The Other Half

by Jess Whitecroft

  “Sure. Maybe. But does that mean your sister deserves to get cut out of her inheritance in this way?”

  “She got the estate.”

  “Jo was meant to share the house with you,” he says, and I have a grim feeling what this sudden outburst of concern is really about. “I was meant to handle the literary estate, as Becky’s direct next of kin. We talked about it.”

  “Dad,” I say. “If you contest the will…”

  “No, no,” he says. “I’m not contesting. I’m just saying. You might want to look into what this Ohanian guy is really about, and don’t let your ostrich instincts keep you with your head buried in the sand.”

  I have an awful feeling this is going to turn into another shitstorm I don’t need, but I’m tired, my back hurts and I’m running out of rooms with floors. I just want to crawl into my tent, snuggle up with Jody and go to sleep.

  “Your mother’s worried about you,” he says. “You blew off Thanksgiving like that, and what about Christmas. I know I don’t generally bother, but what about your sister? And the baby? It’s her first Christmas.”

  “Dad, she’s like five months old. She won’t remember a thing.”

  “You’re coming back, right?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. I just can’t face New York right now…”

  “You see – this is what I’m talking about. It’s the avoidant thing.”

  “I’m fine. Please stop trying to analyze me.”

  “Okay,” he says, and takes a breath. “Just…let me know if you need anything.”

  “A bedroom floor.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Right,” he says. “Well…you take care of yourself up there, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  And that’s that. It’s such a mystery where I get my avoidant streak from.

  The stairs creak on my way down. Maybe I should just walk away. I’m taking too much on at once. It’s all very nice to talk about solid foundations and miracles, but the bed fell through the floor, most of the walls have holes in them and nobody can so much as set foot in the dining room without the whole room sliding sideways. I’m out of my depth, and I’m dragging Jody with me.

  Jody’s sitting at the kitchen table, head in hands. His nail beds are bloody from clinging to baseboards and sills and whatever he could snatch at on his way down. He looks like he’s been trying to claw his way out of a coffin, like a character from Edgar Allen Poe. The Fall Of The House Of Solomon – literally.

  “Hey,” he says, and he looks about done. I don’t blame him. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just…family stuff.”

  “Oh God. They’re not contesting the will, are they?”

  In spite of everything, I laugh. “You still want to inherit this?”

  He shrugs. “You should have seen my last apartment.”

  “I know, but we’re rapidly running out of rooms with walls. And floors.”

  I wait for him to say that it’s not that bad, but instead he just sighs long and hard. “I keep turning it over in my head,” he says. “I threw a pair of balled up socks onto the bed and that was…the last straw. It collapsed under the weight of socks.”

  “I know.”

  “I was handcuffed to that bed like twenty minutes earlier.”

  I had the same thought. And I didn’t enjoy it. “Maybe we need to…” I start to say, and he nods.

  “Take a break,” he says, jumping in. “I know.”

  “A break? I was gonna say ‘run for the hills.’”

  Jody grins. “Temporarily,” he says, and reaches for his phone. “Look, I got us a little Christmas gift, okay? Assuming you do Christmas, and I haven’t just done something culturally insensitive.”

  “Chrismukkah,” I say. “We kind of blend it. Jody, what did you do?”

  He shows me. A hotel. A cute little New Hampshire tourist trap with blue shingle walls.

  “You can’t do that,” I say, but even as I say it I want it more than anything else in the world right now. Hot running water. Stable floors. Walls. “We can’t afford it.”

  “We can. Ever since Leon dropped out of the picture me and Dawn have been on a porno roll.”

  “But the house…”

  “Fuck the house, Chris. We can’t afford not to do this. And I don’t just mean financially. We can’t carry on with the renovations if we’re both losing our minds, and the way we’re going, we’re both gonna be occupying matching padded cells by New Year.”

  “Will they have floors? Because right now the lunatic asylum looks like an upgrade.”

