The temperature dropped twelve degrees between the opener and the headliner, which would have been useful information before I left home in one long-sleeve shirt.
River had dressed like he knew October personally.
He was twenty-two, wearing black tights under a short skirt, a rust-colored knit top, and the largest sherpa-lined denim jacket I had ever seen on a human being. The thing came almost to his knees.
I was twenty-five and pretending I was not cold.
River watched me pretend for exactly one song.
“You’re shivering.”
“I’m moving to the music.”
“You’re moving to hypothermia.”
“I’m fine.”
He gave me a look.
River had several looks. This one meant I am going to let you finish lying and then solve the problem anyway.
We were standing on the lawn at the back of the amphitheater, shoulder to shoulder in a crowd of people holding plastic cups and filming the stage vertically.
The band started the next song.
River unbuttoned his jacket.
“Put your arms in.”
“What?”
“The sleeves.”
“You’ll freeze.”
“I’m wearing four layers.”
“You are wearing a crop top.”
“I contain contradictions.”
He pulled one arm out of the jacket and held it open.
“Come on.”
I laughed.
Then a gust of wind came off the river and I stopped laughing.
“Fine.”
I slid my arms into the sleeves.
The lining was warm from him.
That alone nearly killed me.
The jacket smelled faintly like laundry detergent and the cedar spray River used on everything he owned because, according to him, “people deserve to smell like forests if they want.”
I pulled the front closed around myself.
River stared at me.
“What?”
“You stole my jacket.”
“You gave me your jacket.”
“No. I said we could share it.”
I looked down at the jacket.
Then at him.
“River.”
“I fit.”
“You absolutely do not fit.”
He stepped forward.
I realized too late that he intended to prove it.
River ducked under one side of the open jacket and pressed himself against my chest, wrapping both arms around my ribs beneath the denim.
The jacket closed around us.
He did, in fact, fit.
Barely.
His cheek landed against the base of my throat.
I stood there with both arms halfway out from my sides like somebody had just handed me a complicated animal.
River looked up.
“Okay?”
That mattered.
He had already climbed halfway into my clothes, but the question came cleanly, without assuming the joke answered for me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Yeah stay, or yeah this was funny and now get out?”
“Stay.”
His face softened.
“Good.”
I wrapped my arms around him inside the jacket.
The crowd surged when the chorus hit.
River tucked himself closer.
From behind, we probably looked like one very wide person in denim.
From inside, I could feel every time he laughed.
The bass hit through the lawn and into both of us.
His hands settled flat against my back.
Mine rested at his waist.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
It was warmer that way.
Also worse, emotionally.
River and I had been friends for seven months. We had gotten coffee, gone thrifting, spent a whole Sunday building a bookshelf that arrived with three screws missing. We had sat beside each other on couches, in cars, at bars, at a laundromat at midnight.
We had never stood like this.
During a slower song, River tilted his head back.
“Can I tell you something embarrassing?”
“You are currently wearing the same jacket as me.”
“More embarrassing.”
“Impossible, but go ahead.”
“I bought this because it was big enough.”
“Big enough for what?”
He stared at me.
I stared back.
My brain arrived late.
“No.”
River’s nose was pink from the cold.
“Yes.”
“You bought a two-person jacket?”
“I bought an oversized jacket.”
“For this?”
“I thought maybe.”
“How long ago?”
He mumbled something.
“What?”
“August.”
“River.”
“I said it was embarrassing.”
The headliner hit the first note of the next song and the crowd screamed.
I barely heard it.
“You could have just told me you liked me.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“And this was easier?”
“I had a prop.”
I started laughing.
River hid his face against my chest.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not laughing at you.”
“You are objectively laughing.”
“I like you too.”
He stopped moving.
The whole world kept going around us—lights, drums, somebody shouting lyrics behind us.
River lifted his head.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
His hands tightened against my back.
“Can I kiss you?”
I looked at him in the stage light.
