B-side, Part Four

I make it maybe six more steps across the gravel before my hands start doing the thing.

They start building. A whole opening. Hey, so, the sunglasses—thank you, seriously, that was—okay, and also, about the jacket, the fold was very—and then, casually, like a footnote, hey, that song. Undertow. I have opinions. I know you know I have opinions. Do you want to hear them again, but in a different order.

I stop.

The gravel makes that cornstarch sound under my sneaker and then goes quiet because I’m not moving.

Those are all exhibits. That’s a whole exhibit-based approach. Sunglasses. Jacket. Song. Exhibit A, B, and C, your honor, please don’t ask me what the actual case is.

The neon does its half-blink over the parking lot. Pink and not pink. Pink and not pink. The R has been dark since April. If I go back in there I have to say it out loud, and I’m not sure I know how.

Okay, so, I think, to no one, to the wet asphalt, to my own left pocket where the sunglasses sit safely across the hole because someone put them there on purpose—

Okay, so.

I turn around.

I do not have an opener. I have not built one. I am walking toward a door with no sentence loaded, which is a thing I do not do. My hand goes to the pocket automatically and finds the tortoiseshell arm through the denim, then the plastic arm behind it, crossed like a little X. Someone thought about this. Someone thought, she’ll put her hand here, so put them here.

The front door opens before I reach it.

Toby comes out with the screwdriver in one hand and the sandwich-board sign under his other arm, and he sees me, and doesn’t do a face about it. He sets the sign against the wall. He does the latch trick where you pull it once more so it catches. Then he just—stands. Under the buzzing neon.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

The R flickers. The parking lot goes pink and not pink across his shoes.

“Okay, so—” My hands come up. My hands are already halfway through a slideshow I have not authorized. “I was going to come back with, like, a whole thing. I had a whole thing. It was going to be about the sunglasses, and then a segue, which was going to be honestly pretty smooth, into the—” I gesture at my own pocket. “—the jacket, which by the way, thank you, the fold was very—it was correct, is what it was, sleeves in, on the hook, both pairs threaded so they couldn’t fall through, that’s not a casual—that’s a person who was paying attention, which I clocked, I clocked it the second I saw the hook, I—”

He waits.

He doesn’t rescue me. He doesn’t nod along to speed me up. He also does not walk away, which is the part that’s killing me, because if he walked away I could talk faster and louder and eventually to no one, and I know how to do that, I’ve been doing that.

He is just standing there. Letting me get to the end of it.

“—which is fine,” I hear myself say, “which is totally fine, no it is, I just—” My hand goes into the pocket. Finds the hole through the sunglasses. Worries the edge. “Okay.”

I stop.

I look at him. He’s got the screwdriver hanging from two fingers. His hair has given up. End of a shift.

“I like you,” I say.

It comes out quiet. Not small. Just quiet. My hands, which have been out here doing free jazz, come down to my sides and stay there.

“Not in an analytical way. I just do.”

He looks at me for a second. Under the pink and not pink.

“I know,” he says.

“That is not an answer.”

The corner of his mouth moves. Barely.

“I like you too, Wren.”

I open my mouth. He watches me open my mouth. I close it.

He sets the screwdriver down on top of the sandwich board like he’s putting a tool where he can find it later, and he looks at his own hand for a second like he’s deciding how much to say, and then he says it in Toby portions.

“I listened to them because you liked them.”

“Okay.”

“Twice.”

“You said.”

“When I asked if you even liked them.” His eyes come up. “That night. I wasn’t asking if they were good.”

“Oh.”

“I was asking what makes you happy.”

The neon does its blink. I feel the buzz of it in my molars, which is not how buzzing works, but tonight apparently it is.

“I keep the stuff you leave,” he says, “because I pay attention to you. That’s it. It’s not—” He shrugs one shoulder. Small shrug. “It’s not a bit. I like hearing you talk. Not because you make the table work. Just—the person doing the talking.”

The person doing the talking has, at this exact moment, nothing to say.

Which is new.

I put my hand back in my pocket and thread my thumb through the hole and out again, and I look at him, and my brain, which has been drafting and redrafting all evening, produces one clean sentence and hands it to me like it’s been waiting.

“Can I kiss you?”

“Yeah.”

I step in. He just tips his chin down a little and waits, and I go up onto the balls of my sneakers and I put my mouth on his and it is—

It is a kiss.

It is a real kiss, and it is also, immediately, being narrated by the part of my brain that has never shut up, which is going, okay, so, the angle is—okay, hands, hands are a question, hands are currently a question, and also I can smell the fryer on his shirt a little, which is not a criticism, that’s just data, and his mouth is warmer than I—

I pull back maybe an inch.

“That was—” I say. “Okay, so, I was thinking during it, which I feel like is not the—”

He kisses me again.

Which shuts that down entirely, and I lose the sentence somewhere between his hand coming up to the side of my jaw and the neon going pink over my closed eyes, and this one is quieter and slower and my brain, astonishingly, does not send a memo.

When he pulls back he is smiling. Barely. It’s a Toby smile, which is mostly in one eyebrow.

“Sorry,” he says. “You were about to explain.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“I do that.”

