by Roan Parrish
“Okay.”
“Thursday?”
“Okay.”
Another nod, and I thought he was about to turn and leave.
“Um, should we exchange numbers?” I asked before he could.
We exchanged numbers and Huey explained that he lived above the bar, and the entire time he watched me with a level gaze. I realized after a while that most people who were quite tall tipped their heads down to look at you, but Huey kept his chin up the whole time, only his eyes moving.
I liked it. I liked looking up at him. I liked the angle of his jaw and the minimalism of his movements.
“Should get back,” he said once our plans were confirmed.
“Okay. I’ll see you Thursday. Thanks for…wanting to go out with me.” I smiled at him.
He didn’t smile, but his eyes flashed and he touched my shoulder for just a moment. Then he turned and walked back to the bar, powerful thighs bunching, ass clenching, back rippling, like every muscle in his body was fully engaged in everything he did.
And damn, but I couldn’t help imagining what it might feel like if what he did was me.
Chapter 3
Huey
At a little before seven on Thursday, I was slicing cucumber for the salad and listening to a true crime podcast about a vampire killer in New Orleans. I’d just finished one about the history of skateboarding.
Tonight would be my first date since Rachel and I broke up seven years ago. Rachel had been kind, and smart, and funny, and I’d fucked things up between us, more desperate to prove everything was fine than to make it so.
My first thought when I’d seen Felix in the bar the other night was that he was there to ask for a favor or make a threat involving Theo. I’d heard horror stories about fans using any means necessary to get close to musicians or try to extort them—not just from Theo, but from Caleb and other musicians I knew. Instead, he’d been sweet and nervous. Vulnerable when he asked for exactly what he wanted.
It wasn’t the kind of vulnerability I was accustomed to—the painful need of my sponsees that I knew intimately. Usually they needed my help, support, comfort, or advice; on much rarer occasions they wanted sex. I obliged the former if I could and ignored the latter.
* * *
—
I showered quickly and considered what tonight’s words should be. I stared at my reflection, torso littered with days of faded words like scattered bruises. My eyes looked wary and lines bracketed my mouth from the tension in my jaw. I experimented with a smile, but it just looked like a rictus.
Christ, when Felix had looked up at me after asking me out, nervous, hopeful, and daring, had I smiled like this?
His invitation, delivered in a jumble of blinks and curls and shuffling feet, had been wholly unexpected. I’d run through ways to say no. Saying no had become an art form.
But although no echoed in my head, something had stirred inside me, covetous and hungry.
I uncapped the Sharpie and wrote across my stomach, Hope clouds observation. The stink of the marker clung to my skin.
When the knock came, my heart lurched, and I pressed my palm to my stomach for five heartbeats before I opened the door.
There stood Felix, hand awkwardly in his hair like he’d been messing with it a moment before. I stepped aside to let him in. He flashed me a weak half-smile and shuffled around me into the living room, careful not to brush against me. When I closed the door he startled.
But when he said, “Hi,” he was smiling fully. He had a sweet fucking smile.
“Your place is…wow.” Felix looked around the kitchen and living room. “Extremely, uh…clean.” He ran a finger over the spines of my books, lined up precisely with the edge of the shelf.
When I’d first moved in, the apartment had been a riot of years’ old paint, Reggie’s tattered board games, shoddy built-in shelves in the corners made out of unsanded pressboard, and closets full of shelf liner curling at the corners where it had lost its stickiness and sticky in places it shouldn’t have been. I’d cleared out everything sticky and broken, then stripped the place down to its cleanest layers before repainting a glossy white that seemed like it couldn’t hide any shadows. It had been a good nighttime distraction for the month it lasted.
Now there was the necessary furniture and nothing more. A couch, a coffee table, a bookcase, free weights in the corner. A bed and a dresser in the bedroom. A table and two chairs in the kitchen.
Standing in the middle of my white apartment with nothing out of place, Felix looked intensely alive. He wore jeans somewhere between purple and black. They were tight and showed off his slim legs and the curve of his ass. His short-sleeved button-down was worn soft and clung to his body. It was a faded pink with black geometric designs on it, and it was buttoned up to his throat.
His hair was in a ponytail and I thought he might be wearing eye makeup again. His big, dark eyes looked almost bruised, in a way that made them glow. He plucked at a yellow string bracelet and chewed on his lower lip.
Everything about him looked soft and touchable, and I pushed down the urge to slide my fingers into his hair and press a hand to his back to see if he felt as good as he looked.
The beep of the oven timer made Felix startle.
“You hungry?” I asked.
“Yeah. Um, can I do anything?”
I shook my head and set two white plates on the table, poured water, and dressed the salad.
Felix still stood in the center of the room, arms crossed like he was hugging himself.
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
He tugged the elastic out of his ponytail and his hair spilled down around his face.
Dread crept through me. I pictured a night of stilted conversation, awkward silence. Felix’s hurried leave-taking and his relief at being away from me.
