He scooted to the edge, grinning but trying not to. I tossed my pillow into the empty space between his and Griff’s and settled into the middle of the lumpy mattress. Griff and Zane were warm and smelled like a full day.
“It’s no Ritz Carlton,” Zane said, “but it’s nice.”
Although I kept closer to Griff, could feel his back against my arm, Zane’s face was still only inches from my cheek; there just wasn’t room for it to be anything more. I lay on my back feigning concern for the rippled plaster ceiling. As though if I took my eyes away to meet Zane’s I ran the risk of missing some important message from above.
Griff exhaled again; this time it was more of a sigh. I sighed too, or started to, and then stopped because I was afraid it would sound like I was making fun of him rather than commiserating. I was hot already under the blanket and I wished I’d taken off my jeans—with Zane there that was somehow out of the question. I kicked it to the side, freeing a leg.
A toilet flushed in the apartment next door.
“So Matt Morrow is good?” I whispered without taking my eyes off the ceiling.
“Yeah,” Zane said.
“I haven’t been keeping up with it.”
“It’s the Time Knights crossover. Glanthur somehow crash-landed in El Paso. We’re not quite sure why yet.”
“How about Matt?”
“Paco’s missing—you know, Matt’s friend? I think Glanthur is going to die and Paco is going to get his ring and become a Knight. If they find him, I mean.”
“That would be cool.”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck this,” Griff said, his voice warbling as though he was three seconds away from crying. He sat up and touched my shoulder gently, as if to soothe any offense he may have unintentionally caused Zane and me. “No— I’ll be back, guys.” He got out of bed and left the living room.
“What just happened?” Zane said, leaning up one elbow.
“I don’t know.”
Griff’s blanket, left hanging over the edge of the bed, pulled itself onto the floor. I heard him open Beth’s bedroom door and the kitchen lit up briefly before going dark again. There were voices, soft. I scooted to the end of the mattress, and off.
“Were we talking too loud?” Zane said.
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“Maybe he’s not ready to share a bed with more than one guy?” Zane laid back down, grinning. The springs squeaked.
I stood at the living room door for a moment until I realized both that I shouldn’t be snooping and that I didn’t want to know what they were talking about in there anyway.
Unnerved, I left the doorway and returned to my place beside Zane. I didn’t strain my ears to try to make sense of the whispers through the wall, but my mind still swirled with theories about what could be going on. Was Griff trying to make up with her? Is that why he wanted to come back here, for a second chance? Would we have to come back tomorrow and return all his things? Would I lose him? I studied the ceiling for answers and crossed my hands over my belly to hold in the pessimistic creature who had awoken in the coils of my intestines.
“I never thought I’d see this, you know,” Zane said after a few minutes, moving his hand back and forth in the small space between us. “Us in bed.”
“Zane, come on.”
“I know—your space. Right. I’m sorry.” He crossed his arms beneath his head. His feet hung out the end of the blanket. “Does it bother you that I like you, Vince?”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“But you’d prefer I didn’t.”
“...”
“Well don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’ve been giving me the cold shoulder ever since Halloween.”
“I have not.”
“Sure.”
“We were talking in the store just the other day.”
“I mean outside the store. When was the last time we hung out outside the store? We used to do that, remember? We did it all the time.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re not in the store right now.”
“OK,” he said. “But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t your idea that I come along.”
I sighed. “It’s just... I don’t know, it’s been busy.”
“I think you’re still mad about Halloween,” he said, bolder now; he was conjuring confidence the way he did, manifesting it through sheer will. “But I don’t care. I don’t regret it.”
“Congratulations.”
“Do you?”
“Go to sleep.”
***
He turned his Mustang onto Old Colony Road. Marissa was in the passenger seat dressed as a zombie stewardess—her hair, dyed red, was tied up to look like a geyser of blood, and her torn black blazer sported a bloody wings pin.
“I wish I was a kid again,” Zane said. “Not the suckfest that was my teens. But like seven would be good.”
“Just so you can go trick-or-treating?” she said, reaching over to lower the Fugue In D Minor.
Zane nodded. “Yeah.”
She looked back at me and shook her head. “I told you boys you’d feel more Halloweeny if you got dressed up. But nooo, you’d rather blubber over lost youth instead.”
Zane’s headlights sliced the fog that floated across the street and wrapped up houses full of sugar-high kids. We’d gone to a showing of the original King Kong that started at ten; now it was almost one.
“You need to drop me off soon,” said Marissa. “I have to open tomorrow.” She looked back at me again. “Unless I can get there around noon?”
“Alas,” I said, “we can’t disappoint the fanboys.”
“God forbid,” she grunted. “Well you guys feel free to continue carousing without me.”
Zane pulled up in front of Marissa’s house, an unassuming ranch with its porch light on and a plump scarecrow tied to the front banister. She and I got out, me to take her place in the front.
“Don’t you want your CD?” I said.
“I’ll get it later. There’s a few more tracks on there for you to enjoy,” she said. “Now don’t get into any trouble.” She stuffed a half a bag of peanut M&Ms into her pocket. “Oh, what the hell, it’s Halloween. Just don’t get arrested.” She beat her fists against her chest like Kong and started walking up the leaf-strewn driveway.
