by Roan Parrish
At first I thought he was getting a kick out of it. But Will wore his beauty with a kind of scorn that made it even more potent, the way some people in New York seemed to wear expensive clothes with the air that they couldn’t care less if they ruined them. Like, yeah, splatter duck fat on this gazillion-dollar silk shirt, sure. Or, what’s that? Sit on the dirt in this designer dress and drink champagne? Let’s do it.
After the eight billionth person’s head turned to look at him, though, he started to tighten up. It probably just read as good posture to the casual observer, but to me it looked like he was trying to pull into himself. As if by making himself stiller he could escape notice, a gazelle on the plains freezing to elude the chase.
When he shoved his fisted hands into his pockets, though, I pulled him into a little café, seated him facing the wall, and bought him a coffee. And I watched him slowly relax.
He looked tired and still wasn’t very talkative, but he seemed happy to listen, so to distract him, I told him about Milton and Charles, and about Gretchen, this awesome girl on my hall, who was the calmest person I’d ever known. Seriously, just being around her made me relax. I’d met Gretchen because we were in a tour group for people who hadn’t already visited campus the previous spring. Our tour guide was a sophomore who seemed so jaded that he could hardly raise his voice loud enough to be heard, but clearly took a great deal of pleasure in making us nervous.
When we’d gotten to the lobby in the library, he pointed a languid thumb behind his shoulder and told us that from the fifth or sixth floor looking down, the mosaic tile was laid out to look like spikes rising out of the ground in an attempt to deter students from throwing themselves over. Because before the administration added the cage around the opening, they did that, he told us. A lot. He made eye contact with each of us in turn, as if he were making a toast. I let out a nervous laugh.
The girl next to me, tall, with curly hair so blonde it was nearly white and strangely colorless eyes, cocked her head at the mosaic and said, “That’s so odd. If people wanted to commit suicide, the promise of spikes would hardly be a deterrent would it?”
“Oh gosh,” I said. “You’re totally right.”
And that, I had quickly learned, was really all it took to make new friends the first week of college.
I told him about classes. How my favorite was this physics class that was blowing my mind. Especially the parts about astrophysics. Physics was like a cheat sheet to the universe. Things that once just were suddenly had explanations, a logic all their own—except not all their own because they resonated with other things and forces throughout the universe. I might have gotten pretty excited talking about Newton’s second law.
And as long as I was talking and Will was paying attention to me I felt like I could do anything. Like he was a magnifying glass refracting the light of the whole universe onto me in a beam so intense and so warm that every molecule of my being was illuminated and seen. The threat of being burned alive was always in play, but the risk felt totally worth it.
Two girls at the counter lingered over doctoring their coffees, sneaking glances at Will and giggling. Will let out an exasperated breath.
“They stare at you because you’re so beautiful,” I told him, nudging his coffee with mine.
“Ugh, who fucking cares,” he said, flopping backward in his seat and closing his eyes, like if he wasn’t able to see people, then they couldn’t see him.
I snorted. “Easy to say when you are. I bet everyone wishes they were. Or, most people, anyway,” I corrected myself. It drove Daniel batshit when people made generalizations and whenever I did it in front of him I’d get an earful.
“You shouldn’t wish for that. You’re fine as you are.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said, but secretly I was a little thrilled even at the faint praise. Will hardly ever gave compliments.
“Whatever, you’re fucking adorable. Don’t fish.”
“I don’t get it, though. You like it sometimes, I know. The power it gives you over people. I mean, you use it to, like… meet people, right, so you can’t tell me you don’t like being so hot—”
“Yeah, at a bar or a club—when I’m trying to pick someone up. Not at work or buying a fucking newspaper, or”—he nodded to our surroundings—“drinking a damn coffee. Not when I can’t control it. You think it’s great to look like this? To walk down the street and have everyone stare at you so you can’t even trip on the damn sidewalk without an audience. To constantly have people talking to you and smiling and acting all nervous or insecure or like you’re better than them?”
He cut himself off with a quick look around, suddenly realizing he’d started ranting.
“Whoa. I guess… I didn’t think about that part of it.”
“Yeah, nobody ever does.”
He took another sip of his coffee and made a face. “Ugh. Overextracted.” He was quiet for a while, pushing a finger through the light spill of sugar to leave a trail. “I just…,” he said quietly, then shook his head.
“What?”
When Will had things to say, he said them. When he had nothing to say, he didn’t make an effort to fill the silence. At first this had made me uncomfortable. It was weird to hang out with someone who might be silent for an hour and then, when something occurred to him, monologue about it. But now it was one of my favorite things about hanging out with Will. Realizing that when he said things they mattered to him.
“I don’t want to be responsible for other people’s feelings, you know? I don’t want to know that someone is nervous because they’re hot for me and feel like it’s my responsibility to be nicer to them to put them at ease or some shit. It’s nothing to do with me even. They don’t like me, they don’t care about me. Hell, they just want to stare at me and have me shut up and smile at them. Like I’m a fucking prop in some fantasy.”
His expression was grim, bitter.
