by Roan Parrish
“Can you fuck off now, please,” Will told him, never looking away from me.
The man grumbled and went to the bedroom, coming out a minute later fully dressed as Will and I stared at each other. I was cataloging the places I’d seen the man touch him like I was dusting him for fingerprints, each touch standing out, a black spot on his pale skin.
The man crossed between us, patting Will possessively on the ass as he opened the door.
“I left my number on the bed. In case you want to finish what we started.” Will didn’t even look at him.
“Leo,” Will started, his voice unbearably gentle.
I couldn’t help it. I burst into tears. It was the final mortification.
“I told you,” Will said softly, voice strained. “I told you that I wasn’t what you wanted. That you shouldn’t expect anything from me.”
I shook my head furiously. I knew what he’d said, of course I knew. But so many things he’d done said something so different.
“You like me!” I found myself shouting. “I know you do!”
“I do, Leo. I like you so much. Of course I do.”
I knew that I sounded foolish. Childish. That Will had been clear on this point. And yet I couldn’t help myself. All I could process were the starkest reactions. The most basic hurts.
“Then why? Why would you do this?”
“It has nothing to do with you. I—other people—it’s just sex, it doesn’t matter.”
“If it doesn’t matter then stop!” I demanded. I was a hundred yards out of line, I knew, and my voice sounded frenzied.
Will looked down and shook his head.
“That’s not…. Leo, I don’t want to stop.”
“But how? How can you want them if you care about me at all? I would never do that to you. Maybe you’re just scared to admit that we could actually work!”
Will frowned and took a deep breath. “I’m trying not to lose my temper because I know you’re upset. I never promised you anything. In fact, I stood right here and told you that if we went down this road, it was with the knowledge that if things didn’t go the way you wanted then you were choosing it with your eyes open. And you agreed. You agreed that it was okay and that we’d still be friends. You’ve always known who I was. The fact that you didn’t want to admit it to yourself doesn’t make me the bad guy. It doesn’t mean that I’ve betrayed you or broken a promise. Just because you wanted something to be true doesn’t make it true. You don’t get to decide how things go and make them be that way.”
“No, you always decide! Everything’s always on your terms. You decide exactly how close I can get. What I can ask you about and how much I can know you. When I can stay and when I have to go. I’m always waiting for you, hoping that you’ll—”
“I get to decide those things! Everyone gets to set their own terms. That’s how being a goddamned adult works. It’s my fucking apartment, so of course I get to decide when you can stay and when you have to go. And, Jesus, you already know me better than any—”
He broke off, glaring at me.
“And then you just let yourself in here like it’s a damned clubhouse or something, and you see something you don’t want to see and you call me a fucking whore, like it’s not my right to act exactly as I want to in my own house!”
He spun away, grabbing paper towel and squatting down to clean up the tiramisu splattered in the bedroom doorway.
My heart pounded in my throat and my ears rang. I wanted to punch him, kick him, rip at his hair—somehow mar the beauty that mocked me. Make him hurt the way I was hurting right now.
“I think you’re doing it on purpose!” I choked out.
“Yeah, Leo, sure,” he said tiredly. “I orchestrated bringing some guy back here at exactly the moment you were going to burst in completely unexpected just to prove a point to you that I’ve been making from the beginning.”
“No.” I shook my head, eyes squeezed shut. “I think you hurt so much sometimes—hate the world so much—that you think I’ll never understand, so you’re trying to hurt me so much that I turn into someone who can understand.”
Will rocked on his heels, dropping to the floor as if the force of my words had propelled him backward.
“Jesus Christ, no,” he said, horrorstruck.
I bit my lip, tears streaming down my face.
“I’m done,” I said. “I can’t do this anymore. It hurts too much.” My voice was ragged, choked. I felt blasted out. Hollow.
Will was still on the floor looking up at me, blond hair mussed, bite marks starting to come out as bruises on his neck, one hand raised as if he could touch me though I was steps away.
