All the Lonely People

by Jen Marie Hawkins

  “No thanks.” I scoot my chair backwards.

  He fixes his gaze on my mouth for a moment, then nods and looks away. “Suit yourself.”

  “What were you saying to Henry earlier? About your dad? Is he sick?”

  Mons looks at me again, this time less predatory. “He has Parkinson’s,” he says. “Hard for a man who works with his hands. He can’t complete jobs as fast as he used to, so he’s losing business.”

  This new information gives me a twinge of guilt for disliking him so much. Maybe people who seem horrible are really just going through something that makes them seem horrible. Maybe Mons is just lonely, too.

  “That sucks,” I finally say.

  “Yeah, well. We do what we have to for our families, don’t we? No matter that I’m shite at fixing cars. I’ll live on my father’s reputation for a while until everyone figures it out.”

  He wraps an arm around my shoulders and pulls me into a side hug. In that instant, I catch Henry’s eye as he hangs up the phone.

  “He’s keen on you, you know,” Mons says, tongue thick with scotch. “Shame, really.”

  I turn to Mons, sliding out from under his arm. “A shame?”

  But he doesn’t answer; he’s watching Henry.

  Suddenly Henry’s hand is in mine. He’s helping me to my feet. “Are you all right, love?”

  I am a little taken aback, but I nod. “Of course.”

  Mons jumps up and slams his drink on the table. “Yes, she’s all right, Henry, for fuck’s sake!” His outburst draws the attention of everyone around us. “You’re such a bloody tight ass.”

  “Shall we mingle?” Henry doesn’t acknowledge the dig. He leads me in the opposite direction. He’s trying to be light, to pretend this isn’t a big deal, but I feel the storm brewing.

  To our backs, Mons shouts, “Always the white knight, aren’t you, mate? Saving ladies from the villain!”

  “Just ignore him,” Henry says for the second time tonight. We make our way to the other side of the table where Zara is sitting. “He’s been itching for a fight for ages, and it gets worse when he drinks.”

  Henry’s body jerks—so abruptly I have to let go of his hand. His glass clatters to the ground with a bursting tinkle. I sidestep to avoid the sudden explosion of shards.

  Mons grabs Henry by the lapels of his coat. He’s shorter than him by several inches, so it looks a little cartoonish.

  “Mons, stop it right now!” Zara yells at him.

  “You’re pissed, mate. Don’t do this,” Henry warns, stern and calm.

  “Tell me, then, why is it that you think you’re the hero?”

  “Mons,” Sanjay warns, stepping up behind him.

  Henry glares at Mons, stone-faced. “You can stop being the villain any time you want.”

  Mons laughs then, looks around at his audience, because everyone is watching. Exactly how he likes it. My pulse throbs so hard in my throat I feel like I might choke on it.

  “We’re not talking about me.” He lets go of Henry’s lapels and brushes them off. “We’re talking about you.”

  “Let’s just go, Henry.” It comes out as a whisper. A plea.

  Mons turns his head my way, and a smile slithers its way from his left ear to his right. He looks back at Henry and stabs a thumb in my direction.

  “She thinks you’re the hero, too, then. That’s quite rich, don’t you think?”

  “Mons,” I say, thinking maybe he’ll listen to me. “Everything’s fine, okay?”

  “You think so?” He puts his hands on his hips and smiles, showing teeth. “Wait till you hear all of this one’s secrets.” He pats Henry on the chest. Hard. “Do let me know how fine you are after that. I don’t believe you’ll like him very bloody much then.”

  “You’re a pathetic little man,” Henry says, stepping back. But before he can turn, Mons lunges at him—a barrel of snarls and fists and knees. He makes surprise contact and Henry’s head stutters backwards. Just once. Then all hell breaks loose.

  Chapter 47

  : With a Little Help from My Friends :

  HENRY SLOUCHES IN a rolling desk chair, pressing an ice pack against his left eye.

  I stoop down in front of the bathroom sink and sort through spray bottles of cleaner and trash bags and hand soap until I find the first aid kit: a hard green box with a red cross and a fancy snap-latch. The English are so extra about everything.

