by Kris Ripper
I held out my hand. “Congratulations. That’s a pretty decent get.”
I’d never thought of him as particularly boyish, but he looked younger as we shook hands, his smile jut a little smug, a little proud. “Thanks. I really can’t believe my dad is the first artist I’ve ever gotten in there. He’s so far from a The Museum type of artist.”
“Ooooh, does this mean Chad gets a hipster makeover?”
He laughed. “That would be hilarious only to us. It’d probably offend both hipsters and Dad. Anyway, I’ll send you the relevant details when I have them. Bye, Justin.”
“See you, Colin. Thanks for the coffee.”
He waved and slipped out.
I did my usual morning routine of booting up the computer, turning on my music, and making bets with myself about when Chad would finally roll in. The shop looked mostly as it had when I’d left the night before, so he hadn’t worked overnight.
This part of the project cycle didn’t require much from me. It was too early to start flogging him to get more done, and he was already established enough to not need a lot of hand-holding. I answered emails for a while, some as Chad’s assistant, some as Chad himself, which was probably shady but after the first six months of me trying to be honest and forthright about communications, I basically gave up and let people believe what they wanted to believe: that they were talking to The Artist.
No one’s ever nominated me for an ethics award.
In the absence of pressing concerns, I stumbled around on the internet, looking for unearthed Hazeltine. Which had become something of an obsession.
The beautiful thing about the internet is that there is a metric fuck ton of information out there just waiting to inform the shit out of people. But it can be a little deceptive as well. You can think you’ve sort of seen everything the web has to offer on a certain subject, and then you enter a different search term and Google kicks back a bunch of new results.
This time it was “Enrico Hazeltine meme.”
Which led me to a whole community of Hazeltine fan art.
Which led me to a particular visual artist whose shit was like really good.
Which led me to a particular quote on a particular piece, which I’d never read before: “The world that spiraled out before me from the darkness of my earliest years seemed to go on forever, an ammonite future of increasing possibilities, filthy with hope and chance.” I googled it, since it wasn’t familiar and I’d now read everything he’d formally published.
The full quote was: The world that spiraled out before me from the darkness of my earliest years seemed to go on forever, an ammonite future of increasing possibilities, filthy with hope and chance. Only now do I see that the future is always an illusion, and the past a fabrication. I am the center of the spiral; everything but this moment is merely a distraction.
I took a few sips of coffee and read it again.
The quote came from an interview he’d done for a radio show for queer youth in 1990, a year before he died. It was pretty dark, as far as youth-geared interviews went, but he was sick by then, and I didn’t want to think about what the world had looked like to poz gay men before red ribbons and benefit concerts, before the drugs got better and a diagnosis was no longer a promise of a wasting death. Maybe especially when talking to younger queers. He’d watched a hell of a lot of his generation die, intimately, sitting at bedsides, haunting hospital wards; had he looked at the young men coming up after him and imagined they’d do the same?
My dusty, grayscale porn fantasies about the man seemed tawdry and a little bit gross in retrospect. The other down side to having an abundance of information at one’s fingertips: what once was a simple case of falling in love with a man over a few stunning essays became a complex obsession far too easily. Hazeltine was too real to me now. I couldn’t jerk off to the thought of blowing him without thinking about the golden afternoon he’d spent in a bathhouse with an older couple, when he’d pictured himself an old man spending a golden afternoon with his partner in a bathhouse.
In the rare moments of my life when I imagined my future, I pictured myself alone. I grieved for Hazeltine’s lost dreams as if they were my own.
Chad bustled in, right on time, and I closed all my Hazeltine tabs and decided to buy some new office supplies. Office supplies were always good for a diversion.
* * *
Chad’s disgusted grunt was all the warning I had that Alex was in the shop.
Before I got a car, Alex and/or Jamie often picked me up from work. Chad once made an offhand remark about how weird it was that I had straight friends, and I corrected him.
At which point we had a tense, controlled-volume fight about the rights of queers to maintain their identity as queers after they fall in love with someone whom they might have fallen for even if they were not queer. I’d been so pissed off, I’d ended the argument by lying about being sick and getting the hell out of there.
The next morning both of us pretended everything was normal. We never spoke of it. But Alex and Jamie had never come to the shop without wearing something provocative again. Jamie liked to butch it up. Alex went femme. Today it was a denim skirt down to mid-calf and a black button-down tucked in.
I wolf whistled, since that was my role, even though it felt a bit forced. “Hey, hot stuff.”
“Christ,” Chad muttered.
Alex waved as he picked his way through the shop. “Hi, Chad.” He got a grunt in reply and grinned at me.
It never really waned, the way I felt about Alex. No matter how things were between us—how big of an asshole I’d been, how oblivious he’d been—part of me was forever drawn to him, a magnetic pull I could only haphazardly resist. But sometimes the magnitude of it would wash over me, a wave of heat with a vicious undertow, leaving my heart rate up and sweat at my temples. His grin pulled a smile from my lips and god help me, I wanted to kiss him, standing right there in the workshop with Chad muttering under his breath ten feet away.
