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Transposition error, Hawkeye noted dimly, limbs lead-weighted and eyelids half-closed, body trying to compel him to an eight-PM crash at the kitchen table, the day’s newspaper a thin but passable blanket covering over a twelve-hour shift. He recaptured the thought: transposition error midway through a paragraph on the bottom third of the page, a piece about the Knicks he’d intended to skim and which was instead lulling him to sleep. Roster became rotser. He pulled a pen from his chest-pocket, marked the mistake—BJ, particular and particularly fastidious, usually did so for his own amusement. Circled in pen transpositions, typos, spacing errors of all kinds with the quiet satisfaction he afforded to mystery novels, diagnostic problems, and chess. Hawkeye liked to catch type-errors before him. Sharing the game.
A recollection of a game of cranko—double, triple? Specificity eluded—overtook him as sense-memory, and then as a physical space; he remembered or re-enacted reaching for a chess piece and overturning a pepper shaker, somehow involved, though the rules were lost to the past, and BJ across from him declared the game a draw, eyes bright, reaching out to take the thin material of his robe between his fingers, telling him it looked like he needed somebody to put him to bed.
Hawkeye jolted mildly and pulled his chin off his chest. He suppressed a yawn and recognized what had woken him: BJ at the door, the jangle-clack of his keys on the hook, the latch slipping home. Hawkeye let the newspaper fall to the table. “How’d it go?”
“Shoes, Erin,” BJ called, over rapid-patter footfalls. Erin ran through the kitchen threshold, making for the counter, the radio there.
“Not so fast, kid.” Hawkeye pushed to stand, caught her mid-stride, and lifted her, kissing her forehead. BJ was close behind, handsomely put-together, dove-grey suit still neat and miraculously uncreased after a day at work and three hours in an elementary-school gym. Hawkeye fondly pictured him there, all six-foot-plus carefully arranged on a child-sized bench, knees bent to his shoulders, arms tucked in close, the apologetic hang-dog expression he’d surely adopt at the fact of his unavoidable distinctiveness in a room full of young children, young mothers.
“Nice interception.” BJ bussed Hawkeye’s cheek and went to work on untying Erin’s shoes.
“I know her migration patterns, that’s all.” Erin wiggled hard, straining toward the radio, kicking her shoes off into BJ’s hand. Hawkeye set her on the counter. In seconds the radio was humming awake.
“She can tune that thing faster than I can,” BJ murmured into Hawkeye’s shoulder. A sigh warmed the curve of his neck.
“She can tune it faster than anyone. How was the PTA?” Hawkeye asked under the opening monologue of X Minus One. He clenched his teeth around another yawn and let his weight settle against BJ’s chest, sinking into his solidity. Tension seeped out of his spine.
BJ nuzzled closer, insinuating his arms around Hawkeye’s waist. Erin’s shoes dangled from his left hand by the laces. They knocked a decelerating rhythm against Hawkeye’s hip. Inertia overcome. “Have dinner yet?”
“I didn’t know how late you’d be.”
“Is that a yes?”
Hawkeye indicated the dishes in the sink with an elbow, which BJ couldn’t see but could certainly feel. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. We ate at the meeting.” BJ pulled at his hem, untucking Hawkeye’s button-down and undershirt, scalpel-calluses dragging pleasantly through the hair below his navel.
Hawkeye shivered. “Watch it,” he warned lowly, though he still exhaled into BJ’s hold.
BJ obligingly stilled his hand. Hawkeye covered it with his own over the thin layer of his undershirt.
Erin made a motion toward the edge of the counter, but elected not to jump. “I want my hair out. Please,” she articulated carefully, still focused on the radio dials. She had started a game of her own invention, moving dials fractions of a degree at a time, testing the tolerances of the equipment.
“I got it.” BJ squeezed his hip, passed off Erin’s shoes, and stepped away. The heat of his hand lingered. Erin angled her head down, presenting her twin ponytails for untying. “What’d you eat?”
