by Roan Parrish
“And you don’t want me! That’s what you’re saying!”
Will put his head in his hands like I was the most exasperating thing that had ever happened to him.
“Look, I’m sorry that what I want isn’t the same as what you want. Wouldn’t it be so convenient if we all agreed about everything and wanted the same things?”
“Don’t! Don’t make it sound ridiculous that it hurts my fucking feelings to sit here on this couch with you after a month of basically living together and sleeping together and hanging out together and say that I like you and wish it could continue.”
“Well then stop acting like I’m deliberately harming you by telling the truth when you ask for it. I’m not a monster! I’m not a terrible person or a mean person because I don’t want what you want. And I’m not a sad person or a cold person just because I don’t feel everything that you do!”
I was close enough to him to feel the breath of his exclamation on my face. I didn’t think he was a monster. I didn’t think he was terrible or mean. I just didn’t understand how it was possible to act the way he acted toward me and not have it mean something.
“I didn’t say you were deliberately doing anything,” I said, choked. “But it still hurts. Sorry.”
Will’s sigh was huge.
“Man, don’t apologize,” he said, tugging me a little closer.
I resisted, not wanting to accept comfort from the person who made me need it in the first place. Finally, though, I couldn’t resist Will’s hands on my shoulders. I slouched down against his chest with a sigh of my own, pathetically aware that I would take whatever he was offering as long as I wasn’t being banished from his presence entirely.
“Look.” I could feel the vibration of the word through his breastbone. “Leo, you’re my…. You’re great, okay? But I… the last thing I need is to be responsible for another person’s feelings right now. You’ve got your life, and I’ve got mine. We’ll still see each other, okay? Because we want to. If you still want to?”
I bit my lip against the bolt of hurt and frustration that tore through me. I had promised. I nodded. “Course I do.”
I knew I wasn’t imagining what was between us. That the way we were with each other, the way we touched each other had changed. Where once there was a clear divide between times when we were being sexual and every other moment, now the wall between the categories had eroded.
A hand on my hip as he moved around me in the kitchen to pour his coffee, fingers in my hair when he walked behind me. He touched my freckles sometimes, tracing them across my cheeks and nose with his fingertip. He’d lean his weight against me or drop his chin onto my shoulder to look at what I was doing. And every now and then he’d shove me against the wall and kiss me until I couldn’t breathe.
But if we weren’t dating, if we weren’t in a relationship, I had no context for understanding what those touches meant. Will didn’t seem to need containers for things like that, but I did.
When I’d gathered all my stuff, Will walked me to the door. I felt more like I was leaving home than I had when I left Michigan in the bus’ rearview mirror. Every atom in me was agitated toward Will, every muscle tensed to meet his. It was an actual physical wrench to make myself leave.
At the last minute, even though I felt raw and humiliated, I threw my arms around him.
“Thanks for having me,” I said.
He ran a hand up and down my back, under my backpack, and squeezed me, almost like he might, just the tiniest bit, miss me too.
“Later,” he said when I finally let go.
I turned back to look at his closed door as I waited for the elevator, then turned and took the stairs, bereft of the strength to stop myself from walking toward it again and knocking if it took the elevator more than five seconds to come.
I slouched down the fifteen flights slowly, biting the insides of my cheeks to keep from crying. Shoving my fists into my pockets, I traced the sharp ridges of the key Will had given me when I first arrived a month ago. I hadn’t given it back because it felt so final, and now I took a tiny bit of comfort in the fact that, at least, I knew I could come back. The flop of my busted shoes echoed in the stairwell, a reminder that I still needed to get new ones since the soles were coming off.
10
Chapter 10
February
“You should come out,” I told Charles as I tugged on the clothes I’d borrowed from Milton. The tight jeans hugged my legs and the artful layers of shirt, sweater, and jacket were nothing I’d ever have chosen, but I had to admit it all kind of worked. “We’re going to see Into the Woods at this high school—which, right, sounds like it’d be terrible because high school play, but Milton says it’ll be good?”
Milton came in without knocking and tossed a pair of pointy-toed shoes on the bed with a flourish, Thomas trailing in behind him.
“Here. You absolutely cannot wear those scrofulous Vans with my outfit.”
I thought about protesting, but the truth was, my shoe situation was actually reaching critical. I’d duct taped the soles back on when they started flapping when I walked, but in the cold the duct tape lost its stickiness and kind of sloughed off, leaving the rubber parts of my shoes gummy so that dirt and hair and dust stuck and crusted in the new layer of duct tape I’d added.
It was pathetic, I knew, but I hadn’t bought new ones yet because I’d kind of hoped Will would be so horrified by them that he’d insist on another shopping expedition. The more fool me, since Will was basically immune to manipulation tactics. So I just put on Milton’s shoes. They scrunched my toes.
“Wow,” said Thomas. “You look really great.”
“Thanks,” I said, considering my reflection. Was this how Will would want me to dress? Put together and a little bit edgy? I ran a hand through my hair but it just looked sloppy.
“Here, can I…?” Thomas gestured at my hair.
“Yeah, sure.”
