Room Nine

"Do you know what she's going to do with that video?"

Rainer sat on the end of the motel bed with his hand held out, palm up, like a boy waiting for a ruler. The gauze had come apart in the car. What was under it looked worse than it had in the stairwell. "Put it somewhere useful," he said. "Hold it over me."

"Over both of us."

"You weren't the one swinging."

"I'm in it, Rainer." Jose tore open an alcohol wipe with his teeth. "You think the camera cut away? I'm on my back on that gravel with you on top of me and both my arms around you. She doesn't need a man hitting someone. She needs a picture of the two of us."

Rainer looked at him. Then he laughed, one short dry sound with nothing behind it. "That's a nice angle."

"It isn't funny."

"No."

The Wayfarer Motor Inn had room nine and not much else. Brown carpet, a painting of a lighthouse, a bedspread that smelled of other people's cigarettes. They had driven forty minutes in the wrong direction to get here, in case Tommy Brandt's friends were faster than his lawyer. Jose cleaned the split seam across the base of Rainer's thumb. Rainer didn't flinch. He watched the top of Jose's head as if it were something he was learning.

"You said not there," Jose said. "Ask you anywhere else. So I'm asking."

"Not tonight."

"You stopped moving when she said camel coat."

"You've been watching my hands all day."

"Yes."

"And what did you see?"

"A man who knows something he's afraid of."

Rainer's mouth moved. For a second Jose thought he would say it, and some careful, cowardly part of him braced to hear it. Then Rainer took his hand back and folded it against his chest.

"I'm afraid of how you'll look at me," he said. "That's all I'll give you. That's the true part."

"How I'll look at you."

"The way you looked at me today. When I had him down." Rainer's voice was very even. "You looked at me like I was somebody you'd never met."

Jose opened his mouth to say *you broke his face.* He had every right to say it.

Instead he said, "I was frightened."

"Of me?"

"For you."

That landed in the small room and neither of them could pick it up again.

Rainer's hand was shaking where it lay against his ribs. Fine, quick, like something struck. Jose stared at it. He thought, *he's been holding that still for six hours.* He thought of a bathroom light at two in the morning, a split lip, a wet towel.

"Don't be kind to me," Rainer said. "I can't do it tonight."

Jose kissed him.

---

It wasn't gentle. He hadn't expected it to be, and neither had Rainer. The first kiss tasted of blood, as it always had, and Rainer's good hand locked in the back of his hair hard enough to hurt. They got half the clothes off and lost track of the rest. Rainer's knuckles left a streak on Jose's hip, and Jose didn't care. He heard himself make a sound he'd forgotten he owned.

His body knew everything. That was the thing he couldn't argue with afterward. His body had gone fourteen years and kept the map. The shape of the shoulder blade. The scar under the ribs that Rainer got at seventeen from a rusted fence. Which side of his neck to put his mouth on so that Rainer's whole back would lock. He did it without thinking and felt it happen under his hands and felt, God help him, that he had walked back into a house and found the lights still on.

"Say my name," Rainer said against his jaw.

"Rainer."

"Again."

"Rainer."

It was the first time in years he'd said it that way. Not across a church, not into a phone. As a request.

Afterward neither of them said anything for a long time.

Jose lay on his back and looked at the water stain on the ceiling. It looked like Florida. Rainer's arm lay across his stomach, heavy and warm, and Jose realized they had fallen into the old arrangement without discussing it. Rainer on the right. Jose on the left. His head in the hollow of Rainer's shoulder, as if it had been measured for it.

Camille slept on his right.

He hadn't thought about her in two hours.

That was what began to frighten him. Not the sex. Not even the guilt, which had arrived on schedule and found a seat. It was the ease. He'd spent four years building something that required constant, careful upkeep, lamps left on, paint colors chosen, a hand on a wrist counting. And Rainer had undone it in an hour in a room with a lighthouse painting, and it had been the easiest thing he had ever done.

He couldn't remember what Camille's laugh sounded like.

He tried. Lay there trying, and what came instead was the sound of her saying *eat three more spoons.* The kitchen floor. The skirt. He could see all of it perfectly, and none of it felt like it belonged to him.

*Rested,* she'd said.

Rainer's breath had gone slow and even against his scalp. Somewhere outside a truck downshifted on the highway and the whole room shook with it, faintly, like a struck glass.

At ten to five Jose got up.

He did it slowly, sliding his hand out from under Rainer's arm, setting his feet on the cold carpet one at a time. He found his jeans. His shirt smelled of cigarettes and motel soap and Rainer, and he put it on anyway. The Corolla keys lay on the dresser next to a crushed plastic cup. He picked them up and the metal rang against the wood.

He looked back.

Rainer lay on his side facing the room. His eyes were open.

They looked at each other across the dark. Rainer didn't speak. He didn't reach for him. He didn't ask where Jose was going or why. His face held a grave, tired steadiness, the face of a man who had counted the cost of this exact moment months ago and paid it in advance.

Then, slowly, Rainer closed his eyes.

The way you do when you want someone to believe you were asleep.

Jose stood with the keys in his fist. Fourteen years ago he had stood in a doorway and watched a different brother do the same thing, and he'd told himself it was a kindness to let him.

He decided it was fine.

He went out and shut the door so gently the latch didn't make a sound.

---

The Corolla smelled like him. Rainer's cigarettes, the mint gum he chewed, the cheap pine tree swinging from the mirror. Jose drove with the windows down and it made no difference. His own skin smelled like him. His hands on the wheel did.

He was ten miles out when it occurred to him that he'd left Rainer in a motel with no car, a ruined hand, and a bill that wasn't paid.

He didn't turn around.

That was the thing he'd think about for a long time, afterward. How far he'd got before he noticed. How easily the road had taken him.

His phone buzzed in the cupholder at a red light outside a town whose name he'd never learn. He picked it up to silence it.

*Camille: I watched it. I'm not angry. Please believe that.*

A second.

*Tommy Brandt has an orbital fracture. His lawyer called mine at 5. I've asked them to hold off until Monday.*

A third.

*Come home and we'll talk about what Monday looks like.*

He read it at the light. The light turned green. A truck behind him leaned on its horn.

Jose sat through the whole green and the next red, with the smell of Rainer all over him and her message glowing in his hand, and for a long time he didn't move the car.