“What’s it matter?”
“I like to keep up with you. The afternoon news.”
“The afternoon news? Emergency trach kept me two hours late, then there was paperwork. Quiet drive home—”
“We missed you singing in the car,” BJ interjected, working a tangle out of Erin’s hair.
“I missed getting off-key on the overpass. I ate the rest of the pasta. Scavenged a few things from the fridge. We’re out of tangerines.”
BJ looked at him warmly over Erin’s head. Hawkeye dismissed it with a flick of Erin’s shoes. “I’ll put these by the door.”
“Thanks.” BJ bent to attend to Erin’s other ponytail.
Hawkeye went into the hall. BJ had left his briefcase leaning against the door. Unusual. He was typically meticulous about objects, their placement in the home. Hawkeye moved it into its reserved spot in the entryway-closet, set Erin’s shoes by the door, and double-checked the latch, though he’d heard the lock. All the little rituals of a life.
“Have a good day at school, Erin?” Hawkeye asked, returning to the kitchen. Two non-answers: BJ was obviously dodging the topic of the PTA meeting.
“Ms. Lowell is teaching us adding. And telling time.”
“Ah.” Hawkeye twirled a loose curl of Erin’s hair around his finger. She didn’t react. Too absorbed in her close study of the radio. She seemed less interested in the program—an interesting piece, Hawkeye thought, about a ship lost in space—than in the fact of the mechanism. “And how is that?”
Erin sighed, put-upon. “I already know everything.”
BJ grinned. “I know you know. You’re very good at math.”
And watches were favored toys, mechanisms of interest just like the radio. Telling the time was old hat. She’d probably be bored until college.
Hawkeye exchanged a look with BJ, a well-treaded conversation playing out in the glance: advanced curricula, skipping a grade — or just keeping up with home teaching. BJ shrugged. They wouldn’t resolve anything after eight PM on a Thursday night.
“When I get done early Ms. Lowell lets me read at my desk.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“I like to read,” Erin informed him. She spun the radio dial over an eighth of a degree and the station changed.
“Speaking of reading. I think it’s bedtime, Erin.” BJ slipped his watch off his wrist and let her handle it.
“Eight-seventeen,” Erin read, and gave them a significant look: See how easy that was?
Hawkeye ruffled her hair. “If you get good enough at these little clocks, they’ll put you in charge of Big Ben.”
“You could use the help,” BJ mouthed behind Erin’s back, winking to blunt the tease.
Erin gave him a frank look. “That’s not true.”
“How do you know?”
“She knows Uncle Hawk loves to tell fibs. Up we go.” BJ pulled Erin off the counter and into his arms after allowing her to switch off the radio.
“Fibs!”
“Uh-huh.” BJ carried Erin out of the kitchen. Erin nodded solemnly at him from over BJ’s shoulder, agreeing with BJ’s diagnosis.
“If that’s the way we’re treating a little creative license—eh.” Hawkeye cut off, losing the will to kid with BJ nearly out of earshot. There were dishes to wash, and the table needed wiping down. He tuned the radio back to the science-fiction program and tried to remember the plot through the day’s exhaustion. Erin would want to hear it over breakfast. She liked Hawkeye telling the story better than the radio, anyway, even bare of sound effects, even with details lost or invented, with names elided or re-used.
Upstairs the water went on and off. Erin’s bath, teeth-brushing, footsteps and the murmur of voices as BJ got Erin settled in for the night. The routine was well-established. Hawkeye wandered upstairs at the usual juncture, engaged in a game of wordplay with BJ for Erin’s bedtime amusement, and wished her a goodnight, lingering in the doorway as BJ knelt beside her bed and arranged her blankets, in no way perfunctory despite years of repetition. Hawkeye was attuned to BJ’s awareness of the limited term of her childhood, the missed years and interminable linearity of time.
