He opened the door with the stealth of a cat burglar to find Arnav sitting up in bed, waiting. Always a bad sign. Arnav awake in the middle of the night — Arnav, who had proven he could sleep through their westerly neighbor’s porn-star-like attempts to pound his headboard through the wall, who failed to wake to anything but the shrillest, most obnoxious alarms — meant trouble of the sort Max usually (and with pride) thought himself crafty enough to avoid.
“Nav,” Max whispered. A note of atonement sweetened his voice. “I woke you.” He tiptoed forward, as though it wasn’t too late for tiptoes, and dropped his toiletry bag into his suitcase.
“It’s four in the morning,” answered Arnav hoarsely.
Here was the darker side of love, pretending the person who knew you best — the person who brought you aspirin before you said you had a headache, who could sit down at a diner before you arrived and order your eggs just the way you liked them — didn’t know you at all, that he was daft or dumb or had to be reminded of the simplest things. “I don’t like to rush before a flight,” Max said.
“Your flight isn’t for another four hours.”
Max felt himself moving on a conveyor belt, steadily drawn toward an argument he didn’t want to have. The battle was coming. It had been coming for weeks. And it was coming now. Now that Max had one foot out the door, they could lob their respective grenades without having to live with the fallout.
Max dropped his towel, already hard. Sex was the wrench he most enjoyed throwing into the conveyor belt, certainly the most gratifying way of cutting off a confrontation, of jamming the proverbial works. It was hardly fail proof, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try. “Which means we have time to say good-bye.” He crawled across the bed, into the warm yellow blanket of light cast by the bedside lamp, and knelt by Navi’s side. Stroking himself with one hand, he ran the other through the fur on Arnav’s chest. He tugged first one nipple, then the other, then traveled south, to the thick, musky nest between Navi’s legs, his fingers combing through the hair, tugging, before wrapping themselves around the stubby shaft of his boyfriend’s slumbering cock. “We have time to say good-bye, like, two or three times.”
Arnav retrieved Max’s hand from under the sheet and said flatly, “Tell me I’m wrong.”
Max collapsed like a puppet on snipped strings. “You’re wrong.” His head lolled to the side in a show of theatric frustration. He gazed at Navi with innocent eyes and said, this time with an air of great solemnity, “Will you stop! Do you want to draw blood and check my lithium levels? Everything’s fine.”
Throwing the covers to one side, Arnav bounded out of bed, stormed into the bathroom, and shut the door. Max wanted to call out, but the loud gush of pee made the silence between them deeper, more rigid and impassable. When Navi emerged, he stood, naked, hands on hips, waiting. “Everything is not fine. You’re averaging three, four hours of sleep a night. Your mood is all over the place. You were a complete jerk to that waiter last night.”
“And I apologized to him.”
“You don’t think I know you by now? You’re swinging like a madman from tree to tree. I’m just waiting for the vine to break.”
“I’m working,” Max explained. With the carnal detour he’d hoped to travel blocked, he sensed that sincerity was the only route open to him. Or rage. He certainly had it in him to throw a tantrum, especially now, with three weeks’ worth of psychotropic drugs dissolving in the drain, but he tried for the gentler, more reasonable path. Hugging his knees to his chest, he went on. “I’m finally working again.”
“What are you talking about finally? You’ve been working since you started.”
“Yeah, but now I’m in a groove. I’m almost done. And it’s good.” Work: here was his first defense for all misbehavior — insomnia, oversleeping, overeating, forgetting to eat entirely, brooding, neediness, acting like a jerk, jerking off five times a day. The only defense that mattered. “You’d rather have me where I was when the radio wouldn’t tune? When once every third day I might grab a snippet I could work with. Something I could barely hear. Some faint little melody I had to chase down before it sunk back into static or broke into noise. Noise. Or would you rather have me here, where I am now? Where the station’s been playing twenty-four hours a day for—”
“Three weeks. I know how long.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Nearly a month of solid work! I’m supposed to apologize or something? I finished the second act, Navi. That’s a good thing. That impossible fucking act. Why aren’t you excited about that?”
“It’s not a good thing,” Navi countered, “sleeping three hours a night.”
“When music is the first thing I hear in the morning and the last thing I hear at night, and everything else, everything that’s not it, is a fucking distraction, that is a good thing.”
Arnav may have been stung, but Max knew he wasn’t fragile enough to crack at being called a distraction. He also knew Arnav wasn’t crazy, though he wasn’t above trying to make him appear so.
“You know I’m happy that you’re working. But what kind of work are you doing on three hours of sleep?”
“Stop saying that. I’m sleeping more than three hours,” answered Max more coolly. He aimed for poise, for the kind of imperturbability that might throw Arnav off his scent, but Arnav’s jaws were locked, and he wasn’t letting go.
Navi walked to his dresser and put on his little oblong spectacles, staring, blinking, as though Max were an exhibit meant to stir up curiosity and concern. “We went to bed at one.”
“And I woke up at four. Fine. Three hours. You know I can’t sleep when I travel,” Max said lamely. Then, with rising heat: “I don’t need you counting sheep for me. Or giving me etiquette lessons. Or anything. I’m fine. Just like I fucking am.”
Arnav returned to his side of the bed. His granny distaste for profanity tightened his mouth into a thin, straight line, but he folded his legs under him and took Max’s hand in his. “You’re flying solo.”
Now it was Max’s turn to bound off the bed. He went to his dresser, retrieved a few more T-shirts (though he’d already packed more than he would possibly need), and dropped them in his bag. “You say I’m not taking my pills. I say I am. Are you counting them?”
“You wouldn’t leave them in the bottles. You’re too smart for that. You’d flush them down the toilet.”
Wrong, Max thought, diving through the loophole of his lie with this slightest of technicalities. “So you are counting them?”
“I’m worried about you!” It wasn’t often that Max saw anyone as even-keeled as Arnav abandon equanimity. He seldom heard the deep, mellow voice that supported him like bedrock quake with such high emotion. Ready for it (for anything!) as Max thought he was, the sound of Navi approaching tears left him undone. But he could not, would not concede. Now that his mind had a taste of clear, fluid, creative freedom, he refused to slip back into the thick, jellylike waters of lithium and Depakote, where his mood might have been stable but his brain refused to swim at its quickest pace, where the stream was perfectly calm but also silted and slow, and a beach full of radios (there for no other reason than to torture him) refused to tune. Max had music now, and now was the only thing that mattered, no matter the harm, no matter the price.
“I know you,” Arnav finished dismally. “I know when you’re working out of a good place. And I know when you’re high as a kite.”