I met Rob and Adam at the studio on Saturday morning, not long after Justin left for one of his favorite parts of his volunteer gig -- storytime in the park. He always came home from that in a great mood, because he loved being with the kids, and sometimes he got to be the one to read the book. He said their smiles could help pull him anyone of a bad mood, but I had my doubts about that -- I was pretty sure that a prerequisite to that might have been also liking being around random people’s children. I loved Gus as a kid most of the time (probably due to the limited time I had him), and I love Esme and Sophia in small doses, but there’s definitely a limit to how much I can handle when it comes to interacting with kids. Justin clearly didn’t have that struggle, and I was glad he’d found something to do that he enjoyed, that didn’t remind him too much of his on-hold art career.

The whole way over to the studio, I wondered when Justin might feel ready to go back. If it would be soon, or if it might still be many months yet. I’d already decided that indications were that it probably wouldn’t be “never,” since he was enjoying the pottery thing so much. But I knew there still had to be a lot of baggage associated with going back to painting and sculpting that simply wasn’t there with pottery.

When I arrived, Rob and Adam were already there, sitting in the building’s otherwise-unoccupied lobby, ready to get to work. I hadn’t been in Justin’s studio in months -- not since the day I brought him lunch -- so I wondered what we’d find when we got upstairs, and I couldn’t deny that I was more than a little apprehensive as I stuck my key in the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open.

The blinds on the floor-to-ceiling windows were all closed, leaving the room with a dim, somewhat depressing cast. The sofa we’d bought so he could rest if he needed to (and honestly, so we could fuck, though we hadn’t done it there in a long time) had clearly been set up for sleeping, with a pillow and a blanket that he’d apparently bought for the studio, because I’d never seen them. There was a small pile of wadded-up tissues on the floor below the pillow, suddenly reminding me of what Justin said he’d been doing on the last day he’d been there -- crying as he tried to figure out how to tell me he’d dropped out of the show. In my mind’s eye, I felt like I could see him there, curled up, with his face buried in the pillow, and it made my heart ache. It made me wish I could turn back time and take the afternoon off and drop in and visit Justin in the exact moment when he’d needed me most. To comfort him and tell him I understood. To tell him it was okay. That I was there and I always would be. To just be there for him, in hopes I could have somehow prevented what happened in the twenty-four hours that followed.

As if he could read my thoughts, Rob chose that moment to come up beside me and put his arm around my shoulders.

“Don’t go there,” he said. His voice was soft, and he was running his fingers back and forth over my bicep.

“How’d you know?” I asked, as I turned my head just slightly to face him, blinking to force back the dampness I could feel building in my eyes.

“I know you.” He smiled and gave my shoulders a squeeze, then let go and backed up, moving toward one of the workbenches, gesturing with his head for me to follow him.

Both of Justin’s large workbenches were completely covered in art supplies, discarded canvases and drawings, lumps of clay, and half-completed sculptures. There were partially-completed paintings on every easel and lining the empty walls, but nothing appeared to be finished. Some of them looked like they’d been painted over a time or two. I felt like I was looking at ghosts -- ghosts of how Justin had felt when he’d been in the depths of his depression. Everything he’d been working on was dominated by dark colors, clearly reflective of his mood at the time, just as his art always had been. Looking at it all was hard for me, even, so I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like for him.

Beside me, Rob and Adam looked around, evaluating the room for a few moments, before Rob cleared his throat -- a clear indication that he, too, was having a hard time processing the scene and imagining the headspace Justin must have been in -- and said, “Well, I guess here’s as good a place to start as any.”

Three hours later, all of Justin’s previous work had been stored in a closet that I knew he never used, locked safely away where it would be ready when -- if -- he wanted to work on any of it again. The blinds were open again, bathing the room in a bright, renewing sunlight. Justin’s workbenches were all clean, and we’d trashed any supplies that hadn’t been properly stored, and organized everything else. I knew perfectly well that nothing would stay that organized once Justin came back, though, because Rob and I were the neat freaks in our foursome, and we were the ones that had taken care of that part, while Adam did most of the heavy lifting.

