by Roan Parrish
Will nodded, fingers still in my hair. Good, he was listening.
“So I’ve been thinking about it. The way being a romantic or whatever is kind of like saying that the universal laws, like gravity, are more important than the particular details, like who left the thing there. When really, it’s a lot more like yoga than like physics. Where it’s all about how things are in the present. Not because the future doesn’t exist or because there’s nothing bigger, but because every day we change just by being in the world and learning about ourselves.”
Will’s expression softened a little.
“And it’s bigger than just you and me, actually. It’s not how I want to be. Thinking that I know some right way to do things that ignores all the other ways. Not leaving room for, like, surprises and new possibilities, and changing my mind. And I definitely don’t want to make someone else feel that way. Anyone else. It’s scary. Not feeling like you know how things should be. But… a good scary, maybe? A necessary scary. It is for me, anyway,” I said when Will jutted his jaw out in a yeah-right-nothing-scares-me expression.
“Okay, so anyway, I’m just gonna say this, and it’s what I want. I’m not saying you have to agree, or even respond right away if you want to think about things or whatever. So. Here goes.”
My heart felt like a candle flame guttering in the wind, and my stomach felt like someone had reached in and scooped it hollow. I squeezed my eyes shut the way I used to when Janie and I would ride the wooden roller coaster at Michigan’s Adventure. Just at the apex of the hill, hovering in the air before we slid over the other side and hurtled downward, I would close my eyes and try to identify the exact tipping point when gravity acted on the combined weight of human and machine and dragged us down, screaming.
My voice was a whisper. “I… I love you. I want to be with you. I want to try. I want to figure out a way that we can both get what we want. And I guess I just want to know what it would take for you to want that too.”
My heart was still pounding as my eyes fluttered open and the wave of adrenaline that had carried me through the last few seconds drained away, leaving me shaky and with a weird ringing in my ears. I ventured a quick look at Will. He was frowning.
“Will, did you hear me?”
“I don’t understand,” Will said slowly. And, wow, that was really not the response I wanted.
“Maybe I’m not explaining it well….” I swallowed hard.
“No.” He shook his head frustratedly. “I thought… I….” He sounded confused in a deep way. Like, fundamentally confused. “I guess I thought we… were. After Holiday—after we—” He narrowed his eyes at me. “You said you understood. After you… fucked the geologist or whatever,” he spat out. “You said you understood that I wasn’t trying to hurt you. That night.” He winced. “You… I thought you forgave me for that night.”
Wait, what?
“Forgave you? For the Tiramisu Incident? There was nothing to forgive, Will. I mean, it was awful and I was upset and, okay, fucking heartbroken. But like you said at the time, you didn’t break any promises to me. You had told me what the reality was and I was the one who was out of touch with it.”
Will stood up suddenly, looming over me with his hands on his hips and his eyes fixed on mine.
“But you fucking left!”
“Well, yeah. I was sad as hell and embarrassed and it was too much, thinking of you with another guy. But that doesn’t mean you were wrong.”
“No.” He spun away from me, hands fisted at his sides. “You left me! You… you fucking left me, Leo.” His voice broke. I tried to pull him to face me but he wouldn’t, so I stood up and walked in front of him. All I could see as he stared at the floor was the fall of blond hair and the tip of his nose.
“Hey.”
I tried to tilt his chin up so I could see his face, but he shook me off.
“It was just sex with him.”
“Yeah, I know, Will. You don’t have to—”
Will’s head snapped up and his eyes were a blaze of blue.
“It was just sex. It was nothing. You were my best friend. You were my best fucking friend and I’d told you the truth and you just left me. No more hanging out, no more talking or texts. No more… anything. That one moment meant more to you than every fucking thing we’d shared. That sex meant more to you than it ever could have to me. Because then you were just gone.”
Oh Jesus.
Before the Tiramisu Incident, Will and I had been hanging out all the time, cooking, watching TV shows together, going all over the city together, having a lot of (I thought) hot sex. And all those things meant a ton to me. Had made me deliriously happy, which Will no doubt knew since it’s not like I was super subtle about it. And during that, I had always known Will slept with other people, though I hadn’t let myself think about it. But seeing it in the flesh had in some ways overpowered all the rest of what we’d shared.
And I had left him.
“I—you never said….”
“You told me not to! You told me you didn’t want anything to do with me, Leo. And I understand, right: you were looking out for yourself. You were taking what you needed. And fuck if that isn’t exactly what you should’ve done. It’s what I’d been telling you to do all along. It just….” He jutted his chin out like he was preparing to take a punch and clenched his jaw.
“It hurt you.”
He gave a shrug, absorbing it. It was like everything had polarized. I had hurt Will. I had hurt him with my absence. I had hurt him when I lied and said I could handle things the way they’d been when I knew that I couldn’t. I’d hurt him and he hadn’t said a thing. He’d respected my wishes and left me alone until… what?
Until he absolutely couldn’t anymore. And then I was the one he’d called. The first one.
The only one.
“I’m so sorry, Will. Fuck, I’m so, so sorry I hurt you.” I grabbed his arms and turned him so he was facing me. He sighed, still silent, but his muscles unclenched a little under my palms. I stayed that way until he finally looked at me.