Eighteen years, he reflected, turning away to leave a little space between himself and the familial arrangement in which he was still working to believe he belonged, had seemed nearly endless in his own experience. As a child he couldn’t conceptualize the lived transformation into adulthood, the idea frightening but endlessly delayed. A decade was a functional eternity. Now, though, he could imagine it from his father’s perspective, place himself in the subjectivity of an adult: eighteen years was a fraction of a moment when measured against the love of one’s child. That BJ had missed even a fraction of Erin’s childhood was a personal wound that would never entirely close.
But then things as they were—Hawkeye paused halfway down the stairs, listening for and catching BJ’s usual goodnight-I-love-you, Erin’s more rote but nonetheless heartfelt answer—things as they were were as good as one could hope.
Hawkeye turned the radio off, folded into a kitchen chair, and went back to looking at the paper. Skimmed a headline without reading it, vision unfocused, attuned instead to footsteps above: BJ in their bedroom, a meditative start-stop rhythm, paces measured and softened by distance and BJ in sock-feet. Either unaware of Hawkeye waiting for him, or aware and drawing out the time before he’d return and make good on implied interest.
Minutes passed, Hawkeye turned a page without reading, and BJ appeared again in the kitchen threshold, locked in a tricep stretch. He’d stripped off his suit coat, loosened his tie, and rolled his sleeves up past the elbow. Stubble shaded the line of his jaw. His expression was lax with productive exhaustion. A good day.
Hawkeye turned a page in the paper, eager to not appear eager. “Get her to bed alright?”
BJ folded out of his stretch and came to stand over him, passing a thumb down his cheek, stroking his end-of-day stubble with and then against the grain. Hawkeye lowered the paper.
“Out like a light. Lots of excitement.” BJ curled his fingers under his jaw. Hawkeye looked back at him through half-closed eyes, basking. BJ’s attention registered like a warm beam of light.
Hawkeye pushed his cheek into BJ’s hand. “I think we should buy her one of those little transistor radios. She’d get a kick out of having one she can carry around.”
“That’s a nice idea. A back-to-school present.”
“Since school’s not exactly keeping her interest.” Hawkeye closed his eyes all the way and relaxed against the back of the chair, raising his chin as BJ sunk his hand into his hair, massaging his temple.
“Too smart for her own good.”
“Just like her dad.”
BJ’s fingertips brushed the shell of his ear. “And somebody else I know.”
Hawkeye acknowledged it with a brief smile. BJ took hold of his ear more intentionally, scraping his nail down the shell, ending with a light squeeze at the lobe. Warmth spread across his scalp, down his neck. “I have the feeling you’re trying to distract me.”
“From what?”
Hawkeye opened his eyes just far enough to get a read on his face. Mute calm. A mask, though what it was hiding Hawkeye couldn’t yet tell. A little diagnostic work was called for. “From finding out about this PTA meeting. Give it up. I’ll call the hotline and ask for the minutes, don’t think I won’t.”
BJ’s face folded along all the familiar lines, smile-brightened. The mask fell. He pinched Hawkeye’s earlobe again. “I was elected room mother.”
“Room mother?” Hawkeye tipped his chin up, acquiescing to the pressure of BJ’s hand, baring his throat for another span of slow exploratory petting. “What’s that mean?”
“Nothing much. I’m in charge of event planning. Meetings, classroom holidays. The like.”
“Sounds like the perfect fit. I wouldn’t have elected any other mother.”
“Think so?”
Hawkeye put his newspaper aside entirely. It had been starting to crumple in his lap. “Throwing parties and taking care of Erin. The job’s made for you.”
“I didn’t expect it.” A pause. BJ gauging something. “You know, I was the only man there.”
“That so?” Hawkeye tried to look seductive, responding to a mostly-effaced trace of heat in BJ’s voice, to the teasing way BJ was pulling his tie loose but not off, a light pressure at the back of Hawkeye’s neck. He pictured again BJ perched on an undersized chair, bent nearly double, fiddling with the brim of his hat to have something to do with his hands. “Feel out of place?”
