by Neve Wilder
From the way he studied me, it was hard to tell if he’d bought it. He said nothing for a while, then changed the subject, to my relief.
“You have an Eames upstairs. You know that, right?”
“No shit?” That was news to me, but Alex appeared so caught off-guard by my sudden curse that I cracked a thin smile. “I recognize the name, at least,” I added, tension bleeding from my shoulders. “But I wouldn’t be able to pick it out.”
“Yeah, in the office, the one in the corner. Dark wood and leather. You should definitely keep that. I can’t let you junk an Eames.” He had an approximation of a dimple that filled with shadow when he smiled and there was a certain ownership in the way he said, I can’t let you, that sent a thrill up my spine.
I thought about my apartment in Savannah, the neat alignment of furniture I didn’t care about. The whole apartment might as well have been a beige field with a few familiar shapes. I wouldn’t have noticed the difference. My couch was brown, and it took me longer than it should’ve to remember that. The chair in the corner of my parents’ study that Alex was referencing, though, I remembered in vivid detail. It’d come with them from Jersey where it used to sit in the corner of the TV room Summer and I used, and had been the site of my first blowjob, courtesy of Kip Townsend, who’d become an immediate devotee of grunge music when it first emerged, while I’d still been stuck in New Wave. I’d come all over his plaid flannel shirt while Eddie Vedder wailed on MTV.
“So why don’t you take it, then? Add it to your collection?”
Alex was tempted by the idea, I could tell, but he waved his hand dismissively. “I can’t. I’d feel bad.”
“You’d feel bad that I gave you something I was going to give away anyway?”
Alex shrugged. “It’s worth some money and somehow it’ll feel like a handout, and I don’t do handouts.” His jaw set and his gaze cut away to the foyer, as if he was impatient for Tom to return so he could leave.
I arched a brow at having tapped into some tender spot. Curious.
“It can stay here, then. A bonus for whoever buys the house.”
Alex frowned. “You’re going to sell a place like this? You don’t want it?”
I’d never even considered it. “No use for it. My life is in the city.” Well, what was left of it.
“Yeah, but you could keep it as a weekend place. Or rent it out. It’s, like, a block from the beach. Prime real estate,” Alex argued.
“It’s potentially a few years earlier that I can retire is what it is,” I said, wondering why I was bothering to argue the pros and cons of a beach house with a guy hired to move the furniture.
Alex’s features screwed up as if he was preparing his next argument. I could almost hear the “but” buzzing through the air. The front door opening and shutting stalled him out. Tom’s heavy footsteps echoed down the hallway.
Alex stood, picking up his water glass and carrying it to the sink to dump it out. “If I were lucky enough to even have the option, I’d keep a place like this. Rent it out if I had to. Hopefully I’ll never have a job I hate as much as it sounds like you do yours.”
“You let me know if that day comes. Maybe the house will still be for sale.” I didn’t exactly snap it out, but I spoke briskly, feeling strangely cowed by a guy who’d shown up for work with a box of Cracker Jack in his hand.
When I’d returned to the Nook Island house, the silence seemed normal, but after having Tom and Alex there all day, it was overwhelming, a mute presence hanging around the kitchen table until I opened the window above the sink just to have the gulls and waves to listen to.
It was a nice house and I couldn’t deny it was peaceful there, or that a beach property wouldn’t be great to have. It just seemed like something that belonged in someone else’s life. Someone with a family or kids or a slew of friends, more upwardly mobile, more social. Not a single, thirty-seven-year-old accountant pondering an early mid-life crisis.
And there was Summer to think of, too. She could use the money, and I’d have to buy her out of her half in order to keep the house. Feeling justified in my decision, and also irritated that I even felt the need to justify it to myself, I sealed off the last box of extraneous kitchen items with packing tape and renewed conviction. Then, I opened a bottle of wine to celebrate the small victory of packing and avoiding a rehashing of the night in the club with Alex.
