“Fuck,” he laughs with me. He just ordered a deep-fried Moon Pie.
“I know you’ll still eat it.” I laugh harder, not wanting to lean back just yet.
“Will I?” he teases. “I could be a picky eater now, and you wouldn’t know it.” He meant it to be lighthearted, especially since I’ve seen him eat the same stuff he used to: candy, pizza, huge hamburgers, you name it—all in the past ten days. But an undercurrent of sadness clings to his statement.
“That’s true.” I lower my ass to the seat.
“That was stupid. I’m the same,” he says, more serious. “I promise, I’m the same.”
He’s had nearly half a decade without me. After what happened to us, how could we both be the same? Parts of us did change, but if I could choose anyone to let discover me and for me to be able to discover them, I’d choose Luka.
So I pick up my journal. With a deep breath, I start, “You were my first everything. And then, it just…ended.”
“You were my first too,” he reminds me.
This is going to hurt. “Did you have a second?” I ask outright.
Luka leans back like he got kicked in the stomach. He snuffs out his cigarette in an alien-head ashtray, and then he rakes another hand through his hair.
Yes, his silence says. He did.
My limbs are achingly strict.
“A third? A fourth?” I pause for him to interject, and my throat nearly swells closed. “A fifth? A sixth—”
“It was five years.” He shakes his head repeatedly. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to look at you or even say your name. If I knew we’d be here, right now, I’d have…” he trails off, because it’s too painful to rewrite history like that.
“I’m not admonishing you.”
“Admonishing.” He laughs into a smile. We shouldn’t be able to go from severity to mirth this quickly, but we do. We did.
All the time.
I try to restrain another smile, and then I groan because it won’t stop growing.
“You still look at that thesaurus, don’t you?” he asks, good memories illuminating his features. We both sucked at Aerial Ethereal’s version of high school English, and they gave us thesauruses because we kept reusing the same words in essays. I was actually more interested in mine than Luka ever thought I’d be.
“I like looking at your doodles,” I say seriously. He drew all over the margins of mine. Mostly of stick figures doing cartwheels and backflips. Some of us holding hands.
Sappy teenage moments that I wouldn’t even consider erasing.
“You’ll have to show me them sometime.” He glances over his shoulder like he gathers his thoughts or strength, and when he looks back, his face is stoic but still breakable. “Did you have a second?”
“I tried dating. A lot in the past couple of years.”
He cringes like it’s hard to hear.
I know the feeling. I open my journal so I can explain better.
Luka shifts in the booth, and his gaze narrows at the frosted window. A green neon sign blinks open from inside. “Did you fall in love?”
That’s what he’s really worried about? If I fell in love? “No,” I whisper. “Did you?”
“No,” he says. “You’re the only one.” He licks his lips. “You’re single?”
I nod.
“No friends-with-benefits?” he asks what I asked him in my suite.
“None.”
He tries to relax, and he glances at my journal, noticing my handwriting. It’s not a funny list.
It’s not a joke or surface-level emotions. What I wrote is intimate. It’s something I haven’t even shared with Aunt Lucy. And I definitely wouldn’t show this to Brenden.
My stomach clenches. I’m really scared, but I don’t want to back out. “I meant to show this to you earlier today, but you were late and things just spiraled in a weird direction.”
“I was trying to get my brother off the roulette table.”
“Timo?”
“Yeah.” Luka nods. “I pulled him away when he was four-hundred down.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s not the worst,” he tells me.
It’s just another indication that I haven’t been fully a part of his life recently. I want to be. I want to be so badly, and I ache for him to be a part of mine again.
My list inside the journal is a step towards something more. It’s opening a door that’s been slammed shut. It’s not exactly hope since the contracts still remain fixed, but it’s a hand reaching out to him.
Luka fiddles with the sugar packets. “What is it? The journal, I mean.”
“It’s a list.” It needs more context so I add, “I’ve wanted to move forward, but every time I try, I just…something happens. I’m having trouble in an area—”
“Romantic,” he states.
“Yeah…” I draw out the word to bide my time. “And I think you can help me fix it. You may be able to, you might not. It just feels like my only shot at healing. So I can move on.”
“Move on from me?” he asks tightly.
“I don’t know, maybe.” I would’ve said yes before this season. Before the Infini shakeups. But I feel myself clinging to him more now than ever. “Can you just…?” I hand him the journal, my pulse out of control.
I sweat and overthink. And I scrutinize his focused eyes as they absorb my list.
Act Nineteen
Luka Kotova
I raise the journal higher and nearly smile at her handwriting. It’s always had character. Some letters swoop and pull together, connected but not cursive. Other letters stand on their own. Beautiful like her.
I have no theories about what this list could be, but a chill bites my neck—and I find myself reading slowly.
I lost my parents at 12. I lost you at 14. Maybe this isn’t something you can help me with. Maybe it is. I’d be remiss not to try. (My dad would like that word “remiss”—it’s in the summary of his novel Bones Against Bones. You also drew a carrot next to it in my thesaurus. No reason why. You just did it. I miss being random with you.)
I pause here and glance up at Bay.
