Waiting on Leave

Rod woke at 5:47 because the birds outside his window had no respect for anyone, least of all a forty-two-year-old man who had drunk two beers the night before and slept badly for the second half of it. There was an arm across his chest. A heavy one, with a wrist that looked like a rope and a faint smell of gun oil and drugstore soap.

Rhys Prentiss, Army mechanic, twenty-eight, currently asleep in Rod's bed with his mouth open and one sock still on. Nobody had stayed over in six years. That was the rule, and Rod had thought they were both clear on it.

So here was the math. He could get up now, shower, and be dressed when the guy woke, which said "this was fun, don't get comfortable" without anyone having to say it. Or he could lie here and enjoy the arm, which was the needy option, and Rod had promised himself years ago that he would never be the needy option again.

He slid out from under the arm an inch at a time, like someone extracting himself from a car wreck he'd caused. Rhys grunted and rolled toward the warm spot. Rod gathered his glasses off the nightstand and escaped.

* * *

In the bathroom he took his shirt off and turned to look at his hip in the mirror over the sink. There was a bruise there, purple at the edges, about the size of a plum, right on the bone where he supposed a headboard or a hand had been. He pressed it with a thumb. It hurt in a way that felt like a compliment.

"Well," he told his reflection. "Good for you."

It was pathetic, probably, to feel proud of a bruise. But a bruise was evidence. A bruise said somebody had wanted him hard enough to leave marks, and a twenty-eight-year-old at that, a man with arms like bridge cable who could have been anywhere in Clayton last night. The bruise said Rod had still got it, whatever "it" was, at forty-two, with the hairline going and the knees popping when he got off the couch.

He brushed his teeth over the sink and did not think about the way Rhys had said "stay" at two in the morning. Just one syllable, half into the pillow, and Rod had said yes before his brain caught up with his mouth. That was a problem for later. Right now the problem was coffee, and what to do about the fact that his kitchen contained one mug he'd care to show a guest.

* * *

Rhys shuffled into the kitchen about ten minutes later wearing his boxers and nothing else, dragging one of the socks, his hair flattened on one side like a field where something had slept. He was leaner in daylight than he'd seemed in the dark. There were freckles across his shoulders, which felt like information Rod hadn't earned.

"Morning," Rhys said. His voice was rough. He stopped in the doorway and looked around the kitchen like it was a map of somewhere unfamiliar.

"Morning. There's coffee. It's still going."

"Black, if you've got it."

"Black. Sure." Rod poured it and handed it over. It occurred to him, handing over the mug, that he had no idea if soldiers drank coffee black because that was how they trained them or whether he was stereotyping. It also occurred to him that he was thinking about this way too hard for a Tuesday.

Rhys drank a long pull straight off. "Good coffee. Better than the DFAC."

"The what?"

"Dining facility. Army word for cafeteria." He leaned against the counter, and the counter held him fine. "Sorry about the arm thing this morning. I was all over your side of the bed."

"You were fine." Rod poured his own, added milk, lied to himself about how much he cared. "You sleep okay? The mattress is older than you are."

"Sleep like a rock. First night off base in three weeks." He looked out the window at Rod's back yard, the warped porch, the grill with a tarp on it. "Your porch is crooked."

"The porch is doing its best. Everyone's a critic."

Rhys grinned. It was a good grin, crooked, and Rod took a sip of coffee to give his face something else to do. "Fair," Rhys said. "I fix things for a living. It's a disease."

"You're a mechanic. Trucks, right?"

"Humvees mostly. Whatever they hand me." He turned the mug in his hands. His knuckles had a scar across two of them, small and white. "This is weird, right? This part."

"This part?"

"Morning after. I don't do these, usually." He said it plainly, the way he seemed to say everything, like reading a maintenance log. "I usually leave around two or three. Didn't this time."

"No," Rod agreed. "You didn't."

"So." Rhys looked at him over the rim of the mug. "Is this the part where you tell me you've got a thing? A dentist appointment, a Tuesday thing, anything?"

It was such an accurate guess that Rod laughed before he could stop himself. "I was going to say a staff meeting. Eight o'clock. I've got a staff meeting."

"You're a teacher. It's summer."

"That's right, you memorized my job. That's a little intense, Rhys."

"I memorized it because you told me twice and I listen to people, it's a bad habit." Rhys set the mug down. "Look, I don't want to make this a thing if it's not a thing. I've got six days of leave left. I fly back out on the fourteenth. I'm not looking for anything complicated."

