Tuesday at Four

*I wanted to write a story where the sex was honest but not urgent, and the jealousy was quiet but real. Thanks for reading something that doesn't end in a storm or a confession scene, just two men deciding to stop pretending.*

The Sotheby's sign went up last week, right at the edge of the gravel drive where it could catch anybody coming up the switchback road, and I sat in my van that Tuesday morning looking at it longer than I meant to. Big blue letters, Carlton Steiger's Tudor revival mansion officially entering the world as a product, eleven thousand square feet of 1920s craftsmanship in the hills above Portland, and me with a folding chair and a portable ultrasonic scaler in the back of my van like I was any other appointment on the schedule. I'm Omar Clarkson, forty-three, I clean teeth in people's kitchens and dens and once in a yacht's bathroom, and for six months now my first stop every Tuesday has been this house. At four o'clock. Not 3:30 when I arrive, not 4:15 when I finish. Four.

The house always smells the same when I let myself in with the key he gave me back in month two, sage and empty rooms, like somebody smudged the whole place once and then never fully moved in. Half the rooms are staged with rented furniture that nobody sits on, couches with the plastic tags still on the cushions, and the other half are just bare floors and tall windows and dust motes turning in the light. It's a between-lives house. I walk through it every week and it never gets any more lived in, which I have decided not to think about too hard.

"Back here," Carlton called from the sunroom when I shut the front door, because he always hears me even though he pretends he's absorbed in something.

I found him in the doorway in bare feet and a linen shirt, which, small note, bare feet, and I'll come back to that detail because it matters later. The sunroom is the one room that feels warm and inhabited, all glass on three sides, his actual armchair in it, his actual coffee cup, and I set up my folding chair and my little compressor and my tray while he watched me the way he always does, arms crossed, saying nothing useful.

"You're early," he said.

"I'm always early. You always comment on it. This is our routine."

"One of us should be able to break character."

"Not on a Tuesday, we can't."

I'm going to back up a minute, because the way this started is the part I keep turning over. Six months ago his assistant called our service and booked a mobile cleaning, which happens, rich guys who don't want to sit in an office waiting room, fine. I came out, met Carlton Steiger, forty-six, retired restaurateur, sold off his restaurant group two years ago and now lives in a house that's too big for one man who isn't even technically living in it. And the first thing I noticed, with my little mirror and my explorer before I'd even started, was his mouth. Full of old silver fillings. Big ones, the kind they did in the seventies and eighties, dark freckles all through his back teeth, and I said something about it, how you don't see this much amalgam anymore, and he laughed and said, "I was a line cook at twenty-two, Omar, I lived on coffee and whatever fell off the line," and I liked him right then, which was the first warning sign I ignored.

The second warning sign came about forty minutes in, and this is the part I genuinely can't explain to myself, so I don't try to explain it to anybody else. He'd leaned the chair back, my portable chair, all the way flat, and I was working on his lower left, and he put his hands on my waist. Not grabbing, nothing like that, just steady, both hands resting on my hips like he was anchoring himself while I worked, and I felt them through my scrubs and I did not say a word and he did not say a word and his thumbs moved maybe a half inch, just once. When I finished he stayed flat in the chair for a second, looking up at me with his mouth still open, and then he said, "You do good work," in this low voice, and I said, "Thanks," and I packed up my stuff with hands that weren't quite steady, and when I got to the door he said, "Same time next week?"

And I said yes. Obviously I said yes. I was divorced two years by then, married twelve years to Emeka before that, came out at forty-one and ended a good marriage because I couldn't keep pretending, and my whole dating life since had been apps and coffee and one nice man I didn't call back. So yes, I said yes, and I drove home and sat in my van in my own driveway and thought, well, that's not a thing, people don't flirt at dental appointments, except we both knew it was a thing, and the next week his hands went on my waist again, and the week after that I asked him, right out loud, if I could kiss him, and he said, "I was starting to worry you'd never ask," and that concluded it, we've been whatever we are since.

What we are, as near as I can tell, is a standing appointment. Every Tuesday at four I clean his teeth, and then, with more asking and answering every single time, we end up in his actual bedroom, the one room with real furniture, and he undoes me in ways I'll get to later, and by five I'm packing my scaler and he's back to being a man selling a house. He has never once asked me to stay for dinner. He has never once seen me on a Wednesday. And I have never once pushed it, because Carlton Steiger does not do pushing well, I learned that fast, and because some stubborn part of me figured if I kept showing up, the walls would eventually come down on their own.

Six months. Sotheby's sign in the yard. Tuesday at four. That's where we were this particular Tuesday, me setting up in the sunroom, him watching from the doorway in his bare feet.

"So how long has that sign been up," I asked, snapping my tray together.

"Nine days. You noticed it, then."

"Hard to miss. It's bigger than my van."

"Ike picked the agency," he said, and something in how he said it made me look up, but he just shrugged. "He handles that sort of thing. Paperwork, agents, all the machinery."

"Ike being the business partner? I've heard the name."

"He's around." Carlton said it lightly, the way you'd say the weather's around, and he came and sat in his armchair while I put a bib on him, which is a funny intimacy, a grown man tipping his head back and letting me tuck paper at his neck. "You look tired, Omar."

"I look great. I look like a man who sleeps eight hours."

"You look like a man who hasn't slept eight hours in a decade."

"Says the man who sleeps in a house with no furniture."

He grinned up at me and I got to work, and here's the truth about the cleanings, which is that they're not really about teeth anymore and they haven't been since about week three. He doesn't have a single cavity. His gums are, and I say this with professional envy, immaculate. I could do this appointment in fifteen minutes and we both know it, and instead we stretch it out, me talking about whatever patients I saw that morning, him asking real questions, my hands in his mouth, his hands finding their way back to my waist like they live there. It's the most domestic thing I've ever done with a man I'm sleeping with, and it's also the most dishonest, because neither of us has ever said out loud what any of it is.

I was mid-sentence about some kid who lied about flossing so badly I could've written a novel on the evidence, when I saw it through the sunroom glass. A car pulling into the gravel drive, a gray sedan I'd never seen before, and my chest did this tightening thing before my brain even caught up, and behind the wheel was a compact, energetic-looking guy in sunglasses, and I knew, I don't know how I knew, but I knew that was Ike.

"Your visitor's here," I said, keeping my voice light, still working.

Carlton turned his head as far as my instruments allowed and made a small sound. "That'll be Ike, he's just dropping off some papers for the sale."

"I thought you said he handles the agents."

"He does. Papers." He said it fast, and I noticed, because I always notice everything at four o'clock on a Tuesday, that the papers could have waited, could have been mailed, could have been anything, and also that Carlton was sitting there in his bare feet. Bare feet. In his own sunroom, in the middle of the afternoon, as if he was home and planned to stay home. You don't take your shoes off for a quick paperwork drop at the door, and something about that little fact sat in my stomach as a swallowed stone would while Ike's car door slammed outside.

"How long do these paper drop-offs usually take?" I asked, and I kept my tone even and my scaler steady against a tooth that didn't need cleaning, and Carlton said, "Omar," in a voice that meant nothing at all, and I went back to work and watched the doorway.

The front door opened without a knock, which told me everything before the footsteps did, because a man with papers waits for a doorbell answer, and a man who lives in the rhythm of a house just walks in. "Carlton, you'll love this, the agent wants to reshoot the sunroom, says the light's better in the afternoon," and then Ike was in the doorway, sunglasses pushed up into curly hair, a folder under one arm, looking exactly like the kind of guy who has