Page 80 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“The point is that we aren’t safe. Turning dissidents into criminals is the thin end of the wedge. It always is. The next thing you know there’s a secret police.”
“When does the article come out?”
“Not for weeks, maybe months. They have to do whatever reporters do. More sources, corroboration, I don’t know.”
It seems unfair that Nathaniel spent the first few months here terrified of getting found by the CIA, and now he’s done something that practically guarantees that he’s going to get found by the CIA, and face the consequences.
Nathaniel spends the afternoon in the patch of dirt that’s technically their backyard. The door is next to the kitchen, and Patrick can go months without remembering that it is, in fact, a door, because there’s simply no reason to open it. The yard contains several ancient and mostly decomposed cardboard boxes, some soda bottles, the spindly remains of a dead tree, bicycle parts, bare dirt, and whatever weeds can survive almost total shade and decades of use as a dumping ground.
“What are you doing?” Patrick asks when he brings Nathaniel some cold water.
“Cleaning it up.” Nathaniel drops something into a metal trash can he must have pulled off the street. It lands with a plink. “If Walt comes out here, I don’t want him to step on a nail or broken glass.” He picks up what looks like a tile and drops it in the bin. “Eleanor will be crawling soon.”
Patrick leaves him to it. The next time he looks out the kitchen window, Nathaniel has turned up a shovel from god knows where and is trying to dig out the dead tree. By the time the sun sets over the roof of the building next door, the courtyard is clear. Nathaniel doesn’t come in until Patrick’s closing the shop.
Patrick’s about to ask what Nathaniel wants to do about dinner when he sees that Nathaniel is clutching a blood-stained handkerchief in one hand.
“Let me look,” Patrick says.
“It was just a piece of broken glass.”
Patrick goes to the sink and turns on the tap. “Come on.”
Nathaniel’s hand is still curled into a fist. Some of the blood on the handkerchief is dried and dark, so he must have cuthimself a while ago and kept working anyway. Patrick pries his fingers open and puts his hand under the stream of water. The gash is straight across his palm and there’s dirt in it, the idiot, but it doesn’t look deep enough to need stitches. Nathaniel hisses when Patrick cleans the gash with a bar of soap.
“Sorry, sorry. Nearly done,” Patrick says. “Okay, I’ll be right back with some bandages.”
“Don’t bother. I need a shower anyway.”
While Nathaniel’s in the shower, Patrick finds the little jar of iodine he bought when Hector came home with a skinned knee.
“You don’t need to do this,” Nathaniel says when he comes out, a towel wrapped around his waist and a bloody washcloth in his fist. “I can do it myself.”
“I know you can,” Patrick says, even though it’s a pain in the ass doing anything to your dominant hand. “I like taking care of you.”
“You like taking care of everybody.”
He isn’t wrong, but he’s deliberately missing the point. Patrick pauses in dabbing on the iodine long enough to give Nathaniel an unimpressed look.
“Let’s go out to dinner,” Patrick says when he’s wrapped a length of gauze around Nathaniel’s palm a few times and covered it in tape.
“Stop acting normal.”
“How do you want me to act?” He lifts Nathaniel’s unbandaged hand to his mouth and kisses his knuckles.
“I really wish I knew.”
Nathaniel pulls his hand away and kisses Patrick on the mouth. Patrick’s shoulders hit the wall, the towel rack pressing into his lower back. In the past month, Nathaniel has figured out exactly how to turn Patrick on. Now he deploys his tricks all at once: a thumb on Patrick’s nipple, a thigh between Patrick’s legs, a kiss that’s messy and insistent and sharp at the edges.
When Nathaniel drops to his knees, Patrick isn’t ready for it. He wants to tell Nathaniel that the tile will be too hard on his knees, but Nathaniel glances up at him and says, “Please,” and Patrick isn’t going to argue about tile floors.
There’s something about the whole setup that feels like penance, or at least penitence: Nathaniel on his knees, minutes after basically telling Patrick he should be mad at him. But Patrick is no stranger to using sex to obliterate everything that isn’t another person’s body.
Patrick pushes the hair off Nathaniel’s forehead, then traces the shell of his ear. “Anything you want,” he says, and flicks open the top button of his jeans.
* * *
The next morning, before he’s even had any coffee, Nathaniel announces that he has to run an errand and will be back before it’s time to open the shop. Patrick makes coffee and putters around the empty apartment, then putters around the empty shop, Walt at his heels. It’s too quiet and subtly wrong, like everything in the building got replaced with nearly identical copies. It’s somebody else’s home, in some other dimension.
