Hold My Hand

by Michael Barakiva

  Ethan nodded mutely.

  “So now we’re going to do what I want,” Alek insisted. “I want you to tell me about it. All about it. Start at the beginning.”

  “Can’t we at least go inside somewhere?” Ethan pleaded.

  “No. Here. Now.”

  Ethan leaned against the tunnel. “Alek, honestly, there isn’t much to say. We went to Greenpoint. The party was dope. A guy with this, like, crazy lumberjack beard was spinning some house trance beats. They were fine, you know, but after a while it got a little annoying because you could tell he thought he was being, like, mad edgy.”

  “I don’t care about the music, Ethan. I care about how and why my boyfriend cheated on me!” Alek hadn’t meant to use that word. He had been training himself to think of Ethan as his ex.

  “Okay, sorry.” But Ethan had spotted it, too, this “boyfriend.” And his eyes flickered with newfound hope. “We had a few beers—”

  “So you were drunk?”

  Ethan paused. “I wish I could stand here and tell you, ‘Yeah—I was blitzed, I didn’t know what I was doing.’ But before I came to meet you today, I made my New Year’s resolution. And I’ll say it now, five days early—that I would never lie to you again, never be dishonest in any way. And so, yeah, I had a few beers. But no, I wasn’t, like, wasted. I wasn’t, like, so judgment-impaired that I didn’t realize what I was doing or any bullshit like that. And then we were alone, in one of the bedrooms, and he reached for me, and…”

  “Why, Ethan? Why did you cheat on me?” Alek looked away. “Was it because, you know—I didn’t want to…”

  “No no no no. Please don’t say that, please don’t think that,” Ethan begged. He took a step toward Alek, who stepped away quickly. “I’ve been thinking so hard about what to say, how to try and make you understand … But you have to believe me, it has nothing to do with that. It’s just, you don’t know what it’s like having an ex, Alek. Especially one like Remi.”

  “Because he’s like model-hot, is that what you mean?”

  “No, because he’s always had this, like, power over me. He’s someone who it’s just impossible to say no to. Have you ever had someone like that in your life, someone who could get you to do things that you never thought you would?”

  Alek regarded Ethan. “I did. And then he cheated on me. And now I don’t.”

  Panic erupted on Ethan’s face. “What does that mean?”

  Alek had thought that perhaps hearing about it, about the who, what, where, and how, would make the pain go away. Would make forgiveness possible. But it didn’t.

  “Becky told me that I had to tell you we were breaking up, and I wasn’t going to ghost you because I think that’s like the worst thing that one person could ever do. Except maybe cheating on them with their ex and then condescending and being like, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have an ex.’”

  “You made me talk about it, Alek. That’s what you wanted. Is there anything I could’ve said that would’ve made it okay?”

  “How about ‘I’m sorry’? How about, ‘This the worst thing that I’ve ever done in my life and I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting it and I wish you could forgive me’? Did it occur to you to say any of those things?”

  Ethan closed his eyes and seemed to force tears back. “Alek, I’m sorry.” He met Alek’s gaze full-on, unflinching. “This is the worst thing that I’ve done in my life.” But the tears proved stronger than him, and out they came. “I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting it.” Then he started ugly-crying violently. “I wish you could forgive me.”

  Alek looked at Ethan. He saw the guy, almost two years older than him, whom he’d looked up to in just about everything. He saw the guy who helped him come out, who helped him discover New York, who, really, helped him discover himself.

  And still, it wasn’t enough. “I do, too, Ethan. I wish I could, too.”

  The wind whipped against the tunnel’s boarded-up opening, as if it were trying to beat it down.

  “So what—you’re going to turn around and just walk away from me? From us?” Ethan left the meager shelter that the mouth of the tunnel was affording him, stepping closer to Alek.

  “What else can I do, Ethan? How’m I ever going to be able to trust you again?”