  “See what I mean?” says Jody. “We need this. We need hot baths. Real food. Beds that don’t die when you toss your socks on them. Just a little break. For the sake of our sanity.”

  *

  I’m warm.

  I’m warm and comfortable and there are no holes in the walls. I can walk across the bathroom floor without fearing that I’m going to put my foot through it and when I run the water it comes out clean and hot. I’ve never really cared that much for soaking in tubs before, but since we got to the hotel I’ve taken more unnecessary bubble baths than a chick in a romance novel.

  This is the best Christmas gift ever.

  But as I sink deeper into the pine-scented bubbles it sneaks up on me again, this feeling that threatened to overwhelm me on the first night here.

  I’m alone. And I’m not used to it. I’m used to a house so full of holes that I can hear him talking two rooms away. I’m used to hearing the harsh, gaspy cries he makes when he comes, and the low, snuggly grumbling sound he makes in his sleep. I’m used to his dick practically flopping into my breakfast and I’m used to watching that eyebrow – the ever-faithful barometer of his mood – and the slow, almost sarcastic way his lips curl when something strikes him as funny. I’m so used to sleeping in a heap with him that on the first night here I almost knocked on his door and asked him to take me into his bed, but I stopped because I knew on some level that it would be different. It wouldn’t be some emergency puppy pile against the cold, not here, where there were actual beds and Do Not Disturb signs and all the sexual implications thereof.

  Am I ready for that again? Am I ready to risk it all going wrong and destroying our weird new friendship? Our partnership?

  My body is pretty clear on the subject. Masturbation – it seems – is the luxury of a human body at leisure, a body that is relaxed and warm and clean and fed, a body that doesn’t have to leap up and deal with the next emergency at any given moment. The first time that I touched myself again I came like a teenager, and that was when I realized it had been the first orgasm I’d had since Sebastian, and that rubbed the sheen off it right away.

  He broke me much worse than I care to admit, but he’s not going to have this. He has nothing to do with the erection in my hand right now. This is all mine, a freshly remembered pleasure, almost as keen and sharp as it was when I was a boy and locking myself in the bathroom five times a day. My cock rises up from the bubbles like some exotic plant, and I almost coo to it as I caress it, because I’m so glad to see it back to its old self. I love you, I whisper, because I do. I love my cock and he’s not part of that. Instead I’m back in a loft in Williamsburg with Ash – the man who finally relieved me of my virginity – and who told me that my dick was a beauty, a treasure, a perfect work of art. I’m still sore from being fucked for the first time, but his hands on my body light me up with that heady mix of apprehension and excitement you feel when sex is brand new. Terra incognita. I want to ask him when I get to fuck him, but he won’t stop kissing me. Kissing and kissing, stopping only for breath and to exclaim over me. “I can’t believe I popped your cherry. Twenty-three and still a virgin. How the hell did you manage that with a dick this beautiful in your pants?”

  “I want to fuck you,” I say, and roll him over, then the fantasy shifts and now it’s Jody underneath me. He has plaster dust in his hair and there’s still a bright, fearful light in his eyes, but we’r
e not in pain the way we were the other day. We’re naked in the thin fall light streaming through the loft windows, and our kiss – God, that kiss – it’s like in a nature film when water hits the ground after a dry season. All that life surging back. Life blooming from his lips. Careful, whispers a tiny voice deep inside, but the imagination is reckless and wants only what it wants.

  Right now – if I could only stop what I was doing for a second – I could get up, walk the two steps between my door and his and knock. Okay. You win. I can’t take it any more.

  And I know he’s going to be so, so good. Maybe even better than the dream version in my arms right now. He smells of sweat and dust, and there’s that dirty telltale whisper of lube again, the one that tells me he’s still soft and slick and ready. “Please,” he says. “Please fuck me. I’m dying for it.” His thighs ride higher and higher up my sides as I reach down and tease the edge of his asshole. Yes, he’s soft, fresh from being punished with that purple sparkly dildo, but it’s no substitute for what I have waiting for him. I’m real, fleshy, gloriously hard, and I’m going to give it to him. He’s so ready that all I have to do is push inside him…

  You need to take a test.