I reminded myself that things had ended dangerously between us, and that I didn’t want to be the victim of some kind of intervention, and also, let’s be clear, I didn’t need their fucking help. My life was fine.
Armed with just enough bluster to defend me, I demanded, “What do you want?”
“Will you come to coffee with me?”
Goddammit. Not the fucking questions game. “Why would I do that?”
“Why would you turn down coffee with your best friend?”
“Who the hell said you were my best friend?”
His eyes fucking twinkled at me. So unfair. “Since when have I ever needed outside confirmation to know your mind, Jus?”
I wasn’t about to address that—in question form or otherwise—so I returned to the subject at hand. “What if I don’t want to go to coffee?”
“You’d rather we go to your place?”
The bastard was just so quick with questions. And I’d long suspected that, to my detriment, some subconscious part of me wanted to lose, wanted to give the answers.
I sullenly shoved the last of the paperwork into my briefcase and shut down the computer. “Chad, I’m leaving. See you tomorrow.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to pay you for the rest of the day.”
Typical. “It’s five-thirty. You stopped paying me half an hour ago.” Granted, I’d been doing additional non-mandatory research about Hazeltine’s lost essays, but still. Work-ish. Though it did bring up another point. I nudged Alex on the way out. “How the hell did you know where I was? I’m not even supposed to be here right now.”
“Yeah, you’ve got location turned on. I pinged your phone.”
“That’s creepy as fuck.”
He took my arm as we walked outside, the touch so rare and surprising that I went stiff and he pulled away, leaving me physically and emotionally bereft. But one can’t fix an awkward hesitation that should have been a welcoming squeeze. Fuck me.
“Let’s go to your apartment, Jus. I’ll make
you a toffee nut latte.”
“I’m out of toffee nut.”
“Vanilla, then.”
We paused at my car. “Fine. My apartment.” I hesitated, not sure what to say, what to hold back. “I like the skirt.”
He glanced away, as if something really interesting was happening in the lower branches of the nearest tree. “It reminds me of the first one you ever bought me. From the Salvation Army store by the school.”
I’d bought it partially to be mean, which he probably knew. But only partially. “Certain blues bring out your eyes,” I said, which was what I’d said in the moments after he’d discovered the skirt in his closet and turned to me with this flayed open expression on his face, like he couldn’t decide whether to feel hurt or stricken or maybe relieved that this particular thing wasn’t a secret. At least not from me.
“So, your place. See you in ten.” He took off down the street and I allowed myself to watch. His hair was tangled, as usual, falling past his ears, not quite touching his shoulders. The shirt was inconsistently tucked in, bubbling out a little on the left. I wanted to straighten it. I wanted to run my fingers through his hair until the curls unknotted, as Jamie had the other night.
I wanted to go back in time and walk arm-in-arm down the street for half a block, if only so he knew I…liked that. Liked having him that close. It wasn’t really my style in general, so I understood why he’d taken my momentary rigidity as rejection, but it hadn’t been, dammit.
And wasn’t that just like me, spoiling things I didn’t realize I wanted until it was too late to get them back.
Chapter Twenty
WE BICKERED OVER the tamping of the espresso. Or I bickered, and Alex patiently did other things in my kitchen until I got bored and shut the hell up so he could make lattes in peace.
Two of them, I noticed. Not three. I’d expected Jamie to join us, anticipated it even. At what point did being with both of them become easier than being alone with Alex? For most of our lives, being alone with Alex was the only time I could breathe.
It wasn’t that now. He made lattes—all those sure movements of fingers and hands and forearms, muscle memory and competence I found attractive as hell. Alex knew my kitchen as well as he knew his own. I stood there, leaning against the counter, feeling an unaccountable weight in my chest, a compression of years, all the words we’d shared, all the space we’d occupied in each other’s lives.
“Do you think it’s weird we’ve been friends so long?” I asked.
He glanced over. “Were we supposed to stop being friends at some point?”
“I’m not playing Questions. I mean it. This guy I know, Avery, was saying he couldn’t imagine being friends as long as we have been. And I…can’t really imagine my life…” without you.
“I can’t, either. Did I ever tell you about the last time I prayed?”
His back was to me, even though he’d already poured the milk. How the hell long did it take to stir syrup in? “No.”
“I didn’t have a real strong belief in God or anything, not like Jamie did when she was a kid. But I sort of believed. Like I did in Santa. The day we met I got on my knees before bed, like I’d seen in movies, and thanked God for giving me a friend.” He turned with our mugs and handed one to me. “Then the next day you told me only babies believed in God—and Santa—and I never prayed again.”
I put my non-latte hand over my mouth. “Ohmygod.”
He offered a half shrug, with a half smile for garnish. “It didn’t bother me. I had a friend. I didn’t need anything else.”
“Except the bugs.”
“I’m glad you never gave me an ultimatum about the bugs. I needed them for a long time.”
We sat on my sidewalk salvage sofa, which wasn’t all the comfortable, but was better than the floor. “You almost never talk about bugs anymore.” When had he stopped? Sometime during college, maybe. After Jamie had come into our lives.
