“That’s a long time,” Lionel said.
“Is it?” Sophie asked. “It doesn’t seem that way. But I guess time flies.”
“Yeah. Unless you want it to. Then it’s slow.”
Sophie looked at him sideways, that same distant amusement from before on her face. “Yes,” she said. “It certainly is.”
When it was time to go home, Lionel said goodbye to everyone in the foyer. The host gave him a long hug, slid his hands up Lionel’s shirt, and said, “I want you to stay.”
“Next time,” Lionel whispered back. He gave Sophie a short, tight hug. They exchanged numbers and promised to text or call for lunch the next week. Charles squeezed his hand very hard.
“See you around, Lionel,” he said.
“Goodbye, Charlie,” Lionel said, surprising them both.
Lionel decided to walk home. He liked long walks because they gave him the opportunity to clear his head, and after a night with other people, he really felt that he needed the time to be alone. He had only taken a couple puffs off the joint and had drunk one glass of wine after dinner but he felt pleasantly buzzed. There was something warm flowing all around him, and it would be a while before the sensation ebbed away from him like a low tide.
The snow had blunted the edges of the world. The lamplight was pale blue at regular intervals. Occasionally a car glided through the slush on the street, and the world was filled with a sound like the sea at a great distance. It would take him about twenty minutes to get home, a little longer than usual because he didn’t want to slip and crack his head open. He passed the botanical gardens which had only recently shut down for the winter because the weather had been so mild until now, when things had turned so suddenly for the cold. It seemed transformed, the fountains long-emptied, turned white with snow. The empty limbs of the trees were groaning softly. Lionel paused to contemplate them. He pressed his face against the cold grates and breathed a plume of white breath out into the closed garden.
“Hello,” he called into the emptiness and heard his voice wash back to him, faded.
On he went. He felt a pulsating loneliness inside as he walked. It wasn’t that he was usually surrounded by people or anything like that. Solitude was his normal state. But he never felt more alone than in groups of other people and never more aware of how alone he felt than after he had left the group. Already, he missed the chatter of the party. He missed seeing their faces as they laughed. He thought of the warmth of Charles’s hand against his eyelashes. He wanted to cry. The snow had stopped, but now it was going again, falling in thick clumps all around him. The world seemed so still except for the falling snow. Even though he was moving forward, he felt that he wasn’t moving at all, that he had come to a stillness.
His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he took it out to stare at it blearily. He did not recognize the number. It vibrated again, just a quick pulse in his hand.
A text message:
where r u?
Lionel looked around, trying to figure out exactly where he was. It was a familiar cross street, not far from his house. He had been walking for fifteen minutes already.
He typed his location into the phone to the number that he did not recognize and walked a little more. He was almost home. He would be in his tub full of warm water, getting warmer by the moment. He would be in his bed, sleeping until the first bits of light came through the window.
His phone pulsed again.
on my way
ok
c u soon
who are you?
;)
Lionel looked back along the street he had walked. He felt fear, or something like fear, a much attenuated version of fear. It wasn’t that he felt that someone was going to do harm to him. But still there was something vague and amorphous coming for him through the night, reaching for him, and it scared him to be on the street alone with it.
He kept walking. He would get home and forget about this.
where are you? i don’t see you
Lionel did not answer. He kept going. But then there was a voice calling down the street after him. He did not turn. He did not want to face what had come for him at last. The voice grew louder and closer. Lionel crossed the street. He had begun to sweat. Heat covered his back and his stomach. Keep going, he said to himself. Keep going.
“Lionel!” Someone shouted, and Lionel stopped just outside of his apartment building and turned. Charles, covered in snow, holding his side.
“Charles,” Lionel said. “What are you doing here?”
“I texted you. And then you ran,” Charles said, out of breath.
“Are you okay?”
“Why’d you run.”
“Was I running?” Lionel asked. He had not known that he was running, but he felt it in his thighs all of a sudden. A heat, a tension, a throbbing ache. “Oh. Shit. I’m sorry.”
Charles was flushed. He was leaning over. He spat into the snow and drew himself upright. Of course Charles would come for him. Of course. It seemed so obvious that it was embarrassing.
“Do you want to come in?”
Charles blushed beneath his already red skin, and laughed. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Lionel said.
In Lionel’s apartment, they took off their coats and boots. Lionel turned on the light, which was so bright it startled them both.
“Sorry,” Lionel said.
“It’s okay,” Charles said. He sat at the tiny kitchen table. Lionel felt that Charles made everything in this apartment seem small and ineffectual, like a child’s toy. He felt shy about it now, letting someone see his home.
“Do you want some coffee?”
“Yes,” Charles said. “Oh yes.”
“Is French press okay?” Lionel asked as he went to the kitchen. “I have cheap beans. Will that do?”
“Please.”
Lionel ran some water into the kettle and dumped the black grounds into the French press. He wet his lips and braced his hands against the kitchen sink. He stared through the tiny slit of a window into the yard of the adjacent complex. He heard Charles’s chair scrape back, could hear the boards straining beneath his weight as he walked through the studio.
“So this is where you live?”
“Yes,” Lionel said, his voice stretched tight as a drum skin. “This is where I live.”