I got in the car and buckled my seatbelt, watching as she waved and went in the house. Her porch lights went dark and the goofy scarecrow turned sinister in the headlights.
I pushed eject on the stereo and Marissa’s mix-CD came sliding out.
“Sorry, dude,” I said. “I can’t take any more Monster Mash.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Zane said. “I love Marissa, but damn, she’s got lousy taste in holiday music.”
“It’s just that holiday music itself is in bad taste.”
“Touché.” He flicked off his high beams when a car passed. “So where are we headed?”
“I don’t care. It just seems too early to go home. We could always go throw eggs at something.”
“I have no eggs, but I do have a crate of toilet paper in the trunk.”
“That works.”
He chuckled. “I wouldn’t mind some food, actually,” he said. “McDonald’s?”
“Anywhere else. I had a traumatic experience in the drive thru last week.”
“Oh, that’s right. Your girlfriend left you for the Hamburgler.”
“Worse. Someone named Bernie.”
“I don’t think it’s open this late, anyway. Wendy’s?”
“OK.”
We bought a few square burgers at the window and sat in the car at the edge of the parking lot. On the property next door a building was going up. Steel girders and bricks caught the moonlight like bones. Zane’s window was open a few inches and the night air whistled through. It was warm for the first day of November.
“How many trick-or-treaters did you get?” Zane said. He was scraping the pickles off his second cheeseburger with a burnt fry. He had ea
ten the ones on the first.
“Zero. I kept the lights off.”
“No, really? Isn’t that pretty of Scroogey of you?”
“What are you, the Ghost of Halloween Past?”
“That’s my cousin. I’m the Ghost of Halloween Future.”
“Oh you are, are you? Fine. Next year I’ll take out a loan and buy those six-inch Hershey bars.”
“You’ll find me at your door, you do that.”
“... As a trick or a treat?”
“Both, if you want.”
I felt my cheeks grow warm and I took a quick bite of my burger. “What are they building here anyway?”
“Dunno,” he said. “I was telling Simon we should do some kind of Halloween promotion at the store. Have people dressed as superheroes give out candy or whatever.”
“You just want an excuse to wear spandex.”
“So?”
“Haha. And he didn’t go for it?”
“Are you surprised?”
“I guess not.”
“Comic books are not toys, Vince,” he said. Simon’s mantra. Simon’s voice.
“That’s really creepy. You sound just like him.”
“I spend enough time with him,” he said. “Though not as much since he married his woman. I miss him.”
“He’s growing up. What is he now, forty-five? Are you going to eat those pickles?”
“No, take them.” He dragged the foil wrapper off his lap just enough so that I wouldn’t have to pick the pickles right off his penis. I slid the pickle slices under my bread. “Probably a Blockbuster,” he said, looking at the construction.
We finished our food and rolled the wrappers into balls, stuffed wrappers into empty fries boxes, stuffed boxes into paper bags. Zane went out to trash them.
He got back in the car and put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it all the way, just enough to make his cheeks glow speedometer green.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“You looked like you were going to say something.”
“I was, but fast food’s bad.”
“For what?”
“Your health, Vincent,” he said. “Want to go to the beach?”
We drove across town and parked and stood on the wall of concrete that divided the beach from the street, looking out at the sea. A quarter-mile down, people were dancing around a campfire built on the sand; aside from that the beach was empty. The bright moon illuminated nothing but the sand and the blue-black waves of Nantucket Sound.
“Let’s go down,” Zane said, nudging my arm. He squatted down and dropped off the wall, hitting the sand hard and falling back on his butt. “Ooof.”
“Are you all right?” I asked dryly, looking down.
“No.”
“Did you break something?”
With a blank expression he touched his butt. “Uh oh.”
“What?”
“There’s a crack in my ass.” He starting hobbling around like an old man and made me laugh.
I swung my legs over the edge and hopped down. The breeze blowing off the ocean had a bite, a reminder that this was November and not summertime.
We walked down to where the waves lapped the ridge of seaweed at the top of the tide’s reach. I put my hands in the pocket of my hooded sweatshirt and flicked at a hangnail on my thumb.
“Do you like the beach in the summer?” he said.
“Yeah. It’s a good place to people-watch.”
“I think it’s funny how people stake out their little squares of sand. They get all territorial.”
“Like Lord of the Flies down there,” I said.
“They’re roasting Piggy, I bet,” he said and I laughed again. He looked down at his feet and smoothed a half-circle in the sand with his sneaker. Shells turned up in it, bits of purple clam shell like the kind my driveway was made of. Waves rolled in, breaking at our feet in a steady thrum that made me feel like falling asleep standing up—or maybe lying down, watching for UFOs with Zane. “I always have fun with you, Vince.”
“Me too.”
“I was wondering.” He cleared his throat. “I wanted to ask if you would want to—go out some time. With me.”
My heart started to pound but I felt like laughing, too, because now everything was just a formality, a ritual, a simple dance around a fire. The topic had been broached; the hard part was done.
