The kitchen windows are crooked, Joe thinks, looking at them anew.
It’s long after midnight. The room is dark, the table and chairs, stove and sink thrown into dim relief by the here-and-there moonlight that spills between the clouds. The sashes of the windows are raised high and the wind rattles through them, a sound so familiar to Joe as to be no sound at all. He crosses the room, his bare feet quiet, and splays his hand against one window’s wooden frame.
I am older than this, he thinks, older than the saw, and the nail, and even the tree.
It’s not every night that he feels this, the weight of his years like an anchor that he drags, but tonight he is restless and worried about nothing he can name. He closes the windows just before the rain begins to fall, the scent a tell that sweeps across the sill and tumbles into the sink with damning assurance. The patter of rain against the glass makes Joe shiver, and he watches the shadowed garden turn to mist as he rubs his hands up and down his arms.
“Come to bed, foolish man,” says Nicky.
He’s standing in the open doorway, leaning against the frame, pale and tall and yawning. Joe feels his heart warm at the sight of him, at the angle of his elbows and the small rise of his belly, the cowlick of hair above his left ear that gives away how hard he had mashed his face into his pillow when he fell asleep.
“Hmm,” Joe offers for want of anything better to say.
Nicky ambles over, drops his forehead against Joe’s shoulder, and makes a small contented sound when Joe wraps him in his arms. “What is it?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Joe replies, and tightens his hold just a little, just enough to root himself in the here and now of Nicky’s warm skin. “Sad?” he suggests.
Nicky presses a closed-mouthed kiss to Joe’s shoulder before he raises his head and lifts his hands, before he frames Joe’s face and studies him. Joe waits for the diagnosis that must surely come, an honest blessing born of a thousand years of knowing and being known.
Nicky nods his head and kisses Joe’s forehead. “Come with me,” he says, and leads the way back to the bedroom, herds Joe back beneath the covers and onto his side, curls up behind him and presses close. “You must sleep now,” he says. “Because I have you.”
And nothing is solved or fixed or mended except all that is.
