by Roan Parrish
Will was looking at me strangely and my heart started to hammer, an awkward, sick feeling stealing into my stomach. I didn’t remember what I’d been saying and became convinced maybe I’d said things about us going out aloud.
Pretend it’s casual! I shouted at myself. Everything’s super casual! You’re a casual guy! “Uh, hang out! We can hang out. Right?”
Will’s narrowed eyes suggested that I hadn’t sounded quite as casual as I’d intended.
“Sure,” he said, “we can hang out.” But the way he said it—like maybe he was just humoring me—scraped at the last nerve I had. And, okay, maybe I slightly overreacted. But I had ridden on buses for what felt like forever, lugged around my hallmates’ worldly possessions, been abandoned by my roommate, almost been hit by a car, gotten on the subway going the wrong way twice trying to get here, and now Will was wrenching away the one scrap of comfort I had.
I was trying to keep calm, but my voice had gone all tight with the promise of a subway ride back downtown by myself, each stop putting more and more distance between me and the only person I knew here.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “We got along so well in Holiday. And now I’m here, and I thought… I mean, I came here so that….” Abort! That was definitely not casual. “I just mean that now that I’m here, I thought maybe we might have a chance. Just to try, you know, being together.”
I swallowed and I imagined the sound of it echoing through the open window and out into the streets beyond, announcing to the inhabitants of East Harlem that Leo Ware was completely and officially pathetic.
Will was looking at me like he was puzzled by something essential about me. I felt taken apart by his gaze, like he could see things about me I hadn’t even figured out yet.
“Leo.” He almost never said my name and it cut right through me. “You didn’t come here for me. You came here for college. I live here, yeah, but this is a big city. It’s a whole world. You’ll see.”
I opened my mouth to say something, and he pressed a thumb to the swell of my bottom lip, fingers curling around my chin.
“Look, I want to be clear, okay? I’m not looking for a relationship,” he said. There was an almost savage cruelty to the gentleness of his tone as his words tore through me. It was a quelling blow from an honored enemy, a poison kiss, an end before things had even started.
“You’re… not interested in general, or… with me?” I forced myself to clarify, pressing farther onto the sword.
“In general.”
The silence between us stretched. Usually I’d feel compelled to fill such a silence, but I couldn’t even find the words.
“So, then, you just….”
Will’s eyes went hard with the warning of irritation.
“I sleep with people when I want to, yeah, if that’s what you were going to say.” His tone dared me to find fault with what he’d said.
I looked at him, but it was as if I were watching myself from outside my own body as the one thing that I had promised myself I wouldn’t say fell out of my mouth and landed between us on Will’s posh couch like an unwelcome splotch of oatmeal.
“But… you kissed me.”
It sounded so inconsequential, so childish; like I was dangling something unsavory and clumsy in front of him and insisting that he take it as proof.
Will’s brows drew together, but then he just smiled casually. “Yeah, well, I’m sure I’m not the first to do that. That fucking smirk you throw.” He winked and tapped my lip again.
I gaped at him. In fact, he had been the first. Well, not counting Christina Marciano at the eighth-grade social that Carter had dragged me to back when we were still best friends. Before he decided that sports were cooler than movie marathons and being popular was more important than me. And she didn’t really count because that was spin the bottle, so she kind of had to kiss me. But that wasn’t even the point.
Will’s smile faded in the silence.
“Okaaay. Um, I shouldn’t have done that. I was in a weird place. Being back in Michigan, and stuff with my sister and—”
I couldn’t listen. He regretted kissing me—not even regretted: discounted. Basically the best moment of my entire life, and it had been nothing to him. A mistake.
When you’re in a weird place you, like, impulse buy dumb trinkets at the gas station or decide that you probably should watch Fifty Shades of Grey just to see what everyone is talking about. But Will had kissed me. I mean, really kissed me.
Even all these months later I could slide back into the moment like a jacket worn perfectly to fit my shoulders….
