I leaned forward, carefully, carefully, pressed my lips to the small of his back where his spine met his pelvis, held them against his skin, shivering, my eyes closed. My breath came in quick gasps, like crying. I laid my cheek on the mattress, opened my lips, breathed his skin, smelled warm musk. I was caught in a raging tug-of-war between being drawn to him, between wanting to lay my face there, the curve of his ass matching perfectly the shape of my throat, and fall asleep with my head on his back. At last I was against him and it was everything, everything I could do to keep away.
I came into his boxers.
My whole body throbbing, I pulled my head away from his back, aware now that this was as sexy as a hot stove. Details of things flooded me as I opened my eyes and wiped my penis with his boxers. A zit on his hip, the smell of vomit, sirens on the street below. I sat staring at his back, at the soft ridges of his spine, in disbelief. My eyes welled up.
I pulled up my pants, wrapped his wet boxers into his jeans and then opened his armoire door, careful not to let it squeak, and stuffed his soiled clothes into his laundry bag, all the way to the bottom. My hands were shaking. I sat down on my bed and then got up and went in the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the tub in the place where I cut his hair. I put my elbows on my knees and my wet face in my hands, and in the space between my fingers I looked at my feet and measured them against the square white tiles of the floor.
*
I sat in my underwear on the edge of the bed I’d been sharing with Griff. His pillow was bunched against the headboard, more like some kind of hat than a pillow, and his head lay on the mattress.
I inhaled a quivering gasp, the kind that precedes a sob. He groaned and opened his eyes.
“S’the matter?”
I made some kind of gesture at the wall.
“Where’d Zane go?”
Some tears fell out of my eyes. I closed them and pressed them with my thumbs.
“What’s wrong?”
“I think I’m in love with him.” It felt funny to say, but was familiar too, like saying my own full name out loud. Vince Joshua Dandro. I love Zane.
Griff rubbed his eyes and sat up, the blankets gathering at his waist. “Isn’t that a good thing?” he said gently. “Does he not feel the same? I could’ve sworn he liked you.”
“He does.” I wiped my face.
“...?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He slid over and tried to put his arm around me but I blocked it with my elbow, pushed him back by the shoulder, got out of bed.
***
One random Tuesday six weeks after the welcome back party, I was at my computer chatting with Andy when Griff burst into our room waving an envelope. He tossed his backpack onto his bed and sat on my desk. Pens and pencils clinked in a Shuster mug. He pulled a folded sheet of paper through a jagged tear in the envelope.
“Oh, what’s this?” he said, grinning. “It seems to be a housing lottery letter.” The paper was folded in thirds; he opened it slowly flap by flap and took a moment to examine it as if for the first time. “Well my goodness me. It says here that yours truly has drawn...,” he turned into a game show host now, “lucky number thirteen, baby!” Jumping off the desk, he took off his U2 baseball cap and zinged it across the room. “Can you fucking believe it, Vince? How many thousands of people at Shuster, and I get to pick thirteenth for room selection for next year! Thirteenth!”
I didn’t know where to look; I watched his hat slip down between his armoire and the wall. “Congratulations,” I said. Andy sent an instant message asking if I was still there. I ignored it.
“Did you get your letter? There wasn’t one for you in the mailbox.”
“I got it.” It was tucked beneath a stack of books on my desk.
“Well?”
“Nine forty-seven.”
He raised his letter like a winning Megabucks ticket. “Beat you! We get to use my lucky thirteen. We can get any room we want, Vinny boy. Well practically.” He flopped onto his bed. “Which one should we get? How about one that has its own bathroom? Then when I have to wallow in my own puke I can do it in private.”
“I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about—rooms.”
“Do you know a good one?” He sat up.
“I’m, uh,” I started quietly, and then continued more quietly, “I’m gonna try for a single for next year, I think.”
His smile flatlined. Doctors, nurses ran in with machines. “A single?” His face looked pale. “Wow. I mean, I guess. You don’t want to live with me again?”