“The thing is, though? When you told me you didn’t want to be around me anymore.”
“Couldn’t. I couldn’t. Not didn’t want to.” It was essential that he understood the difference.
“Okay,” he conceded, “couldn’t. That was the first time I believed that maybe I was wrong about what being in a relationship meant.” He shook his head at himself.
“How do you mean?”
“I always saw them as the Borg, where the two of you just kind of sloshed into one being. Or that you had to sacrifice all the pieces of yourself that didn’t fit with the other person. But you… didn’t. You were totally yourself. Even though you wanted us to be in a relationship. Even though you knew getting upset about it wasn’t what I would want. I don’t know, maybe that makes me a total dick. But it made me kind of hope that it was possible. Autonomy and a relationship.”
“Wow,” I said.
“What, you think it does make me a total dick?”
“No. Well, when you put it like that, I guess it kind of makes you a total dick that you realized it when we broke up. Or—sorry, I mean, not broke up. Stopped being whatever we were being. But, no, I was gonna say, wow, Rex was right.”
“Huh? Rex. About what?”
“Oh, um, well….” I gave a nervous laugh. “I kinda… asked Daniel for advice. About you. Us, I mean. And Rex was there because, duh, he lives there, and he overheard and, yeah. It was the night I got home from Holiday. You were still there and I didn’t want to bug you about like, What Does It All Mean, because you were handling everything with Claire and the kids.
“But I was dying, seriously. Like, chugged five Cokes and couldn’t sit still dying over not knowing where we stood. Point is, Rex told me that just because you seem fearless about being blunt to people doesn’t mean you don’t get scared and resist saying stuff about yourself. Anyway….”
Will was glaring.
“Fuckin’ Rex,�
�� he muttered, shaking his head.
I stepped closer to him and slid my arms around his neck, wanting the closeness, the feel of him. “It’s just… I want… I want you to tell me that stuff.”
“I do,” Will insisted. “I do tell you stuff. I called you about Claire even though you’d told me you basically never wanted to see me again!”
“You’re right.” I bit my lip, trying to figure out how to explain what I meant. “I just… I want…. Okay, you know how you tell me what you want when we’re, uh, you know—”
“Having sex?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes,” Will said, and he wrapped the word around his tongue like a caress, like maybe he thought he was about to distract me from this discussion.
“Right, well, I love when you do that. When you tell me what you want, what you like. Even if I don’t… give it to you right away, I always want to know it. I like knowing where we stand. I feel—I don’t know, free when I don’t have to wonder. I don’t have to worry about whether I’m pleasing you or question where we stand. I’d rather fight with you than not know what you think.”
Will looked uncertain. “But you do know me, that’s what I’m saying. You know me better than… anyone. I mean, hell, you’re a scientist, you collect data. You’re great at figuring it all out.”
“I don’t want to have to conduct a science experiment to know how you feel! Do you know how shitty it is to say that to me? Like it’s one hundred percent my responsibility to… study you? That I’m supposed to look at everything you do and draw my own conclusions and act based on them with no confirmation? Why? Why would you want it to be like that?”
And it hit me with a twist of nausea that this was how Will thought things had to be. That he’d grown up watching for signs of what things might mean. Clues. Were his parents going to be distracted enough with each other that he could take money from them to go buy whatever he wanted at the grocery store? Was Claire in a mood where he needed to tell her this thing or that one in order to handle a situation? Was someone giving him something because of how he looked or on his merit?
Will had become so adept at reading the signs that it never occurred to him to say something if he thought he’d already communicated it in another way. With a gesture or an eye roll, a pattern or a habit. Words were just a redundancy to him. Like the time I pointed out that there were bananas and he got pissy because he could see them.
And maybe there Rex was right again. If I took away what Will had never said as well as what he had, I was left with someone who hung out with me, had sex with me, hugged me, joked with me, ate with me, slept with me, and told me about his day. I was left with… someone who acted like we were together.
I took his hands and pulled him back down on the couch.
“Okay, so, it’s not about me being dumb or oblivious. It’s not that I don’t notice things about you.” I rolled my eyes at myself. “I basically notice every stupid little thing about you, so. But sometimes things are complicated and they mean different things to different people, and I don’t want to assume that I know something about you just because I think I do, you know? Because sometimes I’ll get it wrong. Sometimes you’re not as obvious as you think you are, or sometimes my perception of stuff is more about me than about you, honestly. Like, if I’m feeling shitty about stuff, I might read something you did differently than if I’m feeling great, you know?”
“Yes, I understand. I’m not a sociopath. Even though you’re basically making me feel like Patrick Bateman over here.”
“Okay, good! See? Great example of how sometimes people feel things differently.” He glared at me. “I just mean, I wasn’t trying to say you were a sociopathic serial killer—although actually that scene with the business cards I can totally see—”
He snorted a laugh.
“But that’s what I’m saying, Will. I wasn’t trying to be patronizing, I was trying to explain how there is no, like, truth that we both share or anything. There are just so many ways it can go wrong to assume that we know what each other are thinking.”
