The last time I’d seen Finch was a month earlier, at a reception in his honor at Cipriani’s. I’d gone because Keith had said they needed bodies. Of course, when I arrived at the end of a brutal workday, there were already hundreds of people in attendance. Typical Keith— he needed you desperately until he forgot all about you. Finch had greeted me with a too-tight hug before pronouncing my dress “adventurous” in a tone that made me want to ask what he meant and also made me want to tell him off. I couldn’t remember now if I’d said anything back. I couldn’t remember much from that night, except for the way it ended.
Now I kept blinking at Finch as though that might make him disappear. Keith had probably sniffed out that we were up to something and brought along Finch as a human shield. What a disaster.
Derrick appeared then, sheepish at the back of the living room, where he’d evidently been squirreled away this entire time. He ran an exasperated hand over his brown hair, longer now and shaggier, but in an appealing way. I was always surprised by how good Derrick looked these days, so much better than he had in college. He’d come into his own over the years.
“I told them not to do it,” Derrick said, sounding very much like the disapproving literature professor he was. He pushed his tortoise-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. “They wouldn’t listen to me.”
No one ever listened to Derrick.
“Where’s your car, Derrick?” Jonathan’s brow pinched angrily as he looked toward the driveway. “And how did you guys get in? You didn’t break a window or something, did you?”
“We parked up the road and walked back. And break a window, seriously?” Keith looked wounded.
“No need to break and enter anyway when we had these.” Finch dangled a set of keys in the air. His other hand was hooked around the molding above the living room entryway as he stretched his long body forward, tattooed bicep flexing. On purpose, no doubt. “You shouldn’t leave ’em under the mat.” As usual, he was leaning into his southern drawl. “Down in Arkansas that’s an open invitation to come on inside. Right, Derrick?”
“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about, Finch,” Derrick said. “It was your dumb idea to come in, and Keith’s idiotic decision to go along with it.”
“Aw, Keith has to listen to me. You know that, Derrick,” Finch said. “Because without me, there is no him. Right, Keith?”
“Absolutely,” Keith said, as if he couldn’t have cared less how much Finch demeaned him. He probably wasn’t even listening. For all I knew, he was high out of his mind at that very moment. Actually, he definitely was. “Come on, Steph.” Keith stepped closer to me. “Even you thought it was a little funny. You’re smiling on the inside.”
“I am not,” I said, softening despite myself when Keith wrapped an arm around my waist and kissed me on the cheek.
Keith had that effect on people— all people. Men, women, gay, straight, or anything else. Being even briefly in the center of his attention was like staring into the setting sun. You couldn’t pull your eyes away, even after they began to burn.
I could still remember the night freshman year Keith had come to find me in the library, dragging me out to his studio to see a painting.
“Please,” he had begged. “I just finished the first in the series. And it’s amazing.” He got down on his paint-splattered knees in front of my desk, deep in the library stacks. The same desk I worked at every night, so everyone always knew exactly where to come find me. And come they did. Something I must have secretly enjoyed— because I could have moved around to avoid being found. “You need to see it.”
“Me, or someone? Because if you just want someone to say it’s great, we can skip the hike over there,” I said. “It’s great, Keith. I’m sure it is.”
“No, you. You, specifically, need to see it,” he said, his eyes dancing. “It’ll be worth it. I promise.”
Begrudgingly I’d gone with him, heading across the dark campus to his art studio at nearly midnight. And there, set up in his studio under a spotlight, was a huge canvas, a painting of me as a little girl, facing a vast and roiling sea. I’d told my friends the story about my parents not watching— consumed as they both were grading term papers on the beach— as three-year-old me ran right out into the waves and almost drowned. To me, the story explained everything anyone needed to know about my family— the subtle heartbreak of benign neglect. Most people didn’t get it. But Keith had— it was all right there in that painting.