by Solace Ames
“Yeah. We’re good. Hey, where are you? Are you busy right now?”
“School. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. But I had to leave work early and I’m, um—I’m calling around for a ride.”
“Text me the address. I’ll be right there.”
Paul drove a gold Camry and there were a ton of those on the street, so Jay told himself to stop searching and staring. He told himself to do a lot of things, gave himself a whole lecture on perspective and realistic expectations. This is your first job in a year. You can ask for help without being weak. It’s only a ride.
When Paul’s car cruised to a stop, he knew it wasn’t just a ride. It was much, much better. He slipped into the passenger seat. The way Paul looked at him was intense and piercing, as if Jay was worthy of memorizing. Failure was fucking irrelevant under that stare.
“Nice tie,” Paul said, wrapping his fist around it.
Jay didn’t say anything. No snappy comebacks. His brain might as well have been a scoop of ice cream tossed in a deep fryer.
Paul smiled and let go and pulled out onto the street. The muscles in his forearms flexed as he smoothly maneuvered the wheel.
“I like skinny ties,” Jay said. He didn’t think he could formulate any sentence much more complex than that. Not yet.
“Seat belt,” Paul reminded him.
Jay clicked it into place and glared at Paul while he collected himself. “I would have remembered it. If you hadn’t done that fist-phallic-symbol thing.”
“Should I apologize?” Paul asked, not sounding very sorry at all.
“I wouldn’t go that far. And thanks for picking me up.”
“My pleasure.”
“How’s school?” Jay asked, trying to get his mind off sex. Difficult—his gaze kept drifting to the side of the street, looking for a place to pull over and make out, so he jerked his head forward and blinked fiercely.
Paul made a dismissive noise. “The usual. Someone super-glued their fingers together last night in the studio. It’s only two more weeks until the end of fall semester. Nobody’s told me not to come back yet. Have you had lunch yet?”
“No. What about you?” They were dancing at arm’s length. Being with Paul was strange without Adriana. Their date wasn’t supposed to be until later tonight, so this felt a little like...well, what he imagined cheating might feel like. “I’m going to text Adriana and let her know you picked me up. She’s really busy around now, so I don’t like to call her.”
That made things better. The seat cradled him comfortably as he worked his thumbs on the phone.
“I haven’t had lunch,” Paul said, leaving it open.
“I’ve got leftovers and sandwich stuff at home,” Jay offered. “If you don’t feel like going back to school, we could hang out until Adriana gets off work.”
“Sure. And Jay, it kills me to say this, but we probably shouldn’t have sex.” He paused. “Should we?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean—” Jay closed his mouth and thought for a while, and when he spoke again, he weighed every word, wrapping them in pauses like glasses in tissue. “It would be a good idea to wait.”
But not for too long. Paul’s fist around his tie, close against his heart...
Paul merged onto the freeway. The air between them seemed easier to breathe now. Jay told Paul about his truncated work week, painting Mr. Alvarez vividly. “The guy looked like an evil humanoid snapping turtle. Pursed lips and glaring googly eyes. He wanted me to take a ten-minute lunch break and clock out for thirty minutes. I could report him for that shit, but I don’t want to be the proverbial nail that sticks up and gets hammered down, you know?”
“It’s a good thing you won’t be working there permanently.”
“Hell yes. I want to get back to working for a hospital. I’m not sure if I’ll get there with temping, but it’s worth a shot.”
“I could never do that. I’ve got the horror of hospitals you probably hear about a lot.”
Jay shrugged. “I’m abnormal. I actually like the smell of disinfectant. My dad was in the hospital a lot when I was a kid, and my family always kept up a pretty good front about it. And being a medical social worker seems like a good career path. I’ve only ever been in the assistant role, but that’s enough to know I can maintain without burning out.” Before the accident, at least. Now, he wasn’t so sure, but Paul didn’t need to know that. No one needed to know that.
