by Seth King
For some reason I couldn’t stop watching this one kid who looked about my age. He was on the dance floor, dancing and laughing and flirting, looking freer than anyone I’d ever seen before. Soon my arms started aching as I held my grocery bags, and I realized I’d been standing there for a full twenty minutes – but still I could not take my eyes off that boy as he danced.
Two days before Nicky’s twentieth birthday – and yes, I still measured time in relation to him – I woke up with the weirdest feeling. I saw flashing, troubling images in my head of car crashes and police lights and shooting guns, like when you watched some chaotic horror movie and then spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling in a cold panic. And I knew it was about Nicky. He needed me out there – I could feel it. I just didn’t know how he was strong enough to overcome the missing – God knows I couldn’t. We were new people now, but still all I wanted in the world was to wake up and find his warm body filling my bed, see his galaxy eyes exploding at me.
And that evening, so long after we’d first met, I got a text that confirmed everything I’d been feeling:
My grandma just died. I need you
~
I slapped pavement to his house, back to what had broken me, heart pounding and hands sweating, and screeched under the weeping willow before running to his door at full speed. He opened it and fell into me and kissed me like he was underwater and I was an oxygen source, and then something strange happened. Something like magic.
I felt like a different person than he’d fallen in love with. So did he. Before this we’d been play-acting, dancing around our deepening love like the kids we were, terrified by each other. But tonight the concrete had dried and we were set into ourselves, grown up in love, if only for the moment. There was no arguing, no fighting. We moved against the wall as one and kissed without even looking over our shoulders to see who was watching. We were past that. We were meeting in the middle of our problems as if suspended underwater, floating, sliding side-by-side into a love we couldn’t run from anymore, here on this night when we were both teenagers for the last time.
“I couldn’t tell her,” he sobbed in between gulps of air as we kissed. “My grandma…she said she regretted that she’d never seen me with someone I loved, and I wanted so badly to tell her I loved you, because you are the moon to me, and I couldn’t say it…even as she lay there dying with her tongue out, I couldn’t tell her…I don’t know what’s wrong with me…I’m ruined…”
“I’m sorry, Nicky, I’m so sorry.”
And I was. For so much more than this, but I didn’t have to say it. He knew. He started screaming and crying louder, and then he fully collapsed into me, his legs no longer strong enough to support him. I held him as the earthquake hit, and right then and there I made the decision, or rather, the decision made me: tonight I’m gonna forget about the past. Tonight I’m gonna forget about the future. Tonight I’m gonna love him.
He looked awful compared to December. His face was covered in acne, from stress probably, and he’d lost some weight. He was also at war with himself, muttering senselessly one minute and sobbing the next. He was a wreck, falling apart in my hands. And really it just made me love him more. He still had his galaxy eyes, though. Those lights were unkillable.
“And I’m so sorry, too,” he said, “for everything. Everything. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I guess I happened to myself again. I’m such a coward. I was scared, but I’m not anymore. You taught me how to be an adult, Cole – you taught me how to love someone besides myself. I’m gonna love you forever...”
He kissed me deeper, and it was almost like he’d never left me at all. He could break me and then put me back together again just like that. And in that moment I realized just how much I loved him, with every coil in my pink brain. I was almost ashamed of it, actually. I hated the power he held over me with just a smirk or a scowl or a withheld text message. But that still didn’t change the fact that with him, happiness hit me. Years of covering my tracks and telling half-truths and hiding and killing the wishes of my deepest soul were wiped away, and I just fell into this thing. Joy slammed into me, hit me square in the chest and swept me breathlessly away, and yesterday just wouldn’t cut it anymore. This was so much better than any life I had ever known. Life wasn’t life before him – not even close. I was going to love him into our bright eyes turned grey and cloudy. Forever.
I let Nicky Flores give it to me hard that night. I wanted it, I wanted him, in whatever way he was willing to give himself to me, no matter how pathetic it made me feel. He cried while he did it, and I cried a few times, too, in between kissing him for all he had. And in his own language, he was loving me – he just had the toolbox of a man-boy with a broken past. We both did. Whatever we were running from, we were running together. Everyone loved differently, and I just had to accept that Nicky sucked at love. When we were done he stuck his mouth on mine like we were underwater again. Kiss of death, breath of life – it didn’t matter. It was keeping both of us alive anyway.
“We’re gonna make this happen,” he said out of nowhere, in between the kisses. “It’s gonna work out, and I can’t freaking wait. We’ll figure it out…they won’t make us stop loving each other…they will have to kill us first, so help me God…”
Afterward we crawled into his bed, still wet from the shower, and I just lay there and savored the way his sheets smelled like him, just in case this was the last time.
“Coley?” he said soon, his voice hoarse. “I need to tell you something.”
“Yeah?”
He rolled over a bit. “The first time I ever saw you, I loved you,” he said plainly. “I fell in love with you, and I still am in love with you. The way you laughed at something outside the gym, the way your hair stuck up in the front, the way your heart broke when those guys made fun of you – I loved you more than I could bear, from the very first second. That’s why I downloaded the app – I was desperate to find you. But I was terrified of that love. I didn’t want to admit it to myself because it would’ve confirmed everything I hated most about myself, and so I fought it as hard as I could, for way too long. But I am so sorry for every second I let my fear keep me away from you.”
