Mikey and the Chickadee

Chapter 10 - Part 1

By Thursday the city had descended into a strange, bitter cold, which I believed optimistically to be winter's final death rattle before yielding to spring. The radiated heat inside Mikey's apartment was befitting now, and not at all uncomfortable as I stretched out opposite him on the couch. At his suggestion I had thrown together a change of clothes and ventured over after dinner. We would leave for work together in the morning.

Tuesday night's dinner had wormed into discussion and Mikey lifted the bulk of his arms, interlocking his fingers on top of his head. "Sophie likes to talk," he said. "I don't know if you noticed when you were alone with her. She'll sort of lead the conversation sometimes."

I shrugged. "It didn't bother me. I thought she was really nice."

"Yeah, and I don't mean to say it's a bad thing. She's great at jumping in whenever there's a lull in meetings with clients." He lowered his arms and cuddled up against the couch cushion. "What did you guys talk about when I was away?" he asked, only casually disguising a furtive curiosity.

"You, mostly," I said, hiding part of my face with a throw-pillow.

He closed his eyes, head resting against the cushion. "Part of me knew that she would talk about me if I wasn't there. I don't mind, really. As long as she didn't make me look like an ass."

"She didn't," I said. "I promise." It was the first time since dinner that he'd shown anything other than a passing, joking interest in what Sophie and I had discussed when we were alone. I found this heightened fascination problematic, owing to the disparity between my will to hide nothing from Mikey, and a sense that full disclosure would be, apart from everything else, unhelpful. It might also be disastrous in terms of Mikey's confidence and amassing effort to understand himself. I tried to imagine how it would go—explaining how things had gotten quite overt, and that the conversation had been almost entirely about him, about how Sophie had come to accept, beyond question, this relegating truth about him that he could not yet see. And above all, that this man who, for example, had professed explicit lack of interest in ever kissing another man, was of such crushing substance that it made him into someone for whom biding my time wasn't a complete misadventure. In spite of compliments diverted toward his character, the reductive, don't-worry-he'll-come-around tone of the conversation rubbed shoulders with offensiveness. I wanted to protect him from that.

I had spent Wednesday wondering intermittently about Mikey's motivation to have Sophie meet me.

He could not have anticipated that we would have such extensive opportunity to speak in his absence; on the other hand, I trusted he knew his cousin's nature. Maybe he sensed something about her intuition with respect to him. Perhaps, during the plausible instant that she and I were alone, he sought to have me know things about him that he himself could not explain. Ultimately, though, my predilection to overthink things exhausted me; these thoughts were outlandish and at the moment impossible to confirm.

"I got the idea that she's happy we're hanging out," I said. "She thinks really highly of you. She said you're a good guy."

"Naturally," said Mikey with a grin. "Yeah, I remember when I was telling her about you she got all excited. I haven't held on to a lot of friends from my past, and she gets worried when I'm not being very social. Really, there's nothing to worry about, but I can't convince her of that."

"She cares a lot about you."

"Fuck yeah she does," he said, pulling his knees to his chest. "She's three years older. When we were younger, that gave her a lot of authority over me. Sometimes it still kind of seems like it's there. It's not really on her terms, though; if anything I'm imagining it."