  That little voice again. Suddenly I’m back on the floor with Sebastian, balls deep and with no idea how much danger I’m in, but hindsight is twenty-twenty. It’s like being hit with a bolt of back pain, only worse. My dick collapses without warning.

  Oh no. Oh shit.

  9

  Jody

  It’s the morning of the twenty-fourth, and Chris is having breakfast his way. Crispy bacon, two eggs sunny side up, everyone fully clothed and not a chance of a dick dangling into his egg yolks. I’m eating light, since Dawn’s upgraded Mr. Sparkles for a big black nobbly thing that makes my prostate quake with fear, to the point where last night I lay awake wondering how you go about telling a woman that you really don’t want to take it up the ass on camera any more. And could we maybe just cuddle?

  I wonder if there’s a market for that. Cuddle porn? Is that a thing? I know cuddle parties exist, but would the seriously touch-starved plunk down money to watch people snuggle? It’s worth thinking about, because my asshole could seriously use a break.

  We’re the only people in the hotel restaurant besides a couple and their son, who looks about seven years old and like someone recently shot his pet puppy. Every so often he stops crying just long enough to spoon in a mouthful of hard-boiled egg or take a bite of toast, and then – like he’s remembering something so awful that it paralyses his jaw – his mouth plops open and he starts to wail again.

  “Aiden, please,” says the mom. “Stop it, now. It’s not the end of the world.”

  Except it is. It’s Christmas Eve and he’s sad, and I know how that goes. Being sad on Christmas Eve when you’re his age is the biggest bummer on Earth, because sadness isn’t supposed to touch you in those hallowed hours when you’re waiting for Santa. It’s not supposed to be allowed to touch you. You should be given a free pass from it, because you’re a child and Christmas is for children. Everyone says so. Why should you be any different? It is – as I would have said at the same age – Not Fair.

  As they leave the dining room the mom comes by our table. “I’m so sorry if he spoiled your breakfast,” she says. “Carrying on like that.”

  “It’s nothing,” says Chris. “Is he okay?”

  She sighs and rolls her eyes. “Long story. Short version is we’re in the middle of moving house – this was literally the only time it was going to happen – and we had to do it. We explained to him that Christmas might be a bit different this year, but he’s miserable because we don’t have a Christmas tree.”

  “Aww.”

  “He’ll be fine,” she says. “I thought I’d explained it to him, but…ugh. Obviously not well enough. Again, so sorry for disturbing your breakfast.”

  “It’s cool,” I say, as she walks away.

  “That poor baby,” says Chris.

  “He’ll live,” I say. “If all kids died because they had a crappy Christmas then we’d be neck deep in some Children of Men shit right now.”

  He makes eyes at me over the rim of his coffee cup. “You are really well-read. Do you know that?”

  “Children of Men was a book?”

  “Don’t play dumb,” he says, flirting a little. “I know you’re not illiterate. Believe me, I know illiterates: I work in publishing.”

  I laugh and sit back in the window seat, enjoying the view of the frost that’s still crisping the small front lawn and making the picket fence posts shine like knife blades in the thin winter morning sun. The chair’s soft and the coffee is good and my body is so into all this relaxation so much that I wonder if I’ll ever find the will to get back to work. “I read a lot,” I confess. “When I could. It’s one of the few benefits of a really shitty education. You get a taste for knowledge but that’s it, because there’s that kid who learned to armpit fart last semester and still thinks it’s fucking funny. Or someone else gets knocked up and the teachers all panic and you spend every homeroom putting condoms on cucumbers. It was kind of a reverse psychology thing. Every time they failed to complete a lesson plan on Harper Lee because of Farty, Preggo and Drug Boy I was like…fuck it. I’ll just go read To Kill A Mockingbird in my own time. I just wanted to know what happened in the story.”