Laughing at a snarky joke Will made and looking up to find his eyes locked on my mouth, those honey gold lashes vulnerable where his eyes always flayed me. The sudden heat I felt, like every atom between our bodies was agitated to a singing vibration. The drag of those lashes as his eyes met mine and he inhaled sharply through his nose like he was startled by whatever he saw in me. How slowly he moved—almost imperceptibly—until my eyes crossed trying to track his mouth’s approach.
His breath caught moments before we touched, a tiny automatic sound that I thought might be nerves, though Will had never indicated he had any. I closed my eyes at the hint of vulnerability and waited for contact, the whole world—my whole stupid, pathetic life—reduced to our mouths, microns apart, taking each other’s breath into our bodies like maybe we could share something.
But when contact came it wasn’t Will’s lips. It was his hands, one on either side of my face, holding me fiercely still. His eyes were knives again, any hint of uncertainty gone, and he crushed his mouth to mine before I could even register that he’d moved. It startled a sound out of me, a kind of whine in the back of my throat that I try not to think about, and then it was just the taste of him, like warm ocean water on my tongue.
I pushed up on tiptoes to kiss him back, fisting the fabric of his shirt until he yanked me against him and his tongue stroked mine. It was a shock that electrified my whole body. The fucking intimacy of it. Of someone touching my mouth with his. That something of Will was inside me, a part of me—spit and breath and taste and touch. In that instant he owned me.
When I slid my fingers into his hair it even felt blond, the strands smooth and heavy, and Will let out a breath into my mouth. We broke apart for a moment and his eyes were narrowed. Had I done something wrong? Made a misstep I didn’t even recognize?
Before I could apologize or ask or do anything, really, other than try not to plaster myself back against his body, he covered my mouth with his palm and closed his eyes, shaking his head slightly. I tried to say something, but he pressed his palm tighter against my lips, his fingers a blunt disappointment after the poetry of his mouth. His hand stayed there for a moment before sliding away in a silent benediction as he took a step back, leaving me breathless and shaky and tremblingly hard.
Leaving me totally destroyed for anything but another taste of him.
Since the moment I had gotten my acceptance letter to NYU—no, from the moment it had occurred to me that I could come to New York—I’d had a fantasy of this moment. The one where I saw Will for the first time since our leave-taking in Holiday. I’d played it in my head so often, scripted different versions of it so many times, that it almost felt like it’d already happened. As if this meeting were something I’d already read in a book, years before, its details gone flat and hazy with the familiarity of a scene read a thousand times.
I’d pulled that story around myself like a blanket for so long, and needed it so badly, that I hadn’t ever let myself imagine what would happen if Will went off script. After all, I’d written him so many.
There were the ones I’d thought of as realistic, where he smiled and was amused at me and I was awkward and self-deprecating, and we kind of laughed and he said, “Yeah, we’ll see,” but in a way that left me buoyant with hope. There were the ones that were more porn than romance, where we didn’t speak at all, he just stripped me bare and claimed me, as if I had finally
come home.
Then there were the swoony ones. The embarrassingly detailed ones that never ended. There was no climax to them because they were just us, always together. Sharing all the small, daily things that people share. They were punctuated by things like Will bringing me my favorite flowers (not that I knew enough about flowers to have one), or buying me a Valentine’s Day stuffed animal (not that I could imagine real-life Will ever doing such a thing), or planning an elaborate surprise for our one-year anniversary (this was always hazy, since my only exposure to anniversaries was my parents, who exchanged cards from the grocery store over breakfast on their anniversary like clockwork).
I found myself suddenly furious with Will, not just for not wanting me, but for, with one sentence, wrenching away the fantasies that I’d been playing on a near continuous loop for more than a year. I had needed them just to get through the day sometimes, especially this past year. And now he had burned them to the ground.