“But you knew,” he insisted again, clinging to the sentiment the way he clutched the dirty paper towel in his hand. “You knew from the start.”
His eyes were bright and his voice quavered slightly.
I bit my lip and nodded, suddenly so exhausted that for once I had nothing to say to him.
“Yeah, okay. I guess I did.”
The last thing I saw as the door swung shut was a footprint in tiramisu marring the rug the way the man’s bites marred Will’s skin.
11
Chapter 11
February & March
The next month passed in a haze of sleep, forcing myself to eat, going through the motions of attending class, mindlessly making coffee, and, yeah, fine, a lot of crying.
The night I’d walked in on Will with that man, I’d called Daniel sobbing while walking aimlessly. Daniel had gotten freaked out that he couldn’t understand me and then, when I’d calmed down enough to explain what had happened, been so furious at Will that he’d threatened to come down and beat the shit out of him, and Rex had taken the phone away.
When I’d hung up with them, Rex having extracted a promise from Daniel that he would not take the early BoltBus to New York and defend my honor, I collapsed in bed, pulled up the covers, and slept for twenty hours. When I woke up, I had the bizarre synchronicity of having inadvertently set myself on Charles’ schedule. We went to the dining hall together, and he monologued about how the schedules of modernity enslave us, bending our minds and habits to the patterns enforced by business hours, greeting card designations, and department store sales.
“Fuck time,” I’d said. “You think it’s moving you forward, moving you closer to something, but it’s really just happening without you.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Charles had said, like I’d finally seen reason.
Milton had found me in the same stairwell where we’d first met at orientation.
“Oh, hon,” he’d said when I told him. That’s all. He didn’t say he told me so, or that he hated Will—though he said both later on, the former to my annoyance and the latter to my vague and petty satisfaction. He’d just held me while I cried and then taken over my life for the next week, making sure that I ate and slept and went to class.
He dragged me bodily from the dorms one night to go to a movie with him and Gretchen that I didn’t pay attention to and didn’t remember after. I sat between them in the darkness, my friends, and I imagined I was still in the planetarium with Will, and I cried. And then when I got back to my room I YouTubed the planetarium scene from Rebel Without a Cause that Will had mentioned, and I thought how James Dean actually looked a little bit like Will—the sharp angle of the jaw and the eyes that shifted from bravado to uncertainty a little too easily.
Two weeks after the night I’d walked in on Will, he called me to ask how I was. I’d left him a drunken message the night before that I only remembered cringingly when I saw his name appear on my phone. I answered but didn’t say anything at first. Will talked like things were normal between us. He told me about a client at work (screaming fit when he told her she couldn’t have an entirely black cover no matter how edgy her book might be) and about the new Vietnamese place he’d tried in the neighborhood (great bún but bland spring rolls). He told me that he’d been rewatching Firefly and wondered if I’d seen it (of cou
rse I had; what kind of tasteless moron did he take me for).
And, finally, when he petered out and lapsed into silence, I took a deep breath, sat up straight, and told Will what I’d realized.
My friends had weighed in. Milton was loudest, as usual. Will is bad for you. He’s a drug and you’re an addict, and you can’t be trusted to make logical, healthy decisions around him, so you should stay the fuck away. But, barring that, just don’t make yourself vulnerable to him. Be as remote and untouchable as he is.
Gretchen was practical and generous: If he’s taking up space in your head, then he’s a part of your life, and you owe it to yourself to figure out how you feel about him. It blended a bit with something that Tonya said in yoga when we were in challenging poses: Find the place where you’re doing work you don’t need to do. Soften your jaw, your eyes, your hands. They aren’t helping you lunge so you don’t need to expend energy on them.
The truth was that Will was a constantly tensed muscle, using energy even when I wasn’t actively engaging with him.