“I know.”

He does not let go of my jaw right away. His thumb is on the corner of it, just resting. Then he lets go, and his hand comes down and finds mine, and from mine it wanders half an inch left, to the pocket. To the hole. He worries the edge of it once, with his thumb, exactly the way I do.

“I could fix this,” he says.

“No.”

It’s out before I think about it, which is not how I usually operate. I hear it hang there. I look down at his thumb in my pocket seam.

“It’s, um. It’s how I know where the pocket is. That sounds—that sounds insane out loud. It’s a system. I have a whole—the hole is part of it. If I don’t feel the hole I check twice, and if I check twice I don’t lose the thing. That’s the whole—that’s the load-bearing—”

“Okay.”

“Yeah.”

He starts to take his hand back.

“Wait.”

He waits.

“Okay,” I say. “Fix it. But show me how. So I can still—so I know where the pocket is.”

“Yeah. I can do that.”

“Yeah?”

“Tomorrow.” He thinks. “After close. Or—coffee before. I’m on at eleven. Missy’s opens at seven.”

“Seven’s psychotic.”

“Eight, then.”

“Eight.”

“Eight.” He nods once, like he’s writing it down inside his head, which he probably is. “Missy’s. I’ll bring the kit for the pocket.”

“You have a kit.”

“I have a kit, Wren.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

The R blinks. My hand is still in his hand, in my own pocket, which should be too many hands in one pocket and somehow isn’t.

“I have to bring the sign in,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Tuesday’s still Tuesday, right?”

“Tuesday’s still Tuesday.”

“See you at the booth.”

“Yeah.”

He picks up the sandwich board and the screwdriver and gives me one more look under the pink light and goes back inside, and the latch does not catch, and he pulls it once more, and it does.

I get in the truck and I don’t start it. I sit there with both hands on the wheel and the neon going pink and not pink across the dash, and then I take out my phone, because there is exactly one thing I know how to do with a feeling this size.

[[TEXTS]]

Wren: ok so. NIGHTGLASS. correct order.

Wren: 1. Paper Boats first. it’s a b-side, it’s not on the tracklist, I’ll send it to you

Wren: 2. then the album from the top

Wren: 3. except track seven, which you save for last

Wren: no wait

Wren: track seven goes third. trust me. it recontextualizes everything after it

Wren: notes: on Paper Boats there’s a second vocal under the chorus and it’s Micah in headphones singing to himself. once you hear it you can’t un-hear it and the whole song reorganizes around him being the only person in the room

Wren: which is the entire album

Wren: I’m aware you asked me for an order and I have sent you a syllabus

Wren: I’m aware

Nikki: it’s 1am

Nikki: send the b-side

[[END]]

—

The following Tuesday, the booth is the booth.

Dez is halfway through a sentence I walked in on that involves the word tempo used incorrectly, and Bram is eating the fries Toby brought without asking him to bring them, and Nikki has @quietarchive written on her hand again in a different pen, and Isolde is shuffling with her thumb on the top card the way she does when she’s thinking about something she’s not saying yet.

I’m on the outside edge. Same edge. I did not get promoted to the inside. I am currently arguing, at full and unashamed volume, that burying ‘Undertow’ down at track nine instead of opening the back half with it is a choice and not a mistake, because a song about being pulled under should reach you when you’re already tired, and that people who say Hollow Bright is uneven are correct but wrong about why, and Dez is going hand up, hand up, counterpoint, and Bram is going eat a fry, Wren, and I am eating a fry and not stopping talking.

Toby slides into the booth on my side.

Not doing a pass with a rag. Break. On break. Coffee cup, his own, sat down on the table like he lives here.

Nobody says anything about it, because nobody has decided it’s a thing. Dez says did you hear what she just said about track nine and Toby says yeah, from the bar, and Dez says and, and Toby says she’s right, and Dez goes betrayed, and Bram laughs into his glass, and we are just—here. I am still me at full volume. He is next to me instead of behind me.

Isolde looks up from her deck.

She has something between her fingers, edges gone a little soft, like it’s been in a pocket for a week. She slides it across the sticky wood toward me, face down, and taps it once with her nail.

“Here.”

I look at her. She looks at me.

I turn it over.

I don’t say the name of it out loud, because we don’t do that, but I know what I’m looking at and so does she. Two cups. Two hands. The little thing above them that I always thought looked like a lamp.

“You hid this,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

She shrugs. Same one-shoulder shrug she always does.

“Because you would’ve spent a week proving it wrong.”

I open my mouth.

I look at Toby, who is stirring his coffee with the wrong end of a straw because that’s what was on the table, and whose knee is against mine under the booth, not pressing, just there.

“Fair,” I say.

Isolde takes the card back and puts it in her deck like it was always in her deck. Nikki says wait what card, and Dez says don’t derail me, we were talking about track nine, and Bram slides the fries an inch closer to me without looking, and I open my mouth to keep going about the track nine thing because I was not done, I am never done—

Toby reaches up.

He does something to the mounted lamp above our booth. A twist. A push. Something small and mechanical he has clearly been meaning to do for a year.

The lamp doesn’t buzz.

His knee rests against mine beneath the table.