  “I’m going to earn it back. Your trust. Your faith. You might not owe me anything else, but you owe me the chance to try.” Ethan leaned forward. “We have been together for the best six months of my life. I know you’re hurting, and I know I’m the person who hurt you. But you have to give me the chance to be the person to make it go away. You have to let me try.”

  “I don’t know, Ethan,” Alek said. “I just don’t know.”

  “I do. And if you leave now, like this, I won’t be the only one who regrets this day for the rest of his life.”

  14

  “He actually said that? That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard!” Becky squealed. “Did music swell? Did Ethan jump on a white horse and swoop you up and carry you off into the sunset?”

  “It was, like, three p.m., so the sun wasn’t really setting.” Alek sat on Becky’s bed, wiggling his toes in their thick, woolen socks against the dark-blue carpeting of her bedroom.

  “That is terrible planning on both your parts. There was a horse, though?” Becky asked hopefully.

  “Sure, Becky, there was a horse.” Alek was feeling generous.

  “And it was white?”

  “Totally.”

  “I knew it!”

  Becky uncorked and sniffed a bottle on her vanity while they spoke, making eye contact with Alek in the mirror in front of her.

  “Okay—tell me which one you like more.” She dabbed one of Alek’s wrists with a clear, oblong, silver-capped bottle. “I got this one for Christmas. Because we celebrate it on the normal date. Not like you Armenians.”

  He sniffed. “Smells like French toast.”

  “How about this one?” She sprayed his other wrist with a circular yellow bottle.

  “This one smells like I’m being attacked by a rabid florist.”

  “You’re useless!”

  “Do you have any options other than ‘Eau du Brunch’ or ‘Little Shop of Horrors’?”

  Becky ignored Alek and lightly sprayed herself with a third, light-green bottle. A bottle she didn’t let Alek sample first. “But seriously—are you guys back together now? Did you even break up in the first place? Because now that Mahira dumped John when she spotted him at Panera with a trombonist, you guys have the record for longest consecutive couple at South Windsor High.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “It is!”

  “What about Nathan and Shoko?”

  “They broke up during midterms week.”

  “Suzanne and Dev?”

  “Irreconcilable artistic differences.”

  “Wow, I guess Ethan and I really have been together the longest.”

  “I told you! People need you to stay together. You give us hope.”

  Alek stared at Becky’s turquoise comforter, quilted with pink, green, and brown squares in an asymmetrical design. “I thought I was going to break up with him—I had every intention of doing it.”

  “But?”

  Alek wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing in letting himself be convinced to give Ethan a second chance. Before he’d been in Ethan’s presence, he was sure breaking up with him was the right thing to do. In the actual moment, however, he’d doubted himself. In the past, Alek had had no difficulty identifying the “right” thing to do—actually doing it was the hard part. But now the needle on his moral compass was spinning, having lost its magnetic north.

  “Ethan convinced me to give him another chance.”

  “So you guys are still together?”

  “I guess.”

  “You sound about as excited as I do about my first appointment with the gynecologist. Which, by the way, is next week, my mother just informed me.”

  “You
heard of TMI, Becky?”

  “Are you going to be one of those gays who gets like super uncomfortable any time I talk about my lady parts? Because, I have to say, that is embarrassingly stereotypical.” Becky quickly ran a lip gloss along her upper lip, then lower.

  Alek opened the lid of the tea box that accompanied him everywhere. “Don’t listen to her, Señor Huevo. She doesn’t even carry her egg around with her.”

  “That’s right, I don’t. Because I’m not some weirdo like you.”

  “The assignment is to see how well we would take care of a child.”

  “Well then, I guess I’m the Medea of South Windsor High.” Becky pressed her lips together, smoothing out the lip gloss.

  “I don’t think it’s normal that you talk about anything, especially this stuff like sex and periods, without being even the least bit squeamish. I don’t subject you to reports about where hair is popping up all over my body or the intimate details of what Ethan and I did when…”

  Becky began ritualistically brushing her hair out. “I wish you would divulge the secrets of your sex life!”

