Page 67 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
When they get back to the shop, they find Susan at the cash register and Eleanor in her lap. “Wow,” she says, glancing between them. “Things went well, I’m guessing?”
“He found a book his boyfriendtouched,” Nathaniel says. They both start cackling, and Eleanor joins in. That’s a new trick of hers.
Patrick spends the rest of the day restless, pacing the shop and apparently unable to spend more than two minutes at a time at his desk.
“I will do whatever you want,” Nathaniel tells Susan, his voice low, “if you take over the shop and mind the baby for the next two hours.”
“Sure. Two hours,” Susan says. “Wow, ambitious.”
“What—no, you creep, I was going to take him out for dinner.” But now that he’s thinking about it, they can get dinner later. Susan really is a genius. “Come on,” he tells Patrick, pulling him toward the stairs. “It’s not like you’re getting any work done.”
“Where are we—oh.”
He steers Patrick toward the bedroom, pausing only to switch on the record player—he likes the privacy of an added layer of sound. There’s a Rolling Stones album on the turntable—not what Nathaniel would have chosen, but now is not the time to be picky.
Once Patrick is on the bed, Nathaniel straddles his lap. Usually, Nathaniel wants the weight of Patrick on top of him, wants the newness of it. It hasn’t escaped his attention, though, that Patrick likes when Nathaniel pushes him around a little. And why shouldn’t he—Patrick likes it when Nathaniel pushes him around, figuratively, in every other context. Nathaniel can take turns; Nathaniel can be generous.
Patrick loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt as soon as they left Maud Dempsey’s apartment. Nathaniel presses his mouth to the exposed V at his collar and breathes in the scent of him, then starts working off Patrick’s clothes. When he takes his own clothes off, his skin prickles with the awareness of Patrick’s gaze on him. He makes himself slow down.
Maybe there will always be a voice in his head telling him that it’s wrong; maybe there will always be an answering voice that sounds a lot like Patrick saying “you want this.” If those two voices coexist for the rest of his life, that’ll be good enough. Maybe he doesn’t need to get all the psychic shrapnel out of his mind, just find a way to live with it.
While they’re kissing, Patrick reaches up to the headboard to steady them, and Nathaniel has to stop what he’s doing. He’s seen Patrick’s arms dozens of times. He’s had his handson them; he’s had his mouth on them. They’re thick and they’re muscled and they feature in most of Nathaniel’s more pornographic imaginings. He knows every contour of them by heart. But something about Patrick reaching over his head and holding the rail of the headboard lights a fuse in Nathaniel’s belly.
“Can you do that again?” Nathaniel asks.
Patrick raises his eyebrows, but he wraps his hand around the rail. It just does something to the muscles in his biceps, Nathaniel supposes. Then Patrick does it with his other arm, too. Nathaniel’s face must show exactly what he’s thinking, because Patrick grins and says, “Ohreally?”
Nathaniel’s mouth is dry. “You look good like this.”
“You could tie me up,” Patrick offers, easy as anything. He’s probably done it before. He’s probably done it in this bed. Nathaniel might pass out.
“I don’t want that,” he says. “I just want you to stay like that for a minute.” He touches Patrick’s chest, then trails his hand down Patrick’s stomach, along hair and sweat and warm skin. When he wraps his hand around Patrick, he keeps an eye on Patrick’s face and his arms and—Christ. He doesn’t know why this image is working for him. He keeps his grip loose, probably annoyingly so. Patrick strains a little, his arms flexing, putting on a show: he knows exactly what he’s doing.
Nathaniel knows by now what Patrick looks like when he’s enjoying himself, and right now Patrick is taut with desire. He bends his head and takes him into his mouth, not something he’s done before. Patrick makes a noise that he might have muffled in his forearm or the sheets if he could. The moment feels weighted with everything Nathaniel isn’t supposed to want and isn’t supposed to be. Somehow, in the syrupy logic that belongs to warm sheets and fading sunlight, that old wrongness doesn’tquite become right, but it finds a home here in the same way that Nathaniel did.
* * *
“I had no idea you could cook,” Nathaniel says. “You’ve been holding out on us.”
“It’s just a stir fry,” Susan says. “It’s tofu and broccoli with some Minute Rice. Calm down. I was going to riot if I had to eat another night of takeout.”
Nathaniel has never had tofu, and had vaguely supposed it to be an ingredient you succumbed to only after prolonged exposure to drugs and radical politics, but what have the last six months of Nathaniel’s life been if not prolonged exposure to drugs and radical politics? It tastes like meat from the future. He helps himself to seconds.
“The two of you have to start cooking,” Susan says. “Eleanor can’t grow up eating nothing but takeout except for when I cook. Think about it.”
“We have to do it for feminism,” Patrick concedes.
“I clean,” Nathaniel says. “Patrick does the laundry.”
“Put all of us together and we’re one adequate housewife,” Patrick says.
“We just need a dad to mow the lawn,” Susan says.
Nathaniel nearly points out that the courtyard in the back is a true health hazard, but he’s not volunteering to be dad.
The next day, Nathaniel pulls a cookbook off the shelf of books that Patrick always swears he can’t remember buying.Mastering the Art of French Cookinglooks like it’s for people who’ve successfully managed something more involved than toast.The Joy of Cookingisn’t much better. Finally, he pulls down a spiral bound, cheaply printed affair calledSimple Dinners for New Brides. Each of the recipes calls for fewerthan six ingredients and the instructions are written so a not particularly bright eight-year-old could follow them. Perfect.
He goes to the grocery store and buys a chicken, some potatoes, and a bunch of carrots, then has to go back out to a hellish store on Fourteenth Street when it turns out Susan doesn’t have a big enough pan. He doesn’t especially want to roast a chicken, but he also doesn’t want to scour the bathroom and he does that when the alternative is Eleanor taking a bath in a filthy tub.
