CINNAMON

I decide not to see him on Saturday. On Sunday I text him.

“Meet me at Kilim,” I text. Maybe I can make Luke be like regular people, make me be like regular people who wait here for their fathers to get home, hang out with their friends.

He comes. Like everybody, jacket collar pulled up around his neck, a stocking cap over his ears, hands shoved in his pockets. “Eleven degrees,” I hear at the counter. Luke is eyeing others as he makes his way in. He has to check the hands in a crowded place, he had told me. Where are people’s hands? What are they holding? Kilim is tight and small. He watches.

We order coffee, mine with extra room. Then we go to the counter where there are shakers of cinnamon and nutmeg and pitchers of cream and milk. We look at each other, catch each other’s eyes from beneath all our clothes.

I say, “Hey, Luke.”

He says, “Hey, Seal.”

“Seal?”

“You’re like a seal moving through the water. In my mind.”

I try to laugh, and I fill my cup with milk and shake cinnamon, missing the cup, getting it all over the counter. “When you say that,” I whisper to him, “it feels like sex.”

He keeps his eyes down. But he says it again. “Seal.”

This isn’t working. This is nothing like being with my friends. We are gliding, slow motion, through the sea. We sit in the back at Kilim. I take off my cap, and my hair falls. We’re knee to knee beneath Turkish carpets hanging from the walls and tucked in the scent of our coffee doused in cinnamon. All my life there’s been a book at Kilim with threads that stitch the pages so loosely, whole sections fall away from the spine. It’s by Rumi, and someone has left it on the table where we’re sitting.

He reaches for me, his fingers on the flesh inside my wrist. Somehow I feel it to the cradle of my spine. We pull back in the din of voices in the café, crack up at ourselves, as if we weren’t drowning. He opens the book on the table. “Had a friend over there who read Rumi. Took it with him on patrol.”

He presses the frayed spine to the table and turns the book so that we can both read. On one page, Luke drops his finger to a line. What hurts you blesses you.

Is this what praying is? Cinnamon in our coffee, in our hair; deep-red Turkish carpets; the clink of cups; threads that hold a spine.

I’ll stay a little while.