I kissed his forehead and cried. As he smiled and started to drift away I clutched him with the clawing, desperate knowledge that no matter what he told me, our world would never understand our love, not really. It would do anything to stamp it out, actually. As his breathing slowed I held him with this visceral realization sinking into me, this wham-bam feeling that this could kill us, this thing we both felt between our living electric bodies, right down to our marrow. This love could absolutely kill us. There were people out there who would relish the feeling of our blood on their hands, figuratively at least. It was us against the world, and nobody would ever understand how close that brought us but us.
As he fell asleep I hugged him harder and breathed in the scent of his bony, hairless shoulder, and right there within that lovely moment, I knew our love would live forever.
“There’s nothing wrong with chandeliers,” I whispered, but he was already gone.
17
I went home alone at dawn. That afternoon I woke up with hazy memories of sex and wine and tears and happiness, blissful happiness that had asked nothing of me, just made its presence known like a cat on your floor. My phone pinged with a text, and I grabbed it and smiled. All he’d written was “see you soon,” but to me it was the most gorgeous set of words that had ever been assembled. He was back. My boy on the moon was back. He made the ordinary beautiful, elevating normality like when you got lost in a dreary edge of town and turned a corner to find a brick wall blooming with graffiti. Red, yellow, lilac: all the colors were there. He had everything.
I waited and waited and waited. I knew he would come, I just didn’t know when. Five PM passed, cruel and lonely. Then six. Soon it was nine, and I was yawning, and it became clear I’d been stood the hell up. Oh well. I’d been lied to again, led a
long again. Should’ve known. I could always try again, though, I figured.
Nicky did not open my Snapchat the next day. I fluffed my hair and found the perfect lighting in the corner of my room by my bedside table and even sucked in my cheeks to look like a Balmain model. I was thrilled to have him see me looking so hot – why wouldn’t he open it?
I added him on all my profiles a million times, of course, but he never accepted me. It didn’t make any sense to me. Every other time he’d come to his senses, come crawling back. How much time did he need? I made new Snapchat and Instagram profiles, but he refused to accept my friend requests. And that night, after an incredibly passive-aggressive phone conversation with my dad, I got drunk. Very drunk. All the goodwill I’d ever felt for Nicky instantly dried up. He’d dropped me again, and I wanted him to feel every inch of my misery. I knew I couldn’t keep doing this – I couldn’t keep allowing him to treat my heart like the cold green beans at the bottom of the sink after dinner, all because I was too afraid to imagine a future without him, too cowardly to envision a world alone. I hated him, and it made me hate myself. So just before the blackness closed in and took me, I texted him the worst thing I could dream up:
I hate you forever, you stupid faggot. Happy effing birthday.
He never responded, but he didn’t have to. When I woke up the next morning, vomity and trembling, I already knew I’d ruined everything. And as I lay there in a fetal position I decided that letting him fall out of love with me had been the worst thing I’d ever done. Since Jonathan, at least. I should’ve tried harder, I should’ve been anyone but me. Every cruel word from my father, every time someone had called me a faggot or a loser or a freak – all of those words had been confirmed by his departure. I felt lower than dirt. I felt like a worm.
It was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done, but soon I tried to accept that my crazy text had probably been the final nail in the coffin for Nicky Flores and Coley Furman, whatever we’d been. He was done with me, and it made me crumple into myself every time I thought about it. I’d been discarded like an old phone after an upgrade. And that was that.
And so that day I did something crazy: I took a breath and told myself to let him go.
