Metal clinked against metal, and then made a duller sound that might be called a click when the metal hit ceramic. It shouldn’t have been noteworthy, and it shouldn’t have been what Sean was thinking about. It should’ve been a pedestrian, every day, easily tune-out-able sound. Dinner with Isaiah was supposed to be about sharing in each other’s days. The ten or so hours they were forced to be apart had been agonizing when they’d first been together. It was nice in some ways that the desperation to be near each other had faded—who could get anything done when you were constantly texting and/or pining for your lover?—but at the same time, Sean missed it. He missed a lot of things.

Isaiah picked up his glass, and Sean watched his husband’s throat work as Isaiah swallowed the pinot noir. Sean had chosen the bottle from their wine closet—hard to have a cellar when your house was built on a slab—because not only did it pair well with the roast pork he’d made for dinner, but it reminded him of a happier time. A time he’d like to get back and didn’t quite know how, not when they couldn’t just drop everything and run away to Burgundy for a permanent vacation.

Sean cut another bite, concentrating far too hard on the sounds of the flatware against the plates. But with no conversation, what else was he supposed to focus on? Silent dinners were becoming more and more frequent and while he didn’t like it, he couldn’t think of how to fix it.

Objectively, the bite he placed in his mouth was delicious. He’d done a good job on the roast, and the herbs he’d crusted it with made the sweetness of the meat sing. It would’ve been something he’d hope Isaiah would remark on, but now it was another detail he found himself clinging to because there was nothing else to keep him from screaming at the dinner table.

How had they come to this?

A screech of knife hitting plate made him look up, and his husband murmured an apology before tucking back into the food. Sean didn’t doubt Isaiah appreciated his cooking—he still took seconds and sometimes thirds—and when he thought of it would say thank you to Sean for the meals he prepared. But it lacked the same attention, the same enthusiasm. The same intimacy. It had become rote, just like some other things.

Another bite of wild rice, and then he pierced the quartered Brussels sprout and dragged it through the butternut puree he was trying out for the first time. It was good—he knew it was good—but he’d rather be eating a terribly greasy burger with limp and over-salted fries if it meant Isaiah would talk to him.

Long silences had always been a part of their relationship because Isaiah lived so much of his life in his mind. Always tinkering with problems. Even when he appeared to be totally occupied doing something else, like changing the oil on one of their cars or playing a game of chess, his mind was whirring in the background.

It wasn’t unusual for Sean to come home and find a garden bed half-weeded, a sink still partially full of dishes and water that had stood so long it was lukewarm and flat instead of hot and topped with foamy crests of bubbles. The other part of that equation was that Isaiah would be in his office, typing madly on his computer or scribbling on the whiteboards that covered the walls of the small room.

It should have been annoying—who liked completing their spouse’s half-finished chores?—but Sean had found it endearing and knew he could look forward to Isaiah telling him about his breakthrough later. Over dinner. Like he should’ve been now.

Sean didn’t always understand since chem had been his worst class in high school, but he could listen to Isaiah talk for hours about a new idea for a formula or a tweak to an existing drug that might someday make people’s lives better. Sometimes Isaiah would take the time to translate his brilliance into laymen’s terms, but even when he didn’t, his enthusiasm didn’t need any deciphering.

In some ways Sean loved coming home to something half-finished because he knew Isaiah would be excited and engaged. It was like a scavenger hunt: an incomplete chore would lead to a kid-on-Christmas-morning husband who he’d need to look after because when Isaiah was in one of those spaces, he’d forget to eat, shower, sleep. Since big and protective Isaiah usually got to play the role of care-taker, Sean relished being able to nourish his husband and loved to see how his synapses snapped in ways Sean’s never would.

Was he quiet because he was mulling over something from work? He could ask him. Should ask him. “How was your—”

But at the same time as he’d finally worked up the conversational nerve, apparently so had Isaiah. They were talking over one another, and while it shouldn’t have been a big deal—these things happen all the time—it felt to Sean like one more piece of evidence that they were badly out of sync.

Sean flushed and gestured with his empty fork. “You first.”

“Did you see the news?”

He had, but these days it was hard to keep track of everything that was happening. The blows came both hard and fast. Those that weren’t a slower push up against a wall that gave people enough time to get exhausted from digging their heels in, from slogging through the everyday fight of contacting their reps and donating money and shouting into the rain or the ether of social media at any rate. But one story among the clusterfuck of too many stuck out in his mind.

“The trans ban in the military?”

Isaiah nodded, his jaw working and his thick forearms flexing as he held his silverware just above his plate. Whatever else might be off between them, Sean still found his husband mouthwatering. He knew he shouldn’t, because they were talking about something meaningful and serious, but he let his gaze wander from Isaiah’s big hands wrapped around the knife and fork, over his forearms bared by his hastily and unevenly rolled-up sleeves, up to his broad shoulders and barrel chest to where his shirt gaped open at the collar and showed the tiny whorls of his chest hair. Up his thick neck to his shadowed square jaw, over the broad bones of his cheeks and the flare of his nose to his big wide-set dark brown eyes. Eyes that were boring into Sean now. Expecting something from him. Probably something profound and far-reaching, but Sean could only come up with one thing.

It was another disconnect between them that Sean used to think of as complementary but now he wasn’t so sure: Isaiah had a knack for looking at systems, larger scales. If they lived a thousand years ago, Sean had no doubt he would’ve lead an army of warriors.

Sean was better with smaller scale: individuals, households, and that’s what forced its way to the forefront of his mind and out of his mouth.

“It’s going to kill Brady.”

“It’s going to kill thousands of Bradys,” Isaiah shot back, turning his gaze to the pork on his plate that he attacked viciously with knife and fork, rending piece upon piece. “If it happens. It was just a fucking edict spat out on social media, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. That isn’t how this works, and it can be stopped. In the meantime, I’m going to send more money to the ACLU. You okay with that?”

“Yeah, of course.” They had the money. Isaiah’s salary as a chemist for a drug company and his own as a school counselor meant they had plenty since they didn’t have kids. Yet. “I’ll send Brady a care package too.”

Isaiah grunted, and went back to eating his dinner. It wasn’t anything he’d said, but Sean somehow felt as though he’d disappointed his husband. Not enough outrage? Only thinking of their friend when it was a much bigger issue? He couldn’t tell. But he’d do what he always did: the best he could.

He couldn’t bake for Brady because brownies or cookies would never make it in one piece to Afghanistan, but he could pick up some of his other favorite things. Candy that wouldn’t melt, some books, batteries, socks, sunscreen. The guy who’d stood up as best man at their wedding deserved more than that, but what he really deserved wasn’t within Sean’s power to give.