We were just about finished -- tidying up the last of the paintbrushes and putting them in the drawer they belonged in -- when my phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket and saw that it was Justin, which still always made my heart skip a beat, because in the back of my mind, I wondered if something was wrong. I also wondered if that feeling was ever going to go away -- if my subconscious would ever learn to trust that Justin might be calling with good news instead.

“Hey,” I said into the phone, as I signaled to Rob and Adam to be quiet, so as not to give away our location or what we were doing. “What’s up?”

“Just wondering where you were… I got home a little early. Did you go over to see Nick again?”

“No, I, uh…” I struggled for a second or two to come up with a believable lie, ultimately deciding to go with a half-truth instead. “Rob and Adam needed me to help them with something.”

“Oh, okay. I could come and help too. Are you at their place? What are you guys working on?”

“We’re almost done,” I said quickly, finally feeling my talent for creating smooth lies starting to kick in. “I should be home in about a half hour. Then I’m all yours.” I purposely made my voice sound a little more sultry for those last few words, in hopes that they might get Justin’s wheels turning and distract him from asking any further questions. (And the possibility of spending a little time with one of us inside the other wasn't bad either.)

Justin laughed -- the breathy chuckle that told me my message had been received. “I’ll be waiting,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. That coquettish, slightly shy smile he always had whenever I got him too aroused in public, and he was having a hard time waiting until we got home. Only he was home; I was the one who wasn’t.

After I hung up the phone, Rob, Adam, and I quickly finished what we’d been working on before turning off the lights, locking up the studio, and going our separate ways.

I took the subway back to our apartment, which should have only taken me about twenty minutes, tops, but ended up taking much longer because the elevator at the station closest to our apartment was out, which meant I had to get back on the next train and go out of my way until I got to a place where I could turn around and try again from the other direction, where thankfully, that elevator was working.

Should have taken a car, I thought to myself, as I finally pushed through the front door into the lobby of our building, making my way to the elevator. One thing I had gotten out of my unusually long ride was a lot of time to think about how we pretty much had the best damn friends in the entire world, and to talk myself out of telling Justin right then that we’d cleaned up his studio for him. The cleaned-up studio wasn’t the only surprise I had for Justin, and I didn’t want to ruin any part of it.

But when I got upstairs and went into our apartment, keeping the secret got much harder, because the sight that was in front of me when I opened our door was one that I had to blink a few times before I believed it was real life and not a hallucination. Justin was sitting on the sofa, his feet pulled up onto the cushions, sketchpad balanced on his lap, drawing. With his right hand, no less, using the tool Rob had given him right after his accident, that hooked over his index finger and held the pencil in the crook between the finger and his thumb, so Justin wouldn’t have to grip it as tightly. I hadn’t seen him use it in a couple of years -- not since he’d retrained his left hand to be his dominant hand -- and I wondered why he was using it then, but now that I look back, I wonder if it was yet another way to get some separation between past and present. Between what he had been doing before, and what he was doing now.

“Hi,” Justin said, a shy smile on his face as he looked down at his work. “I was just doodling.”

I took off my jacket and crossed the room, transferring to the sofa so I could sit next to Justin, because sitting in front of him -- separated -- was never the same as being able to touch him. I halfway expected Justin to turn his drawing away from me, not wanting me to see what he was working on, but he didn’t. He was still looking down at it, absently rubbing his right hand with his left as he studied it.

It was a rough sketch, still missing a lot of fine detail, but it was easy to tell what it was -- an older couple, two men, holding hands and leaning on one another as they sat on a bench, gazing at two children sitting on the ground in front of them.

Gently, I took Justin’s hand in my own, sliding the pencil grip off of his finger before taking over the massage -- being mindful not to put too much pressure on the muscles that I knew got sore and cramped when he overworked it. He hadn’t needed this from me in a long time, but I still enjoyed doing it. It felt good to do something that helped Justin. It always had, even in the times when I never would have admitted it.

