Something changed at my apartment, subtly, for the better. Not so long ago, Cal hadn’t seemed to want Nicole to know about us. And I had planned to keep us a secret, for his sake, from everyone. After all, I didn’t need people to know that we were together; I only needed him, and I wouldn’t jeopardize that.
But Cal, of his own volition, had practically exposed our relationship to Nicole. He was changing during intimacy, too. He was letting himself come, seeking it out, he wasn’t rushing through sex, and the haunted expression was fading from his face.
When we got back to Red Feather, he built a fire, laid blankets in front of it, and made love to me. Afterward, though it had been obvious in his touch, he gathered me against his chest and said, “I love you now.” He made it sound like an oath. I told him I loved him, too, but I don’t know if he heard me. He stared into the flames and gripped me tighter. “I love you now,” he repeated.
On the occasions we went out together, he seemed more relaxed. He never held my hand or kissed me in public, but he stood close enough that our bodies brushed, he sometimes touched my arm or shoulder, and he let his eyes linger on me the way he did at the house—long and slow, with obvious affection.
One day, at the grocery store, he pressed an avocado into my palm and closed his fingers around mine.
“This one’s perfect,” he said. “See?”
I smiled and shrugged, pressuring the leathery skin. “Kind of.”
“Not too firm, not too soft.” His hands moved up to my wrists. “Perfect.”
I must have flushed, because he chuckled and studied my face.
“Nobody cares,” he remarked on the way home. He glanced at the rearview mirror as if he expected a tail.
“About what?”
“You, me.” He sounded far away.
He meant, I realized, something related to his display at the grocery store. I nodded and allowed him to think a while longer. Then I said, “Yeah, it’s twenty-sixteen. We’ve come a pretty long way. It’s a good thing.”
He didn’t agree or disagree.
It was the middle of November and I had completed, revised, and polished the profile. I finally showed it to him. He sat on the couch with my laptop while I chewed on a nail and waited. His dark eyes scanned the screen, he grew still as a stalking cat, and his expression betrayed nothing. A nervous laugh shot out of me.
“We should trade laptops,” I said. “I could check out what you’re writing.”
He glanced at me absently. “Oh, I don’t think so, Michael.”
“Kidding.” I rubbed my palms on my jeans.
“It would be awkward,” he murmured.
“Why?”
He continued to read. “It’s about you.”
“What?”
“I said, it’s about you.”
“No, I heard. I ...” I looked at his laptop, its thin silver profile resting innocently on the couch. “I’m surprised, that’s all.” And I was suddenly, rabidly curious. I wondered what Cal could have to say about me at any length.
“Are you?” He closed my laptop halfway and leveled me with his stare. “I think about you constantly. I wake up thinking about you. I fall asleep thinking about you. I’m always wondering what’s on your mind. I wish I could constantly hear your impressions. I think about what sort of gifts you would like, or places we could travel together. Even after we’ve been in bed ... I’m immediately fantasizing about other things I want to do to you. Every song I hear seems to be about you. My hand doesn’t want to draw anything else. If I pick up an instrument, it’s you I’m playing for. When I’m working out, I’m thinking about the way you look at my body, how much I like it. I think about you more than I think about God now. So what else would I write about?”
His confession hit me with physical force. I sank back in the armchair. For weeks, I had thought that my fascination with Cal was one-sided, or maybe it is always impossible to believe that someone else’s obsession could match our own. But Cal had essentially described himself through my eyes. I think about you constantly.
“Do you use my name?” I blurted out.
He laughed, openly amused by my question. “Always, in first drafts. Whose name do you think I used instead of Abigail? I go back and change it, when I’m done.”
I thought about Cal writing The House of Faith using his own name instead of Abigail’s. “Your family would come around,” I said. “If they knew. If you told them.”
“You think so?”
“I know they would.”
His eyes closed for a while and his smile faded. “You make me believe that, but if you weren’t here, I think I wouldn’t be able to believe it.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere.”
He stirred, as if he were going to get up, and then he went back to reading.
About ten minutes later, he said, “This is very good, Michael.”
I exhaled deeply. “Yeah? You like it?”
“I do. I’m impressed. I shouldn’t be—I know you’re a great writer—but this is very different from your blog. More serious. It’s deft and insightful.”
The goofiest grin expanded on my face. “Yeah?”
“Yes.” He smiled and passed my laptop. “It will be the best of its kind, easily.”
“Only because you gave me your book.”
“No,” he said seriously. “You made it work, given what you could say and what you couldn’t. And you kept it objective.”
“That wasn’t easy.” The relief was obvious in my voice. His opinion mattered to me more than anyone else’s. “How are the facts?”
He clarified some details and I took notes and implemented them. Then he read it again and said, “You’re good to go.”
The profile had been our premise for meeting for so long that I felt something cave under me. Relief and happiness gave way to doubt. “Great. I’ll ...” I stared at the document. “I’ll send it off, I guess.”
He was watching me, reading my face.
“You could stream here, you know.”
I blinked a few times. “You want that?”
“Yeah, if the net is good enough. We could get you set up in the guest room, or in my office. I mostly write out here anyway.”
My Twitch channel was bleeding subscribers, and, each day I spent in Red Feather, I was losing hundreds of dollars in donations. It made sense for me to return to streaming now that I had finished the profile.
“I think I could make it work with your upload speeds,” I said tentatively.
“Good. Anyway, if you can’t, I’ll stay with you while you stream.” He shrugged and went back to writing—writing about me.
I didn’t trust my voice just then, so I nodded hurriedly and e-mailed the profile to Eliza Harel at The New Yorker.