~
After a few brutally chilly and windy weeks, winter finally surrendered to spring. Our break lasted longer than any other break, until it wasn’t a break, really, but a breakup. The full Monty. Time started to glide on without him – I didn’t touch the ground, but I wasn’t flying, either. I was just drifting, existing. It was all grey. Soon almost a year had passed since our first meeting, that humid day in the gym when I’d faced hatred and he’d temporarily rescued me from my own mind. By now we were settling into new lives that had nothing to do with each other. Nicky even moved away. Where, I had no idea, but one day late in February I happened to bike by his house (translation: shamelessly stalked him) and saw moving trucks at the entrance to his unit. As the spring heated up I avoided everything having to do with him. Our separate worlds had never really overlapped before anyway – we had no mutual friends, and beyond that, he was One of Them, a Normal Guy, and I was not – but I made extra precautions to avoid him. I knew that if I saw him I would fall apart, so I stayed away. I still could not escape the cloud of him, the hole his absence had left in myself, my life. I’d sooner swallow curdled milk than go to a bar on a Thursday and see him flirting with some guy – or worse, a girl. A girl who could offer him everything I couldn’t, like ovaries and boobs and a normal relationship that wouldn’t turn them both into pariahs…
I couldn’t believe the school year was coming to a close. The older I got, the faster time seemed to fly. The kids I’d grown up with were, well, growing up. Girls who’d been posting party pictures just a few years before were now loading pictures of their babies, or their new townhouses with their fiancés. Guys who’d been posting gym selfies last fall were now posting photos of their cubicles. My relationship with my dad was the same as ever – he’d call me, use me as his punching bag, and then I’d hang up and feel black and depressed for the rest of the day – and I did not speak to my mother more than once or twice, ignoring most of her calls in between. At least I was starting to think about Nicky less and less. He was always there, obviously, but soon he was a whisper instead of a deluge. Sometimes I still got weak and waited for him to come to his senses. I waited for a text. I waited for a message. I waited to wake up to a drunken voicemail left from the garden of some bar at one thirty in the morning where he’d pour out his soul into the line and tell me how much he missed me and needed me. None of that ever came. When I was the worst version of myself, the version that was tired or hung-over or starving in the line at KFC while the lady in front of me took forever on her order, I would think of Nicky out there in the world and I would wish he was miserable. I would wish he was standing on some pier, choked with nostalgia for me, staring blankly at a sunset he could no longer find beauty in. I would wish he was in bed, crying alone, sunken in and broken down and hating himself for letting me go. But those wishes never lasted long, because I’d loved Nicky Flores once and I would love him forever. So even through the good and the bad, even through the worst and the best of me, I still had one wish for him: wherever he was, whoever he was with, whatever he was doing, I hoped that boy was free. Just as free as he’d been with me. Even if I hated him.
The thought of him lying with someone else, touching them, kissing them where he’d kissed me, made me want to erase myself from the world. But the only thing that scared me more than his happiness was his misery. Because once you loved someone, you could never truly unlove them. If my beautiful daydreamer was hurting out there, crying on a back porch somewhere in the rain, I didn’t even know what I would do with myself…
One thing I started to learn was that Nicky had done me a solid. He’d set me free, and I could become anyone with that freedom. I hadn’t been good enough to keep him around, so I became better. Soon I was reading more books and jogging all the time. A boy looked right at me in front of Dunkin Donuts one warm morning, and instead of looking away, I stared back for a second. I felt breathless and dazzling and only a little horrifying, like my throat had simultaneously caught fire and shrunken three sizes. He ended up walking away and exiting my life, but still, it was starting to occur to me that I could be whoever the hell I wanted to be. I was in a sea of strangers, free to pretend to be whoever I pleased. So I went to Target that day and got some shirts in size small instead of medium, some shorts in bright blue instead of khaki. I bought a crystal lamp instead of a black one, then I stocked up on grooming supplies in the beauty section, and only looked over my shoulder once instead of constantly. And for the first time, I did not disgust myself on the drive home. What was I going to do with this small bit of freedom? Who was I going to become? Who was I going to love?
I stayed away from the hookup apps – for now, at least – for a few reasons. I was still a little scared of having someone who knew my family see me on there, but also, the idea of having sex with someone who wasn’t Nicky made me feel like dying. Deep down I still wanted to be his, and to have someone else make me their own, well…that concept was still unfathomable. But still I knew I would honor the mess we’d made together that summer. Because the thing about people was, they changed. I was changing every day. As the years went on, I knew I would get older and look different and rethink the way I thought about some things, and pretty soon I wouldn’t be me anymore. Not the Me I’d been with him, at least. And Nicky would change, too. Eventually we would become other people, and other peoples’ people, and we would fall in love with other souls who would lay claim on our hearts, and those two kids that had existed in ColeyAndNickyVille would be completely washed away by Ye Ole Tides of Time. They would get married and forget the other one existed and they would disappear. But as I lay there one night, I committed us to memory, set us in amber, and told myself we would always live inside those scenes. The person I’d been that summer was Nicky’s, and he alw
ays would be. Those kids would exist forever together, even after they didn’t anymore.
One day when it was really starting to get warm outside, just like it’d been the day I met Nicky, I passed myself in the mirror, and for a sliver of a second I did not recognize the person looking back at me. I was like a peacock that had just discovered its colors. My skin was a lot better because of all the products I’d bought, my depression-related weight loss had evaporated any remaining baby fat in my face, and my clothes were getting tighter and more stylish with every new shopping trip I took. The lovesick doormat I’d been the previous summer and autumn seemed a million miles away. And the biggest change was this: the kid in the mirror appeared to actually like himself. It almost made me gasp.
And speaking of the summer: across the mall atrium I saw a boy who looked like Nicky with the volume turned down, and I felt something final sink into me – it was done. I had to let go for good. I’d found myself in the loss of him, and we were two different people now. I was still hanging onto his texts, a few of his shirts – I’d even kept his sandals on my floor, right where he’d left them – but I had to stop. He wasn’t coming back. Ever. And I had to accept that he didn’t want me anymore. So I kept walking and told myself that he was with me forever. He was a sunburst, and when he broke it off, he’d exploded all over me. Maybe I’d never wash him off, not really – he was with me still. Even if I would never again feel his peace, revel in his chaos, let him screw me numb and then kiss me back to life again – he was still there.