“Omigod,” breathed Jonah in her ear. He elbowed her in the ribs, grinning stupidly.
“Do y’all want to go inside?” Georgia offered, belatedly remembering her manners.
“Yes, thank you,” said Jonah.
They looked at Edwin.
“I’d appreciate assessing the interior,” he said. “Then I’ll be most comfortable waiting out here.”
“Of course,” she said, then added, “Please don’t assess the smell as a threat. It should be dissipating rapidly.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Edwin, after a slightly confused pause. They all trooped inside.
After Edwin assessed the interior—a short process, given that almost every inch of her home was visible from the doorway—he went back outside to guard them, and Georgia and Jonah collapsed on the futon. “So what do you think of Edwin?” he asked.
“He’s mega-hot. Straight, though.”
“Au contraire. I picked up a vibe.”
A half laugh, half snort erupted through her nose, and suddenly she found herself seized with helpless laughter. She bent forward at the waist, fanning her face for air. Jonah looked up, startled, and then he began to laugh too, hard enough that tears came to his eyes. “Poor Edwin,” she wheezed. “He has no idea what kind of mess he’s gotten himself into by accepting this job.”
“None,” Jonah agreed. “Zero.”
“He is cute.”
“Delectable. My assessment: très bien monté.”
She clutched Jonah’s arm. His face looked the way hers felt: flushed and maniacal and utterly out of control. Together they slid to the floor, pressing their cheeks against the cool stone tile until finally their laughter subsided into hitchy gulps and then, eventually, into silence.
* * *
—
Georgia fell asleep as soon as they crawled upstairs but woke a short time later. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t relax. She’d urged Jonah to spend the night on the loft with her, even though she knew from prior experience this was a mistake; he had a habit of going horizontal in his sleep, edging out anyone unlucky enough to share a bed with him. By one o’clock in the morning, he’d hogged so much of the mattress that she found herself half out of the low bed, one buttock suspended an inch above the planked floor by a hammock of twisted sheet. She started to poke him in the side when she caught a glimpse of his face in the moonlight. He was crying, silently, in his sleep.
She pressed her palm against his cheek until the silvery snail track of his tears disappeared. Moving her hand, she cupped the back of his head. The tension in his face fell away and she felt her own face relax too. She’d have thought he’d have woken, but he only shuddered in his sleep, his mouth falling open to produce a small snore. She untangled herself from the sheet and rolled onto the floor.
Creeping down the tiny staircase from the loft, she was careful not to make noise. Dobby raised his head from his nest behind the futon and, ridiculously, Georgia put a finger to her lips in a preemptive bid for quiet. He seemed to understand, though; after one cautious thump of his tail, he raised himself up and pattered over to her, his backside wiggling in silent joy at the unexpected nocturnal visit. Beckoning at him to follow her, she grabbed her phone and crept outside to the courtyard behind the house.
Her courtyard: this was where your average Charlestonian would place lawn furniture and maybe a nice fountain. She’d gone in a different direction. Although she did keep a small garden back here, she’d converted the majority of the space to an open-air workshop. The end of the yard housed a shed enclosing a worktable and all her tools, and scattered across the pebbled ground rested a sawhorse and a trestle and multiple industrial containers she used during her various projects. Tiptoeing around a bucket of pneumatic tubes, she regarded the one outdoor chair—an old metal tractor seat she’d soldered onto a rusty tripod—and turned on her phone.
Scrolling through Jonah’s social media profiles, she tried to channel her horror into stronger resolve instead of picking up a sledgehammer and smashing her phone into a million pieces. These people . . . where did these people come from? They yearned for a return to a more moral America, for a return to the days of criminalized homosexuality, for a time when they weren’t confronted with the horror of gay people insisting on living their lives in public. And those were just the politicians.
From there on Jonah’s feed, it was just a hop, skip, and jump from the well-meaning hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner types to those urging stoning and beheadings. What was it about someone else being gay that consumed so much attention from the rest of humanity? Couldn’t these people find an actual sin to rage against?
Georgia didn’t realize it was raining until a fat drop splatted onto the phone’s screen, blurring the Twitter profile of a snarling brunette in a red hat who had just accused Jonah of bestiality. She turned the phone off, stood up, paced the yard, and sat back down. Screw the rain.
Mark answered her FaceTime on the second ring; behind him in the dark she could just make out an expanse of headboard.
“Georgia.”
“I’m so sorry to wake you up. I know you’re exhausted.”
“Please. It’s okay.” He angled his head to the side and clicked on a bedside lamp. They both blinked. “You’re tired,” he said, studying her face. “I hoped you’d have fallen asleep.”
She started to answer but stopped as she regarded Mark’s face; his warm eyes, his brow furrowed in concern that she wasn’t sleeping. The concept that someone cared whether or not she slept was so novel her smart-ass comment died on her lips.
“I can’t sleep,” she said finally.
“Do you want me to come back over?”
“No. I mean, yes, of course, I want you to, but no. Jonah’s finally asleep. It’s selfish of me to call you, I just . . .” She trailed off, defeated by her own neediness.
