Linger

My birthday sandwich turned out to be roast beef with mayonnaise, the same as Grace’s. We spread out the papers between us so that the edges overlapped and Grace hummed “Happy Birthday” in a terribly off-key way.

“And many more,” she added in an entirely new key.

“Why, thanks,” I said. I touched her chin, and she smiled at me.

After we’d finished our sandwiches—well, I had nearly finished mine, Grace had eaten the bread off hers—she gestured to the sandwich wrappers and said, “You should crumple up those papers. And I’ll get your present out.”

I looked at her, eyebrows raised, as she pulled her backpack from the floor onto her lap. “You shouldn’t have gotten me anything,” I said. “I feel silly getting a present.”

“I wanted to,” Grace said. “Don’t ruin it by going all bashful. I said get rid of those papers!”

I bent my head and started to fold.

“You and those cranes!” She laughed as she saw that I was folding the tidier of the two sandwich papers into a big, floppy bird printed with the Subway logo. “What is it with you and them?”

“I used to make them for good times. To remember the moment.” I waved the Subway crane at her; it flapped its loose, wrinkled wings. “You know you’ll never forget where this crane came from.”

Grace studied it. “I think that’s a pretty safe assumption.”

“Mission accomplished,” I said softly, and rested the crane on the floor beside the love seat. I knew I was stalling the moment before she presented her gift. It gave me a weird knot in my stomach to think she’d gotten me something. But Grace wouldn’t be put off.

“Now, close your eyes,” she said. Her voice had a little catch in it—anticipation. Hope. I silently said a prayer: Please let me like whatever it is she got. In my head, I tried to imagine the face that went with perfect delight, so that I could have it ready to pull out no matter what she had given me.

I heard her rezipping her backpack and felt the cushions rocking as she rearranged herself on the couch.

“Do you remember the first time we came up here?” she asked as I sat there, half-alone in the darkness of my closed eyes.

It wasn’t a question meant to be answered, so I just smiled.

“Do you remember how you made me close my eyes, and you read me that poem from Rilke?” Grace’s voice was closer; I felt her knee touch mine. “I loved you so much right then, Sam Roth.”

My skin tightened in a shiver, and I swallowed. I knew she loved me, but she almost never said it. That alone could’ve been her birthday gift for me. My hands lay open in my lap; I felt her press something into them. She closed one of my hands over the top of the other. Paper.

“I didn’t think I could ever be as romantic as you,” she said. “You know I’m not good at that. But—well.” And she did a funny little laugh at herself, so endearing that I nearly forgot myself and opened my eyes to see her face when she did it. “Well, I can’t wait anymore. Open your eyes.”

I opened them. There was a folded piece of computer paper in my hands. I could see the ghost of the printing that was on the inside, but not what it was.

Grace could barely sit still. Her expectation was hard to bear, because I didn’t know if I could live up to it. “Open it.”

I tried to remember the happy face. The upward tilt of my eyebrows, the open grin, the squinty eyes.

I opened the paper.

And I completely forgot about what my face was supposed to look like. I just sat there, staring at the words on the paper, not really believing them. It wasn’t the hugest of presents, though for Grace, it must’ve been difficult to manage. What was amazing was that it was me, a resolution I hadn’t been brave enough to write down. It was something that said she knew me. Something that made the I love yous real.

It was an invoice. For five hours of studio time.

I looked up at Grace and saw that her anticipation had melted away into something entirely different. Smugness. Complete and total smugness, so whatever my face had done on its own accord must’ve given me away.

“Grace,” I said, and my voice was lower than I’d planned.

Her smug little smile threatened to break into a bigger one. She asked, unnecessarily, “You like it?”

“I…”

She saved me from having to compose the rest of a sentence. “It’s in Duluth. I scheduled it for one of our mutual days off. I figured you could play some of your songs and…I don’t know. Do whatever you hope you’ll do with them.”

“A demo,” I said softly. The gift was more than she knew—or maybe she realized everything that it meant. It was more than just a nod to me doing more with my music. It was an acknowledgment that I could move forward. That there was going to be a next week and a next month and a next year for me. Studio time was about making plans for a brand-new future. Studio time said that if I gave someone my demo and they said, “I’ll get back to you in a month,” I’d still be human by the time they did.

“God, I love you, Grace,” I said. Still holding the invoice, I hugged her, tight, around her neck. I pressed my lips against the side of her head and hugged her hard again. I put down the paper beside the Subway crane.

“Are you going to make it into a crane, too?” she asked, then closed her eyes so I could kiss her again.

But I didn’t. I just stroked the hair away from her face so I could look at her with her eyes closed. She made me think of those angels that were on top of graves, eyes closed, faces lifted up, hands folded.

“You’re hot again,” I said. “Do you feel all right?”

Grace didn’t open her eyes, just let me continue tracing around the edge of her face as if I were still pushing her hair away from her skin. My fingers felt cold against her warm skin. She said, “Mmm hmm.”

So I kept teasing her skin with my fingers. I thought about telling her what I was thinking, like You’re beautiful and You’re my angel, but the thing about Grace was that words like that meant more to me than to her. They were throwaway phrases to her, things that made her smile for a second but were just…gone after that, too corny to be real. To Grace, these were the things that mattered: my hands on her cheeks, my lips on her mouth. The fleeting touches that meant I loved her.

When I leaned in to kiss her, I caught just the tiniest trace of that sweet, nutty smell from the wolf she’d found, so faint that I could have been imagining it. But just the thought of it was enough to throw me from the moment.