  “I’m fine,” Henry says as I set it on the desk by his bed. “Really.”

  I give him a look he can’t even see because one eye is closed and the other’s swollen shut. There’s a spray of blood down the front of his half-unbuttoned shirt. I make a pact with myself to keep my eyes above his neck at all times.

  “The cut looks pretty nasty. He must’ve got you with his ring.” I stall while I come up with a plan. My fingers separate the bandages from the antiseptic wipes, the antibiotic ointment from the alcohol pads. I have literally no clue what I’m doing.

  Eeny-meenie-miney-mo. I settle on the antiseptic wipe and tear the package open. When I remove the ice pack from his face, he lets go and opens his good eye. Him watching me blunder around incompetently makes me eleventy billion times more nervous than I already was.

  “I can’t believe that tosser broke my glasses. I bloody liked those glasses.”

  “Be still,” I command, and with a shaking hand, I dab the cut above his left eye with the wipe. He hisses through his teeth in response. “Oh, don’t be such a baby.”

  “I’d like to see a baby take a punch like that,” he mutters. “Or not hit the guy back. I could have, you know. I wanted to.”

  “Yes, you are a big strong man, and everyone was very impressed by your self-control.”

  A smirk spreads between his dimples. “Even you?”

  “Especially me.” I push his forehead back until his neck rests on the back of the chair. With a Q-tip, I dab some of the antibiotic ointment and paint it delicately over the wound. Even with one of his eyes all busted up in ten shades of maroon, his face may as well be a gallery exhibit. Chiseled cheekbones. Delicious dimples. Boy band hair. I paint on an extra coat of ointment, just to buy myself twenty more seconds to look at him up close. I could be an A-list romance heroine, objectifying him like this.

  “Will you two be able to get past this?”

  Henry closes his right eye again as I work. He chuckles. “This isn’t a new thing for Mons and me.”

  “Because of Zara? Or…”

  “That started it, yes.”

  I wait for him to go on. When he doesn’t, I ask, “What happened?”

  “One night Zara and I hung out alone. We drank too much and we kissed.”

  As I watch his mouth form the words we kissed, my stomach twists. I instantly regret asking.

  “It felt right at the time,” Henry says. “As drunken decisions tend to. It’s easy to confuse levels of relationships.”

  “What do you mean?” I blot away the excess ointment with gauze.

  “Being close friends with someone can make you sort of thirsty for more. You think, wow, I wouldn’t even have to do the work of getting to know someone if I fancy this person here, who already knows I’m a bloody asshole sometimes but cares for me just the same.”

  I swallow. Oh. So maybe that’s what this is. With me and him.

  “But the truth of the matter is, we got things confused for a bit. It was convenient.”

  “So Mons decided he liked her after this?”

  Henry shifts in his chair. “Not exactly.”

  I wait.

  “He always had a thing for her.”

  “Oh.” One at a time, I put small butterfly bandages over the cut.

  “You’re judging me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. I see it in your face.”

  “Well, if he liked her first and you knew… Never mind. Finish the story.”

  “I’d been telling him all along that he shouldn’t ruin their friendship, it wasn’t w
orth it. But he made his move anyway. She shut him down by using us as an example. Told him we’d been seeing each other but decided to split, and that she knew from experience dating friends complicates things. He lost his mind because we’d kept it from him. It took us all a while to recover and go back to being friends.”

  “Based on your busted eye, Henry, I don’t think Mons has recovered.”

  “Fair point. Everything I do now pisses him off.”

  I take a deep breath, admiring my improv handiwork.

  The image plays back in my head: of Henry holding Mons down on the ground, eyebrow dripping blood, refusing to let him up until he calmed down. He could’ve beaten the ever-loving hell out of him, but he didn’t. He used his head instead of getting revenge for the cheap shot. It was maybe the most evolved thing I’ve ever seen a guy do. The bouncers still kicked them both out, though.