I shuffled backward and grabbed my skateboard, determined to get out of there before Will saw me cry. I plastered a smile on my face and nodded.
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. No problem. Cool. Um, thanks for”—I gestured around searchingly—“the water and all. I’ll uh, I’ll see you around, okay, night!”
I thought he might’ve said my name as I slammed out the door, but he didn’t follow me. I didn’t wait for the elevator, just stumbled down the stairs and out onto the street. I wanted to be swallowed up by the noise and the heat and the thick air and everything that didn’t care I was crying as I picked a direction blindly and walked, my fantasies joining my well-intentioned resolutions in dissipating around me like smoke in the evening breeze.
Chapter 2
September
THE NEON plastic cup slipped out of my hand where I sat slumped against the wall of the stairwell and plinked on every step on the way down when someone kicked at my shoe.
“Are you alive?”
With one eye slitted open all I could see were black skinny jeans terminating in expensive-looking black ankle boots. One of those boots nudged my sneaker again.
“Quit it.”
Skinny Jeans dropped into a squat one step below me, and I immediately tried to focus because he was wicked hot. He was black, about my height, and everything about his posture said he knew how hot he was, even squatting in a stairwell under fluorescent light. His white T-shirt was almost transparent and it was shredded in places in that artsy way that super expensive stuff sometimes is, so you could see smooth, taut skin through the fabric. He had permanent dimples and a mouth that turned up slightly like he was smirking at everyone.
He crossed his arms, making the deep V-neck of his T-shirt gape even wider and smiled knowingly when my eyes darted to his chest. His smile held no shadows. It was as bright and inviting as a sunrise, and I wished I could return it.
“You’re drunk alone in a stairwell, my friend,” he said, his voice light and warm and tinged with a New York accent. What I thought was a New York accent, anyway. “It’s only day one. You’ve gotta pace yourself.”
He winked at me, and I couldn’t find anything to say. I wished I’d had another one of those Jell-O shots. I could still taste the bite of artificial cherry in the back of my throat. But when I tried to stand up to go get one—and get away from the pretty guy who looked as happy as I was miserable—the whole stairwell tilted.
“Whoa, whoa. You’re toast,” Skinny Jeans said. “Here, sit.” My ass hit the step, jarring my whole spine, and I dropped my head to my knees. The guy sat down next to me, every movement graceful.
“Omigod, kill me,” I groaned.
“How are you this drunk? The party only started an hour ago.”
“I don’t drink really ever.”
He laughed. “Oookay, so, what, you’re newly away from home and feeling your freedom and independence or what?”
I squeezed my eyes shut trying not to replay the epic fail end of my hangout with Will in my head. Trying not to relive our first—and what was clearly going to be our only—kiss.
“Uuuggghhh,” I groaned, burying my face in my hands.
“What’s the problem, sugar?” Somehow Skinny Jeans made that ridiculous endearment sound friendly and casual, and suddenly I was close to tears. “Hey, hey, it’s cool,” Skinny Jeans crooned. His hands were on my face, and I tried really hard not to map every distinction from the sensation of Will’s. “Whoa, boy, what the hell happened to you?” He swiped his thumbs under my eyes and they came away wet. Oh god, I wished the stairs would turn into a slide like in the cartoons and a trapdoor would open up at the bottom of it and swallow me.
Skinny Jeans tried again. “You homesick?”
Was I? I hadn’t even thought about it, but when I did, I had to admit to myself that maybe I was just a little bit homesick. Not that I wanted to be back in Holiday, or back in my parents’ house. But it was overwhelming, having no clue what the hell my life would be like a month from now. Or a week. Or, really, tomorrow.
It was more than that, though. As long as I was in Holiday, dreaming of being in New York, anything was possible. It was all potential energy, anticipation, promise. Now that I was here, though… fuck, it was all so real it took my breath away.