“And then, if I don’t play along—if I don’t smile the way they want, or flirt back, or say thank you to their compliments—it’s like I’ve somehow committed a social foul. I’ve offended them so they have to get revenge somehow. Like by asserting that I’m an actual fucking person I’ve invited retribution.”
I started to respond, but Will’s jaw was tight and he clearly wasn’t done.
“And if they aren’t turning me into a prop or a fuck toy in their heads, then they just let me do whatever I want because beauty is basically an all-access pass to the world.”
“People don’t really think that, do they?” But even as I said it, I thought of my own initial reactions to Will’s beauty.
Will hit me with a heavy, pitying look.
“Leo, you would not believe the shit I can get away with by looking like this. Seriously. It’s sick.”
“Like what?”
He sighed, like there were too many to even list.
“The things that I can say to someone and not get called on it…. Like, I was on a date over the summer with this guy and we had nothing in common. He started talking some stupid shit about how stop-and-frisk is the best thing to ever happen to the city. He kept flirting with me and I kept telling him off. Like, he’d say ‘Tell me about yourself,’ and I’d just dead-eye him and say, ‘If you think stop-and-frisk is a good policy, you are a racist.’ And he just let me talk all this shit and kind of laughed like I was kidding and never called me on it.”
“Well, maybe he was just being polite because you guys were on a date and he was trying to make the best of it since you didn’t have anything in common.”
“Dude, I called him a racist to his face and he just looked embarrassed and said nothing. Whatever—he’s just one example of shit that’s happened hundreds of times. I’ve tried it the other way around too. I’ve said ignorant, bigoted shit just to see if people will call me on it and they don’t. People don’t call me on being rude or selfish or ignorant even when the person next to me will get called out for doing the exact same thing. It’s like a social experiment a
t this point. A… screening process for assholes.”
The idea of Will wandering through the city feeling like everyone he interacted with was failing him, instead of actually connecting with them, made me incredibly sad.
“They give me credit for something that has nothing to do with me. It’s… it’s bullshit,” Will continued.
“Um, well, I guess it means you get what you want, though?” I was trying to put a positive spin on it, but as someone who had never really felt like I had the license to be rude or selfish or inconsiderate, it didn’t seem like the absolute worst thing.
“Yeah, great.” Will slumped. Clearly that was the wrong thing to say. “Never knowing if you get something because you deserve it or because someone just likes the way you look is awesome.”
“Shit, sorry, I didn’t think about it like that.”
He threw back the rest of his coffee like a shot and stood abruptly.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The second we were outside again, Will straightened his spine and set his shoulders. Even his gait changed. The mask slid back into place, like he could filter what went out and what got in. Will was pretty good at that whole making a bubble around yourself thing.
After a few blocks, he pulled me into a store where every single article of clothing was white. Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of rule about white after… some day? I was going to ask Will, but he was distracted, pinching the pressed pleat of a pant leg here, running a fingertip over the crisp collar of shirt there, and caressing the cable of a sweater with the back of his hand as he walked through the store.
“Here, try this on.”
Will held up a pair of pants that tied at the waist with a strip of fabric and had built-in suspenders, like in those old Charlie Chaplin films. He handed them to me along with a sleeveless shirt that looked like an undershirt but probably wasn’t. It was baby blue and cut low enough that the few chest hairs I had would be on full display.
“Um, why?”
Will’s eyes narrowed, like he was seeing me in the outfit he’d chosen, and gestured me toward the dressing rooms.
“Because I want to see. Okay?”
And of course the idea that Will would want to see me in anything was so flattering that I immediately stumbled to the dressing room. Will hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and gave the dressing room attendant a look that said he had this and we didn’t need any assistance. She just gave him a bored once-over and raised one painted-on eyebrow, tapping at her phone where it rested on her slender thigh.
I hung the clothes on the back of the door, kicked off my ratty sneakers, and pulled off my jeans and T-shirt, letting them fall in a pile on the floor.
The mirror certainly didn’t do me any favors. In the direct lighting, reflected to myself from three angles, there was no avoiding it. I was… not much to look at. Skinny as shit, kind of tan, but it maybe looked more like I was just scruffy. Freckles across my nose and cheeks. Hair on my arms and legs but, for some reason, only a sprinkling of hair on my chest and a few under my belly button.
My shoulders and knees were bony—I mean, I wasn’t in Charles’ league, but he was about nine feet tall—and my shoulder blades poked out. Once, when he’d had a few drinks, Daniel told me that he thought I would be handsome in a few years. Something about growing into my face. But it had been over a year since he’d said that, and if it was going to happen, it certainly hadn’t yet.
My nose still looked like a little kid’s, and I had these deep dimples that my grandma used to touch whenever she’d see me and say, “God just took a little stitch.” Which was actually terrifying when I thought about it. My mouth was too big for my face. My eyes were… I dunno, they were mine so it was hard to tell. Okay, I guess? Mostly I just thought I looked startled all the time. And my eyebrows kind of didn’t go with my face or something. I looked nice, mostly, but my eyebrows were all über serious, like I was concentrating really hard or someone had just hurt my feelings.