At 1:00 a.m., I woke to my phone ringing. Alex must have been tangled in my dreams, because for a confused handful of seconds I thought it was him calling, his final argument for keeping the house assembled, ready to be funneled into my groggy ear.
The voice on the other end of the line was more familiar and equally argumentative. By the sound of his breathing, Sean was drunk. Typical.
“I only answered because I was asleep and confused. I’m hanging up now,” I said, pulling the phone away from my ear.
“Rob.” That breathless gasp I knew so well. “Wait. Just wait a second.”
I told my thumb to continue its trek toward the round red button, but it refused.
“Rob,” he said again, softer. I heard sleepy mornings in the rasp of his voice, the way his hand would slide through the sheets to my hip, then wedge between my thighs, needy and seeking. My cock stirred. The traitor.
“This isn’t what we agreed to. I’m hanging up.”
“Let me come out and see you for the weekend. One more time. Come on, Rob. I need it.”
I hated myself for granting nostalgia and old hope the briefest pass in my mind, where they colluded to whip up a twee montage of the two of us walking the beach, drinking wine, filling this house with more than the last sad year of its past.
All right. I mouthed the words, careful not to give them breath before I exhaled and said, aloud. “Don’t call me again.”
He called my name again as I hung up. I turned my phone off and let misery have her victory, rolling over in the bed and taking my cock into my hand.
2
Alex
It was my second month on the job with the Buffs and I was finding that there was a kind of art to it. Tom was into it because he said it was like someone paying him to work out. At first, I was into it because it didn’t involve a cubicle farm or more telemarketing. Some of the places we ended up were interesting, though. Not just the people, but also the things they decided to get rid of and the things they decided to keep.
Some folks were very organized and detached about the whole process, while others stood by with their arms crossed, biting their nails to the quick reconsidering every little thing they’d marked for us to take. Those were the ones who really interested me. If you’ve never seen someone agonizing over whether or not to toss a set of Flintstone glasses circa 1980, you’re missing out. But then I realized that all of these objects were attached to deeper meanings or emotions, that they in some way defined a portion of a person’s existence, whether big or small.
What they were actually deciding was…how important is this to the person I think I am? I’d been thinking about it so much lately that a loose project had begun sketching itself in my mind. Too bad nothing had materialized so far, aside from the fact that I’d filled my parents’ garage with other people’s throwaways.
I couldn’t help but think of Rob then, because what kind of person was willing to just throw away an Eames? I guess the same kind of person who would just ditch out mid-hookup. I’d believed him when he’d said he wasn’t straight, but his excuse was so lame and so unwillingly given that it made me wonder if it was a convenient lie to cover up that he’d been stepping out on someone. Which made him a dick. So after that, I wasn’t much interested in discussing the night anymore.
After we left Rob’s, we had one last stop for the day. It was supposed to be a straightforward one—a light donation haul and trash removal at a woman’s apartment just over the bridge that connected Nook Island to the mainland. And that was good because I needed another mindless distraction after leaving Rob’s. Rob. Not even cl
ose to the name he’d given me in the club, the one that was on his profile: Jason. It pissed me off. Not just because he’d bailed that night almost as soon as I’d swallowed, but because of the whole smoke and mirrors act—something else that made me suspicious.
Watching him squirm in his front yard had been amusing, though, and since I was capable of being professional, after a sadistic minute of gorging myself on his obvious discomfort, I’d let it go. Or had tried to. He was right: it didn’t matter anyway. He was one notch among many on my bedpost. Okay, half a notch. And so what if he was just as mouthwatering in the daylight? Not in a leading man kind of way, but like the second lead in a film, the sidekick or something. The one who was kind of invisible at first, but kept popping up with all his little inconsistencies and quirks that gradually became more appealing than the overexposed Tom Cruise-type in the foreground.
