Page 42 of Takedown

I chased him the length of the quad. Nobody looked twice. Two teammates, roughhousing in a snow war — the whole hiding-in-plain-sight machine running in reverse for once, letting us be exactly what we were in front of everyone, because joy, it turns out, is the one thing that needs no cover. Nobody audits happiness in a snowball fight. We were never more visible and never more hidden, and I've thought about that day every winter since.

* * *

The afternoon we spent in his room, and I'm going to write down what happened, which is nothing, which is everything.

Fire in the grate that draws. Wet gear steaming on the radiator. He read for his Thursday seminar in the window seat with his socked feet in my lap while I watched film on my laptop — actual film, the Cornell guy, March never fully leaves the room — and the snow kept coming down past the glass, and every so often one of us would say something and the other would answer or not, and that was the whole event. At some point he made tea on the contraband kettle his family's own housing rules prohibit — a genuine crime, in his world; there is a bylaw; the kettle lives behind his sweaters like a fugitive with a price on it. He made it wrong, besides: milk-first, too strong, the way the housekeeper made it when he was small, and I drank it wrong right alongside him and told him it tasted like a radiator, and he said "it's supposed to," serene, and we left it there. "Your people would arrest this kettle," I said. "My people would arrest most of what's happened in this room today," he said, not looking up from his seminar reading. "The kettle's the least of it." He turned a page. And I filed it under the accumulating evidence that Grayson Whitfield, handed one snowed-in afternoon off the leash, was funnier than his entire bloodline had ever once been permitted to be. At some point I got up to stretch and kissed him on the way past, no reason, toll-free, and he tipped his face up into it like it was owed, and I did it again on the way back.

That's the thing I'd never had, and I didn't know it until the snow day handed it to me: the toll-free kiss. Wade and I touched with the meter always running — every contact priced, occasioned, deniable. Even Grayson and I, all fall, had touched inside events: sessions, scenes, storms. This was the other thing. Kisses in passing. His feet in my lap. The sound of a page turning and a fire ticking and a man breathing four feet away with nowhere else he'd rather be, and I sat in the middle of his ancestors' furniture doing no math of any kind and understood that this — not the heat, not even the seeing — this was the thing everyone's guarding all the doors about. Tuesday. The native format.

"Stop it," he said, from the window seat, not looking up.

"Stop what."

"Being moved. I can hear it. You do a thing with your breathing."

"I was thinking about the Cornell guy."

"You were not." He turned a page, socked toes flexing once in my lap, smug as a housed cat. "You were composing. You've been composing since the tea. Read your film, Kovac. The romance of the daily is best appreciated silently."

"The romance of the—" I stared at him. "You've been composing too."

"Since the snowball," he admitted, shameless, and put his book down.

He put the book down and I crossed to the window seat, and there was a stretch of minutes there I'm not going to be able to land on the page the way it landed in the room, which is fine; some things you keep off the record on purpose. Kissing him with no clock on it. His hands coming up unhurried into my hair, a man with nowhere on earth to be for the first time in either of our lives. The snow doing its silent work past the glass. I'd wrestled this body four months and known it only as a problem to solve — an obstacle, an itemized truth in a green singlet — and here it was, warm and slow and given, no rep count, no whistle, no meter running, just Grayson Whitfield tipping his face up for another and getting it, and another, until neither of us was keeping score at all, which was the whole miracle of the afternoon, because keeping score was the only language either of our families had ever taught us to love inside of.

"Okay," I said finally, against his mouth, wrecked in the good way. "Jesus. Okay. This is a problem."

"It's the good problem," he said. "It's allowed to be one. Today it's allowed."

"What happens after March?" I asked it into the fire-quiet before I'd decided to. Day like that, questions float up. "Nationals, the offseason, then it starts over — and then it starts over twice more, and then—" I gestured at the room, the ancestors' furniture, the whole waiting architecture of his life. "Then what? Firm? Board seats? The house with the name?"

He was quiet a moment, watching the snow. Then: "There are fourteen Olympians on that trophy wall," he said, which was not an answer, which was the whole answer. "I counted them at fifteen years old, on the tour. I've never said the word out loud in this room. My great-uncle made a team and gave the medal away — the family has enough silver — and every Christmas that story gets told at me like a warning, and I've never once been sure what it's warning against. Wanting it. Or wanting it visibly." He looked over. "Four years is a long time. It's also one Olympic cycle. Both of those facts live at my weight class."

"Both of those facts live at mine," I said, and let the sentence sit there in the fire-tick, enormous, neither of us picking it up — same weight, same cycle, one spot per weight on any team that matters, the arithmetic we'd been not-doing since October scenting the air like the tea — and then he did the merciful thing, the Tuesday thing, and pushed it off the table with his socked foot.

"March first," he said. "Then we'll count. Today we're composing."

He crossed the room the way I taught him, and we didn't get much more studying done, and the fire drew, and the snow came down on the postcard, and the portraits on the stairwell kept whatever they keep.

* * *

The invitation was in his entry hall mailbox that evening, when he walked me down — heavy card stock, engraved, RIDLEY, WINTER FORMAL PREGAME, SATURDAY — and he read it standing in the doorway with the snow still coming down behind me, and rolled his eyes with his whole head.

"The whole team's invited. Miles will insist. It's a nice house and a loud night and Ridley's father buys champagne like he's afraid of it going extinct." He tapped the card against my chest, once, light. "Wear the tux. I like the tux."

"You like Bellamy's tux."

"I like what's in it," said Grayson Whitfield, twenty years old, snow-lit, happier than the whole gold machine of his world had ever once managed to make him, and kissed me goodnight in the doorway of the oldest house at Ashworth — toll-free, unhurried, the last easy kiss of the fall, though neither of us knew to count it —

He watched me from the doorway until I hit the first lamppost — I know because I turned around at it, the way you do, and he was still there, leaning on the frame in the spilled gold light with the snow coming down between us, and he raised one hand, not a wave, just a raise, the mat signal for I see you, and I raised mine back, and neither of us went in for another minute, two idiots in a snowfall conducting semaphore about nothing.

Then I walked home through two feet of snow with my collar still wet from his snowball, past the buried quad where our war was already filling in, white and smooth and new, like the whole day was being archived as I watched.

Saturday, the card said.

Nine days were down to two. The postcard kept snowing.

Chapter 19 — DANNY