They talked all the way home. Paul was frighteningly easy to talk to, sometimes. So easy that it made Jay want to pull back, not knowing how much of the conversational intimacy was real, and how much of it was...well, magicked up by Paul.
But then, what did real really mean? The absence of intent? The absence of money? Maybe Paul deserved to be treated like a normal person, no second-guessing.
They talked in the parking lot and up the walkway and through the door and into the kitchen. The conversation and motion flowed in sync, suppressing the deep-water shock as Paul crossed the threshold right behind Jay. Close enough that Jay’s skin came alive at the puff of breath against the back of his neck, whether it was faintly felt or even just imagined.
“Mushroom, cheese and tofu quesadilla?” Jay asked. “It’s got a lot of cilantro inside.”
“I love cilantro.” Paul took a seat on a barstool on the other side of the kitchen counter.
Jay put a griddle on the stove. He didn’t have to be a chef to know that cooking with a tie on over a gas burner was idiotic, so he quickly slipped it off.
Paul sighed.
Jay turned around to face him. “You really wanted to reel me in with it, didn’t you?” He tried to keep the message consoling, regretful, but couldn’t help a mischievous twitchy grin at the end.
“There’ll be other opportunities.”
Smug bastard.
The quesadilla took a few minutes to heat up, and then they sat next to each other at the counter while they ate. Paul put the empty plates in the sink; Jay told him he wasn’t allowed to wash them. It was very civilized.
“How’s work?” he asked Paul.
“I’m at a frustrating place right now.” He took the glass of water that Jay offered him and went to sit at the couch. “Why did you meet me in a hotel that time? I’m a little curious.”
Jay followed and sat beside him again, although the L-shaped curve of the couch meant he was looking at Paul now. Not straight into his eyes—that was so goddamn intense he’d rather work up to it by degrees—but the indirect eye contact was perfect.
“Hey,” he said softly. “It’s okay if you talk about your job to me in—well, in non-rosy terms. Really, it’s okay to talk about it any way you want.”
“Thanks,” Paul said. He seemed at a loss for further words.
Jay wished he could run and put the tie back on, all of a sudden. “But yeah, I’ll tell you about the hotel.”
* * *
Paul had a theory essay due today, something on urban sprawl and rhizomatic structures that he’d lost the passion for halfway through, and it would never get done on time now, not that he gave a damn. Seeing Jay in his crisp white shirt with two buttons undone at the collar, at ease, talking to him, trusting him...he brushed the last theoretical cobwebs out of the corners of his mind and sat back to listen.
“Adriana used to hang around with some cholos,” Jay said. “She wasn’t happy at school, and her mom was hard to deal with. Where we lived isn’t super hood, it’s very middle class, so it’s not like gangs were in your face, but they were there if you looked. Sometimes she’d hang out with the art fags—” he coughed and pointed to himself with a thumb, “—and sometimes she’d hang out at the other extreme. Back then she wanted to be a Marine like her dad, so she didn’t get that far into it. She didn’t want a record.”
“That’s...inte
resting.” He pictured Adriana with her hair pinned neatly under a cap, holding a rifle at a jaunty angle. Or maybe with a buzz cut, like the hot space marine woman in Aliens.
“Yeah, she was in ROTC. I used to give her shit about it all the time. Back then we were friends, that was all. And one day one of the guys she knew tried to rape her at gunpoint. She got away, and she filed charges. Nothing happened. The guy told the cops it was just a lovers’ argument. And then he let her know he was sending his vatos after her.”
“God.” The sexual gun imagery he’d been loosely spinning disappeared, nausea taking its place.
“Her dad was in Afghanistan, and she was worried about her little sister, and her mother was just...checked out. We went to a hotel in Anaheim and hid out for a week, and I came along for support, so she wouldn’t get lonely.”
Paul put it all together. “That was where you started as a couple.”