"Me neither," Rod said, quickly, in the voice of someone who had rehearsed it.

Rhys nodded slowly and drank his coffee, and the kitchen was quiet except for the fridge humming and a bird outside still going about its business like it was being paid by the hour. Rod became aware that he was standing in his own kitchen in a T-shirt and underwear arguing with a man in his boxers about who wanted less. It was not a look he'd have chosen.

"Okay," Rhys said finally. "So we've got a deal. Casual. Nothing complicated. Can I use your shower? I smell like last night and I've got to be at Farley's place by eleven."

"Bathroom's at the end of the hall. Towels are in the closet, the ones on the top shelf are clean, the ones hanging up are decorative."

"Decorative."

"Everyone has decorative towels, Rhys. It's part of being an adult."

Rhys took his mug and refilled it without asking, which was either rude or comfortable, and Rod couldn't decide which. At the hallway he stopped and turned around.

"Hey. Thanks for not doing the dentist thing."

"I've still got time to do the dentist thing."

"Sure," Rhys said, grinning again, and padded off down the hall. A second later, from the bathroom: "Your shower head sprays the wall!"

"It sprays where it wants! It's an old house!"

The water came on. Rod stood in his kitchen holding his cooling coffee and looking at the ceiling, and thought about the bruise on his hip, and the fact that he had six days, and the fact that six days was exactly the kind of number a man could tell himself was small.

The bird outside shut up, finally. Somebody, somewhere, had got their wish.

* * *

By the time the shower shut off, Rod had made eggs. It wasn't a decision he could point to. He'd just opened the fridge, seen the eggs, and started doing it, the way a man mows a neighbor's strip of lawn and then wonders why he's holding a mower.

Rhys came down the hall with wet hair and his jeans back on, which felt like cheating somehow. He looked at the stove.

"You're cooking."

"I'm cooking. Sit down or don't, either way."

Rhys sat. He ate the eggs without ceremony, the way people eat who have eaten in worse places, and Rod sat across from him with his own plate and felt the silence come on like weather.

"Porch?" Rod said, to fill it.

"Porch."

They took their second coffees out back. The boards gave under their feet in the usual places. Rhys sat on the rail itself, which Rod's landlord would have found objectionable, and looked out at the yard like it was scenery worth looking at. It wasn't. There was a tarp on a grill and a fence that leaned.

"Nice morning," Rhys said.

"It's North Carolina in summer. Give it three hours and it'll be a wet sock."

Rhys laughed at that, a real one, and Rod felt stupidly pleased about it. So he did what he always did when he felt something, which was paper over it with talk.

"You know, this reminds me of a conference in Fayetteville. Teacher thing, two summers ago. The hotel had one of those continental breakfasts, and this guy from a charter school in Raleigh, he's telling me about his grant program, and I'm nodding along, and the whole time the waffle maker is beeping at somebody, just beeping, nonstop, like a smoke alarm nobody believes anymore. And this guy says to me, he says, 'You look like a man who reads history for pleasure,' and I didn't know whether to be flattered or call my doctor."

He'd meant it as a story. It had a shape and a punchline and everything. Rhys just looked at him.

"That wasn't a story," Rhys said. "That was a deflection with a waffle in it."

"It was an anecdote."

"You're older than me. Why do you act like you've never done this?"

Rod looked at his coffee. The coffee did not help.

"Done what, exactly."

"This. The morning. Breakfast. The porch. The story about the waffle guy." Rhys counted them off on his scarred fingers. "You've had people stay over before. You're forty-two. You've done this a hundred times."

"I haven't, as it happens. Not in six years."

"Why not?"

"You ask a lot of questions for a man eating free eggs."

"I ate the eggs already." He wasn't smiling now. "Six years is a long time, Rod. What happened six years ago?"

"Nothing happened. Nothing dramatic. I just decided I was done being somebody's Tuesday." He heard how it came out and wished it hadn't. "Done being the convenient option. The guy you see when you're between things. So I stopped doing the between things and only did the real ones, and it turns out the real ones are rare, and here we are."

"Here we are," Rhys said. "Eating eggs."

"You didn't answer my question, by the way. About the breakfast."

"I didn't ask about the breakfast."

"You asked in the kitchen. Whether I make breakfast for one-night stands."