“We go out all the time,” I said with a smirk.
“Bastard, you know what I mean.”
“So what you have in mind would be like... a date, then?”
“Yes, that’s what I have in mind, yes. You’re a dope. I’m going to smack you. Come here.”
“Can you catch me?” I slipped away from him and ran a few yards over crackling seaweed.
“Come here!”
He chased me and grabbed my arm and we stopped, neither of us sure what to do with this contact. He let go and we stood side by side, our hands in our pockets.
“Where should we go on our date?” I said. “Maybe to the beach?”
He laughed. “I guess we could go to the beach.” He looked around. “Oh wow, here we are.”
“You did say you were the Ghost of Halloween Future.”
“That’s true.”
I could tell he felt relieved. How long had he been planning this? How long had I wanted it myself? And yet—and yet—maybe I was wrong about the hard part being over. Something felt off, in a way that made me realize I was trying to trick myself into believing I was going to roll with this. My mind felt full; it churned with too many other faces. But his was smiling.
“Can I...”
“What?” I said. Now he was laughing. “Why are you laughing?”
“Can I kiss you?” God, he was so cute. It made my chest hurt.
“Only if you tell me why you’re laughing first.”
“Because I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. There. Can I now?”
“Yeah.”
His tongue ran over his lips, subconsciously wetting them in preparation. He stepped closer and his lips parted in a grin right before they met mine; I could feel his smile with my lips. His mouth was soft, his chin like the skin of a peach—kind of like Melanie’s. He pulled his hand from his sweatshirt pocket and put it inside mine; his warm fingers closed around my hand. His thumb found my hangnail and tried to smooth it down.
“Wait,” I said. “Hold on.” I took a step back. My heels knocked against a driftwood log half-buried in the sand.
“I’m sorry,” he said, a reflex, his eyes confused. “What’s wrong? Is it too soon?”
“It’s not about Melanie,” I said, “I don’t think.”
“Do you— Should I— Should I not have done that?”
“I don’t know.” I felt suddenly feverish with the cold ocean air rolling across my forehead and my embarrassed-red cheeks.
“Do I have mustard breath?”
“Zane...”
“...?” He was waiting.
“I don’t know, we work together.” I said it because I had to say something and it was the first thing I thought of. “I just— It’s probably not a good idea, you know?”
“Do you really think Simon would care, though? Even if he did, it’s not like Golden Age is some big important career we’re going to jeopardize.”
He’d had salt on his lips. “It’s how I feel,” I told him. “I’m sorry.”
I stepped on one end of the driftwood and the other end sprang up, kicking sand and broken shells high into the air.
*
A reflection from something on the street caught one of the prisms in Beth’s window and three purple dots appeared on the wall and slid down to the floor.
“I’m not tired,” Zane said. “And anyway, you didn’t answer me. Do you wish I hadn’t kissed you?”
“Whether I regret it or not doesn’t matter,” I said. “I think it’s best for everyone if it just gets written out of our continuity.”
“You can on
ly ret-con comic books, Vince. You can’t ret-con real life.” For a long time we lay quiet. The voices in the bedroom droned and in a while they stopped too. After a few minutes of what I perceived as almost total silence, Zane whispered, “Here, give me your hand.”
I allowed it to be lifted off my chest; he brought my arm across the gap between us and laid my hand palm-up on his belly. He traced his finger like a fortune teller over the lines of my palm. I didn’t pull away or feel uncomfortable. It was remarkably without insinuation—gentle, like what a mother might do to a little kid during a thunder storm, to quiet him. After a few minutes I felt my eyelids get heavier and I started to believe for the first time all evening that I might actually fall asleep. I half expected Zane to start in on a lullaby. It was like he was trying to comfort me, or distract me. After a minute I realized that’s exactly what he was doing.
In the other room, Griff and Beth were making love.
“Oh god.” I yanked my hand back and sat up.
“Don’t be upset, dude,” Zane said. The way he said dude reminded me of Griff, and he was not Griff. Definitely not Griff. Because Griff was in the other room. With Beth. Fucking. “It’s a good thing, right?”
“No, it’s not.”
“He would probably disagree with you on that.”
He leaned up on his elbow and looked first out the window and then down at me. “It’s snowing,” he whispered.
“Zane, enough!”
I kicked aside the blanket and got off the mattress, dragging the blanket behind me, tripping, throwing it on the floor. I straightened my pants.
“Where are you going?”
“Bathroom.”
When I was passing through the kitchen I heard Beth say, muffled, through the door, “You what?”
And then the bedroom door swung open and Griff nearly collided with me. He wore only boxers and they were hiked up way past his belly-button.
“Is it sex if you don’t come?” he said. He squinted, a look that wanted to be accompanied by a forehead slap.
“Yes,” I said as though I’d spent all evening pondering the question and finally received it from the swirls in the ceiling plaster. “She kick you out?”
“I’m kicking myself out. Sorry, but— Get your stuff.” He went into the living room gasping like a person on the verge of hyperventilating.
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 14