“You don’t have to justify calling me.”
“You’ve done so much for me already, Mark.”
“I’ve done nothing.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You’ve listened to my drama every night for over a month, you’ve crossed the ocean to visit me, and then you allowed Jonah to crash our night together. I think I love you.”
She hadn’t meant to say it. She didn’t know she meant it. Or perhaps she meant it casually, the way she loved Michio Kaku’s books or the way she loved new shoes or the way she loved that guy at Cane Rhum Bar who made the best mojito in Charleston. But as the words hung, crystallized, in the air, she realized she did mean it.
Mark, bless him, did not attempt feigned surprise or false modesty. He did not try to pass it off as a joke. His eyes never left hers. “I think I love you too,” he whispered.
They stared at one another, their faces connected through the physics of cloud-based video streaming, and it was like he was right there. Like a toddler, she reached her palm out to the screen. He placed his palm against hers. “Can you come here?” he said.
* * *
—
It only took her a few moments to reach Charleston Place. Mark had given her the room number, telling her it had a little balcony with a view of a winding street lined with palm trees and pastel buildings. As she skulked through the grand lobby, it dawned on her that if Mark had a balcony with a view of King Street, he was probably in a suite, which, combined with what she knew about his luxurious digs in Amsterdam, meant he was about a hundred times too posh to stay at her house. If this association continued, one of them was going to have to adjust their living standards.
She took the elevator to the top floor. The room did indeed turn out to be a suite, and, as promised, had a glorious view. She saw the glittery street below through a set of open double doors for perhaps ten seconds before Mark swept her up into his arms.
Twenty minutes earlier, she’d have sworn nothing could have distracted her from her worries,
but clearly she’d have been wrong. Mark bent back her neck to kiss her throat, and her eyes drifted shut. She entered a realm of pure mindless sensation, shrinking and magnifying her perception at once, so the smallest things grew mighty. The rough graze of his cheek against hers, the warm hush of his breath, the grasp of his fingers against the back of her skull; they obscured everything. She became hyperaware of her own physiology; her breath, surging in and out of her lungs; the hot urgent thrum of the pulse in her neck; the fine erectile furze of hair along her arms. She felt everything and thought nothing.
If only it could have lasted.
After, his fingers drifting through her hair, her leg tossed over his, they listened to the hushed nighttime sounds of the street below. She thought he didn’t want to break the spell by speaking, and neither did she, but the words rasped out anyway: “It’s awful.”
His hand stilled. “I know.”
“No, you don’t know. You think I mean what’s happening to Jonah. And of course; that is awful. But I meant something else.”
He waited.
“I mean my reaction.”
She’d spoken in a tone so low she thought he might not have heard—and maybe he hadn’t, because the next thing he said was the last thing she expected. “But I do know,” he said. “I know exactly.”
She rose onto an elbow, unable to hide the skepticism in her voice. “You do?”
He remained on his back, staring at the ceiling. “I do. You’re upset because you think you’ll lose him.”
She stared down at him.
“And,” he went on, “that upsets you further because you know the correct thing—the dominant thing—you should be feeling is distress and anger at what’s happening to him, not concern for what your life will be like if he leaves.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “How do you know?”
He lifted his torso so their faces were level. “I lost someone.”
“Who?”
“My mother,” he said.
She’d known his mother had died when he was young, but as he recounted the details, she found herself aching for the bewildered boy he’d been, stuck in a house with a father who vacillated between angry and absent and a brother only marginally more equipped to cope than he was. She stroked his arm as he talked.
“I lost my mother too,” she said, when he was quiet.
“Tell me about her,” he said.
She started to talk and immediately the ache burned at the edges of her heart, consuming a little more of her in a flickering smolder she could never quite manage to put out. The thought of her early childhood evoked a weird contradictory blend of feelings: anger and hurt for sure; but also a deep, uncontrollable yearning for her mother’s voice and a sharp, bittersweet pang of nostalgia.
In retrospect, it became clear her mother must have suffered some form of mental illness. Why else would she have left, without a word, when Georgia had been so young? Later on, when it was just Georgia and her dad, they chose to spend most of their time on campus, where he alternated the afternoon hours between his office, his classrooms, and the small chapel where his closest friend served as the college minister. Spending time on campus was enchanting: Georgia discovered a new and trippier realm in the pages of books. She spent almost every day after school in the college library or holed up in one of the dozens of hiding places she’d fashioned in odd corners of the campus. To her father’s delight, she developed a fascination with physics and mechanics; to his bewilderment, she also developed a fascination with the glittery fashion of the disco era, as unlike her mother’s sartorial style as it was possible to be.
In all the years since Georgia’s mother left, she had never once reached out.
But if Georgia lacked closure, at least she could comfort herself with the possibility, no matter how remote, that her mother might not have wanted to leave. Her father seemed to believe she’d left willingly—she’d often threatened to take off, claiming to feel trapped by the idea of a house, a job, a rooted existence. But perhaps something had happened to her. No one really knew.