He and Milton exchanged a look, and Thomas took a small container out of his bag and rubbed a dollop of some product that smelled warm, like a bakery or something, between his hands. He nudged me onto the bed and stood in front of me, touching me tentatively at first and then massaging the stuff into my hair and doing… some kind of arranging. It felt nice, and I leaned into his touch. His hands softened, just touching my scalp.
“Um, o-okay,” Thomas said, stepping away.
My hair was still its usual wavy brown mop, but now it looked like I wore it that way on purpose. It made me look older.
“Hey, thanks!”
“You look great,” Thomas said, ducking his head and looking at the floor where my poor cast-off Vans sat in a puddle of duct tape and melted slush. “I mean, you always look—I didn’t mean, um.”
“Ooh, do you mind taking a picture of me?” I asked him, tossing him my phone. “I wanna prove to Will that I’m not always a total wreck.”
Thomas didn’t say anything as he took the picture.
I texted Will, Outfit approval? Wish you were coming! xoxox
“I’ll, uh, meet you guys out front,” Thomas said, then left.
My phone pinged with a text from Will: Not bad, cowboy. Bet you *could* make me come if you put your mind to it… ;)
Heat flushed through me, and I immediately wondered if I should skip the play and go over to Will’s instead.
Milton thwacked me with the back of his hand.
“What is wrong with you?!”
“What’d I do?” I looked away from my phone and forced the smile off my face.
“Come on, Leo, you cannot be this oblivious. Thomas? Likes you. Obviously.”
“No way. Wait, did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to tell me, you idiot, it’s completely obvious. He hangs on every word you say, he stares at you, he invites you to do things.” Milton was looking at me with raised eyebrows. “Did you seriously not know?”
I shook my head. I seriously didn’t. It hadn’t even occurred to me that someone m
ight feel that way about me. I was a radio, and the only station I was tuned to was Will’s.
The play turned out to be great. I’d dragged Charles with us at the last minute after all, and he, Milton, Thomas, Gretchen, and I sat in the very back row, sipping vodka from one of Milton’s ever-present flasks mixed with hot chocolate we bought at the concession table.
I was warm and tipsy and full of joy, snuggled in my seat between Milton, who kept up a running stream of funny commentary, and Gretchen, who began adding her own commentary after about half of one of Milton’s flasks and enough hot chocolate to send me into a sugar coma. I licked whipped cream off her nose and spent intermission with my head on her shoulder, watching the audience through half-closed eyes.
After the curtain call, we spilled out into the streets with the rest of the audience, everyone talking excitedly, the stress of the parents somewhat dissipated now that the show had finished, people bragging about the lighting effect their son had come up with or the way their daughter had covered for another actor who forgot his lines.
I had one arm linked with Gretchen’s and the other with Milton’s, and the snap of cold air made us half run and half skip the three blocks to the diner. We ate plates of fries and hummus with olives and pita triangles, and we drank coffee doctored with more vodka from another flask that Milton produced from some mysterious inner pocket that hadn’t even disturbed the line of his perfectly cut overcoat, and we talked and laughed in a cloud of fizzy excitement. Charles was explaining the paper he was writing, called “On the Tyranny of Time,” to Gretchen, and Milton was telling us his own theatrical greatest hits and misses.
On our way out, I was so tipsy and high on my friends’ energy that I tripped going down the narrow, slush-slicked staircase that led to the bathrooms, and Thomas caught my arm to keep me from falling. Did he hold on a little longer than was necessary? I wasn’t sure, so I just smiled at him. The smile he gave me back was luminous.
By the time we got back to the dorms, the cold air had sobered me a little, but I was still buzzing, the fluorescent lights in the hallway making my head throb and the texture on the carpet seem hyper-real. Thomas and Gretchen waved good night, and Milton caught my shoulder as I made to follow Charles to our room.
“One sec,” he said, suddenly serious. “About Thomas. Just don’t fuck with him if you don’t mean it, okay?”
“Fuck with him? I don’t fuck with him.”
Milton hesitated. “Just don’t treat him the way Will treats you.”
“What!? I don’t—”
“Babe, you kind of do. I know you probably don’t mean to.”
I shook my head, and Milton patted me on the shoulder.
“Okay. Just… you know how shitty it feels, so be careful with him.”
I nodded, bewildered and nauseated, all the good feelings of the evening rushing out of me like a deflating balloon.
The stars rushed past and we zoomed through the planets’ atmospheres, space debris suspended in the thick darkness. I was shaky with awe at the scale of the known universe, even rendered in flickering light and color on the ceiling of the planetarium.
The e-mail from my astronomy professor telling us we had to go to the planetarium for class had come while I was FaceTiming with Will, and I told him it’d be more fun if I could go with him. He’d rolled his eyes at me and muttered about “puppy dog eyes,” but he’d been smiling when he agreed.
Today was the first time I’d seen him since taking my leave of his apartment after our winter break together. We’d talked and texted over the last couple weeks, but I could tell that Will was skittish about the way we’d left things, and I decided to prove to him that I wasn’t some codependent loser by not asking him to hang out every day.
When he’d walked up to where I was waiting in front of the entrance, though, my heart totally leapt. He had come from work, so he was dressed impeccably, and the reminder that he’d left work early to make sure we could catch the last show made me all warm and swoony.
