studio apartment was just like an extension of the café—the same polished floorboards and rough white walls, bookshelves filled with secondhand books. The only differences were the surfboard and guitar leaning against the wall, the stack of CDs and stereo.
“I can’t believe it,” said Jane.
“What?” asked Tom.
“You’re into jigsaws,” she breathed, pointing at a half-finished jigsaw on the table. She looked at the box. It was a proper hard-core (as her brother would have said), two-thousand-piece jigsaw featuring a black-and-white photo of wartime Paris.
“We jigsaw,” said Jane. “My family. We’re kind of obsessed.”
“I like to always have one on the go,” said Tom. “I find them sort of meditative.”
“Exactly,” said Jane.
“Tell you what,” said Tom. “I’ll give you some clothes, and you can have some pumpkin soup with me and help me jigsaw.”
He pulled some tracksuit pants and a hooded sweatshirt from a chest of drawers, and she went into his bathroom and put her soaked clothes, right down to her underwear, into his sink. The dry clothes smelled like Tom and Blue Blues.
“I feel like Charlie Chaplin,” she said, with the sleeves hanging below her wrists and pulling up the waist of the tracksuit pants.
“Here,” said Tom, and he neatly folded up the sleeves of the shirt above her wrists. Jane submitted like a child. She felt unaccountably happy. Cherished.
She sat down at the table and Tom brought them over bowls of pumpkin soup swirled with sour cream and buttered sourdough bread.
“I feel like you’re always feeding me,” said Jane.
“You need feeding,” said Tom. “Eat up.”
She took a mouthful of the sweet, spicy soup.
“I know what’s different about you!” said Tom suddenly. “You’ve had all your hair cut off! It looks great.”
Jane laughed. “I was thinking on the way here that a gay man would notice straightaway that I’d had a haircut.” She picked up a piece of the puzzle and found a spot for it. It felt like being at home, eating and doing a puzzle. “Sorry. I know that’s a terrible cliché.”
“Um,” said Tom.
“What?” said Jane. She looked up at him. “That’s where it goes. Look. It’s the corner of the tank. This soup is incredible. Why don’t you have it on the menu?”
“I’m not gay,” said Tom.
“Oh yes you are,” said Jane merrily. She assumed he was making a bad sort of joke.
“No,” said Tom. “No, I’m not.”
“What?”
“I know I do jigsaws and make amazing pumpkin soup, but I’m actually straight.”
“Oh!” said Jane. She could feel her face turning crimson. “I’m sorry. I thought . . . I didn’t think, I knew! How did I know? Someone told me. Madeline told me ages ago. But I remember it! She told me this whole story about how you broke up with your boyfriend and you took it really bad and you just spent hours crying and surfing . . .”
Tom grinned. “Tom O’Brien,” he said. “That’s who she was talking about.”
“Tom O’Brien, the smash-repair guy?” Tom O’Brien was big and burly with a black bushy beard. She had never even properly registered the fact that the two Toms had the same name, they were so different.
“It’s perfectly understandable,” said Tom. “It would seem more likely that Tom the barista was gay than Tom the giant smash-repairer. He’s happy now, by the way, in love with someone new.”
“Huh,” said Jane. She considered. “His receipts did smell really nice.”
Tom snorted.
“I hope I didn’t, um, offend you,” said Jane.
She hadn’t fully closed the bathroom door when she’d gotten dressed. She’d left it partly ajar, the way she would have if Tom had been a girl, so that they could keep talking. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. She had talked to him so freely. She’d always been so free with him. If she’d known he was straight she would have kept a part of herself safe. She’d let herself feel attracted to him because he was gay, so it didn’t count.
“Of course not,” said Tom.
Their eyes met. His face, so dear and familiar to her now after all these months, felt suddenly strange. He was blushing. They were both blushing. Her stomach dropped as if she were at the top of a roller coaster. Oh, calamity.
“I think that piece goes in the corner there,” said Tom.
Jane looked at the jigsaw piece and slotted it into place. She hoped the tremor in her fingers looked like clumsiness.
“You’re right,” she said.
Carol: I saw Jane having a very, shall we say, intimate conversation with one of the fathers at the trivia night. Their faces