Page 67 of Making It Live!

I can't watch you become someone I don't recognize.

God, I'd been a stupid kid.

Nelson made a small sound.It was a soft exhalation, the kind of noise people make surfacing from a dream.His hand on my stomach twitched and then settled, fingers splayed against my skin.His eyelashes fluttered.He blinked, slowly, and his blue eyes focused on me from six inches away, and I watched him remember where he was.

His face softened.The corner of his mouth lifted and a crease that had been on his forehead in sleep smoothed out, and he looked at me like I was something he was still deciding whether he'd actually woken up to or invented in a dream.

"You're staring," he muttered.

"Yes."My voice came out rougher than I expected."I am."

"For how long?"

"A while."

He closed his eyes again and pressed his face against my shoulder."Creep."

I laughed — a stupid, full, helpless laugh that startled both of us.Nelson's mouth pressed into a smile against my collarbone and I felt his smile more than I saw it, and that did something to me that I couldn't have named under oath.

"What time is it?"he mumbled.

"Early.Five-something."

"Mm."He didn't move."I should go."

"You should."

Neither of us moved.

A minute passed.Maybe two.Nelson's fingers, the ones splayed on my stomach, drew a small, absent circle.The same lazy pattern he used to draw on me years ago, when neither of us had anywhere to be and our tiny apartment was full of cheap furniture, the radiator was clanking, and we believed everything good lasted forever because we had no evidence yet that it didn't.

I had to close my eyes for a second.

"I'll make coffee," I said, when I could.

"Your coffee is terrible."

"My coffee is famously terrible."

"It's an embarrassment to journalism."

"And yet you're going to drink it."

"And yet I am."

I extracted myself carefully from the couch, retrieved the throw blanket from where it had slipped, and tucked it over him.He watched me, eyes half-open, with the expression of a man who had not been tucked into anything in a very long time.I shuffled to the Keurig on the credenza, naked.

The Keurig made its terrible asthmatic noises.I rinsed two mugs in the small sink and watched my reflection ghost in the window over it.My hair was a catastrophe and my mouth was swollen.There was a mark on my throat that was definitely going to need camouflage today.I looked, by every objective measure, terrible.

I had never seen myself look better.

I brought the mugs back to the couch.Nelson had pulled the blanket up to his shoulders and arranged himself into something approximating dignity, which on Nelson was a Nelson-specific feat — his hair was still wrecked and he looked, for the first time in the years I'd been quietly Googling him monthly, like a person and not like a brand.He accepted the mug.Sniffed it.

"Christ, Jimmy."

"I warned you."

"This is offensive."