There was the feeling that a cave had formed at the base of the forest, that the narrow creek cut through it, that branches and growth arched over them, that the darkness was less gloom than guardian. Ben held open the door and Ronny walked past. The room was shabby, bare except for a bit of furniture, clean, smelling of bleach and pine cleaner, on the paneled wall a calendar with a picture of Mitch Kupchak going for a layup, stained with something that looked like mustard. Ben loomed over everything in the room.

Ronny had begun to fathom what was happening. Dingy as the room was, there was something pleasant about it when Ben turned on a lamp. The kitchen had a Scrooge McDuck refrigerator magnet in the center of the door. There were chains of beads for curtains. “Hippies,” Ronny said, running his hands along the beads.

“Probably.”

Two bedrooms, one small, one tiny; two bathrooms, one crowded, one cramped. They walked from one room to another as though each of them had dropped his wallet somewhere, searching for it, studious and quiet, shoulders hunched. Ben waiting in the living room and after Ronny took one more look at the closets, he followed. Ben squared his shoulders. “We can rent this.”

The words brought a slow hand of warmth to the pit of Ronny’s gut, and he felt a change wave through his body, a quickening of blood, a sense of a moment happening, the look of Ben’s black curls, the sharply defined shape of him. “Really?”

“I know the guy who had it before. Doesn’t matter. We can rent it if we want to.”

Cheap, too, as it turned out. So that could be the next thing, living in this bowl of shade at the edge of the woods, having a creek in the yard, taping Springsteen posters to the walls of this grungy trailer. Not bad. “You want to move out of Ehringhaus?”

“Fuck, yes.” Ben snorted, jammed his fists into the pockets of the jacket. If God Is Not a Tar Heel. The jacket so blue and clean.

“You want me to do the same thing.”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I want.”

There it was. Breathing in and out as though he had exerted himself, nostrils wide. Ronny felt as though waves were rushing through his body; Ben looked as if he wanted to shove his hands though the ceiling, reaching upward, stretching his shoulders.

“All right,” Ronny said. “When?”

“Now. Whenever. It’s ours. I already paid the deposit and shit.”

So it happened, they stood there and drank it in. Ronny wandered through the rooms again and walked around the trailer outside, peering into the forest. A cardinal hopped on the ground, fluttering to the branch of a bare shrub, maybe forsythia, spring’s yellow telegram. Ben walked up behind him. They stood, body to body, calm in desire, simply pressing each other. And Ben said, “I guess we might as well get it done today. There’s no need to stay at the boardinghouse anymore.”