“At first. I got mistaken for an administrator a few times. I explained Peg was out showing a house. Then everyone understood. We all struck up a nice conversation.” A ghost of a smug smile, gone as it came. “I guess I won them over.”
Hawkeye pictured it again. A different facet of BJ: Funny, friendly, a wicked gossip when he was so inclined. Warm and competent. Adoring of his daughter. That version of BJ fit the scene neatly, trading anecdotes, news, gleaned practical knowledge with fellow parents. “Clearly. Your daughter’s first week of school and you’re already holding office. We’ll have to celebrate.”
“Funny. That’s what I was going to say.”
Hawkeye caught hold of BJ’s wrist as he traced Hawkeye’s collar-button. “Hang on. Hang on. Before we kick off the festivities. How much work is this thing going to be?”
“Only as much as I want to put into it.”
Hawkeye raised his eyebrows.
The imagined hang-dog expression actualized. Disappeared again when BJ laughed at himself. “I know. I’ll try not to take it too seriously.”
“Fine if you do. Just let me know what I can do to help.” He gave BJ a serious look, was undermined by BJ flicking open his collar one-handed. “I mean that.”
BJ bent slowly, planting his palms on Hawkeye’s upper thighs, bringing them nose-to-nose. His thumbs pressed into the creases of Hawkeye’s thighs. “Oh, I have a job for you, don’t worry.”
Hawkeye raised his eyebrows, inviting it. Angling for a kiss but not yet chasing it.
BJ got a hand under Hawkeye’s hem again, picking up where he’d left off at the beginning of the evening, running his fingertips through the hair below Hawkeye’s navel. “You have dessert with dinner?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I’m in charge of heading the bake sale at the end of the month. Have to put my best work forward. I’m going to need a taste-tester.”
“Ah. There’s a task I can rise to. When’s this job start?”
BJ pinched his hip. “Tonight. If we have enough butter.”
Hawkeye checked the time. Turned his wrist backward for BJ’s benefit, tapping the watch face. “It’s nearly nine.”
“So?”
“So it’s a work night. So—” BJ interrupted him with a kiss. “So you need to sleep,” Hawkeye murmured around a second kiss. He caught hold of BJ’s tie, stilling him. “So if Erin smells something baking, she’s going to wake up and come down here, and, while I’m always happy to see her, I’d like you to myself for the rest of the evening. Get it?”
“I get it. Baking postponed.” BJ patted his hip, amenable, though he wore an expression Hawkeye didn’t need to work to decipher.
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t look so put out. You can feed me a test batch tomorrow. I should be clutching my pearls. Dear sweet room mother getting off on baking for me. What would the PTA ladies say?”
BJ hummed and went back to leaning on his thighs, hard enough to make his quadriceps buzz pleasantly with the reduction in circulation. He bypassed Hawkeye’s mouth and pressed his lips against his jaw. Murmured against his neck, “Maybe that I’m a natural caretaker. That I know how to look after a man.”
“Is that what you call it?” Conversational quality was a necessary sacrifice with BJ close, hands spanning the breadth of his thighs, mouth moving down his neck to the open vee of his collar. Hawkeye closed his eyes and fell happily into sensation, the building reactivity of his skin, the electric sensitivity of touch.
Breath against his carotid: “I keep you well enough, don’t I?” The weight on one thigh intensified, driving his ischium into the wooden chair with a pleasant dull ache. With his free hand, BJ pulled Hawkeye’s belt open. In the kitchen’s dead expectant air the buckle’s jingle registered with obscene clarity.
Hawkeye steadied himself against the back of the chair. Anticipation made him shiver twice before BJ opened the button on his slacks. The character of the evening had shifted in his intended direction, but far faster than he’d anticipated. He had wanted to be gentle. Seduce BJ, take him to bed, treat him softly after a mutual long day. It was becoming clear BJ had other plans. A pace of his own. He opened his eyes and tried to read BJ’s posture, determine from where the mood had precipitated. “Oh, I’m kept. Happy. Diverted. I just didn’t know well-fed ranked so high on your list until after I married you.”