  “You wouldn’t be grossed out?” Alek asked.

  “My parents are scientists, remember? Band practice, work, NASA’s New Horizons images of Pluto, and my menstruation cycle are all acceptable breakfast table conversation topics. And since you and Ethan are still together, you’ll have to tell me everything.”

  “What do you think, Becky? Do you think I should’ve just dumped him?”

  Becky got up from her vanity and jumped on her bed, next to Alek. The perfume she had chosen was citrusy. And nice. Not that Alek would admit it. “I’m pretty sure I would’ve. Because when I think about Dustin doing something like that to me, I’d just want to claw his heart out and eat it raw while he watched.”

  “I think that would be difficult,” Alek observed.

  “Not if I already hooked him up to artificial life support.” Becky sat up on the bed. “See—I’ve already planned for this possibility.”

  “And that’s how you’d react to some guy you barely knew cheating on you.”

  “I’m not sure if I’d describe Dustin as some guy I barely knew. We’ve been dating for almost three weeks. Twenty days, to be exact, making tomorrow our three-week-versary.”

  “We both know that’s not a thing.”

  “You continue talking like that, soon you’re not going to be a thing.”

  Alek kicked his shoes off and rolled over, onto his back. “All I’m saying is that you think you would kill Dustin if he cheated on you, and Dustin’s no Ethan.”

  “I don’t know what you have against him.” Becky semi-playfully swatted Alek with a pillow. “Can you please give him a chance at least before you get all judgy?”

  “Fine.” Alek caught the pillow before Becky could swat him again.

  “And this isn’t about comparing Dustin to Ethan or whatever. It’s not about what I’d do in the situation. You’re the one living it.”

  “So what does matter?”

  Becky hopped off the bed and went to her closet. “When you think about it, what’s the first thing that pops into your head?”

  “How stupid I feel.”

  “Really? For what?”

  “For not knowing. My birthday was a whole week before our six-month. That means for seven days, I was hanging out with Ethan, I was holding Ethan’s hand, I was kissing Ethan.”

  Becky held up a pair of chunky black boots for Alek’s approval.

  “Trying too hard.”

  Becky tossed the boots back in the closet. “It sounds like you were doing more than just kissing him.”

  Alek shook his head no. “It’s a euphemism.”

  “You’re a euphemism.” Becky dragged out a pair of slightly less chunky black boots.

  “I thought I knew him so well, you know?” Alek stared back down at his toes. “That I could tell when something was upsetting him without him having to say anything. Like I could read his mind. But clearly, telepathy and not reality manipulation should be the power that I want. Or maybe not, because if I could manipulate reality, then I could just undo all this and we’d go back to being the way we were. Instead, I have to wonder if staying with him says, ‘It’s okay to treat me like this because I don’t deserve any better.’ When people find out, they’re going to think I’m more of a loser than they already do.”

  Becky finished lacing her boots up and hopped back on the bed. “Look—the only thing I know is that the last thing you should be doing is worrying about your imagined reaction of the populace of South Windsor High. They’re all idiots.” She hugged Alek. “And besides, it’s impossible for their opinions of you to sink any lower!”

  Alek hugged her back. “You always know just what to say.”

  “I know.”

  “And what else is Ethan hiding from me?” Alek and Becky leaned back, against her bed’s headboard. “And why did he wait for me to figure it out rather than just tell me himself? It must’ve been there, every moment we talked or touched or whatevered.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t.” Becky disentangled from Alek, got up from her bed, and continued brushing her hair.

  “Wasn’t what?”

  “Maybe every living breathing moment he was with you wasn’t about, ‘Should I tell Alek that I cheated on him?’”

  “How could it not have it been? If I had cheated on Ethan—”

  “Sure, if it had been you, that’s all you would’ve thought about.” She gesticulated with the brush in her hand. “But maybe Ethan’s not like that. Maybe he just buried it away so far and deep that he’d never have to think about it. Denial’s not just a river in Egypt, you know.”