I took a deep breath and told Will, “I guess I kind of thought if I just waited long enough you’d realize that you wanted to be with me.” My voice sounded small and pathetic, but I forced myself to go on. “I know you didn’t promise me that. I know. We really do want different things, I guess. And I’m just making myself pathetic now, so I need to stop.”
Will started to say something, but I didn’t let him. I needed to get it out now or I never would.
“The thing is, I can’t see you. You take up too much… everything. I don’t know how to, I guess, feel things halfway. If you’re always there in the back of my mind—if I’m always so invested in you…. See, I want to give you what you want. You know? I want you to be happy because I—I care about you so much. But I can’t really because giving you what makes you happy makes me so… so fucking miserable.” I took a deep breath, trying not to cry and failing.
“So I get that you won’t change, but I don’t think I can either. I can’t stop wanting what I want—so. So I need to stop. I need to like get a fucking life, I guess. Of my own. Yeah. I need to get a life.”
Silence, but I knew he was still there.
Finally, his voice as small as I’d ever heard it, Will said, “Okay. I understand. Take care of yourself, babe.”
He ended the call.
And I broke all over again.
I threw myself into Project: Get a Life with as much enthusiasm as Charles undertook his Project: 36-Hour Days, and a level of manic desperation that I acknowledged and accepted.
Milton was enthusiastic and got everyone else on board too. He dragged me to campus plays, choir concerts, dance performances, narrating the reviews of each that he’d compose for the Arts column in the school paper that he’d begun writing for.
Thomas took me to Life Drawing with him, at which I produced one ludicrously malformed sketch after another. Thomas being Thomas tried to encourage me, telling me my style was Picassoesque. But a mention of Picasso just made me think of the day Will and I went to MoMA, and I found myself wondering what he’d seen in that painting Christina’s World that was different enough from what I’d seen that it’d made him kiss me in public.
I wondered what he’d thought the gray thing was between the house and the barn. And, as I sat on the uncomfortable metal stool in the art room while people sketched around me, I had an internal collapse at the realization that I might never know.
Gretchen made sure I went with her to yoga three times a week, pulling me out of my room and throwing sweats at me if I didn’t show up in the hallway to meet her at the appropriate time. Of all of it, that was the one activity that felt like it was helping. For those sixty-five minutes, I took myself out of my own hands and placed myself in Tonya’s. I followed her instructions with a slavish accuracy, desperate to believe that just showing up in good faith was enough. Desperate to believe what she always said: that we were each enough, as we were, and that we could sink into our enoughness and trust it to buoy us.
And if occasionally something she said in class struck my heart or my gut with the precision destruction of a smart bomb—like the day she said, “It’s in the moment that you give up that you realize you could have kept going. It’s also the moment it’s too late.”—then no one said anything about the tears that streaked my skin along with sweat.
Gretchen didn’t talk much about her personal life, but she and Layne were still seeing each other, and from the brightness of their smiles when Gretchen would show up to Mug Shots, things were going pretty well. I never told Layne how spectacularly I had twisted her advice, but I figured Gretchen had probably given her the basics because, though she never brought it up, I would sometimes catch her looking at me with a kind of sympathy that said she’d been there.
But for all that my friends saved me, week after week, I still wanted something that was just mine. I saw my mistake now. That casting Will in that role—as the thing that was just for me—was paradoxical and had set me off on the wrong foot. No, I wanted something that was mine the way theater was Milton’s and art was Thomas’, and… you know, toppling the heteropatriarchy was Layne’s.
Physics was the thing I’d found that I was constantly interested by, so I talked with my professor, and she let me start working in the physics lab. Just helping out for now, but with the promise that if it was a good fit I could potentially be involved in research projects the next semester. I talked to one of the seniors who told me they sometimes let sophomores assist over the summer in exchange for room and board if they declared a physics major before the end of the semester, so since I was technically a sophomore, credits-wise, that’s what I did.