“Inside the jacket?”
“I paid forty-six dollars for the jacket. I would like to get the full experience.”
“Then yes.”
He kissed me once, smiling halfway through it.
It was not cinematic. Somebody nearby spilled beer. The wind pushed River’s hair into my face. The singer missed a note badly enough that half the crowd laughed.
It was perfect anyway.
At the encore, River asked if we could stay like that until the lights came up.
We did. And somewhere in the last song he went still against me and I realized, the exact second he did, that he could feel it. Because I was hard. Pressed against his stomach inside a jacket, in a crowd of four thousand people, from a hug.
River tipped his head back and looked at me with an expression of pure academic interest.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re saying it with your face.”
“My face is cold.” He shifted his hips, very slightly, on purpose. “Everything else is extremely warm, though.”
I put my forehead down on top of his head and laughed until the band left the stage.
My car was parked in the far lot, under the one light that worked. We got in on opposite sides and the doors shut and the quiet was so sudden it rang.
River was still wearing the skirt. I was still wearing his jacket.
He reached over and turned the heat all the way up. Then he looked at me across the console.
“I live twenty minutes away,” he said.
“I know where you live.”
“I’m saying it’s twenty minutes.”
“River, I can make it twenty minu—”
He climbed over the console. It took him two tries and one knee in the cupholder, and he swore, and I laughed, and then he was in my lap, facing me, skirt rucked up, the steering wheel at his back, and I stopped laughing.
“Okay?” he said. Same question as on the lawn. Same clean way of asking it.
“Yes. Yes.”
He pulled the jacket shut around both of us again. Two-person jacket. He’d been right about the sizing the whole time.
We kissed for a long time, really kissed, the windows going white with fog. His tights were thin enough that I could feel the heat of him through them, and he was hard too, and every time he rocked down onto me he made a small, pleased sound like he’d solved something. I got my hands up under the rust-colored top and his skin was cold at the edges and hot in the middle.
“Can I,” I said, my thumbs at the waistband of the tights.
“Yeah. God. Please.”
I peeled them down as far as the car allowed, which was not far, which made him laugh into my mouth. He was flushed and wet at the tip and he pushed into my hand the second I touched him. I jerked him slow, watching his face in the yellow parking-lot light, his mouth open, his breath fogging the window behind him.
He fumbled my jeans open. Got me out. Wrapped his hand around both of us together and looked down between us and said, “Oh, that’s nice,” in the exact tone he’d used about a vintage lamp at the thrift store in July, and I came apart laughing and then stopped, because he started to move.
He rode my lap like that, the two of us sliding together in his fist, my hands on his ass under the skirt pulling him down harder, the jacket closed around us like a tent. It was clumsy. My elbow hit the horn once and we both froze and somebody three rows over yelled “NICE.” River buried his face in my neck and shook.
“Keep going,” I said into his hair. “Don’t stop. River.”
He didn’t stop. He got faster, and wetter, and his rhythm fell apart, and he said my name against my throat right where his cheek had landed on the lawn, and came over his own fist and my stomach with his whole body shaking inside the denim. Watching him do that pushed me over a few seconds later, his hand still working me through it, slow, until I had to catch his wrist.
We sat there breathing. The windows were completely white. The heater roared.
“I got it on the jacket,” River said eventually.
“You got it on the jacket.”
“It’s our jacket. We share custody.”
I wiped us up with napkins from the glovebox, badly. River stayed in my lap the whole time with his chin on my shoulder, watching me do it like he was supervising.
On the drive back he sat in his own seat with his tights back on and my hand on his knee. At a red light I tried to give him the jacket back.
He shook his head.
“Keep it on.”
“Aren’t you cold?”
River slid his hand over mine on his knee.
“Not really.”
The light changed. He leaned across the console and put his head on my shoulder anyway.
“Still sharing?” I asked.
“Different configuration,” he said, and pulled the sleeve of the jacket over his own hand so we were both holding it.
