“I can’t do this anymore,” he says when her voice dies out, cracked and broken.
Her laugh is bitter. “Of course you can’t.”
“You don’t love me.”
“You don’t know that.”
He frowns at her. “Hey, you don’t, okay? Not like… not like we should.”
“Don’t put this on me,” she says, and she’s crying now. “It’s you too. You did this too.”
And she’s right, of course, and he could probably sling any number of things in her face right now (the text messages to the person in her phone listed only as BT that say things like miss u and can’t wait to see u and 2day was exactly what I needed xx) but he doesn’t. He doesn’t, and it’s not because he’s a better person. No. He’s not a better person and he feels that old familiar anger rising up in him, that sick fury that causes the palms of his hands to itch, that makes him want to reach out and just shake her silly, to snap at her, to tell her what he knows while his grip tightens on her shoulders.
He’s about to do exactly that, about to throw it back at her, but he’s distracted, because there’s a bird. There’s a bird sitting on the rail of the balcony, a bird that’s staring at him, unblinking.
“Are you even listening to me?” she cries. “God, this is just so fucking typical—”
But he’s not listening. He’s seen the bird, and he’s thinking, Starling, huh, that’s a starling, like when I was a kid, watching TV with Dad, and he said, “Look, look at that, would you look at that, oh my god, look,” and I did, and there were thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, and they were moving together, they were dancing, Dad said it was called a murmuration, said it was order in the chaos, and that it’d be the most beautiful thing I’d ever see.
And that had stuck with him, hadn’t it? The fact that his father could ever find something beautiful. He cried when he found out murmurations were rare, true murmurations with tens of thousands of birds, and that he’d probably never see one. His father put a hand (a loving and terrible hand) on his shoulder and said, “One day, we’ll see them with our own eyes, right above us, bucko, I promise,” but they hadn’t because his mom and dad had died, and he just couldn’t. He couldn’t go back without thinking of them, and life got in the way after that. After the grief had settled. After it hurt, but only dully. His life, he was living his life and then came the baby and the shit show that had followed. And here he is now, she’s crying, his fists are balled at his sides, and there’s a starling sitting on the balcony.
“What are you looking at?” she asks tearfully. “Am I not even important enough for you to—”
He ignores her. His heart is thundering in his chest, blood rushing in his ears. He thinks about the moon hitting his eye, it’s like that pizza pie, wasn’t it? Happy sang that. Happy sang that and it feels like he is bleeding through because there are Happy and Oscar (Walter) and it is bright and sunny and he thinks one word. One word as the starling lifts its wings and flies from the balcony.
He thinks, Sean.
He doesn’t know any Sean.
He loves Sean.
The light pouring in from the window darkens, like clouds have moved over the sun.
But it’s not clouds.
He knows this.
She yells at him to pay attention, yells at him to just fucking look at her, but he’s taking a step and another step and another toward the sliding door of the balcony as the shadows grow in the room, and if he listens, if he really listens, he can hear the beat of thousands of wings, the rush of air as it’s split, the rolling movement of the starlings.
He thinks, Sean, because that’s all he’s ever wanted.
He opens the sliding door to the balcony.
The sky outside is black with birds.
They murmur his name in the murmuration.
He laughs as the window cracks, as the floor cracks, as his mind cracks.
He’s—
HE’S RINGING the doorbell, and he hears, “Just a minute,” and he smiles to himself, insides twisting, but it’s in a good way now.
He practices again, reminding himself that he’ll open the door, say hello, you look nice today, and maybe there’s a small part of him that thinks, Don’t put this on me, you did this, you did this too, but he has no idea where the thought comes from. He shakes his head, thinking that the ten-minute walk from the bookstore to Sean’s house was uneventful enough that he should have calmed down some, but he’s excited and nervous and just wants this to go well. It’s the romantic in him (hidden, of course, because he never really wants to show that side of himself to anyone if he can help it, and he looks down at the flower in his hand, snorting in irony) that wants this to go so well that it goes on forever. He never wants this feeling to end, these butterflies of anticipation, of a future that could bring so much.
The door opens and Sean’s there. Sean’s there with his just-for-Mike smile, and maybe it’s curved a little more than it normally is. It freezes slightly when he sees Mike, and then he’s choking out, “Mrs. Richardson?”
Mike flushes brutally, making a mental note to scold that woman the next time he sees her. “Mrs. Richardson,” he says in a slightly strangled voice, and it’s already not going like he wanted it to. “Hello,” he says. “You look…” and he can’t say nice like he planned, because nice doesn’t even begin to cover it. Sean’s wearing a pair of pink pastel Bermuda shorts and a checkered shirt that’s white and the lightest of blues. It’s buttoned down the front and pulls tight against the lean muscles in his chest. He doesn’t have socks on, and his legs are pale and hairy and Mike’s brain short-circuits just a little. It hits him then, just how handsome he thinks Sean is, and that finally, finally, finally, they’re moving forward with this… this thing, this thing that Mike wants more than anything else in the world.