We were just talking about her thesaurus, and she’d written about it here—who knows how many days ago.
Our lives have been circling back to one another. To these moments. Not temporary like the throw of a boomerang. Not flashy enough to be fireworks, but we’re something subtle—yet bigger. Greater.
Infinite.
Baylee holds my gaze, and I see a pain in hers that says she’s still terrified.
“You look scared,” I say.
She makes a face at me.
I make one at her. “Come on, I can tell.”
She shrugs, tense. “What I wrote is heavy and it’s not like we’ve been…” She gestures from her chest to mine.
“Communicating?”
Bay nods. “We just started talking outside of work.”
“Right…” I wish we could erase all the years of silence. Replace them with actual memories of us together. So my name doesn’t sit side-by-side with her parents, in a pool of everything she lost. More than anything, I want to return to what we were. To be here for her.
To give her what she needs.
But it’s not real. Because “giving myself” means breaking the contract even more, which I’m not sure she’s willing to do. Me—I’d do just about anything at this point.
(I realize I’m reckless like that.)
I return to her list.
We ended things abruptly (no breakup, no closure, nothing) and ever since, physical intimacy has been difficult for me. This is a more detailed list of what I’m having trouble with:
1. any over-the-clothes touching: every time I’ve done this with another guy, I feel really numb.
2. all kissing: refer to explanation #1.
3. skin-to-skin contact: I’ve been called a wooden board and a corpse by two different guys.
4. oral (giving & receiving): I freeze up. Every. Single.
Time.
5. sex: refer to explanation #4. I haven’t been able to go this far with anyone else but you. Honestly, every time I try, it just feels like I’m betraying the memory of you (and I know that’s so inaccurate and weird—we’re not together). But I’m still holding onto you, and I have to figure out how to let go emotionally. I eventually want to be able to have sex again. I can’t cling onto you forever.
I can’t.
I reread the entire list three more times. My muscles strain, burning up—and the only time I move is to lean back, stunned silent.
She’s still holding onto me.
All this time—I had no clue. I didn’t even recognize the impact it’d have to leave Baylee the day after we screwed behind a costume rack. Without ever talking to her. We should have had time to discuss us.
Everything physical we had was layered in emotion. She was fourteen. I was only a year older, but we’d lost our virginities a year beforehand. We were both anxious, nervous, excited, so many sentiments pooling together as we fooled around, but I did everything I could to make her comfortable.
On a rare day her brother was gone, we had sex in her bedroom. I lit candles and put on a playlist of her favorites and mine. I can still see her escalating smile when “Hold Me Tight” by Johnny Nash started playing.
In our extraordinarily abnormal lives, that night was the most typical teenage experience we’ve ever had.
After that, it became hard to find locations to have sex. We didn’t own cars. (Still don’t.) Our places were almost always occupied, bedrooms shared, and so we chose riskier spots like the elevators, the hotel guest bathrooms, the seemingly empty backstage.
It’d all been good up until we got caught.
I put my hand to my mouth, thinking.
She can’t move on physically until she moves on emotionally…is that it?
(Corporate did this.) I blame AE for not giving us a chance to have closure. Four-and-a-half years ago, I pleaded to talk to her. To end this cleanly.
I look up just as Baylee sips her coffee. She’s watching my hands as I flip through the rest of the journal. The pages are blank except for this one. I close the journal but keep it near me.
I have so much to say, but I choose to start with this. “These ‘two different guys’ that called you a corpse—they can go fuck themselves.”
“Funny,” she says, corner of her lip rising, “that’s exactly what I told them.”
“You didn’t,” I say, knowing her.
“No, but believe me, I was put-off. I physically kicked the second guy out of my bed.”
Good. “Kick his dick or balls?”
“I was an inch away. No one was more pissed than me.”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty pissed right now.” I never envisioned Baylee with another guy. I could’ve, but I tried not to torment myself like that. Not even when I saw her with Sergei at the bar.
Now I’m thinking about her in bed with a bunch of pricks—it’s as horrible as I thought it’d be. (I don’t suggest this for anyone who has an ex.)
I literally can’t stop shaking my head. It’s like I have a neck spasm, and now I’m grimacing at the ceiling. Fuckfuck.
I reopen the journal.
She watches.
With knotted brows, I reread everything. She’s only had sex with me. If I were another guy, it’d probably make me feel great, but since I’ve slept with other women—I just feel like an asshole. And terrible.
I feel terrible.
I risk a glance at Bay, but she’s unzipping her wrist wallet and inspecting the contents.
“I finished,” I say.
“I saw.” She looks up. “You still weirded out?”
“I wasn’t ever.” But we’re both sitting uncomfortably straight again. I know what the list boils down to, and it kills me that she’s struggled for this long. “How can I help?” (I want to help.)
Before she can respond, the waitress carries out my plate of fried Moon Pie. We don’t order anymore food.
I stab a fork into my discolored “extraterrestrial experience” and marshmallow oozes. I take a bite. It’s burnt and tastes like canola oil and soot.
Still, I eat another piece.
