The glare remained. "I'm a grown man, Emory. I'm capable of making rational decisions."
"That doesn't mean they won't be bad decisions."
Nate made a loud noise of aggravation. "Don't patronize me," he said, flinging the comforter off as though it had done him a grave wrong. He swung his legs out into the divide and crossed it, looming over me. "Move over, asshole."
"What? What are you doing? This is untoward," I protested, as he rolled me over to the far side of the bed and climbed in.
He settled himself neatly under the covers a chaste distance away from me, looking up at the ceiling, seemingly content now that he had finished making a nuisance of himself.
"Are you happy now?" I asked, punching his shoulder ineffectually.
Nate turned away from the ceiling to look at me. "You can't say all those things to me and expect me not to want to come over and say I miss you too."
An ember of hope glowed in my chest, but I ignored it, carrying on in the vein of being put-upon. "You know, you could've done that without forcibly displacing me."
"That was for saying all those things and not doing anything about it."
"I'm being noble, all right? Besides, it would be a really bad idea," I said. "I know you know it as well as I do."
Nate sighed, which was as good as getting verbal agreement. He reached over to the nightstand and shut the light off. Under the covers, our hands found each other; our fingers twined together, good enough for now, and sleep finally found us.
Morning was a different beast altogether.
I awoke with Nate lying half on top of me, the side of his face mashed into the pillow, sleeping the sleep of thorough exhaustion.
If things were different, if things were how they had been before, I would simply have put my arm around him to draw him nearer and fall back asleep, enveloped in him. How many mornings had I done it, how many times had I'd squandered the luxury of doing it unaware that there would be an end date in sight? Enough times to become a habit; too few to even come close to losing its thrill.
If things were different, I would wake him up with a kiss, or if I was feeling particularly suicidal, a jab to his side.
If things were different, I wouldn't be thinking about it, I'd just do it.
I ran the pad of my thumb over his jawline, fitting the curve of my palm over it, molded seamlessly together, like that was where it belonged from the beginning.
Funny how you can still have the muscle memory for something even after a long absence; of course, it's all a matter of the strength of neuronal connections in the brain and body, but I preferred to think that I was just meant for waking up every morning next to Nate and knowing exactly what to do.
Except, of course, that I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
Carefully, I extricated myself from Nate; he was too far gone to even notice, his limbs leaden with sleep.
When I finished showering and got dressed, I emerged from the bathroom to find Nate sitting up in bed, blinking, his hair a mess, creases in his face where he'd been sleeping on the pillow.
"Hey," I said, leaning against the wall.
"Hi," Nate said blearily.
He rubbed his face, reddening his stubbled cheeks. When his eyes cleared it looked as though it had come back to him why he was here in the first place, in this hotel room, with me on the opposite side of it. A deep sigh rattled out of his throat.
"Do you ever wish," he asked, "that you could be somebody different?"
"Most days," I said, coming over to sit on the other bed. "Who do you want to be?"
Nate shrugged, picking at a corner of the comforter nestled over his legs. "Somebody whose last words to his dad could've been three days ago, instead of fifteen years."
The saddest thing was that he so clearly still loved them, was so clearly still hoping to be forgiven for something he had as much control over as he did the direction of the earth's rotation. Or maybe the saddest thing was that he was hoping for forgiveness, when he should be the one asked to grant it.
"Don't do that to yourself," I said. "None of it is your fault."
"I just--" He shook his head, unable to finish the thought. "Who would you be?"
"Somebody more like you."
Nate frowned, nonplussed. "Have you seen me recently? I'm a mess."
"Being sad doesn't make you a mess."
"Pretty sure I look it, though," he said, running a hand through his hair, which didn't help to tame it any.
"Yeah," I said flatly. "It's pretty rough. Soon you'll only be able to book modeling jobs for department store circulars in the Sunday papers."
His shoulders shook with a short laugh. "The horror."
Feeling slightly less of a mess for the moment, Nate slid out of bed and headed for the bathroom, while I, having nothing better to do, retrieved my laptop and meandered about the Internet, looking for things to do. The burial wasn't until tomorrow, and today was the space in between.
I didn't know what Nate was going to do; it seemed like there must be something, there was always something else, something more to do when someone died, making sure each detail would meet the approval of someone who wouldn't even see.
Nate didn't know either.
"My mother won't let me help with anything. It's probably more work for her to have to tell Julie to tell me what to do," he said.
So we drove out to the coast, less than an hour away. In the summer it probably did a roaring business, but we were still on the cusp seasonally, winter still clinging on by its fingernails while spring tried to pry them off one by one, and there was no business to be had.
Outside of us, there was a single beachcomber with a metal detector and hopes of buried jetsam ambling along the shore, just out of reach of the waves as they rushed in to play tag with him.