Jay grinned crookedly. “Chalk it up to a combination of fear adrenaline and the wine coolers we persuaded a homeless guy to buy us. There’ve been better first times, but I guess there’ve been worse, too.” His smile evened out, becoming more blissfully nostalgic. “She asked me if I was like fifty-fifty bisexual. I said more or less, but I didn’t know how to prove it, did she have any ideas?”
“And in the spirit of scientific inquiry...” Paul laughed, glad the story had lightened considerably.
“Oh, yeah. It escalated. First we decided I was going to jerk off to straight porn versus gay porn on the pay-per-view, and she’d time me. But we stopped paying attention to what was on the screen.” Jay’s smile was wide and toothy and absolutely infectious. “We had awesome sex practically nonstop. Ran out of condoms, even. It was so fucking hot, and I loved being able to make her happy, you know? We turned a bad time into the best vacation in the world. And then things worked out so she went to live with her stepmom up in Washington, so we said goodbye and stayed in touch. We had a very close friendship for years after. Talked almost every day.”
Jay had chosen to meet him in a hotel room, too—an innocent mystery solved, although a more unpleasant one remained. “And the guy?”
Jay shrugged. “Fucking cops should have listened to Adriana. He ended up raping someone else. He’s in jail now for a long time, and the case was so fucked up, his gang buddies cut him off. I’d rather not talk about it.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then blinked rapidly. “She’s safe.”
“Good.”
“She’s safe,” Jay said again, as if he’d forgotten, and then startled, probably realizing it. “When she moved back down here after culinary school, we’d both grown up a lot, but it was like she never left, too. We had all the good times without being afraid. It just kept getting better and better. Until I had my stupid accident.” He rolled his eyes and slumped back into the sofa.
“Hey.” Paul edged over toward Jay. The air resisted motion, slowed time, as if he’d fallen into a frozen river. Please don’t move away, he begged Jay silently. He wasn’t sure why his need was so strong. He had to—he had to prove to himself that Jay’s fragility was deceptive. Oh God, or maybe it was the opposite, that he was desperate for Jay to be wounded enough to need him.
Jay didn’t flinch. Paul sat next to him. Put an arm around his shoulders. The air unfroze. The man in Paul’s arms had a lovely slim body and a strength he’d probably never understand the depths of. Jay was tense, but he didn’t shiver.
“Is this okay?” Paul asked. “Or should I move back?”
“No,” Jay said, his voice very low. “It’s good.” Jay leaned his head so that it rested lightly against Paul’s shoulder. The touch felt more intimate than a kiss and sent a knifelike sliver of intense joy piercing through Paul’s chest. “Yeah, it feels good. No kissing though. I still have mushroom cheese quesadilla breath.”
“All right, then.” No reason not to talk about his own problems now, since Jay didn’t seem to want to go on. The story—really, Adriana’s story—must have had an aftershock. “I’m not doing well in architecture school this year. I’m not worried about the design or the theory, but everything else is turning into a nightmare. And I don’t understand what changed.”
“There’s a lot of burnout, right? Like social work. You just have to ride it out until it gets better or you can’t take it anymore, and then you have to do something else. But figuring out that point...”
Paul waited a few seconds, but Jay had definitely trailed off. They understood each other. “Yes. It’s hard for everyone. The idea is that it’s worth it, and we end up as architects with good careers.” He couldn’t imagine himself behind a desk yet, analyzing cost overruns, but he’d get to that point closer to graduation, surely. “I’m not anywhere near quitting, but I don’t like this sense that I’m falling away. It needs to stop soon.”
“What would you do if you quit?”
On some level, Paul knew there were alternatives: historical, theoretical, design degrees. But none of them counted as architecture, and none of them were particularly well-paid. Architecture was what he’d started, and what he needed to finish. “It’s all right,” Paul said, smiling, and squeezed Jay’s shoulder. “It’s not going to kill me, and I have some classes I’m looking forward to next semester. Your hair smells really great, by the way. Citrusy.”
“I tell my mom I like grapefruit one time, she buys me a case of grapefruit shampoo at the flea market. Do you want to watch a movie?”