“Sorry,” Felix said sheepishly, “I’m really nervous.”
I blinked at him.
“Why?”
“Why?” he asked, eyes wide. “Because. I don’t know you really, so I’m not sure what we should talk about first, and you’re all…” He gestured vaguely at me. “And I feel like a mess, and I don’t want you to think I’m an idiot. And because, um.” He cleared his throat. “You’re hot and you kind of make it hard to maintain eye contact and I get all shaky, and, uh…then I ramble.”
He looked down at the white tile floor, and I shoved my fists into my pockets and stood perfectly still.
When he looked up at me, his gaze was steadier.
“So, why are you?” he asked me.
“Me?”
He nodded and stepped closer.
“I’m not.”
He raised dark eyebrows skeptically but then shrugged.
“You look a little nervous,” he said lightly. “You’re standing like a robot.”
“You look soft,” I said, then ground my molars. I hadn’t meant to say that.
“Soft?”
“Your hair,” I said. “Your clothes.” I clenched my back teeth.
Felix smiled.
“You look hard.” Then his eyes flew open and he tugged at a lock of hair. “I meant, you know, you’re all…jacked. God, make me shut up.”
With his hand in his hair and his wide eyes on me, I didn’t feel hard. I felt raw and abraded, as if with a few sentences some crucial distance between us had been blasted away.
“Do you like soft?” he asked. It wasn’t flirtatious, but curious.
“I like it.”
Felix took a step closer and I saw him gather his courage. “ ’Kay, good. That’s good. Maybe we could, um. Sometimes touching makes things a little less awkward. We could…hug hello? If you want? Or not,” he added quickly. “Not’s fine too.”
He bit his lip and I
blinked at him, every muscle locked tight. I imagined holding him, bruising him, damaging his soft sweetness with all my hard edges.
“We really don’t have to,” he said softly into the silence.
I rounded the counter and stood before Felix, holding very still and letting him come to me. He closed the distance between us and slowly slid his arms around me. Our height difference meant his cheek came to my chest and my chin rested on the top of his head.
It was awkward and stiff at first. Then he flattened his palms against my back and pressed us closer. I remained motionless. When he gave a little squeeze and let out a deep breath, I let my arms come slowly around him.
He was soft. The fabric of his shirt felt like it had been washed a hundred times. I ran a hand over his hair and that was soft too. Gradually, I forced myself to relax. Made my arms gentle around him, even as he held on tight. I held him to me and breathed in his smell—light and clean and grassy, like fresh laundry dried outside.
My heart rate slowed and I could feel Felix taking deep breaths, feel his stomach and chest expand against me. I slid my fingers into his hair and he nuzzled his cheek against my chest, just over my heart. I was sure he could feel it pounding. It was a dream moment, lasting forever and over too quickly.
Felix gave me one more tight squeeze, then he loosened his hold on me and looked up.
“Thanks,” he said. “I feel better.”
I nodded. “Good.”
When he didn’t move away, I brushed his hair back and let my thumb skim his cheekbone for just a second.
“You wearing makeup?”
He bit his lip, then jutted his chin out. “Yeah.”
It was a challenge, like he thought I might disapprove.
“Makes your eyes look like storms,” I said. They were beautiful.
The air between us thrummed, electric with possibility.
“Wanna eat?” I asked when I couldn’t stand it any longer.
Felix sat at the table, and I pulled the chicken out of the oven to rest while we had the salad.
“Wow, you really cook,” Felix said, eyes running hungrily over the food.
“I like to know what I’m eating,” I said by way of explanation.
Felix nodded but kept watching me, waiting for more.
“I used to make the same few things all the time,” I went on. “A few years ago, one of my, um, friends gave me a subscription to one of those delivery meal kits as a gift. I didn’t continue the subscription after the month was up. They’re great for some people, but since I don’t need things premeasured the amount of packaging was an unacceptable tradeoff.”
The cold packs in the boxes were full of chemicals, hundreds of thousands of them ending up in landfills all over the country. The convenience wasn’t justifiable for me.
“I liked following the recipes they sent, though. Kept them. Once the month was over I kept making them. Looked up other recipes. Theo and Whitman got me some cookbooks. So. Now I cook.”
Felix smiled and dug into his salad.
“I cook too, but just for practical reasons,” he said. “Sofia and I did the cooking when we were kids, ’cuz our mom worked until six or seven most nights. We’d make dinner for us and my other brothers and sister and then save some for our mom. When I was like eleven or twelve and I started cooking, I made the same three things every day. Mac and cheese from the box, spaghetti with hot dogs in it, or rice and beans.”
I filed away the image of a small Felix cooking dinner for his whole family.
“Spaghetti with hot dogs? That sounds horrible.”
“Yeah.” He shuddered. “It was something they served for lunch at school, so I just copied it. It was disgusting, honestly. I still can’t eat hot dogs.”