He stirred the foam on top of his latte with a pinky finger. I desperately wanted to suck the foam off, look him in the eye, force him to think of my lips, his dick. But obviously I just sat there, trying not to vibrate with desire. Far more rational.
“Once I decided not to actually become an entomologist, I kind of…not lost interest, exactly. But maybe became interested in other things. Shared interest, so the bugs weren’t everything.”
“You became interested in Cork,” I teased, and even though I loved her—even though I loved the two of them together—some ancient, brittle layer of sadness lingered. That I’d loved him for so long and he’d never known it, or maybe, more deeply, that without Jamie he never would have known it. He never would have seen me.
He only shrugged. “There was more to it than that. Though yeah. That, too. Meeting Jame was like meeting you. It changed everything. Changed me.” He sipped, licking the milk off his lip with a swipe of his tongue. Watching me watch him. “It all tied together. You were going out all the time, trying to find people like you, who were into the things you wanted to be into. And she was the first person you weren’t jealous of, or whatever. So I thought maybe, you know. Maybe she could be our friend.”
“You thought I wasn’t jealous of Cork? I’m a better actor than I thought.” I’d cried bitterly, but only in the shower. Good to know it had worked.
“Not like you were with other people. You never tried to hurt her, or make her go away.”
“You had shit taste in girlfriends. And boyfriends. I only did what anyone who cared about you would have done.” Kinda. Ish. Motivated by wanting to protect him, and also by wanting to have him to myself. “I’m sorry,” I said, years too late. “I shouldn’t have pulled that shit. A few of them weren’t that bad.”
“A Few of them Weren’t That Bad: The Alex Tierney Story,” he intoned.
I laughed, and it was only a little forced. “We gotta remember to tell Cork that one.”
“Yeah. Anyway, after she’d been hanging out for a while, she told me that she was having fun, but probably you and I should work out whatever was going on between us. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ Totally confused.”
My laughter of a second ago, still echoing in my ears, might as well have been from another century. I couldn’t speak.
“Except after she said that, I noticed things. We’d been friends for so long, it all just seemed normal. You scaring people off when they got too close, or undercutting me when I showed interest in someone. I figured that’s what friendship was.”
My guts twisted. Even the smell of the latte made me feel nauseous, but I kept it in my hands, something to hold, a shield against his voice.
More apologies I’d never made, but should have. I couldn’t speak, as if not speaking made me invisible, erased the terrible, childish things I’d done.
“But I didn’t know how to talk to you about it, so I just…made it necessary that the two of you become friends. I, uh, made it so.” A ghost of a smile.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, unable to smile along. Unable to say anything without first saying that.
“You were a serious bastard, Jus. Like, for real.”
“I know.”
“But I figured that you wouldn’t scare away someone who was really good for me, you know? I thought all along that you were sort of…the guardian of my virtue, in a way.”
I shook my head. “Only you. Only you would even think that.”
“It was true. I had like no experience. And I was pretty scared of sex. So when you got rid of people before it got to that point, in a way, it felt like you saved me the trouble.”
“Jesus. I took away God, Santa, and a trail of college kids who could have introduced you to the garden of delights.”
“Yeah, but you left me Jamie.”
“No, no, no, no. Don’t act like I did you a favor. I tried to get rid of that girl, but she was fucking immovable.”
“You really didn’t. Because you liked her, too. And because she wanted to be your friend just as much as she wanted to
be mine.”
“Foolish woman.”
“Clever. Clever, clever woman. And it still took her years to get you to admit how you felt.”
I returned to my latte, which I could now sip without feeling queasy. “I was going to keep it a secret until I died. But she kept playing that Pansies song over and over again and like looking at me. With her eyebrows doing a thing.”
He hummed a few bars. “‘I Really Wanted You,’ yeah. You know she calls that our song, right? Yours and mine.”
“It’s about a guy who watches the guy he loves go off with a girl. Fitting.”
He shook his head violently. “I didn’t go anywhere. I’ve been right here the whole time. Our whole lives. You’re the one who keeps running away, Jus, not me.”
“I do not.” Goddammit. “I— I bought Thai food! I tried to do—to do something. And it was horrible, which you should remember, because you were fucking there. I don’t run away!”
“You did like three nights ago! You ran out like someone was chasing you with a knife.”
“Nice concrete detail. Why’d you go knife not gun? All those fantasies of stabbing me?”
Instead of answering, he started humming again. And my brain supplied the lyrics, lovesick and resigned. I shut my eyes.
“And the time before was bad because you two tried to act like it didn’t mean anything. Well it worked, congratulations, you and Jame screwed up the three of us having sex.” He cut himself off. “It doesn’t matter. But you run away from stuff, Jus. You always have. I think you needed aftercare but you ran away from that, too. Then you found a way to program yourself to shut off instead, to go back to things that made you feel like you had a handle on yourself.”
“Eating a bag of chips, if that’s what I actually did, isn’t extreme binging.”
“Eating a bag of chips with a vacant look on your face, then going to the gym for two hours wasn’t nothing. And I watched you do it. Not every time, but a lot of the time after you came home from being with people.”
“I didn’t. I don’t—I don’t think I really did that. I don’t remember doing it.” And I hadn’t. But now I did.