“I think I want to try living by myself.” It felt like kicking him in the teeth. Bam. It felt like slipping on a pair of brass knuckles and beating the shit out of him.
“Oh.” For a moment he pulled at a piece of rubber on the sole of his All-Stars. I opened my eyes wide and breathed in. This will be the last of it, I told myself. Do it quick like a Band-Aid. If I could just get through this, this would be the last.
“Can you even get a single with 947?” he asked finally.
“I’m going to take my chances.”
“Because I’ll have already picked by then. I mean, we could maybe work out something with Housing later if you need a back-up. Or maybe before, some kind of safeguard. Just in case.”
“Griff. It’s OK.”
“Just in case.”
“I need to give it a shot.”
*
He scrambled out from under the covers and grabbed my wrist, hard, when I was no more than a few steps away from the bed.
“No,” he said, teeth clenched. “You’re going to talk to me. I’m not taking any fucking hints this time, Vince. Don’t give me the cold shoulder. You’re good at it. You’ve done it before. You’re quick and you’re fucking slippery and you’re doing it again with Zane, aren’t you?” I tried to yank myself free of him but he had my arm with two hands now and dragged me backward. The backs of my legs hit the side of the bed and he pulled me down onto my back, and suddenly he was sitting on my stomach. His feet clamped down on my thighs. His architect’s fingers clenched my wrists, one by my side, the other up near my head. My hands felt prickly. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to squirm and the flannel comforter burned against my ear. “But as hard as you push, Vin, from now on, I’m going to fucking pull even harder.”
“Griff—! Get off me!”
He leaned down, bringing his face very close to mine. His hair touched my cheeks and all I could see of anything was Griff’s face. Story of my fucking life. “No,” he said. “No, Vince.”
“Griffin! Fuck!”
I yanked my left hand out from under his and got my arm around his neck, had him in a headlock, spun him and flipped him off me. He hit the mattress on his side and the whole bed lurched on its castors, opening up a big space between the headboard and the wall. He wound up to come at me again and in moving to block him I whacked his nose good with the side of my hand.
Instantly we stopped.
He put his fingers to his nose, looked at them, touched his nose again, looked again.
“That was fucking unnecessary, Vince.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Save it. Just—just save it.” He was breathing heavy and held his nose with one hand, rubbed his shoulder with the other. “Ow, fuck.” He laid down on his back; I laid down beside him. “I was hoping to wrestle you metaphorically, but whatever.” He put his disheveled hair behind his ears, stared up at the ceiling. “Tell me what happened with Zane and I’ll forgive you.”
If he had let me go I would’ve felt very alone. I knew that. There was a reason I’d come to my room in the first place. What I needed, what I had always wanted in Griff, was someone who wouldn’t let me get away with my own bullshit.
I sat up then and he did too; we sat Indian-style, facing one another in the low light. I told him about the Halloween night on the beach, about how Zane had rubbed aloe on me after the pine-branch thing, and about what had just happened in the spare
bedroom. All those things and everything in between. It came out in long streaming sentences as though I’d been rehearsing it for months.
“I feel like I fall in love with every fucking person I meet,” I told him. “I can’t handle anyone else and I don’t want to deal with anyone else. Especially when I know they’re all just going to end up ripping my heart out. It’s too fucking overwhelming. I only want one.”
He didn’t say anything until I was finished, and when I was finished he told me, “Come here.”
I could never describe what it felt like to hug Griff. Not because I couldn’t find the words, but because I never remembered them. I could describe the grooves on the surface of a record, the feel of a leather steering wheel against my palms, the cold, grainy snow—all that was vivid. But the density of his muscles, the shape of his shoulder blades, the smell of his neck, the feel of his hair against my cheek all eluded the grasp of my memory. Always as soon as it was over, after every hello and every goodbye and every congratulations, it was like it never happened. I was left, blinking, a time traveler with missing moments. Sometimes I thought it was better that way. Certainly easier. In the morning I would not remember a thing.