Rob’s parents’ house turned out to be a mild downer compared to the apartment we arrived at next. The lady who greeted us, Mrs. Ware, spoke quietly and had nervous hands. Sadness was written all over the downturn of her mouth and her dull, watery eyes made more sense as she led us around to the side door of the duplex and unlocked it. Inside, someone’s downward spiral was scattered all over the place in piles of laundry, overfilled ashtrays, the stench coming from a sink heaped with dirty plates. A large, flat screen TV sat on the floor in one corner of the room. A lumpy futon had been shoved up against one of the walls, a coffee table made of a door on cement blocks in front of it. Small green and brown vials littered the top like toxic glass beads.
Mrs. Ware was trying hard to be in the detached category, but started slipping into the overthinker category as soon as Tom and I got inside the door and pulled on some gloves. We had an unspoken code that Tom didn’t deal with mourners. He got awkward and uncomfortable and when he got uncomfortable, he got inappropriate, so he started down the hall to the bedroom while I stayed in the living room with Mrs. Ware, a trash bag in one hand and a box for Goodwill in the other.
“I should’ve cleaned up the trash before I called you guys here. It’s a waste, and it’s something I could do…” She took a step forward like she meant to come closer to the table where I was picking up vials and dumping them in the trash, but she kept stalling out as if there was an invisible barrier stopping her.
I was quick to shake my head when she faltered. “Nah, it’s our job to take care of all of it, anyway.” I picked up one of the ashtrays, mounds of ash spilling to the table, and started to toss it in the trash bag when her hand whipped out and grabbed my wrist so fast it stung. I glanced up at her in surprise.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, withdrawing her hand.
“Not a problem.” I gave her a cheery smile and set the ashtray back on the table. Once it had been emptied, I discovered it was clay, fired in a kiln into permanent misshape. A child’s school project. Initials and a date had been etched into the bottom. “Should I put it in the Keep box, then?”
Mrs. Ware shifted from one foot to the other, her fingertips drumming over her lips. Then, she reached for the ashtray, cupping it in her hands the way someone would hold a bird with a broken wing. “It’s hard to know what to keep,” she said. “He made this, my son, when he was in fourth grade. I had no idea it was here. I didn’t think I’d be—that I’d—” She shook her head and looked to the ceiling the way people did when they were trying to keep their tears from spilling over.
I might have been the more socially capable of our team, but sometimes I didn’t know what to say, either. It was hard to confront a stranger’s grief, to show the proper level of sympathy, especially sweating in a neon orange T-shirt with a caricature of a greaser dude on the back. Mrs. Ware, like some of the other mourners we’d encountered, was self-conscious about it, I could tell, but she couldn’t help herself. Usually, I’d make a few sympathetic noises and it’d be fine. I didn’t exist, not really. They were stuck in their grief and I was meant to be a silent witness.
“How about a box for keepsakes—whatever your gut says? We can just put it in here and you can seal it up and put it away until you’re ready, if you want.” I placed an empty box next to her foot, then turned away to sweep ashes from the table and give her a little privacy.
When I got to a trunk of old paperbacks and CDs, Mrs. Ware and I sat on the floor together sorting through them, opening jewel cases and reading off the band names. “He had some of the strangest taste in music. I never understood it.” She smiled.
I nodded, fighting the fact that it was difficult to sit next to her and be close to her while she sorted through her dead son’s things because it was like her sadness was sitting right there next to us, too, thick in the air. I searched for a distraction, going back in my mind to the Eames chair and the figurine and Rob himself. And, unlike the heaviness of Mrs. Ware’s grief, Rob’s felt less like grief than resignation. Like a breath finally exhaled.
What he did with his house was none of my business, but I thought I’d been trying to provoke a reaction out of him when I’d said all of that. The man in the club had been nothing but directness and raw want. I’d loved it, been drawn to it like a hummingbird to nectar—how sure his hands were on me, how his voice had twisted and grated with passion as I’d worked him over in the bathroom. In daylight, he seemed so mild-mannered and indifferent and then in the middle of the afternoon there’d been that random curse like a shock of ice water—a hint of his club persona beneath the polite veneer. I’d wanted to see if I could hit the button to unmute his personality again when we were in the kitchen. I guess I had, but not necessarily in the way I’d meant to.