“God, did you read Nietzsche this semester or something?”
“Um. No? Okay, but so the point is that even when you think you’re communicating something, I might not get it. Also, though, I just….” I twined our fingers together. “I want to hear you say things. Like, I know I’m a dork or whatever, and I’m skinny and clumsy and you think I’m all overenthusiastic or not cool enough and stuff. So maybe sometimes when there’s something about me that you do like, you could… I dunno, tell me. Just to balance things out a little bit. Maybe.”
I looked down at our hands, Will’s beautifully proportioned and nimble, with neat, clean nails, and mine, long fingers interrupted by knobby knuckles and various nicks and smudges from being clumsy, fingernails bitten down roughly.
“Leo.” Will said my name in that way he had that felt like a whole conversation in one word. And, shit, how had I not noticed how eloquent he sometimes was without saying anything at all.
He pulled me toward him, and I kind of draped my legs over his until we were sitting the way I’d sat as a child on the swings with Janie, each of us facing in opposite directions, one of us always moving backward while the other moved forward.
Will looked at me with soft eyes. “I like a lot of things about you,” he said. “I’d be saying things an awful lot if I always commented on them.”
“Yeah?” I grinned at him, and he rolled his eyes at me. I couldn’t help myself. “Okay, will you tell me just one?”
Will searched my face and ran a finger over my eyebrow as he started to say something.
“Wait, wait, but make it a really good one,” I interrupted. “I mean, if it’s just gonna be one.”
“I was about to say some flattering romantic shit to you, and you interrupt me to tell me how to do it?”
“Well we’ve already established you don’t know how to do it right.” I grinned at him.
“Oh yeah, good thing you told me because I guess what I was going to say wasn’t actually that good.”
“Aw, no, wait, but now you have to tell me.”
Will pursed his lips and shook his head. “Nah, you clearly didn’t want to hear.”
I pouted at him, and he smiled, but his finger went back to my eyebrow again.
“Your eyebrows do this thing,” he said, slowly pressing his fingertip to the inside of my eyebrow, “when you feel something really intensely. And sometimes all I have to do when you’re talking, or when you’re looking at something, or when I’m touching you, is look right here—” He tapped the spot. “—and I can tell if you’re kidding, or if you’re upset, or if you’re about to come. The whole rest of your face can lie sometimes. But this never does.
“And the night that you came over and I was with that guy?”
I bit my lip and Will smoothed my eyebrow.
“All I had to do was look right here, and I knew I’d fucked up in this major way I couldn’t take back. Not because I did anything wrong,” he said quickly when I started to protest that again. “But because I’d hurt you in this deep way that I never intended.”
Will gritted his teeth. His eyes were a little wild, and he squeezed my hands.
“Look, you have to understand, okay. I don’t discount the effects my behavior has. I’m not… I’m not oblivious either. And I’m not my sister. I can control what I do. I’m just so fucking scared that if I do this—if we do this… I have to know that we’re both being honest about what’s okay. Not like before.”
Shame washed over me for how much I’d hurt Will by trying to give him what I thought he’d wanted. I nodded silently.
“I can try not sleeping with other people,” he went on, “but I don’t know if I can promise it forever. I don’t know what will happen in the future. And I can’t fucking take it if you leave me again because you were making us something in your head that we aren’t.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I’m fucking
serious. I wasn’t okay when you told me to fuck off. I was….” He sighed. “I wasn’t good. At all.”
I had actually meant was he serious that he’d try not sleeping with other people, but I’d be damned if I was going to make him regret admitting he’d been a mess without me.
“And you’d… you’d want to try. With me? With just me? For now?”
“Yeah, I’ll try.” Then a strange look came over his face. “I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean it would be a hardship to only have sex with you. That’s—that’s not what I meant. It’s not about sex between us at all. It’s… it’s separate, you know. It’s about me. I… we’re great at sex.”
“We are?”
He rolled his eyes. “Quit fishing, I just said so, didn’t I?”
“’Kay.” I smiled at him and he smiled grudgingly back.
“I still don’t think that I’m the only person you’ll ever want to sleep with,” he said, like he couldn’t stand to let us just be happy for a minute.
“I think we’ve already covered the we’re-not-sure-what-the-future-holds bit.”
“Fine,” he said.
“Fine.” I glared down at Will, whose face was set in a defiant sneer. It was the arms-crossed-over-the-chest of facial expressions, and I did the only thing I could think to do with that stupid sneer. I kissed it. Just a peck in the corner of his stupid mouth, but his arms came around me, and as always, the taste of him drew me in.
“Soooo,” I said a minute later, pulling away. “What does this mean?”
“This—” He pressed his hips up so his hard cock ground against mine. “—means shut the hell up and fuck me.”
“’Kay, in a minute, but seriously.”
Will groaned. “Seriously, what? What more do you want me to say?”
My first thought was that I knew exactly what I wanted him to say. The three words that I’d let loose like hellhounds a few minutes before and that Will had barely even seemed to register. But if I thought about it—really thought about it….
“I want you to say whatever you’re thinking. For real, though.”