W E D N E S D A Y
Like a beacon of guilt, the spot on my hand that had clobbered Griff’s nose was sending out signals of awareness to my brain. It didn’t hurt, but it pulsed just enough to remind me. I sat down in the brown chair with a bowl of Cocoa Krispies to watch the news before work. The weatherman forecasted—correctly, it would turn out—that the next few days would be warmer and warned of flooding as snow melted into streets and through roofs. The icicles hanging on the other side of my picture window released crystal beads in a steady plink plink plink timed to the sensation in my hand.
Griff walked into the kitchen pulling on a yellow t-shirt with a Shuster shield on the front.
“’Morning,” he said, folding his arms across the half-wall like a bartender ready to take my order or hear my troubles. “How ya doing?”
“Eh.” I rubbed the side of my hand against the cushion.
“Heard anything from Zane?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he went when he left?”
“No.”
“Mm.” He went to the fridge and took out the orange juice. He pinched the carton shut and shook it. “You working today?”
“Yeah.” With my tongue I pushed a chewed mass of cereal into my cheek and squeezed chocolatey milk through my teeth like tobacco juice. “Looks like the weather’s warming up.”
He took a glass from the cupboard and filled it. “You should call in sick.”
“To who, myself?” I changed the channel. I liked my news to come from multiple sources.
“Whoever. We should go have an adventure.”
“We had an adventure a couple days ago, didn’t we?”
“That wasn’t an adventure,” he said, “that was a predicament. Just the two of us this time. Get Clarissa to cover for you.”
“Marissa,” I corrected. “I would, but today’s new arrival day. We have to put out the new stuff. It’s the biggest day.”
“Oh, OK.” He frowned. “Then maybe tonight after work we can do something? Or tomorrow? I only have two more days on my reservation, you know. We’ve had kind of a rough couple days and I was hoping we could have some time to chill. You know, before I hit the road. Just the two of us.”
“I know.” Why did he have to remind me he was leaving? It seemed cruel of him. Why did he even have to be leaving?
I put my bowl in the sink and went to brush my teeth. In the spare bedroom the new bed lay empty and violated, a three-by-six–foot crime scene. There should’ve been chalk outlines on the carpet, police tape across the door; the unused condoms belonged in an evidence bag.
I closed the door.
Simon was at the counter perusing a binder of spring solicitations. His Golden Age t-shirt was stretched over a belly grown not from beer but from a seemingly endless intake of Sprite, a can of which sat sweating by his elbow. He wore thick round glasses and his grayless brown hair was slicked back. He was not an unattractive man, but years of being surrounded by geekdom had left a lot of it imposed on him, adding traits—the glasses, the gut—I suspected were not completely natural but rather just part of the job. Like farmer’s tan or plumber’s butt.
“Hey Vince,” he said cheerfully when I came through the door. He took a swig of Sprite. “Ahhh.”
“You’re here early,” I said.
“Wanted to get a jump on the day—Patti’s got something up her sleeve for this afternoon.” He turned the page and jotted something with pencil on a sheet of lined paper. “How was your Boston trip?”
“Dramatic,” I said, folding my coat over my arm. To most other people I would’ve just said it was fine, but with Simon I could tell the truth without fear of being pressed for more information. It wasn’t that Simon wasn’t interested—he took in what you gave him—but he wasn’t the prying type. Maybe comic-book cliffhangers had taught him to wait patiently for future developments. “But my car’s fixed, so that’s good.”
“Good, good. Nice to see you and Zane hanging out too. Seemed like you two hadn’t been clicking lately.”
“Really? Nah, we’re fine.”
He nodded. “Just my overactive imagination, then.”
“Deliveries come yet?”
He tapped his watch anxiously. “Not yet. Makes me nervous.”
