Page 305 - A Little Life: A Novel

He pays and they walk outside, where it is raining, not heavily, but
steadily enough so that there are no cabs, and the streets gleam like licorice.
“I have a car waiting,” Caleb says. “Can I drop you somewhere?”

“You don’t mind?”
“Not at all.”
The car takes them downtown, and by the time they’ve reached Greene
Street it’s pouring, so hard that they can no longer discern shapes through
the window, just colors, spangles of red and yellow lights, the city reduced
to the honking of horns and the clatter of rain against the roof of the car, so
loud that they can barely hear each other over the din. They stop and he’s

about to get out when Caleb tells him to wait, he has an umbrella and will
walk him into the building, and before he can object, Caleb is getting out
and unsnapping an umbrella, and the two of them huddle beneath it and into
the lobby, the door thudding shut behind him, leaving them standing in the
darkened entryway.
“This is a hell of a lobby,” Caleb says, dryly, looking up at the bare bulb.

“Although it does have a sort of end-of-empire chic,” and he laughs, and
Caleb smiles. “Does Rosen Pritchard know you’re living in a place like
this?” he asks, and then, before he can answer, Caleb leans in and kisses
him, very hard, so that his back is pressed against the door, and Caleb’s
arms make a cage around him.
In that moment, he goes blank, the world, his very self, erasing
themselves. It has been a long, long time since anyone has kissed him, and

he remembers the sense of helplessness he felt whenever it happened, and
how Brother Luke used to tell him to just open his mouth and relax and do
nothing, and now—out of habit and memory, and the inability to do
anything else—that is what he does, and waits for it to be over, counting the
seconds and trying to breathe through his nose.
Finally, Caleb steps back and looks at him, and after a while, he looks

back. And then Caleb does it again, this time holding his face between his
hands, and he has that sensation he always had when he was a child and
was being kissed, that his body was not his own, that every gesture he made
was predetermined, reflex after reflex after reflex, and that he could do
nothing but succumb to whatever might happen to him next.
Caleb stops a second time and steps back again, looking at him and
raising his eyebrows the way he had at Rhodes’s dinner, waiting for him to

say something.