Filing the paperwork made me feel better. As if now that I was affiliated with a department I belonged here somehow. It was the first time I’d felt like I belonged anywhere, really. Even doing scut in the lab was fascinating. Milton always said he didn’t get how I—someone he thought of as being creative—could want to be a science major since they were methodical and unimaginative.
But he was so wrong.
Yes, physics was methodical, but the method was part of what the very discipline questioned. It was incredibly creative. These scientists began, sometimes, from whims and questions as personal as any that inspired a play or a song, running those personal investments through the most rigorous of testing, a gorgeous blend of feeling and thought that produced experiments and theories from the atomic level to the heights of philosophical query.
I was particularly fascinated with the crux of astronomy and physics, and when I started looking at the course catalog for fall semester I heard Will’s voice in my head for just a moment, saying, “Astrophysics? You’re going to study actual rocket science?” I thought he’d be excited by it, actually. One of the things I liked so much about Will was how his creativity and art were crossed with a nearly scientific rigor, his designs as much based in layout and market research as they were in aesthetics.
And then I banished his voice from my head like I’d done a thousand times since that night and redoubled my attention to work.
On Valentine’s Day in elementary school, we were instructed to give cards to everyone in the class. We’d made construction paper mailboxes with our names on them and placed them at the front of the room, colorful and open, ready to receive well wishes from anyone who might drop them in.
In fourth grade, I’d followed this instruction as I had every year before, carefully tearing apart the perforated Batman cards I’d gotten at Target and writing a classmate’s name on the back of each one. I’d saved the best one—Batman standing next to the Bat signal looking out over a moon-drenched Gotham City—for Noah Waldmann, who I thought was the coolest kid in my class. I’d been crushed when I looked through my mailbox to see that I hadn’t gotten a card from him. Then embarrassed when I realized that though the girls had given cards to everyone, unlike last year, all the other boys in my class had only given cards to the girls. Something had shifted. An un
spoken line had been drawn through our social relations that had been clear to everyone except me.
Aside from that mild humiliation, Valentine’s Day was just something that happened, with the bonus that there was usually candy lying around. Sure, maybe I got the slightest bit jealous when I thought about people out with their dates, having attention lavished on them. But I knew it was just a stupid Hallmark holiday, really.
This year, though, it was like every force in the universe seemed hell-bent on shoving Valentine’s Day down my throat, up my nose, and into my eyeballs. Every storefront was plastered in a nauseous combination of pinks and purples. Posters for everything from kissing booths to film series appeared on campus bulletin boards, all of them printed on garish pink, purple, and red paper. The dining hall acquired table toppers that left an unsanitary dusting of glitter on the tabletops, which I’d find on my clothes and in my hair throughout the day. Even the radio was in cahoots, rendering songs I usually liked noxious through syrupy dedications of love.
So, though I had never paid the day much mind before, now, at exactly the moment I wanted to avoid thinking about romance, it was everywhere and there was no escape.
When I walked into Mug Shots the week of V-Day, Layne was in the middle of showing George, our newest employee, how best to place red hots just so on the whipped cream that topped our Hearts Afire Hot Chocolate, and where the vat of precrushed candy canes to sprinkle on the Mint Mocha Love Latte was. There was a dish of candy hearts, two of which were to go on every saucer holding a for-here drink. There was white-chocolate syrup dyed red for the Brownie Blitz Cappuccino, pink marshmallows for the Gimme S’Mores, and cinnamon sticks to stir the (Very) Dirty Chai Lattes. It was as if Valentine’s Day had exploded. And it was caffeinated.
That whole week I got home from work with red chocolate blood spatter dotting my clothes, shards of candy cane under my nails, and dust and dirt clinging to the marshmallow residue that coated my hands. By the time Gretchen came in to meet me near the end of my shift on Valentine’s Day evening, all I wanted was to be stricken with a particular strain of colorblindness that would disable me from seeing any color that contained red pigment. Also if I never heard the phrase, “I guess I’ll treat myself since no one else is going to treat me,” presaging the order of a drink again it would be too soon.