Baylee finishes off her coffee. “My original plan was to talk with you about your experiences. How you were able to move on, how you got over me—”
“I didn’t get over you,” I interject, mauling the Moon Pie with my fork.
“Luka.” Baylee shrugs at me. “Don’t make me say it.”
I lean forward. “Emotionally I didn’t get over you.”
“I’m not talking about emotionally. I mean physically.” She eases forward too, elbows on the table. “Do you really want me to say it outright?”
“Yeah.”
“You fucked other girls.”
We both wear a pained expression. A thousand arrows pierce and plunge into my chest—but I force myself to stay close, not recoiling. Not rocking back.
I stay right here. “We were apart for five years. I didn’t think I’d ever be with you. And I never…” I take a breath. “They were all one-night stands, Bay. I never even dated another girl. You could’ve had a boyfriend…”
“I didn’t…it didn’t work out like that,” she says. “Sure, I dated, but none stuck. I tried casual sex, but it didn’t happen either.”
(I realize that.) “Okay, do you think…are you saying that I don’t love you as much because I didn’t wait around?” I shake my head vigorously again. “This isn’t a reflection of my love for you, Baylee. It’s not.”
“Hey, I know it’s not.” She drops her leg to the ground and scoots even closer to the table. As close as me. “I remember what you told me when I was thirteen, right after I asked if you knew what to do.”
She means in terms of sex.
I can’t recall exactly what I said, but thick nostalgia hangs in the air. “What’d I say?”
“You told me that you knew more about sex when you were seven than you did math or science. Not because you experienced it but because you were surrounded by men who constantly talked about ‘fucking’ and ‘masturbating.’”
My older cousins: too many to name. My older brothers: Sergei, Nikolai, Peter. It suddenly reminds me that I did grow up with Sergei. More than just his absence shaped me, and I didn’t really recognize it.
I listen closely as she continues, “You were raised seeing sex as an act of pleasure. Like momentary fun. Love wasn’t a requirement. So I understand.” She exhales. “I just want to know how you do it. How do you shut off the emotional aspect in order to just get physical?”
“You want me to visually describe all of my one-night stands?” I go numb.
She sits more stiffly. “Not all of them—please, don’t give me an exact number.”
If she can’t even stomach that, then how would this ever work? I can’t even fathom sharing the details with her. I want to scrub them all right now, and she’s asking me to push them to the forefront.
I shake my head over and over. “I want to help, not cause you more pain.” She deserves to be unburdened by our past, but this’ll make her freeze-up more.
And I’m not even touching the fact that helping her means she’ll be having sex with other guys. She should be able to, the moral part of me screeches. She deserves to be free of me.
The selfish part of me yells and shouts to hold on for dear fucking life. I already gave Baylee up once. I don’t want to lose her again.
She leans back, dejected. “It was a long shot anyway.”
My mind speeds through our history, and I dump out a container of toothpicks, slowly pocketing them. “Look, you don’t need to be fixed. It’s okay if you can’t separate the emotional from the physical. Both ways are fine, and neither is wrong.”
She nods once and then hesitates, contemplating. “Maybe I shouldn’t do it like you then, but in order to do it my way, I need to figure out how to get over you emotionally. That way I can form an emotional connection to
someone else and eventually be physical with them.”
I have no idea how to do that. My emotions are still completely tied around her. I’m no sooner ready to let go than she is. But really, I want to help as much as I can.
A thought pops into my head.
“You could just need closure,” I say. “Like a redo.”
Her brows spike. “With you?”
“Yeah, with me.” I give her a look and upright the empty toothpick holder. “Who else?”
“We can’t touch.” She stares off, remembering earlier at the hotel, the cab. Where I did actually touch her. More than Corporate says I’m allowed to.
I take my cell out of my pocket and set it down. “It’s not going off. No one’s scolding us by email.” I lean forward for the thousandth time. “I can touch you—outside of the Masquerade, we can do anything we want. We’ve just never tried.” There’s the risk of being caught, but it lessens outside of the hotel.
We’re older.
We have more ways to evade Corporate’s vigilant gaze than we did before. More freedoms. Simple ones: I don’t have a curfew set by Nikolai. She doesn’t room with her brother anymore.
Baylee rotates her empty coffee cup, deep in thought.
“Hey,” I whisper, “it’s up to you, krasavitsa.”
She may not be ready to mess with Corporate again, not after we were burned. Since this is our first long conversation, I don’t know where her head is at. She was only initially seeking a talk about her list and my experiences. I pushed things further.
I always do. Nikolai was right. Give me an inch, I go five feet.
I’m okay with that. (Chastise me. Sue me. I don’t care.)
Bay looks up. “Let me get this straight.”
“Okay.”
“You want to go through my list and physically redo everything with me?”
“Yeah,” I say, absolutely serious.
“That really seems counter-intuitive.” She eyes me. “Sleep with you to get over you?”
Yeah. It’s dumb.
I think we’re both fighting for a way to see each other more. I’m definitely fighting for a way. It’s a narrow path, but I’ll gladly cross it. “It’s an ending. Something you didn’t get before.”
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