  “So why didn’t you hit him back tonight?”

  His jaw tenses.

  “I care about the guy. Anyway, I hit him enough the night he came on to Zara.” He opens his eye again. “I hit him more than a few times.”

  I grimace.

  “Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t a possessive thing.” He shakes his head. “He shoved his tongue down her throat and groped her. After she said no. That’s assault.” He takes a deep breath. “I saw him with you and…” He clenches his fists at his sides. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t have been so charitable if he’d tried anything like that tonight.”

  I go a little wobbly. Mons was right about one thing: Henry is the hero. Normally I’d reject this kind of bravado, but he gets away with it. Somehow I know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that Henry would never be the guy who’d send me pictures of his limp, bread dough junk and expect me to swoon. He’d never tell me that the seal is broken just because we had sex once, and expect it to continue despite my weak protests. He’d never drive himself into my stupefied-with-depression body while his parents were out golfing.

  Henry is a different breed of boy.

  The kind of boy I might willingly be with. Not out of obligation or habit.

  I try not to let this scroll over my face like a message from the emergency broadcast system. We’re still for a few moments, even though I’m out of reasons to stand in his space like this, sharing his oxygen, his knee touching my leg, my hand on his shoulder. His bed inches away. I think about how his mouth felt. In real life. In the dream. How I could lean down a tiny bit and melt right into it. My phone buzzes on the desk and my soul startles right out of my body.

  I take a step back and grab my phone.

  Long before you.

  Every syllable is an air-horn reminder that I am a temporary blip on this radar. That workshop or not, I’ll be an ocean away soon.

  “Is that Zara?”

  I nod.

  “Shit!” he yells, and I jump.

  “What?”

  * * *

  “I still have her birthday present. Tell her I’ll bring it to her later.”

  I relay this to her via text, and then set my phone down on the nightstand. I hand him two pain relievers from the first aid kit. He takes them and washes them down with a glass of water.

  “So what’d you get her?”

  “Tarot cards,” he says as he slinks out of his blood-spattered shirt and tosses it at the hamper.

  My knees liquefy. I freeze and try not to look at all the bare skin.

  He reaches into his coat pocket where it hangs on the back of the chair and pulls out a deck of cards with a red ribbon tied on them. Before I see the deck, I already know it’s solid black with music notes of golden filigree. He hands it to me and dives into his bed.

  “Scoot over,” he says to Felix, who’s been sleeping on his pillow ever since we got back. Felix stands, stretches, and growl-yawns, then trots to the bottom of the bed where he collapses into a furry pile and goes back to sleep. “Look at them,” he says. “The artwork is nice. I think she’ll like them.”

  I nod and swallow. This would be a terrible time to draw a Lovers card.

  “What is it?” He squints at me with his good eye. “Tarot cards freak you out or something?”

  “No, it’s not that.” I hand him the deck. “I’m just tired.” I take the first aid kit to the bathroom and put it back under the sink cabinet.

  He flips his TV on and scrolls the channels with the remote. I glance up as he stretches out.

  “Goodnight,” I say from the doorway and give him a little wave.

  He lifts his head a little, and I can’t tell if he’s giving me a weird look since only half of his face is readable, but it feels like he’s giving me a weird look.

  I can never seem to stop myself from running, even if I want to be caught.

  “Thanks for everything,” he says. He looks like he might say more, but I leave before he has the chance.

  Chapter 48

  : Do You Want to Know a Secret :

  IN PATRICK’S ROOM, I crawl out of my dress and tights and shoes.

  I allowed things to happen with Dylan. Never really because I wanted to. Even the night we met—at Mom’s work Christmas party—he talked me into sneaking outside when I didn’t really want to. But he had a nice smile and he gave me attention and I was sick of pretending to have a good time. I never analyzed his glances, his words, the way his body moved.

  Not like this.

  I crawl into bed, hair and teeth brushed, face washed, and night shirt on, and then reach for my phone to check my texts. But it isn’t there. And then I remember.

  I left it on Henry’s nightstand.