“So all three of us—you, me, and Jonah—are, essentially, orphans,” she said to Mark. Mark’s mother had certainly not wanted to leave him, and Georgia’s might not have, but Jonah had no such reassurance. His parents had disowned him when he came out at age eighteen. He didn’t like to talk about it, and Georgia didn’t know the particulars of how it had all gone down. But she knew he no longer communicated with his parents or with any of his three older brothers.
“We’re all each other have,” she said. “Me and Jonah. If he has to move away, I can’t stand losing him for myself, for the hole it would leave in my life, but I also can’t stand what it would mean for him. He has nobody else either.”
Mark, wisely, didn’t try to argue about car trips and vacations and video chats. He pulled her into him.
Eventually, she slept.
* * *
—
She awoke to cool air and the bluish effervescent light of a predawn day, and despite being awake most of the night, she felt oddly refreshed. Something about her confession had bled the worry out of her. In their sleep, she and Mark had knotted together in the center of the large bed, and as she gently untangled herself, he stirred but didn’t fully wake. She kissed him, scribbled a note promising to call him, walked the short distance home, then crawled back up the ladder to the loft and burrowed beside Jonah.
She’d dozed off again, but Jonah must have risen, because now, at six thirty, the space next to her was empty. She stretched and sat up but then closed her eyes again, thinking of Mark, and a huge ridiculous grin split her face. She didn’t know where this was going—obviously Mark was geographically undesirable—but at the moment she didn’t care. She had, finally, broken her string of dysfunctional men. No more excruciating blind dates with men who couldn’t shut up about their drug problems or their bitchy ex-wife or—surprise!—their bitchy current wife. No more relationships with men who turned out to be closet racists or passive-aggressive humorless workaholics or pretentious wine snobs. No more dates with men who thought Islam was a country or that the term absolute zero referred to “ugly chicks.”
It occurred to her this was an inherently negative way of looking at the situation. It was fine to feel celebratory about the absence of bad relationships but it was better to bask in the glow of a good one. She thought of Mark’s handsome face, his intelligent eyes, his repertoire of attentive, sincere expressions. Part of his appeal might have been related to the memory of him in bed, where his good-guy status devolved into something a bit edgier; their time together last night had burned up her brain to the point where the world had gone soft, reduced to an undulating hush, a wordless, formless ocean of haze and ecstasy. But it wasn’t all lust; every conversation they’d had reinforced her impression of his intellect and his sense of humor and the Markness of him: every moment with him seemed a little shinier, a little more real than the moments without him.
But yeah: the lust was pretty freaking magnificent too.
A small sound—a shuffle, a snort—tickled her eardrums, and gradually she became aware she’d been hearing it for some time. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes and saw something perched at the top of the ladder to her loft that initially she mistook for a raccoon or a cat or some sort of small, malevolent creature. Black and fluffy, it trembled in an odd way, almost as if it were vibrating. Then it lifted up a fraction and she realized it was Jonah’s head, bent forward as he shook with laughter.
“Here’s you just now,” he crowed, and his face took on a dreamy, demented cast: fluttering eyelashes and parted lips and a solidly stupid grin. “I almost fell off the ladder.”
“Yes, well,” Georgia said crankily, “I was having happy thoughts. Until you barged up.”
He crawled forward on one hand, brandishing a steaming mug in the other. “Thought I’d bring you coffee, p
rincess. Unless you need some private time.”
“No, gimme,” she said.
Jonah handed over the cup and clambered back down the ladder, reappearing a moment later with his own steaming mug. He settled in beside her, rearranging the pillows to prop himself up, and began clicking through his phone. She stretched, wishing she could stay in this cozy nest under her skylight with Jonah instead of getting up to get dressed for work, but she could hear Dobby whimpering at the base of the ladder. She’d already shed her sweatpants when a thought struck. “Hey,” she said. “Where’s Howie?”
“Who?”
“Howie? Arnold? I mean Edwin. Your bodyguard. I didn’t see him. Surely he didn’t stay outside all night?”
Jonah clapped his hands to his mouth and scrambled to the ladder. He returned perhaps five minutes later, wearing a chagrined look. “I have to go,” he mumbled.
“Wait! Did Edwin stand outside all night?”
“No, he said he came in for a while when you left. He said it rather pointedly, in fact. I think he was mad we forgot to lock the door.”
“You are the worst bodyguardee ever.”
“I know.”
“Well, maybe you can make it up to him when you get out of town. Buy him some good dinners or something. What’s the etiquette in that situation?”
“George, I am not taking a bodyguard with me when I flee the law. I can’t afford it.”
“I’m paying, Jones.”
He sniffed. “Not open for discussion.”
Above their heads, a tiny bird swooped in graceful arcs above the skylight, at one point gliding so close to the tempered glass they could see the downy fluff adorning its breast. They watched it until something else caught its attention and it vanished from view. Georgia turned to Jonah, planning her words carefully, but his phone chirped again and he was already thumbing through it. She thought of taking it away—her mind filling with the monstrous image tacked to his door last night—but she was too late: just then he let out a sound like someone had kicked him, hard, in the kidney. “What?” she said, instantly on alert. “Something nasty online?”
The Antidote for Everything Page 22