“They’ll be here. You always get nervous.”
I went to hang up my coat and then turned on the computer behind the counter. Standing beside Simon, I read over the order he’d written out. “Might want to boost the Majestic by a dozen or so copies,” I told him gently. “We’ve been selling out.”
“Ugh.” He made a hole in the paper trying to erase it so he just crossed it out. “He’s a Superman rip-off, you know.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Good point.” He laughed and took a swig of Sprite. “This enough?”
“That should do. So what’s up Patti’s sleeve?”
“Nantucket,” he said.
“She’s still on the Nantucket thing, huh?”
“She’s a firecracker,” he said, shaking his head. A rosy glow came over his face, a glow of happiness and also relief—the relief of a never-married forty-five–year-old comic shop–owner finally making the catch of his life. “Her dream house is on the market, apparently.”
“You go look at it?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Probably today if the ferry times work out.” He took another sip of Sprite. “She’s trying to get me to move there, you know. I think she whispers it to me in my sleep. Nantucket, Nantucket. I’m not sure I’m an island man.”
“I’ll help you reverse the curse,” I said, and then whispered, “Harwich, Harwich.”
He laughed. “Hey, I couldn’t find the pull lists. Do you know if Marissa printed them out? Oh—deliveries are here!”
He went to let the man in.
Not long after I returned with our lunch and Simon and I were chowing ham-and-cheese subs at the counter, Patti burst into the store looking like she should have bubble-lettered exclamation points bouncing over her head. Her hair was wild and brown and she wore a red leather jacket that sat nicely against her wide hips.
“Simon!” she chirped. Her lips matched her jacket. Red red red. I found her intimidating in the way a sixth-grade boy might feel about a voluptuous teacher who leaned close to explain long division. Over her shoulder she held by a finger a coat-hangered blue shirt in a clear plastic bag.
“Hi toots,” he said. He wiped mustard off the corner of his mouth with a napkin and leaned over the counter to kiss her.
“Hi Vince,” she said. I smiled. “It’s like spring out there! Wow!”
“What brings you to Golden Age, ma’am?” Simon said.
“The ferry is running and we have an appointment,” she said with a wink.
“But Patti, you know it’s my da
y to work,” he said. It was playful but I knew Simon well enough to know there were few places he’d rather be than Golden Age. He looked at her sadly and pushed out his lips, which had a silly sheen of red from the kiss. I hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to see these two interact and I was enjoying every second of it. It was so strange, so full of apparent conflicts, and yet I couldn’t imagine either of them with anyone else.
“Pish posh,” she said, squeezing Simon’s pursed lips. “Vince is a big boy. He can handle the store. —Can’t you, Vince?”
“Of course, yeah,” I said. Simon glared at me from behind his thick glasses. “I mean, I guess I could. If I absolutely have to.”
Patti looked at Simon and drew a circle in the air with a red-nailed finger. “Let me look at you.”
He came out from behind the counter and obediently rotated. The black shirt stretched over his belly made him look like a moon orbiting Patti.
“It’s just as I feared,” she said, smirking at me. “You can’t wear your comic book t-shirt to a real estate showing.” Unlike the rest of us, Simon wore his store shirt all the time. His closet must’ve been full of them, a superhero’s wardrobe. “We need to look serious!”
After hanging the coat hanger on one of the arms of the action figure display, she grabbed the waist of Simon’s t-shirt—he raised his arms and—swoop!—she yanked it up over his head and off. In my surprise I choked on a chunk of cheese. It shot from my mouth and clung to the hair above Simon’s right nipple for a second before tumbling down the face of his stomach and splatting on the floor. Patti brushed his chest with her hand before pushing the dry-cleaned shirt against him.
“Here you go, lover.”
Simon took the shirt from the bag and looked at me with an expression that was—to my surprise—not embarrassment, not shame, but total satisfaction. He put his arms through the sleeves and started doing up the buttons.
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 20