He put his arms around me, surprisingly strong for how lithe he looked, and pulled me against him, the scent of something warm, like amber, and fresh, like moss, filling my nose. God, he even smelled expensive. And sophisticated. Like he could choose a cologne because he knew who the hell he was and what he was supposed to smell like.
All the things that Will would want in a boyfriend, right? Someone with taste, who knew about clothes and cologne and boots and how to sit in a stairwell and still look classy.
No, I reminded myself. No, Will didn’t want a boyfriend at all. Will wasn’t interested in a relationship.
I just didn’t get it. Like, I got wanting to go out and party and screw a different guy every night. The concept of it, anyway, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t for me. And I got not wanting to take a relationship further because you didn’t like someone enough. And of course I got not being into someone in particular…. But, not wanting a relationship? Like, weren’t relationships kind of the whole point? The eventual goal?
Having people you connected with, were intimate with, who knew you, understood you… wasn’t that sort of… everything?
Snot was streaming out of my nose, so I pulled away because the T-shirt my face was smooshed against probably cost more than anything I’d ever owned in my whole pathetic life.
“Jesus, kid, how many of those Jell-O shots did you have?”
“Don’t call me that!” I pushed away from him, missing his smell immediately as the stale air of the stairwell crept back in. He put his hands up in apology. I sagged against the wall. “Three.”
“Three Jell-O shots? Good lord.” He patted my back and gazed out past the toes of his boots. Next to the scuffed toes of my Vans, they looked aggressively pointy. “Come with me,” he said after a minute or two of diplomatically ignoring the sound of me sniffling into the silence. He dragged me up by the hand and kept hold of it, pulling me after him up flights of stairs. Finally, he pushed open a metal door and we were on the roof. He toed a brick between the door and the frame and pulled me to the edge.
“I thought you could use some air.”
I took deep breaths, the air thick with the residue of the day’s heat, smelling faintly of something metallic, like blood, but mostly of traffic and pavement and the mush of so many warm bodies in proximity.
In the dark that wasn’t really dark, the rooftop felt private. I could already tell that this city was a place where you had to make your own privacy. Construct a bubble that you carried with you as you moved through the streets. Something to prevent every little thing from getting to you. Every glance from a stranger, or brush of a shoulder, or startling noise. I’d never been very good at that. Things did get to me. Things that maybe shouldn’t have.
Skinny Jeans loo
ked like he belonged on this rooftop. He looked like he could belong anywhere, from a fancy cocktail party to one of the benches in the park I’d seen this morning. Whereas I… didn’t. Looking at all those windows in all those buildings, all of them with lives happening, just made me feel insignificant. Like the more people I could see at once, the easier it was to dismiss them all and myself in the process.
The city spread around me in all directions and, without the guarantee of Will as a touchstone, I was so thoroughly alone I almost couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I didn’t have even one friend from home close enough to text. When I was still in school I’d hung out with a few people, but mostly not. High school had been small, and I hadn’t really fit in any of the groups. I could text Janie, but knowing my sister she was either on a date or recording an episode of her vlog, and either way she wouldn’t want to be interrupted. Which left exactly no one.
My stupid brain started trying to quantify it: how many millions of steps in every single direction could I go and not encounter a single person who cared about me? How many miles, how many kilometers, acres, leagues, furlongs, fathoms, hectares, picas.
Then it started making up new units of measurement to quantify my isolation. How many skateboard-lengths away from love was I? How many pineapple-and-bacon pizzas? How many medium lattes, mass-market paperbacks, USB to HDMI cables, park benches? How many Jell-O shots?
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger,” Skinny Jeans said, leaning back against the chest-high wall I was looking over. “You know.” He rolled his eyes and gestured expansively, like we both knew he was repeating something common. “Anonymous confession and all that.”
“I don’t think you’re really dressed for the confessional,” I told him.
He grinned and turned toward me, his eyes doing that warm smiley thing. “Are you flirting with me?”
“What? No!”
He just smiled and went on.