“Took care of your siblings a lot, then?”
He nodded.
“Yeah, I’m the oldest, and my mom worked all the hours she could get since it was just her, so I made dinner and cleaned up and checked homework. Sofia helped when she got a little older.”
When he said her name he smiled, then furrowed his brow.
“How’s she doing?” I asked.
Felix put his fork down.
“She’s…good. She…yeah, she’s great. They’re rehearsing and planning stuff for the tour. It’s really something.”
His tone was almost too upbeat, and he was looking anywhere but at me.
“She’s great, really,” he said to the table. “This is her dream come true. She’s over the moon. She…”
He sighed.
“She’s great,” I repeated. “But you’re not?”
“I haven’t gotten to see her that much lately.” His voice was small and tender. “Riven’s trying to get her up to speed because their concert dates are set, so she’s been super busy. I feel like an asshole because she’s gotten this amazing opportunity, and I’m really happy for her—I am. But…it’s always been the two of us, you know? We’ve always figured stuff out together, planned stuff together.”
His voice broke and he pushed back from the table.
“And now that she’s so busy, I…I’ve just never not had her around. God, I’m making a super-attractive first impression, huh? Third impression.”
He drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs.
“Not pathetic to need people. To miss them. You tell your sister how you feel?”
He shook his head. “She’s just busy; she hasn’t done anything wrong. I don’t want to make her feel bad. Not when she’s so happy.”
“You can’t make people feel things. You can just tell them how you feel. Being honest is important.”
Felix looked at me evenly. “Maybe you can’t force people to feel certain ways, but if you know something’s gonna make them feel guilty when they didn’t do anything wrong, isn’t that…I don’t know. Unkind?”
“ ‘Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.’ ”
“It…does?”
“It’s a quote,” I explained. “Frank Herbert, Children of Dune.”
“So, people feel guilty if they feel like they’ve failed at something?”
“Yes. If people don’t think they’ve failed, they won’t feel guilty. So if your sister feels guilty for you missing her, chances are she feels like she’s failed to be there for you. That’s about her, not you.”
I clenched my jaw, realizing I was speaking to him the way I spoke to my sponsees.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe you feel guilty because you think you shouldn’t need her,” I suggested evenly.
His eyes flew to mine. He bit his lip and nodded.
“Yeah, maybe I do.”
“Everyone needs help sometimes. Support.”
Felix’s expression was vulnerable. Everything about him was so hypnotically open.
“Even you?” he asked.
I pressed my palm flat to my stomach, imagining I could feel the words inked there.
“I’ve needed a lot of help.” I swallowed hard. “And now I try my best to help other people. I’m a sponsor. In NA. Narcotics Anonymous,” I clarified.
He bit his lip.
“Can I ask you something?”
I nodded. I knew what was coming. I’d mentioned NA, and this was the part where I would have to make my disclosure.
“Do you cook dinner for a lot of people?”
I snorted.
“Ah, no.”
“You don’t cook dinner for a lot of people, specifically, or you don’t go on a lot of dates?” he asked, voice faux casual.
“Either. Both. I don’t date.”
I cleared my throat, and the itch between my shoulder blades that made me want to do push-ups crept down my neck.
I grabbed the salad plates off the table and replaced them with the main dishes.
“Roast chicken with fennel and couscous with cauliflower.”
“Thanks, wow.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes.
“ ’S good, thanks,” Felix said. Then, “Can I ask you another question?”
A bone-deep exhaustion attended Felix’s slow chipping away at me. I wished he’d ask whatever he needed to know and not draw it out.
“You can ask me as many questions as you want,” I told him.
“Why don’t you date? And, but this is a date. So you do. Date. Me. I mean, you’re on a date with me. Right? It doesn’t have to be, but when I asked before, you said…”
He shoved a forkful of cauliflower in his mouth to stop the words.
I kept my hands flat on my thighs.
“When I was using drugs, I was…sexually active,” I said carefully. “But I didn’t date. When I was trying to stop using, and for a couple years after, it took everything I had to take care of myself. Had no room for any of that. For anyone else, really.”
I squeezed my fists, trying to ward off the memory of being driven throughout the day by the desire for something I’d decided I would never have again. I still had nightmares sometimes. I would wake up and think I was back there, when my life had been ruled by something outside of me.
“I tried. Once. It didn’t…I fucked it up.”
The image of Rachel struggling to shove her shoes on before she walked out the door, mouth set in a grim line, angrily wiping away tears she didn’t acknowledge as she told me that she was the one calling it quits, but I was the one who’d left her no other choice. She’d been right, I knew now.
“Spent a long time getting to the point where I felt okay. Then after that…I haven’t met anyone I was interested in, I suppose.”
The truth was both simpler and more confusing, though. At some point I had just stopped. Stopped connecting, stopped thinking of people as part of my life beyond the point when I was interacting with them. Stopped imagining that anyone would think of me that way. Just…stopped.