A Typesetting Error in Chainmail

The audience released one appalled noise and then remembered its manners.

Kenta hauled at the laptop cord. The projector continued shining.

“Battery backup,” Mervyn called from near the sponsor banner. “I paid extra.”

“Of course you did,” Kenta said.

The screen offered another line.

19. A public humiliation becomes a scene only when someone insists upon character development.

No one could have arranged it. That was the most offensive part: it had arranged itself, out of his vocabulary and his trousers.

Tsubasa picked up the watering can, set it upright at Kenta’s feet, and placed his cue cards on the lectern. Each movement had a terrible neatness.

“You asked for control over the pageant,” he said. “You meant control over the story.”

“No.” Kenta pulled his tunic lower with one hand. “I meant we decide what happens to us.”

“And you made notes on what I was for.”

“I made notes because I was trying not to write you.”

“You were writing me while you wrote that.”

Kenta’s objection stopped somewhere before speech. He had spent the day protesting the intentions everybody else had assigned him. Now proof of his own habit blazed twelve feet high.

“You think affection is a stage direction,” Tsubasa said. “Yet whenever someone gets close, you turn him into work. Is that meant to be safer for him or only for you?”

“I did not write it for an audience.”

“But you wrote it where an audience could find it. Again.”

Tsubasa stepped past the false arch and through the canvas door at the side of the stage. He did not hurry. That somehow made the departure worse.

Kenta picked up the empty watering can and closed both hands around its handle. Every carefully rehearsed contempt in him—against romance, spectacle, and strangers who wanted things plainly—failed to give him cover. How did a man ask to be seen as himself after he had put the worse version in type first?

Kenta did not ask anyone. He left through a service flap beside the false arch, carried the empty watering can across the herb beds, and deposited himself in the potting pavilion, where darkness made a modest claim of privacy. Rain ticked over the canvas roof. Rows of pots stood beneath their covers; damp earth and crushed rosemary gave the place a severe, medicinal cleanliness.

He had abandoned the detachable ceremonial codpiece on a peg by the door. In crimson velvet, it looked less like a garment than a bureaucrat’s idea of a threat.

Later, while revising the incident report, Kenta would object to the word fled, then leave it in. A man whose trousers had failed during an involuntary reading of his interior life was permitted one inaccurate verb.

The latch lifted.

Tsubasa entered without closing the door behind him. Rain dotted his sleeves. One bare hand rested on the doorframe, soil dark beneath the nails, and Kenta hated that he noticed it even now, when noticing anything about Tsubasa seemed liable to become evidence.

“I am not here to see whether you are all right,” Tsubasa said.

“What a relief.”

“I did not come to accept a polished apology. I came to demand one that does not make me into a clever paragraph.”

Kenta put both hands on the potting bench. The wood was cool and rough beneath his palms. Every useful sentence arrived dressed in clauses, carrying footnotes, prepared to make him look like the injured party in a situation he had authored.

“I am sorry,” he said.

Tsubasa waited.

“I made you into something I could arrange. An opponent, a description, a man whose patience I could borrow for my own work. I put you in my notes because it was easier to make you manageable on paper than admit you might have an opinion of me.”

“Better.”

“It is not enough.”

“No.”

“I am sorry that, when the file went on that screen, I thought first about how foolish I looked. I should have thought first about what I had done to you.”

Tsubasa stepped farther into the pavilion. “Do not give me an apology that knows it may be quoted afterward.”

“I do not know how to make it sound less written.”

“Try one sentence you cannot use.”

Kenta looked at the red velvet monstrosity on the peg. It had, in its way, suffered less than he had.

“I wanted you to like me.”

Tsubasa’s face altered, not kindly exactly, but with attention.

“The allotment contest mattered because your opinion mattered,” Kenta continued. “I kept entering against you because a score sheet let me pretend I wanted to win, when really I wanted you to look at my plot and think I had done something worth noticing.”

“You grew a three-headed squash.”

“It had character.”

“It had a fungal disorder.”

“That is, regrettably, a fair assessment.”