  An inordinate amount of time—read: obsessive, ridiculous, absurd—is spent debating on whether to go into his room through the bathroom or the hallway. Hallway seems less personal, somehow. So I go that way, and stare at his open door while my muscles remain at maximum clench. Light from the TV flashes shadows on the walls outside his room. Faint music plays. As I get closer, I recognize the tune.

  I peek in the door. A Beatles movie is playing on the screen. It’s at the part in Let it Be where Yoko has asserted herself in the studio and the guys are emitting their bugger-off beams.

  Henry turns his head and looks up at me then. Bare from the waist up, under the covers from the waist down.

  “I left my phone.” I don’t know why I whisper it.

  He points at the TV. “The BBC is having a Beatles marathon.”

  I smile. “I haven’t seen this one in forever.”

  He lifts the covers beside him and glances down at the empty spot on the bed. A wordless invitation. My cheeks flame. Saying no is the right thing to do.

  “I’ll keep my hands to myself, if you want,” he says. “I kept that promise once before, if you remember.”

  If you want? I swallow. “I do remember.”

  I only think about it for another half a second before I crawl in, enveloping my chilled legs in the warmth of the covers. His bed smells like him. I settle in under the blanket, stiff as a studio with Yoko in it, and fold my hands awkwardly over my stomach. Like a corpse. He looks sideways at me.

  “There you are.” He smiles.

  A nervous laugh bubbles up. “Here I am.”

  He doesn’t touch me; he doesn’t scoot closer. He looks back at the TV and I clear my throat.

  “So why are you, the non-fan, watching a Beatles movie marathon?”

  “I’m not so much watching it as listening to it since I’m working with one near-sighted eye at the moment.”

  “Don’t you have a back-up pair of glasses?”

  “Yes. In the darkroom somewhere.” He turns to look at me.

  “But everything I need to see right now is already up close.”

  Oh God. Was that a line? I fix my eyes on the movie and pretend not to catch it.

  “So why are you listening to the Beatles, exactly?”

  He shifts in the bed until he’s on his side, facing me. The same way he did at Glastonbury. “Can I tell you a secret?”

  “
Uh, sure.” I gulp and keep my eyes deadlocked on Paul at the piano. His gaze heats the side of my face while I wait.

  “I actually really bloody love The Beatles.”

  My mouth falls open with a little pop. I cave and look at him.

  “I thought you’d like to know.” He grins. “Your theory was correct. Liar or asshole. I’m a liar. Also sometimes an asshole.”

  I think back to that day. The smarmy look, the whistled Rolling Stones song.

  “That’s a pretty stupid thing to lie about. I at least try to ration my untruths.”

  He laughs. “I had my reasons.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “When you first arrived, my daily goal was to irritate you.”

  On some level, I already knew this, but I have to ask. “Why?”

  He touches the end of my nose with his index finger. “You do this thing when you’re flustered where your nose draws up just here, and…” He drops his hand, trailing off as he meets my eyes. “It’s adorable.”

  Inevitability is sometimes a feeling, like letting go at the top of a slide. You know the moment you release your grip, you’re going to zoom—exhilarated, amused, alive. But then you hit bottom and it’s over. It isn’t the slide I’m afraid of. It’s the bottom. And right now, I don’t trust myself not to let go. It’s easier to watch Paul and George argue about simplifying guitar rhythms, so I look back at the TV.

  “This is my least favorite of all their movies, if I’m being honest,” I finally say.

  “Bittersweet,” he agrees.

  “And it’s the end,” I add. “I hate endings.”

  “Me, too.”

  We’re quiet for a few minutes.

  “So tell me about these untruths you’ve been rationing,” he says.

  It feels like a nudge. To get me to admit things he already knows.

  “You’ll have to wonder.” I flash him a flirty grin.

  His dimples wink. “Truth or lie: my aura is purple.”

  “Truth.”

  “Truth or lie: my eye doesn’t look that bad.”

  “Trick question,” I say. “It didn’t look that bad in the tube when you asked. It looks terrible now.”