“I forgot how tired my right hand gets now when I try to draw with it,” he said, his voice quiet and a little detached, like he was lost somewhere in his thoughts.

“Who were you drawing?” I asked, partly because I was curious, and partly because I wanted to pull Justin back to the present, in case the road his thoughts were about to lead him down wasn’t a good one.

“Oh, just a couple I saw at the park today. They were there with their grandchildren, and you could just see how in love they still were with each other, and how much they loved those kids. I kept thinking about them the whole way home… What they looked like. The love that was in their eyes when they looked at each other. So I decided to draw them.”

That was something the “old” Justin had done often -- sitting down to sketch something, mostly to get it out of his head. Putting it down on paper so he wouldn’t forget it. But it was something I hadn’t seen him do in months. Longer than I realized, once I thought about it, just like so many other things in our lives that had once been a constant and somehow ceased to be once depression took hold.

I was still rubbing Justin’s hand, feeling the tense muscles relax slowly beneath my fingers, when I heard his voice again, soft and wistful.

“I want that to be us someday.”

“It will be.”

The words came out of me before I could stop them. Before I had a chance to even think about what they meant or whether or not I had it in my power to make them true. Whether or not I could keep that promise. If anything in my forty-eight years on earth had shown me that life was unpredictable -- that I wasn’t in control, but I was merely along for the ride, and I had to allow the universe to take me wherever it would -- the last few months in our lives had.

Justin went still for a moment, then looked up at me, his eyes shining with tears.

“I know that we don’t know that,” I said, still holding his hand in mine, my voice much huskier than I would have liked. “We can’t know. But I want it to be us.”

He blinked, and a single tear slid down his cheek as his lips turned up into a smile. His sketchpad fell to the floor as he wrapped his arms around me and kissed me -- hard. Reminding me of a night years ago, when I’d finally admitted what I felt for Justin, standing in the middle of the street as smoke poured from the building that had once been my playground. This was different, though. This time, my words weren’t motivated by fear, but by desire.

Justin kissed me again, tears still glistening in his eyes, then laid his head on my shoulder. His arms around me, and my arms around him.

As we sat there together, holding each other, the realization of what I’d just said -- my own prayer, in a way, for what I wanted to have happen in my life -- started to sink in. How differently I felt now, compared to the early months and years of our relationship, long before I would even admit that was what it was. How on my thirtieth birthday, when Lindsay had gone on and on about how she wanted to grow old with Melanie, get wrinkles and gray hair, and become a grandmother, insinuating that I might someday want the same sort of things, I’d shrugged off her words with a joke.

Some past version of myself would have made a sarcastic comment this time, too. Changed the subject. Anything to avoid talking about the idea of getting older, much less sharing those years with another person. But this version of myself wanted to give Justin what he wanted, because I loved him. And I really did want the same things. Maybe not the wrinkles and gray hair, but spending as many years as possible with Justin by my side… that, I wanted. Without a doubt.

I wasn’t the same person anymore -- the King of Liberty Avenue, whose entire sense of self-worth was based on looks and how many guys he could fuck in the back room on a given night. I’d been forced to let go of that person a long time ago, by life and a circumstance known as spinal cord injury.

Through it all, though, I never lost Justin. He still loved me, even though I’d spent six months lying to him by omission -- not telling him what had happened to me. He loved me as I struggled to accept it all. As I tried to figure out who I really was underneath all of the bravado and the sex-god reputation that I could no longer physically maintain. As I worked toward becoming the person I now realize I’d had the makings of all along. Justin was always there, even when I felt lost. Because he loved me. Unconditionally.

I still didn’t always feel like I deserved it, but I was trying to be better about that. Trying to be more accepting, more open. Trying to be the partner Justin deserved to have. Supporting him in the same way he’d supported me -- the way we’d promised to support each other as we stood together in Boston twelve years before, on a snowy December day.

The way I wanted to for the rest of our lives.

The way that I promised myself I would, from that point forward.