A short laugh escaped Tsubasa, and he appeared annoyed by it. “You insulted my prize marrow for two consecutive summers.”

“Your prize marrow looked upholstered.”

“You see?”

“I was trying to make you look at me.”

“That is the worst courtship technique I have encountered, and I work beside men who wear decorative codpieces voluntarily.”

“Not voluntarily,” Kenta said. “Contractually.”

Tsubasa’s hand left the doorframe. “I did not think you wanted me to like you. You made every serious thing into a joke before it could become serious.”

“Yes.”

“I mistook your defensive wit for contempt because contempt felt safer than wanting something from you.”

The sentence arrived without decoration. Kenta had no defense prepared for it, which was perhaps why it entered so cleanly.

“Wanting is not safer,” he said.

“I have noticed.”

“I never despised you.”

“I know that now. It does not repair tonight.”

“No.” Kenta looked down at his hands. “It does not.”

“I may still be angry tomorrow.”

“You should be.”

“I may correct every comma you use for the foreseeable future.”

“That seems proportionate.”

“It is not forgiveness.”

“I know.”

Tsubasa considered him for a moment, then lifted one hand toward Kenta’s collar. “May I undo that?”

Kenta had been wearing the stiff ceremonial collar since Marion had declared it more medieval than breathable. “Please.”

Tsubasa came close enough for Kenta to see rain caught in his hair. He opened one brass button, then another, each movement calm and exact. The collar gave way around Kenta’s throat. He had not realized how fiercely it had pressed there until it stopped.

“May I hold your hand?” Kenta asked.

Tsubasa offered it.

Kenta turned the hand over carefully. Soil had settled in a faint crescent near one knuckle and at the base of Tsubasa’s thumb, ordinary marks from a day spent saving plants from weather and people from themselves.

“May I?”

“For what?”

Kenta looked up. “May I kiss your hand?”

Tsubasa’s answer came after a beat. “Yes.”

Kenta kissed the soil from Tsubasa’s knuckles, one careful mark after another, until the earth was gone. It did not absolve anything. It did not turn the projector off or repair a seam in borrowed velvet. It was only what he had asked permission to do.

Tsubasa’s other hand rested lightly at Kenta’s collar.

“May I kiss you?” Kenta asked.

“Do you want this because of tonight?”

“I want it because of you. Tonight merely stripped the disguises off badly.”

“And if I ask you to stop?”

“I stop.”

“And if you want me to stop?”

“I will say so.”

Tsubasa studied him, then said, “Then yes.”

Kenta kissed him. At first it was brief and cautious, a question with no herald present to misread it. Tsubasa kissed him again, his hand still near Kenta’s loosened collar, and Kenta kept his own hands where Tsubasa could feel them: one around his palm, one open at his side.

Rain worked steadily over the canvas.

They drew apart only enough to look at one another.

“All right?” Tsubasa asked.

“Yes. You?”

“Yes.”

A gust worried the pavilion door. Tsubasa caught it with his free hand, still holding Kenta’s with the other, and drew it shut. The ceremonial codpiece remained on its peg beside the hose, an extravagant comma in the evening’s grammar.

What, Kenta wondered, was a man meant to do with a beginning that had arrived dressed as a disaster?

By morning, the beginning had acquired cold tea, a damp collar, and a joint editorial meeting.

The rain had withdrawn to the roofs and hedges, leaving Brackenmere bright with puddles and humiliation. Kenta came out of the potting pavilion beside Tsubasa, which felt more conspicuous than walking through the gate beneath a banner reading I HAVE MADE A POORLY TIMED EMOTIONAL DISCOVERY. No one appeared to notice. The early staff were busy hauling painted battlements upright and treating last night’s disaster as a scheduling issue.

Tsubasa had fastened Kenta’s collar correctly at dawn, while explaining that brass buttons did not respond to literary despair. Now they drank tea beside the rehearsal tent: Kenta from a paper Solander cup bearing a smudged crest, Tsubasa from a chipped porcelain mug decorated with a knight who had lost one arm.