Now, I reached out and twined my fingers through Will’s where his hand rested on his thigh. I did it without thinking, seeking some connection in the face of the sublimity of space. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Will turn to look at me, but I just kept my gaze heavenward and after a minute he squeezed my hand back.
My chest was hollow with yearning, my stomach aflutter with affection for Will. For the feel of the hand I held, the leg our hands rested on, the warmth of his shoulder just touching mine.
Love. Not affection. I knew it, really. It had to be love because you didn’t feel affection for a hand. You fucking loved it. Right?
I was light-headed, the word zinging around to the tune of the whooshing keyboard and the zinging strings that accompanied our rush through space, my skin tingling as if it were only molecules magnetized toward Will by the force of his pull. I wanted to close my eyes, to shut out a vastness that dwarfed my love, but I couldn’t because I wanted both.
I wanted all the solidity of Will’s hand on earth, and I wanted to be blasted apart by echoes of it thrumming through space like the afterimage of a supernova.
“Makes me feel like we’re in Rebel Without a Cause,” Will was saying as we left the planetarium and walked through Central Park.
“I never saw it.”
Will shook his head at me the way he did whenever I hadn’t read or seen something he considered essential to being a cultured human in the world. I got the sense he’d worked really hard to catch up on all these things when he left Holiday.
“In class the professor told us this amazing story about Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan,” I offered. “Part of the Voyager project was that on board each of the craft were these records where they recorded a bunch of sounds from Earth—like little Earth capsules or something to communicate things about our world and about humanity if they ever made contact with alien life, and Carl Sagan was the one to curate it. Like, jeez, how do you curate the experience of Earth? It’s so wild.”
My shoulder brushed Will’s companionably, but he didn’t put any distance between us.
“Ann Druyan was the creative director of the project, and she and Carl Sagan fell in love while they were working on it. So she had the idea that they should include a record where they measure electrical impulses of the brain and the nervous system then translate that into sound, with the idea that possibly if the record were found those sounds could be translated back into thoughts. Which is such a brilliant idea, just in theory.
“So she let them record the sounds while she meditated, and she says that she was thinking about being in love with Carl Sagan, so that really it’s like the soundtrack to her feelings of love for him. And, okay, I mean, in meditation you’re supposed to not really think, but still. Isn’t that the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard? She sent her love into space to echo throughout the fucking cosmos!”
I hooked my elbow through Will’s and squeezed his arm against me, caught up in the story. If only I could transmit to him the feelings that I knew he wouldn’t want to hear me say out loud.
Will let me take his arm, but he shook his head.
“I guess, but wasn’t Carl Sagan married to someone else, and didn’t they have some super dramatic divorce with kids and stuff because he fell in love with Ann Druyan?”
“Oh my god, why do you always focus on the part that spoils everything?” I groaned.
“The truth of something doesn’t spoil it, kiddo. It’s the truth. I’m not saying they weren’t in love, I’m just saying—”
“No, but come on. I know you think I’m an über-romantic or whatever, but admit it. You, like, fundamentally refuse to believe that something might be romantic.”
He swung around and looked at me, eyes narrowed. “No. Things aren’t romantic or not romantic. It’s not a definitional category. It’s individual. And I think it’s more accurate to say that a lie is what spoils something. I hate lies.”
This I knew. Even the tiny little white lies that m
ost people would consider a part of basic manners weren’t safe from Will’s scorn.
He started to say something more but stopped when a handsome man in his late-twenties jogged up to us, cheeks flushed and the muscles of his chest defined by sweat.
“Will,” the man said, inclining his head.
Will dropped my arm without looking at me, but the man’s eyes tracked the movement.
“Hey, Tariq. How’s it going?”
Tariq’s smile was flirtatious. Filthy. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind it was a smile that broadcast We have had sex.
“It’s going great.” His eyes tracked up and down Will’s body appreciatively. “You never called,” he said flirtatiously.
Will didn’t say anything, and Tariq set his jaw and cut his eyes to me.
“I guess your tastes run a little more to the… barely legal? To each his own. You take care.”
He gave me a dismissive look, then jogged off, his powerful arms pumping at his sides.
“Asshole. Ignore him,” Will muttered before I’d even had time to process what the guy had said.
A part of me had been wondering if an element of Will’s reluctance to really give a relationship with me a try was our age difference, but when I took Tariq’s comment as an excuse to ask him flat-out, Will dismissed it. “I don’t give a shit how old you are,” he said.
Still, though we went to dinner and back to his apartment after, he was as distant and unreachable as a star.
Layne was holding the portafilter in one hand and a bag of beans in the other, and she looked panicked. Probably because she’d finally responded to my laborious sighs and asked if I wanted to talk about it, clearly assuming—and hoping—that I would say no like any polite person. But I was desperate. So I said yes.
“Oh, okay,” she said, rallying and putting down the beans.
I gave her a thumbnail sketch of what happened over January break, culminating in me asking Will if we could still be together. I told her about what Tariq said and how Will insisted that he didn’t give a shit about my age or about what anyone thought about who he fucked.