Turning my back to concentrate on the pants wasn’t much better because even though they were, you know, pants, there was something weird about them, and I couldn’t figure out which way around they went. As I was pulling them up, the door opened, nearly pushing me into the mirror, and Will slid in.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” he asked.
He took in my state of half undress with a total lack of concern or interest, and I felt this particular kind of shame that usually comes when you give someone something that really matters to you and they don’t even notice.
“These stupid pants are like a puzzle,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out which—”
Will tossed me the shirt, which I pulled on—couldn’t mess up a tank top at least—and the second the fabric touched me he tucked it into the pants, and did something where he tied the fabric and engaged the suspenders in one easy gesture.
“Who could wear white pants anyway?” I muttered. “I’d sit down on a bench or something and be filthy in point five seconds.”
He didn’t respond, regarding me, leaning against the dressing room door, a hand on his chin like he was considering what he thought of me. And when he smiled it felt emptier than I’d expected, because it was like he was smiling at the clothes and not at me at all. Was this what he was attracted to? People who dressed like this?
Was this what he wanted me to be?
I looked ridiculous. Like I was trying really hard to be someone I wasn’t.
“You like this?” I asked Will.
He nodded.
“But, like, for me?”
“Well, you wouldn’t wear it, would you?”
His hands went to my shoulders to adjust the suspenders, and I shook my head.
“I don’t look like me.”
He shrugged like that was nothing.
“You get to decide what you look like. You get to decide who you are.”
“You don’t get to decide who you are,” I said. That was ridiculous. “You just… are who you are.”
Will’s hands, still hovering at my shoulders, tightened. I took a step toward him so we were almost chest to chest.
“Why did you really want me to try this stuff on? You know I wouldn’t wear it.”
“Just for fun,” he said, but his voice sounded like he was having the opposite of fun.
“I don’t believe you.” I stepped forward again, putting Will’s back against the door. “Seriously. Why?”
I could feel it again. That heat. That pull between us like it was taking more energy to keep our bodies apart than it would to allow their collision. How did that fit with your first law, Newton? We might’ve been at rest, but everything in us was straining together, like only this skin was keeping us from getting all messed up in each other.
Will’s breath came a little short as I stared at him. Somehow, looking at him this close up, his perfect beauty fell apart and reformed into something different. No longer was it about proportion and line and angle. Up close, Will was texture and shadow and something far more human. I could smell him. The familiar, slightly milky smell of the coffee shop. Beneath that, some subtle cologne that smelled like expensive suits and garden parties and maybe just a hint of leather. The slight sour bite of fresh sweat. And then his skin, like dust warmed in a beam of sunlight.
His eyes locked on my mouth and his hands came up like he wanted to put them on my hips but was stopping himself, so they just hovered there.
“See,” I said, and it came out as a whisper.
Will shook his head but his eyes didn’t leave my mouth. I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and watched his Adam’s apple slide and catch in an audible swallow.
I wanted to press him against the dressing room door and kiss him until he actually talked to me, the way he’d started to do in Holiday. But it was like he’d gotten enough time apart from me for whatever spell Holiday wove to have fallen away. Or maybe it was as simple as he had needed someone to talk to in Holiday and Rex was occupied so
it became me by default, and now that he was back in New York I was just… I don’t know.
But I could feel this—whatever it was—between us.
“Will.”
He was almost glaring at me, like a super turned-up version of The Look. And for some reason it made me ridiculously happy, because with Will, any response other than haughty neutrality was a step in the right direction.
“Hey, kiss me,” I said, nudging him, and watched his battle with himself play out over his face.
He stared at me, breathing through his nose, having come, apparently, to no decision whatsoever.
“Okay, I’m going to kiss you now if you don’t stop me,” I said, which actually sounded a little creepy of me.
But he didn’t stop me. And he didn’t seem creeped. He just closed his eyes and sighed a little and I didn’t know what he was thinking. Now that we were the same height, I just stepped into him and pressed our mouths together.
The second I kissed him he came alive, a sparkler touched by a match. He made a sound in the back of his throat and pulled me against him with a palm at the small of my back, just above those damn pants. His mouth was hot, and I could taste his coffee from earlier, a bitter note that gave way almost immediately to the sweetness of his taste.
I remembered it, even all these months later, and it tasted like home.
Will had his arms around me now, wrapping me up so tight I almost couldn’t move. He pushed one hand through my hair to hold my face to his while he—holy shit—while he kissed the hell out of me. One second I was kissing him, and the next he’d flipped me, slammed me against the dressing room door, and was basically eating my face. Only, you know, in a good way. An awesome way.
It felt nothing like my make-out session with Milton. Even when Milton had touched my cock I hadn’t felt as electrified as I did from Will’s kiss. I scrabbled at his back, trying to… something—to touch skin or trace muscle, but it was really all I could do to keep my feet under me with Will’s mouth on mine. Finally, he tickled the roof of my mouth with his tongue, just gently stroked it, and I found myself so close to coming that it shocked me. I let out a groan and tried to grab for his hips, desperate to get some friction.