We sat on a bench, swaddled in hooded sweatshirts, and watched the progress of his fruitless scavenge, thick clouds above turning everything into a muted gray version of itself.
Once the man passed out of our sights, following the shoreline into eternity as far as we knew, Nate turned to me. "Yesterday, when you said you told everyone, what did you mean?"
"Everyone important, I guess. I mean, aside from my parents," I said. "I didn't rush out to inform my mailman or anything."
"Oh, he knows," Nate said offhandedly.
"Oh. Okay," I said, thrown. "Well, I guess I can cross him off the list. But people at work know. I suspect it was the hot topic of conversation yesterday and will continue to be for some time whenever I'm out of earshot."
"Why?"
"Uh, because the last interesting thing that happened was someone breaking her leg six months after she broke her arm while skiing, and she's all better now, so unfortunately it's going to be me for a while, until something more exciting comes along," I explained. "Fingers crossed for the other ulna to get fractured within the week."
Nate looked at me, dissatisfied with my treatise on the vagaries of water-cooler talk. "I meant, why tell anyone?"
"Because I realized you were right about pretty much everything," I said.
He grinned. "Well, I very much like the sound of that."
"I assume it's the novelty of it that you find so exhilarating, since it gets said to you so infrequently? Ow," I laughed, jerking away from the vicious prod his fingers delivered to my waist.
"You're an ass," he said, undercutting it with a smile toward the sky.
"Yeah, well," I said to his upturned profile, "you're the one who still likes me, so."
His smile widened. "Is this how you plan to win every argument we ever have?"
"I don't know," I said, studying him carefully. "Were you planning to have a lot of arguments with me in the future?"
Nate turned his gaze to mine and held it steady. "Can we?"
The bank of embers in my chest sparked up to full flame, immolating my uncertainties to ash and brightening my face with a wide grin. "Yes," I said simply.
He tried to bite down a smile. "Good."
"In that case, I'll have to mix it up so we don't get stale," I said. "So once in a while I'll resort to name-calling, too, and maybe pull your hair."
"That sounds amazing," Nate said, laughing. "I can't wait for our next fight."
"Why wait?" I said recklessly, unable to tamp down my happiness -- and frankly, after everything, why should I? "Your gloves are stupid, and I can't believe you wasted good American dollars on not one but two pairs of those things. There, I said it."
Nate looked at me, tickled. "Not this again. You're never going to let this go, are you?"
"I don't know, you think you can make me?" I goaded, tipping exceedingly into his personal space.
He leaned into mine. "I know I can," he said, in that honey-dipped voice I knew so well. "My sources tell me I can be extremely persuasive."
As we ditched the argument in favor of skipping right to making up, it was hard to say who closed the distance first, not that it mattered in the greater scheme of things. I couldn't remember when I'd had a more satisfying fake fight.
My fingers dug furrows into his hair, and his gripped at my back, clutching me closer and closer as if the laws of physics would even allow it. There were tongues and teeth, and gasped, airless breaths, searing brands onto each other's skin, the heat between us blindingly delicious as a dying winter wind coiled around us, as though hoping to preserve us forever in that moment.
With great effort, Nate wrenched himself backwards. "Wait, wait," he said. "We can't do this here."
I blinked at him stupidly, the haze of lust yet to lift. As I looked around I realized he had a point. There was no one around, but we were smack in the middle of an open beach, and it probably wouldn't be an auspicious start to our reacquaintance if we both got charged with public indecency.
Nate shoved his fingers into my sweatshirt pocket, pulling out the car keys, which he then dumped into my hand. "Drive," he said.
We raced each other back to the car, wild with purpose, and couldn't help but kiss fiercely again once we got inside.
"Okay, okay," I said finally, sticking, with slight difficulty, the key into the ignition. "Driving now. No touching rule in effect immediately."
"This is going to be the longest hour of my life," Nate complained, making a point to sit on his hands as I peeled out of the parking lot and out onto the main road, back toward the highway.
"Hey," I said, taking higher ground, "you're the one who suggested we drive all the way out here. You have only yourself to blame."
He laughed. "There's nothing else to do out here. Besides, if you hadn't been so intent on being noble yesterday, we could have been having sex at least twelve hours ago."
"Twelve hours ago, we hadn't gotten back together," I pointed out.
"Twelve hours ago, I loved you just as much as I do now," he countered.
I very slowly applied the brakes, rolling the car to a stop along an empty parking lane, and put it in park, plus the emergency handbrake. "Did you just...?"
"Yes," said Nate, straightforward and unflinching.
I bit the inside of my lip. "Well, twelve hours ago, so did I."
He beamed at me. "That is such a sneaky way of getting out of saying it."
"Nate," I said. "I love you."
"That's better," he said, and took the opportunity, now that our vehicle was stationary, to unclick both our seatbelts and pull me into a long kiss.