  “And that’s another thing—if he had brought it up himself, sooner, in a less…” Alek coughed. “… charged situation, it might’ve been easier to get over it. But what if we hadn’t—you know—been about to do it that night? Would I still not know?”

  “Oh my God. It’s called ‘sex.’ How can you have come so close to losing your virginity and still be afraid of saying that word? You’re not going to summon Voldemort.”

  “Volde-who?”

  Becky slammed the brush down in exasperation. “Sometimes, seriously, I can’t even with you.”

  “I’m just kidding—I know he’s from those books. Those books without a single gay character.”

  “Dumbledore was gay!” Becky protested. “She said it in an interview.”

  “Okay—if he was really gay, then where was his boyfriend? Or his husband? And more importantly, why wasn’t there a single gay student in the entirety of that school for wizards? It is A SCHOOL FOR WIZARDS FOR GOD’S SAKE. Shouldn’t, like, at least half of the population be queer? If not more? But that’s not the point!” Alek jumped off Becky’s bed. “The point is, what if we weren’t going to have sex that night?” He managed to say the word without stumbling too much before or after. “Or what if I hadn’t surmised with my Sherlock-esque deductive skills what the already-opened box of condoms meant? How long would we have gone, our relationship built on a lie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither—that’s why—”

  “Becky…” Her dad called up the stairs.

  “… your gentleman caller has arrived.” Becky’s mom finished her husband’s sentence, as they always did for each other. But usually they did it without giggling. The way they were now.

  Becky rolled her eyes. “I am never letting my parents go to a community theater production of Tennessee Williams again.” She turned to the door and sucked in air to holler to her parents below. “We’ll be right there!”

  Alek leaped from the bed. “Dustin’s here?”

  “What, you think I’m putting on perfume and lipstick for your benefit?”

  “But we’re hanging out now. We’ve had these plans for days. I still have around four more hours of talking to do, which I could conceivably compress into three.”

  Becky stood up and put all of her cosmetics away. “I
invited Dustin along because it might be nice for the three of us to hang out together. We can watch a movie downstairs, or make my folks drive us to the movies, or…” Becky trailed off. “I guess the movies is actually the only thing to do around here.”

  “I would rather get called into the reverend father’s office with my parents, which, by the way, is happening this weekend, than have to endure you and Dustin’s stolen glances and ‘accidental’ finger-brushing in the popcorn bucket.”

  “You’re the worst.”

  “I’m not the one who invited someone to crash our date.”

  “’Sup?” Dustin appeared in the doorway of Becky’s room, a messenger bag slung over his shoulder, holding his bright green skateboard even though it was snowing outside and Alek knew for a fact there was no way he was going to use it.

  “Dustin!” Becky leaped from her vanity and greeted her boyfriend with a peck on his cheek. “I was just telling Alek how much I was looking forward to the two of you spending some time together, and lo and behold, there’s my mom calling me.”

  Dustin and Alek exchanged a quizzical glance. “I don’t hear…” Alek started, but Becky cut him off.

  “What’s that, Mom?” Becky called out, loud, as if she were responding to her mother’s voice from downstairs. “You want me to come down and help you with something so that my best friend and my boyfriend can spend some time together? What a swell idea. I’ll be right down.” She tidied up her room, putting away the rejected outfit options and an errant pair of slippers. “I have no idea how long this will take, as my mom might need a lot of help with that unnamed activity, but I’m going to guess around thirty minutes. I’m sure you two will be fine until then.” She walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  Dustin sat on the chair at Becky’s vanity. If he were at all conscious of how incongruent he appeared there—a skater boy at a very girly vanity—he showed no trace of it.

  “So…” Alek started.

  “Yeah?” Dustin asked.

  “Why don’t I tell you about myself?” Alek launched into an unrehearsed monologue about his family, his Armenian-ness, his aspirations, his interests. “And now—what about you?”