Page 30 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“Save your sweet talk for when Patrick’s around to be impressed,” she says, because she really is a harridan. But she does put on another pot of coffee. “Come here,” she says, when the coffee machine is puttering away. She opens her arms.
Nathaniel squints at her and takes another gulp of coffee.
“Come on,” she says, advancing on him.
“Truly unnecessary,” he says, appalled, but she’s already upon him, his coffee whisked away, her arms around his shoulders, her face smashed against his chest. She’s tiny. Nathaniel is maybe slightly above average height for a man and on the skinny side, but having her up against him makes him feel like a lumbering giant. She smells like baby soap and marijuana and she willnotlet go. Eleanor, squashed between them, thinks this is all tremendous fun and celebrates by biting Nathaniel’s neck with her toothless gums.
Susan removes the little beast and puts her in her crib, and Nathaniel thinks his trials have come to an end, but then she’s back at it, her head tucked up under his chin.
It’s that, maybe, the tickle of her hair against his neck, the sound of Eleanor making little noises in her crib, the old and unwanted familiarity of it all, that makes Nathaniel crack. He squeezes her back. He doesn’t know how long they stand there, but his collar’s damp from where she’s been crying all over it.
“It’ll get better,” he says, because that much is true. She doesn’t ask how he knows, and she doesn’t point out that his voice is hoarse. “I went to the grocery store on my own. It was hellish.”
“The fact that you did it at all is something,” she says.
“Spare me,” he says. She hauls him toward the couch, presumably as punishment, then pastes herself up against his side, halfway onto his lap. “If this is a seduction, I have terrible news,” he says, shocking himself by coming so close to admitting the truth aloud, even though he suspects she already knows.
She looks up at him just long enough to roll her eyes, then puts her head back on his shoulder. Inspired by what he can only assume is a further descent into madness, he puts his arm around her and kisses the top of her head. It’s…fine. It’s nice. He’s comforting a friend. He’s letting himself be comforted. When was the last time he touched someone like this? Before coming here, he can’t remember the last time anyone touched him at all, other than a handshake or a trip to the dentist.
The apartment door swings open. “There you are,” Patrick says, sounding half frantic. “I couldn’t find you.” And then he takes stock of what he’s walked in on. “Oh,” he says, frozen in place on the threshold. “I should have knocked.”
“Oh, be quiet,” Susan says, not even bothering to extract her limbs from Nathaniel’s person. “It’s not like that.”
“It looks like that,” Patrick says.
“My husband died three months ago.” Susan snipes at Patrick all the time, in the way people do when they’ve known one another so long that childhood patterns stay fixed. But this might be the first time Nathaniel’s heard Susan sound genuinely angry at Patrick.
“Everybody grieves differently,” Patrick says. Nathaniel bets he read that in the book on grief he keeps under his desk.
“Oh my god. Nathaniel’s gay.”
“Hey!” Nathaniel says, because Susan could have some discretion, even if, apparently, Nathaniel has none.
“Weird thing to say about your boyfriend,” Patrick points out.
“We aren’t sleeping together, you madman,” Nathaniel says.
“I’m supportive!” Patrick says. “Oh, I get it. You haven’t slept togetheryet.”
Nathaniel starts laughing. Beside him, the indignation is pouring off Susan, so he takes one of her hands in his and squeezes it. Patrick can do with that what he will.
“No offense, Nathaniel, but I don’t want to have sex with you,” Susan says firmly.
“Likewise,” Nathaniel says, still laughing. “With all due respect,” he adds, tipping an imaginary hat, which sets Susan off laughing too.
“Okay! God! Sorry! You’re cuddling platonically,” Patrick says, more sarcastic than Nathaniel’s used to hearing from him.
“Yes, Patrick,” Susan says. “We’re cuddling platonically.”
“Should I start knocking when I come over?”
“Is it okay if I push him out the window?” Susan asks nobody in particular.
“I don’t think that would help, exactly,” Nathaniel says. He picks up Susan’s wrist and glances at her watch; his own left hand is still wedged behind her back. “We need to open the shop. Perhaps some of us can find another time to be obtuse and dramatic.”
Downstairs, Nathaniel flips the sign to Open while Patrick switches on the lights. “I apologize for making you worry,” Nathaniel says, his attention on some books that a customer put back horizontally. “I went out to buy milk.”
“You don’t need permission to buy milk.”