“I like you well-fed. Is that a problem?” BJ asked with studied innocence, wide-eyed as he palmed Hawkeye through his slacks.
“Jesus, Beej. In the kitchen?” Hawkeye dropped his head and tried to catch back up to the repartee, to keep the volley going as BJ’s broad hand cupped him. “No complaints here,” he managed. His hips bucked, going unevenly nowhere with BJ still holding him down by the thigh.
BJ knelt, pressing his legs open smoothly.
Hawkeye pulled in a breath. “We can go to bed. Or the couch, at least. Your knees—”
“Let me worry about my knees.” BJ kissed along his waistband, open-mouthed, getting his teeth around Hawkeye’s hip where it curved against his beltline. Another nip followed, a possessive bite to his lower belly.
“Proud of yourself?” Hawkeye asked, bracing against BJ’s shoulder. BJ bit him again, made him laugh. “You should be.”
“Why’s that?” BJ laid his face against Hawkeye’s inner thigh, stubble rasping against gabardine. With no warning besides proximity, BJ mouthed at him through his undershorts.
Hawkeye jolted and slammed his elbow into the table, hissing with the combination of pleasure and pain. “Can’t think when you do that.”
BJ hummed, smug, and took him out of his shorts. “I guess that’s as good a compliment as any.” He pulled Hawkeye closer by the hips, the chair dragging over the floor by a half-inch, a grating pull over tile until friction lost the battle and Hawkeye slipped down half a foot in the chair as BJ got him almost to the seat’s edge and took him into his mouth, and then to the base, nosing into his crotch with a rough noise of pleasure.
Hawkeye scrabbled for something to hold, newspaper ruching under his hand as his stomach seized, the influx of pleasure knocking his spine out of commission, precarious perched as he was on the seat’s edge. So much for the sports section. “Where is this coming from?”
BJ pulled off. The cold contrast to the heat of his mouth made Hawkeye wince. He rolled his hips into nothing. “You want to stop and talk about it?”
“Do we need to?”
“No.” BJ leaned in again.
Hawkeye stayed him with a hand on his shoulder. “I want to. Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” BJ laughed and sat back. “What does it look like I’m trying to do here?”
Hawkeye adjusted his undershorts, feeling exposed under the fluorescent kitchen light.
“I’m more than okay.” BJ squeezed his thigh. Seemed to mean it. Dark gaze, face flush. “I missed you today.”
“Oh, if that’s all.” BJ avoided looking at him, focusing instead on his palm against Hawkeye’s knee. Hawkeye narrowed his eyes. “Is that all?”
“All that matters,” BJ replied glibly, regaining his footing.
“Ah-huh.” Hawkeye closed his slacks and crossed his legs. “Not all that matters to me.”
“Hawk.” BJ fell to rest on his hip, legs splayed to the side, cheek against Hawkeye’s calf. Eyes wide. Supplicant.
Hawkeye softened. Before he could acquiesce, BJ exhaled through his nose, giving in. “I was hoping you’d be reading the paper. Glad I was right.”
“When?” Hawkeye looked down at the top of his head, the fine whorls of hair around his crown. “When you came home?”
A nod. “I’d imagined that. Or you eating dinner. Or—I don’t know. On the couch. Something.”
“As opposed to what?”
BJ shrugged.
“That covers my entire routine when you’re home late.”
“I guess so.” BJ pushed his face into Hawkeye’s leg, hard, rubbing against him insistently.
“The newspaper,” Hawkeye repeated. He tried to run back the evening from BJ’s point of view: An extended PTA meeting, coming home to find Hawkeye sitting at the table reading, dishes in the sink, still in workwear, nearly asleep. The appeal eluded him. Though he wasn’t the best judge of it. It was still a surprise, daily registered, that BJ found something in him worthy of commitment, was against all odds in his bed at the break of every new day. “Why the paper?”