Charles stood near his bookcase, dragging a finger along the spines of his books. He was humming, and the sound of it filled the apartment. He turned to Lionel.
“Are you nervous?”
“A little,” Lionel said.
“Why? Because of me?” Charles came nearer to him. Lionel swallowed thickly.
“Yes.”
“What about me makes you nervous?” Charles was in front of him, pressing him against the counter. Their stomachs touched and the fronts of their thighs. Lionel felt himself receding.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know?” Charles asked. Sympathy streaked his expression.
“You have a girlfriend,” Lionel said.
“Yes,” Charles said. “I do.”
“Okay,” Lionel said. The kettle hissed. The water was hot. “I should pour this.” Charles stepped back to let him pour the water into the French press. He poured slowly, watching the level of the water rise higher and higher. It brought him pleasure to do such things, to pay attention to ordinary tasks. He felt steadier when he had something to do with his hands. He depressed the plunger and poured a cup for them both.
“Cream?” Lionel asked.
“No. I don’t like cream.”
“Okay,” Lionel said.
“Do you?”
“Like cream?”
“Yes.”
“I do.”
Charles took a long drink from his coffee which must have been too bitter and yet there was nothing in his expression that hinted at pain or discomfort.
“I like it this way, black.”
“It’s too bitter for me that way.”
�
�Sophie’s the same.”
“I like Sophie,” Lionel said. “She’s really nice.”
“She is,” Charles said. “She is better than all of us.”
Lionel knew what Charles meant, or he thought that he knew what he meant, that Sophie possessed some essential goodness not present in the rest of them. That she was made of better stuff. He wanted to be her friend. He wanted desperately to be her friend. But Charles was looking at him, and he could feel that possibility closing off. Charles set the cup on the table.
“Where do you sleep?” Charles asked.
“I’ll show you,” Lionel said.
In the morning, Charles was still asleep when Lionel got out of the bed. He took their cups from last night to the sink and turned on the tap to rinse them. Then the French press, which he took apart and cleaned piece by piece and then put them in the rack to dry. He stretched in the gray light, his body naked and brown all over though he was what they called winter pale. He could still feel Charles’s hands all over him, the sureness of his grasp and the grinding pressure of their bodies coming together. He went to the bathroom to brush his teeth, to brush the taste of Charles out of his mouth. By the time he got back to the front of the apartment, Charles had rolled over onto his back and was lying there naked and on display. His body was magnificent. Edges and lines and clear definition. He was beautiful to behold. A thatch of dark pubic hair. His penis was uncut, average in length but thick. Everything about him seemed proportionate, and that was the thing Lionel found most beautiful, the immaculate proportions.
Lionel made more coffee for them. He sat at the table in boxers and a sweater, waiting for Charles to get up, wondering where he’d go after he left here, wondering what had brought him here. There was a sudden bang at the window, and Lionel jolted up. He went to the kitchen and there in the sink was a bird that had flown through the glass and crashed into the apartment.
“What the hell?” Charles said from the bed.
Lionel turned to him. “A bird…a bird flew in.”
“Christ,” Charles said, and turned over.
Cold air came in through the hole in the glass, and Lionel stood over the bird watching it twitch, its small little body, green feathers and white belly, just twitching, waiting to die. As he watched it, Lionel thought he could understand the bird a little, the impulse to fling yourself wildly at a surface and hope to tear through.
“Poor bird,” Lionel said.
“Do you want me to take care of it?” Charles asked.
“Would you?” Lionel said. “I get a little freaked out by birds.”
“Sure,” Charles said, and he climbed out of bed, scooped the little bird up into his hands and marched to the door. Then he flung the bird out into the world, but there was no miracle of flight, no sudden recovery. It soared through the air like a rock, and it landed soundlessly in the snow across the street.
“Thank you,” Lionel said.
Charles leaned down to kiss him, gripped the backs of both of Lionel’s thighs and lifted him as easily as he had lifted the bird from the sink.
“You’re welcome,” Charles said. Lionel wrapped his legs around Charles and let himself be carried back to bed.
“Stay,” Lionel said later, when Charles was getting dressed.
“Can’t,” Charles said. “I have to go.”
“Stay,” Lionel said, the plea hanging nakedly from his voice.
“I’ll be back,” Charles said. He kissed Lionel’s forehead and then his mouth and he was gone out the door. Lionel drew his blanket around him and lay down.
He began to count from some enormous number, and when he lost count, he started over.
About the Author
BRANDON TAYLOR is the associate editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer’s workshop. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he is a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction. His debut novel is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.
About Platypus Press
Platypus Press is a boutique publisher based in England seeking to unearth innovative contemporary poetry and prose from a broad variety of voices and experiences.
platypuspress.co.uk
wildness is an online literary journal of poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
readwildness.com
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Brandon Taylor
All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced, stored or distributed in any form, or by any means, except for brief quotations, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by Platypus Press, England
Cover and layout design by Peter Barnfather
Cover illustration by Roman Muradov
Version: 2018-03-23
They Belong Only to Themselves (Platypus Press Shorts Book 3) Page 2