  He has the shyest smile I’ve ever seen, which is nuts, because his teeth are perfect. Every time he catches himself breaking into a grin he presses his lips together, and I wonder if it was something to do with the hardware that went into making those teeth so straight and white. Yeah – I can see that. A teenage Chris with a mouthful of metal, learning to conceal his grin. “Have you ever read a self-help book?” he says.

  “No. Never.” I don’t understand the question.

  “Good,” he says. “Don’t.”

  Weird, but okay. It’s not like I don’t need help, but probably not the kind of help I’m going to find between the covers of some chintzy-ass book about how to fix your life with feng shui or some shit.

  God, but that winter light is a good look on him. It brings out the cool green in his eyes and lights up the darker brown freckles across the bridge of his nose. His hair is growing out, so that the longer parts on top are starting to look like a little fro-hawk, and as I look at him I realize that it’s the first time since Becky’s funeral that he hasn’t had dust or plaster in his hair. The funeral. I shouldn’t think about that, because his lips are tempting enough without thinking about how they taste. There’s a pinkish smudge on the Cupid’s bow and just seeing it lights up my brain with the smell of strawberries. It’s that lip balm he slathers on every night before bed, and I’ve lost count of the nights I’ve lain next to him just wanting to close the gap between us, stick my tongue out and taste it.

  I might be in love.

  He sips his coffee and I follow his gaze out of the window. And then I get a nasty shock, because he’s looking directly at some guy standing next to the gate. Middle-aged, medium height, big mop of dark hair that’s going the exact same iron gray my own will go one day, assuming I don’t get hit by a bus next week. In fact, if there was a bus coming by right now I’d happily toss myself under it to avoid what’s coming, because I know that hair. I know the slope of those shoulders, and when he turns his head to the side that nose is so much my own that I half expect Chris to frown and say “Is that your dad out there?”

  But he doesn’t. He licks his lips, sets down his coffee cup and turns back to me, sweet and oblivious. Thank God. “You have any plans for the day?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, although I’m already making them. How did he find me? And more to the point, how do I get rid of him? Chase him over the state line at gunpoint? Tape a baggie of smack to a frisbee and toss it into the woods? Giant can of Raid? Jack is – after all – as close to a cockroach as you can get for something that only has two legs. “I was probably just gonna…sit around. Nothing much.”

&nbs
p; “Isn’t it disgraceful how lazy we become as soon as we have the opportunity?” says Chris. “I did nothing yesterday except take baths, order room service and read The Godfather.” He stifles a yawn. “It was one of those bestsellers I always kept meaning to get around to reading and never did.”

  “Good?” I say, really because I have to say something. Otherwise I’m going to start screaming. Jack turns towards the window and for a moment I think he’s looking right at me, but then he narrows his eyes and shades them with a hand. What is he fucking doing here?

  “No,” says Chris. “It’s not. The movie was way better. The writing’s not great, and for some reason it’s gone into this bizarre plot swerve about the size of Connie Corleone’s bridesmaid’s vagina. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I say, showing far too many teeth in a grin. Is he coming in here? Oh God, please don’t let him come in here. “Should have passed on that third cup of coffee, I think.”

  “Tell me about it. It’s strong, right?” He gets up from the table and looks down at me. “Listen,” he says, like he’s been rehearsing this. “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”

  “Dinner? What? Like a date?”

  “Sure,” he says, and I see Jack move away down the street. My heart almost crawls down out of my throat.

  “Aren’t you a little reboundy for that kind of thing?” I ask, and he blushes.

  “Maybe,” he says. “But do you realize we’ve never actually sat down and had a beer together? We just got…tossed in the deep end. There was no time for small talk. I never got to find out your favorite movie, or your favorite color or your perfect Christmas gift.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Sounds good.”

  My heart’s still hammering as I watch him go. He crosses the hotel lobby just as Jack walks in through the front door, and I can’t keep it together any longer. I leap up – almost knocking over the breakfast table – hurry into the lobby, grab my old man by the arm and swiftly steer him back outside.