in the same room as the feeling without setting the room on fire.

There was one more night that almost broke the seal — Bill, three beers in, laughing too hard at something on TV, falling sideways into Paul's space on the couch the way he always did when his guard came down, head landing on Paul's shoulder like it belonged there, like it was the most natural resting place in the world. Paul sat rigid for a full ten seconds before he made himself relax, made himself let his arm settle around Bill's shoulders the way it would have a year ago, before any of this, before he knew what his own hands were capable of wanting.

"You're tense," Bill said, eyes half shut, voice slurring soft at the edges.

"I'm fine."

"You're always fine. It's annoying." Bill said it the exact way Paul said things to him, a small private joke, an echo, and Paul felt it land somewhere dangerously close to his heart. "You know you can not be fine around me sometimes. That's allowed too."

"You stole that line from me."

"I steal all your best lines. You should be flattered." Bill's eyes were fully closed now, his breathing slowing, and Paul sat there in the dark with Bill's weight against him and thought, with a clarity that felt almost cruel in its simplicity: I could ruin this so easily. One wrong move and I could take the one steady thing you have left and turn it into wreckage.

He didn't move. He sat there until Bill's breathing evened out into sleep, and then he sat there longer, because moving felt like it would wake something up that he wasn't ready to face — not Bill, but himself, and the specific ugly voice in the back of his skull that still, after everything, after every logical argument he could build against it, whispered that wanting this made him something broken, something his father would have had a joke ready for.

He didn't believe the voice. He wanted, badly, to not believe the voice. Those were two different things, and Paul, who prided himself on never lying to himself for long, had to admit that some nights the gap between them felt impossible to close.

---

He didn't tell Bill. Not that year. Maybe not for a lot of years — Paul didn't make promises about timelines he couldn't keep, not even to himself. But some nights, lying on his ceiling doing inventory the way he always did, he let himself sit with the word bisexual a little longer each time, turning it over clinically, the way he turned over anything he needed to understand before he could accept it, until it started to feel less like an accusation and more like just another fact about himself, filed next to doesn't like musicals and plays video games on Tuesdays and is loyal to a fault.

He was, if nothing else, a person who did not lie to himself for long. He hadn't agreed to feel this. He hadn't asked for it, and some days he still hated it, hated the old ugly wiring that made wanting his best friend feel like a moral failing instead of just a fact about who he was. But he wasn't going to pretend the feeling wasn't there, either. That wasn't how Paul worked. He'd never once in his life said yes when he meant no, and he wasn't about to start lying to himself about the one thing that mattered most.

He just hadn't figured out yet what to do with a yes this inconvenient, this quiet, this completely, hopelessly aimed at a man who was still learning how to stand up straight after everything that had been taken from him.

So Paul did what Paul always did when a thing was too big to solve all at once. He kept showing up. He sat on the floor. He let Alice build her Barbies a hundred more weddings he no longer flinched at, not because the feeling had gone but because he'd finally, grudgingly, learned how to carry it without dropping anything else in the process.