Now that our respective cats were out of their bags, off somewhere making best friends with each other, it felt as though there was a different quality to our kiss now, charged but languid, intense but indulgent, like we had all of forever to sort them out. And maybe we did.
"Okay," Nate said at length, "I really want to take this fucking sweatshirt off you, so we should probably start driving again before I haul you off to the backseat."
I agreed, releasing the handbrake, and drove as fast as I dared.
The minute our hotel room door eased shut, my back hit the wall, Nate pressing me up against it, his mouth on mine, his hands diving underneath my sweatshirt, burning their imprints into my skin.
I never wanted to stop touching him or for him to stop touching me; even the mere seconds away necessary to shuck our clothing seemed beyond excessive.
Finally getting them out of the way, we staggered, entangled and lost in each other, toward the nearest bed, falling in a heap as soon as the back of my knees hit its edge. His hands glided along my sides with a sweet smoothness as we slid up the bed, freshly made and chocolate-minted.
There were a million things lighting my senses on fire all at once, his day-old stubble grazing my chin, his fingertips tattooing their pinpoints into my back, the salt on the skin at his neck, the sound that emerged from his throat when I licked into its hollow.
I burned underneath his touch, underneath his tongue, a trail of dirty, incendiary kisses everywhere he could reach.
The million things coalesced into one bright spark as Nate pushed me over the edge and sent my senses soaring wild, tethered only by his body, by his lips murmuring into my skin how to find my way back.
The morning of the burial, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. We hadn't talked about it the day prior, focusing on and reveling only in having wound our ways back to each other, exploring our relationship in its newness all over again.
Nate dressed slowly, taking his time with the cuffs on his shirt, the buttons of his jacket. He looked at himself in the mirror for a long time after he was done, but I didn't think he was really seeing himself there.
Just to feel useful, I straightened his tie, and he smiled. It came easily to him.
"I'm glad you're here," he said again, as I dusted specks of nothing off his shoulders.
"I'm here," I said. Where else could I be?
We drove to the church under a light drizzle, such a trite convention that it seemed as though somebody had ordered it off a funeral checklist.
The rest of Nate's family was already gathered in the front pew when we arrived. I folded my hand over his briefly, imparting in silence whatever courage or conviction he might need in addition to his abundance, and hung back as he made his way to join them in front of the apse of the church.
Like I had at the memorial service, I stayed toward the back of the church, keeping Nate in my sights. I kept watch still when the sermon had been said and the eulogy over, when the coffin was picked up and carried out the back of the church by people I didn't know. Nate hadn't been asked to be one of the pallbearers.
After the casket was transferred to the hearse, Nate opted not to ride with his family to the cemetery, coming to find me in the parking lot instead.
At the other end of the lot, Julie waved. Picking up on it, Abby spotted me and followed suit, turning to her mother as she did so, probably to ask why her old speech therapist was in attendance.
It is a little known fact of our distinguished profession that we all enjoy cultivating friendly relations with all of our clients' uncles. It's just one of the many services we provide.
I returned the gesture to both of them and unlocked the car. "Your mother is looking suspiciously this way," I said, wondering if I should wave at her too to be polite.
I did, even though she had no idea who I was, other than as a person standing next to her son, and it was probably the rules of newspaper column etiquette that made her acknowledge me with a curt nod.
"Well, you know, she's probably judging you as we speak," Nate said, casting a quick eye toward her as she folded herself into Julie's car, "and going through a laundry list of egregious sins you're likely to have committed."
"Oh, yeah, I do tons of those," I said. "Keeps my brain sharp."
"Yeah, I can think of a few you're really good at," Nate said with a wry smile.
"Well, if she's judging me as I am now, at least I look nice, right?" I said, glancing down at my suit. "I mean, the guy who sold me this was thoroughly adamant that it did."
He chuckled softly. "You're just fishing for compliments now."
We got into the car and followed the line of the others behind the hearse, heading toward the cemetery. When we reached, I once again left Nate unaccompanied to take his place with his family at the side of the grave.
Maybe one day we would walk toward them together, hand in hand, but today was not that day, and now was not the time.
Instead, I joined the small, remaining throng of guests in the informal semi-circle they had made around the burial plot. The same drizzle was still misting over the grounds, bowing everybody's heads.
The coffin lowered into its final resting place.
Nate hesitated, and then put a hand on his mother's shoulder, squeezing it gently. She froze, stuck in a long moment of indecision, and finally lifted her hand and placed it over his, and she squeezed back.
It was all she gave him, and it wasn't much, but I suppose it was a start.
As the guests began to disperse, I walked back to the car to wait for Nate.
"I saw that, with your mom," I said, when he appeared at last. "That was good."
He shrugged and ran a quick hand under his nose. "It's something."
"Come here," I said, wrapping my arms around him, keeping him warm until the drizzle stopped.
"Hey," he said. "Let's go home."