“Buzzkills all around today, Jesus,” Tom said as we climbed into the truck after finishing up. He blasted the A/C and we sat at the curb waiting until the air cooled and the interior of the truck stopped smelling like burning plastic. “There’d better be a sorority house clean-up in the schedule next week. I can’t take all these sad people. No offense,” Tom said, tossing a look in my direction as he pulled away from the curb.
I shrugged. Tom knew my dad was sick, but there was a kind of silent pact between us that we didn’t talk about it that I was grateful for. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore than he did, and I knew he understood because the first day we’d worked together, he’d told me his dad had died in a car accident when he was ten.
“It’s fine. I don’t mind them. I guess in a way it’s like practice.” My dad’s diagnosis of colon cancer had shattered every ounce of predictability in my life like a cheap vase. Every day, week, and month was a waiting game based on chemo, drug trials, and scans, and none of the doctors could give us anything more than statistics, so we’d all been living in a weird limbo for the past six months. And it might’ve been a weird thing to say, but I’d gotten used to the chaos. Not pleasantly, but in the way you’d eventually get used to sleeping on a sack of rocks if you had to, or had a piece of glass buried in your foot. It hurt, but the days kept coming and at some point you had to get up and keep moving through them.
“But yeah, a sorority house would be okay with me.” Hunting for a subject change, I asked, “Wanna come to The Tap House with me tonight?”
I gave Tom my best eyebrow waggle for good measure. The Tap House was our favorite drinking spot with a hundred beers on tap, a big deck furnished with misters, and a slew of tourists and locals on summer break for eye candy.
“Pass,” Tom said without hesitation, my eyebrow waggle wasted.
“Aw, come on. You haven’t beaten my record of landing a hookup, yet.” I tried to appeal to his competitive side. In spite of his ace physique, the only sport Tom currently excelled at was amassing an impressive collection of tit pics on his phone.
“I can get a hookup without even leaving my apartment.”
“Tindr’s such a cheat, dude. No interaction, no sweating it out on the dance floor, no failed pick-up lines, drinks to the face. Where’s the fun in that?” I teased.
“The fun is in my pants. Getting laid and saving a li
ttle damn money. Besides, don’t even act like you’re too good for an app. Pretty sure I’ve seen you on LocalMeet.”
“Yeah?” Just as Tom excelled at tit pics, I excelled at social media hypocrisy, throwing shade at it almost as frequently as I used it for a quick hookup. LocalMeet was an app tailored to Savannah and the surrounding areas.
“Mm,” he grunted, then grinned, his knuckles drumming the wheel to the beat of the radio. “Pretty sure that was your microdick I swiped through last week.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “If you’re swiping through dicks, that means I need to get my game face on, ‘cause now I have a chance.”
“Not with a microdick, you don’t.”
“I’m of at least average size,” I countered, then upped the ante with a smirk as I started to unzip my pants. “Happy to show you.”
Tom gave me an agitated wave and tried to scowl.
“I saw you trying to sneak a look just then.”
“Fuck off,” he said, giving up and laughing. “And my final answer is no. I’m not going out. I’m fucking beat.”
In the parking lot of the little ramshackle corrugated building that housed College Buffs’ office, we secured the truck, double-checked our supply of blankets and dollies, and clocked out.
“Seven a.m. for Mr. Macomb’s, yeah?” Tom called out as he walked toward his car.
“Yep. You get lonely tonight, you just give me a call, sweet thang.” This time, my eyebrow waggle landed and Tom flipped me off, chuckling as he ducked inside.
As I drove home, I went through my mental black book, trying to think of someone to rope into going out with me. Not that I was too proud to go alone, either. The Tap House was the kind of place where the drinks were so cheap and the foot traffic so heavy that there weren’t any strangers after 11 p.m. As far as fishing ponds went, it ticked all the boxes, and my success rate there hovered around ninety percent. The week before, I’d gotten laid by a prissy recent grad with a killer smile who was on his last night of family vacation.