Borrowed Hearts

The first time Ben and I slept together, it was because of a dead squirrel.

Not a metaphor. An actual dead squirrel, stiff and flat on the sidewalk outside my apartment, and I'd called him at eleven on a Tuesday because I didn't know who else to call about a corpse. He showed up with a trash bag and a shovel and a look on his face like this was the most normal request in the world. That's Ben. He doesn't ask why. He just comes.

We buried it in the strip of dirt behind the building, under the dying rhododendron, and then we went upstairs and drank two beers each and watched a nature documentary about octopuses. He fell asleep on my couch with his shoes still on. I remember standing in the kitchen doorway looking at him, at the way his mouth had gone slack and his hand was curled against his chest like he was holding something invisible, and I thought: I could love this person. And then I thought: don't.

That was three years ago.

Now it's a Thursday in October and I'm sitting on the floor of his living room with my back against the radiator, which is clanking like it's trying to communicate in Morse code. Ben is on the couch, laptop open, scrolling through something with the particular frown he gets when he's reading emails from his mother. The radiator clanks. He sighs. The radiator clanks again.

"She wants me to come home for Thanksgiving," he says. "She's using the word 'expecting.' Like I'm a weather event."

"You should go."

"I went last year."

"So go every other year. Alternate. It's a system."

He looks at me over the top of the laptop. His glasses are smudged, which means he's been touching them, which means he's stressed. "Come with me."

"No."

"I'll pay for your ticket."

"I have a job, Ben. I can't just take off for Thanksgiving."

"You work at a bookstore. Your boss is a seventy-year-old man who calls you 'kiddo.' He'll survive."

I throw a pillow at him. He catches it one-handed without looking, which is an infuriating thing he can do, and sets it beside him on the couch. The radiator has gone quiet. The apartment smells like the curry we made two hours ago, turmeric and coconut milk and something burnt at the bottom of the pan that neither of us wanted to acknowledge.

Here's the thing about Ben and me. We're not dating. We've never dated. We met at a party in Bushwick six years ago, both of us hiding on the fire escape from the same boring conversation, and we spent the next four hours talking about whether it's ethical to eat octopus, given how smart they are. I said yes, he said no, and I've never been so happy to lose an argument. We exchanged numbers. We became the kind of friends who call each other from the grocery store to ask what kind of onions to buy. The kind who know each other's parents' names, each other's allergies, each other's worst exes.

And then, three years ago, the squirrel. And after the squirrel, the couch. And after the couch, everything else.

It's not complicated, is what I tell people. We're friends. We have sex. We're not in love. We're just two people who happen to fit together in a specific way, and we've decided not to ruin it by calling it something it isn't.

Except when I say that out loud, it sounds like a lie. Even to me. Especially to me.

"You're doing the thing," Ben says.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you go quiet and stare at the wall and I can hear you thinking from across the room."

"I'm not thinking."

"You're always thinking. It's your defining characteristic. That and your inability to kill insects."

"I killed a spider last week."

"You put a cup over it and slid a piece of paper underneath and carried it outside. That's not killing. That's relocation."

"Same outcome for me. Different outcome for the spider."

He closes the laptop and sets it on the coffee table. The radiator gives one last clank and then goes silent. Outside, a car alarm starts up, distant enough that it's more like a bird call than an emergency. Ben leans forward, elbows on his knees, and looks at me with that expression he gets when he's about to say something real. I've learned to recognize it. It's the same face he made when his father died, when he told me he was quitting his job at the ad agency, when he asked me, three years ago, if I wanted him to stay.

"Come with me," he says again. "Not as a date. Just as. You know. You."

"That's not a sentence."

"You know what I mean."

I do. That's the problem. I know exactly what he means, and I know exactly what it would look like: the two of us in his childhood home, sleeping in separate rooms, pretending to be just friends for his mother's sake, and then the moment we get back to the city, the moment we're alone, the way we always end up. The way I always end up in his bed, or he in mine, and the way I always tell myself it doesn't mean anything, and the way it always, always does.

"I'll think about it," I say.

"You won't."

"I might."

"You'll think about it for three days and then text me a paragraph about why it's a bad idea, and I'll read it and agree with every point, and then we'll do it anyway because we always do."

"That's not true."

"It's a little true."

It's entirely true. I hate that he knows me this well. I hate that I've let him. I hate that I'm already composing the paragraph in my head, the one about how Thanksgiving with his family is a bad idea, how it crosses some invisible line we've been carefully not crossing for three years, how it would mean something, and how we've both agreed that things between us don't mean anything.

But here's the other thing, the thing I don't say, the thing I've never said: sometimes I wake up in his bed before he does, and I lie there and listen to him breathe, and I think about what it would be like to stay. Not just for the morning. Not just until the coffee runs out. To stay. To be the person who gets to wake up next to him every day, who gets to know the name of every person in his family, who gets to have a drawer in his dresser and a toothbrush in his bathroom and a place in his life that isn't just the space between the hours we spend together.

I don't say that. I never say that. Because the one rule we've never broken, the one rule that keeps this whole thing from collapsing, is that we don't talk about it. We don't name it. We don't ask for more than what we've agreed to give.

So I say, "I'll think about it," and he nods, and he picks up the laptop again, and the radiator starts its clanking, and somewhere in the building someone is playing music loud enough that I can feel the bass through the floor.

And I think: this is fine. This is what we do. This is what we've always done.

And I think: I'm going to go with him. I'm going to go with him, and it's going to ruin everything, and I'm going to let it.

I just don't know yet how much.