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
Jay settled on what he said was one of the less nightmarish David Lynch movies, Mulholland Drive. “Don’t worry, you won’t understand it the first time you see it.” Paul didn’t mind being patronized, not when Jay put down the remote and held his hand loosely. “Part of this movie is a dream, but it’s hard to know when the dream world begins.”
I’m already in it, Paul thought. He pressed his lips together to keep from saying something so hopelessly sentimental, laced his fingers together with Jay’s, and settled in to watch.
* * *
The thought of sabotage of the petty or serious variety kept Adriana in a state of constant low-level anxiety, like someone humming mocking words at the edge of hearing. She kept her knives out in the open or by her side. She stopped bringing a tote bag to work and started wearing cargo pants with everything she needed in the pockets. When no one was looking, she broke her personal drawer in the office, popping off one of the roller wheels, and used that as an excuse to keep it conspicuously empty. Planting a baggie of coke in there was the kind of scumbag move she could easily imagine Steve pulling.
It’s not paranoid if they really are out to get you.
So even though she’d worked the less-demanding morning shift, she still felt mentally exhausted as she walked up to her door. Paul had picked up Jay from his temp job and was with him now, in her home, but she couldn’t really work through the implications. Perhaps she should be jealous, or nervous, or excited, but right now, she was only numb, and mildly grateful.
She stepped in and shut the door behind her. The lights were off. The room was dim, and swelling with orchestral music. She’d drifted over the threshold into a world without time, where raw emotion and yearning were the atomic building blocks, the laws, the forces.
“This is the saddest part,” she said in recognition, tears not spilling but waiting hot and heavy behind her eyes. “You want Betty and Rita to be together. Even though she’s dead, or dreaming, or both.” God, this movie always got to her, always hit her where it hurt.
Jay and Paul turned their heads toward her. They seemed dazed and very far away. But when the movie died and the last line of dialogue—”Silencio”—was spoken, her heart stopped aching, and they were all in the same world again, as real as ever.
“Hey baby,” Jay said, and got up to hug her. “How was your day?”
She was home. Jay’s arms wrapped around
her, holding tightly, sending strength surging into her. “It was all right,” she said. “Hi, Paul. Thanks for picking up Jay.”
Paul curved his lips into that stunning, suave sort of smile that promised mysterious knowledge—he did that so well—but something in his eyes was lost, maybe still in the dream. “You’re welcome. Excuse me, I’m a little...shaky. The movie, you know.”
“I understand,” she said.
Paul got up and walked toward her, cutting straight through the dimness as if he didn’t need light to see in his own home, this home that he’d claimed. The echo of how he’d first walked through her door. Fear and desire made her stiffen in Jay’s arms. She didn’t know where Paul would stop. She didn’t know where she wanted him to stop, now that the money was gone. She didn’t understand anything anymore, and the confusion dizzied her—she’d never known paranoia could come mixed with pleasure.
If it wasn’t for Jay, if it wasn’t for—
I never panic.
“Can I have a kiss hello?” she asked Paul. She looked upward and away from his too-perfect face, presenting her cheek.
Jay moved a step away so that could Paul kiss her, softly and gravely. At the touch of his lips the shadows grew richer, full of lush promise.
“Don’t turn on the lights,” she said to both of them. “Please. It’s good like this.”
Paul ran his hand from her shoulder down her arm. She thrilled to his touch, not reading it, not interpreting it, just letting herself feel.
And then he stepped away, went back to the couch and sat down again. It was hard to look at him when he wasn’t touching her, maybe because she couldn’t picture herself together with him. Paul was...iconic. Like he should have an elegant blonde at his side, not a woman greasy from the kitchen. Even knowing some of his strange depths, surfaces mattered more than she wanted them to.
“You must be tired from work,” Paul said.
She nodded, and heard the suck of air as Jay opened the fridge. He came back to her with a cold bottle of lime soda. “Sit down,” Jay urged her.