BJ’s brow lowered. Hawkeye waited him out, and hooked a knee over his shoulder in the meantime. Jostled him reassuringly.
“At the meeting,” BJ started, and smiled, preemptively embarrassed. “There was a lot of conversation. Gossip. About the kids. Obviously. But also about husbands. Marriage, domestic life. The men at home. Complaints. Bragging.” BJ grasped him around the knee, leaning into his inner thigh. “I wanted to talk about you so badly. My man at home.”
“Oh,” Hawkeye said, surprised and touched. He shied away, reached for a defense: “All bad things, I’m sure.”
“Not in the least.” Earnestness from BJ was piercing, hard to take directly. “Some of the stories I heard…” he bared his teeth. “I wanted to show off. Talk about how well you treat me. How happy I am. Instead I just sat there missing you. Picturing coming home to you.”
“To me reading the newspaper. Waiting for you.” It was coming together slowly, the thing from BJ’s perspective.
“I was so grateful for you. Am so grateful. Affectionate. All I could focus on by the end was how much I wanted you, how I couldn’t wait to run home and—” Tension rose and then receded along BJ’s shoulders. “Show you how much I love you.”
Hawkeye laughed lowly. Recalled the end of the last-minute trach, the overwork-exhaustion and back-ache, picturing through the entirety of the surgery coming home and tipping into bed, wrapping around BJ like a contained parenthetical, humming his appreciation into BJ’s neck, and finally relaxing. “I had something like that in mind myself.”
“Something like it.”
“Maybe domestic in a less exciting way,” Hawkeye added, turning over the bare outline of a fantasy he sensed in the fabric of BJ’s recounting of the evening, one of mild exaggeration, an arrangement of roles stricter than those they inhabited interchangeably, nurturer and provider, care-giver and receiver. “But I’m not opposed to your angle.”
“And what’s my angle?” BJ asked, blithe, as though he weren’t kneeling at Hawkeye’s feet, head in his lap.
Hawkeye let the chair-back take his weight, opening his legs, passing his hand down the gentle rise of his middle to rest with his fingertips brushing the open button of his fly, relaxing and settling into himself fully, comfortably, disinclined to move. BJ liked him to pretend to be lazier than he was.
BJ looked him over, keen and alert as any diagnostic encounter. Sensing the change in posture, the slip into somebody like but other than himself. In response BJ grinned, harmlessly smug about getting his way, and laid his head in Hawkeye’s lap again, expression shifting to one of eager restraint. Willing to do as he was told—to a point.
“What did you have in mind?” BJ asked, nosing slowly, innocently, into Hawkeye’s inner thigh. Maintaining eye contact, smiling sweetly.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. Take care of me however you’d like, I’m too tired to move. Then I get to take you up to bed and return the favor. Providing you do a good job.”
“I always do a good job.”
Hawkeye shrugged.
A threatening intensity of heat filtered into BJ’s unblinking stare. “You know I do.”
Hawkeye folded under the twin pressures of historical truth and fear of earning some kind of prolonged teasing. “You’re always good.”
“To you?” BJ slipped a hand up his shirt again, teasing along his waistband.
“Of course. And in general.” He meant to say something else, elaborate on the praise, affirm how often he thought of BJ during the day, hard cases, exhausting hours in OR, the fact that he had never had somebody be so consistently good to him for so long, a state of affairs that was only bearable in its terrifying intensity because he trusted BJ more than he worried about losing him—all of that disappeared into a gasp as BJ pushed his legs apart and took him into his mouth again, at the same time wrapping his arms around his hips in a loose, affectionate hug.
Hawkeye grabbed at the sports section again, and put a hole clean through to the advice columns. In tossing his head he caught sight of a photograph, framed, early days in camp, BJ’s arm around him, the careful, fraternal posture of two people delicately aware but not acknowledging the truth of their relation: God, Hawkeye thought, cupping the back of BJ’s head, holding him close, breaking his gaze away from the past: if I could see myself now—all good things.