Perfect Ten

by L. Philips

  “I’ll drive you home. You could stay but I’m not sure how long I can keep up this good guy act with you in my bed,” Travis says while I tug on my clothes. His eyes watch me carefully, greedily, and I feel more than flattered when he runs his tongue ring around the rim of his lips, licking his chops like I’m the most appetizing dessert he’s ever laid eyes on.

  It’s almost three thirty when Travis pulls his beat-up old Mustang up to my curb. I tell him thanks, which covers all manner of sins, and he leans over, kissing me again. This time it’s soft, teasing, neat—all of which he negates by nipping at my bottom lip before pulling away.

  “Call me,” he says. “Or I’ll call you. Whatever. I don’t really wait by the phone, ya know? But God help us when you’re ready. I’m going to eat you alive.”

  Hours ago I would have seen that as a threat, but now I just smile in return and hope he doesn’t make promises that he doesn’t intend to keep.

  “Later,” I say as I step out onto the sidewalk. The Mustang is gone before I reach my door. I let myself inside, swallow five aspirin, and lie down. I have to meet Jamie in six hours, and I refuse to look hungover when I pick him up because, Goddess knows, that boy will look gorgeous.

  Eleven

  The November air is cool but there’s not a cloud in the sky, and the bright morning sun makes me reach for my sunglasses as I drive down State Street. I’ve got at least a ten-minute drive ahead of me before I reach Jamie’s house on the east side, knowing Athens’s screwed-up stoplight system. Just enough time to call Landon.

  I ignore the uneasiness in my stomach and hit his number on my speed dial.

  “Hello?”

  “Before you ask, yes, I’m all right, I have all of my organs still, and no, I didn’t have sex with him. He didn’t even try. Well, not until I was sober, anyway.”

  There’s some clanging on the other end of the line and I would put money on it that Landon’s doing his weekly room cleaning. Not that he’s a neat freak. No, he’s way too cool for that.

  “Good. Glad to hear he didn’t make a dress out of your skin or something,” Landon says, and although I hear some relief in his voice, he’s also strangely detached.

  “Hey,” I say, and the clattering in the background stops. “Thank you for looking out for me. Travis said you were pretty upset.”

  “I was kind of a jerk to him, honestly.”

  “Well, he may have mentioned that too.”

  “I would have understood if he’d beaten the shit out of me. I think I accused him of being a sexual predator at one point.”

  I press the phone closer to my ear, maneuvering my car with only one hand. I can barely hear Landon. His voice is weaker than normal, almost fragile sounding.

  “You were worried about me. He understood that.” I pause, thinking of what Travis said last night. “That’s all it was, right? Worry?”

  Landon pauses too. I hear more rustling on his end of the line. “Yeah. Of course.” Another pause, then, “I guess I didn’t need to be. I mean, he’s not exactly the type of guy who’s going to stick around forever, but he seems decent. He wanted to take care of you.”

  I pull up to a stoplight, grateful for a slight reprieve from engine noise. “Is that why you let me go home with him? ’Cause you decided he was a good guy?”

  Landon sighs so loudly that I hear it on my end. “That’s just it, Sam. I shouldn’t be letting you do anything. I’m not your mother or your brother or your boyfriend. If you want to have sex with Travis, you should have sex with Travis, and I need to just . . . let it go.”

  I reach up and rub my forehead. I don’t feel hungover anymore, but I could swear my brain is not working at optimum capacity. It’s like information is meandering through my synapses, not quite firing in the right directions, and it takes me a while to get what Landon’s saying. “But you’re my friend. That’s part of what friends do. They watch out for each other.”

  “Yeah, that’s what friends do,” Landon says. “But friends should also let you make your own decisions.”

  I say nothing, and the stoplight turns to green, so I press down on the gas.

  “Are you going to see him again?”

  “I don’t know. He wants to but he also kind of made it clear he’s not into the boyfriend thing.”

  I hear Landon hum his agreement. “And you’re seeing Jamie today?”

  “On my way to pick him up. I’m going to take him to Yellow Springs to see the art.”

  “Sounds good.”

  There’s dead air again for a while, which makes me even more uneasy than before. Landon and I never run out of things to say to each other, and even if we’re silent, it’s usually of the comfortable variety. This is definitely not comfortable.

  “Are we okay, Landon?”

  “Huh?” he asks, then hums again. “Yeah. We’re fine. Sorry. Last night was really weird and, uh, I’m just really tired, you know?”

  “Well, get some sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

  He agrees and we both hang up. Just in time, too, because I’m on Locust Street, which is Jamie’s street, and I pull into his driveway. Jamie all but bounds out the front door and hops into the car, and I turn to him, amused.

  “Good morning,” he greets me, beaming, and drops a black peacoat into my backseat. I was right about him looking gorgeous. He’s wearing a tight-fitting gray-and-white-striped shirt that I’ve never seen him wear before, with a vest over that and a pair of combat boots tugged up over his jeans. He looks more like a model than a sophomore in high school, and honestly, I’m not sure even Travis could compete with him at the moment.

  “Morning.” I reach down to the console and pull up a Styrofoam cup, holding it out to him. “Coffee. You’re going to need it, trust me.”

  Jamie smiles and takes the cup, drinking a bit before fastening his seat belt. He bounces a little in his seat. “So are you going to tell me where we’re going, or do I have to guess?”

  “Are you up for a long drive?”

  “Sure,” he says, sipping more coffee, which I’m not entirely sure he needs now. He might be naturally wired. “I told Mom I’d be gone all day, and she’s got the night shift anyway. She’ll never know what time I got back.”

  “Good, ’cause where we’re going is about two hours away.” I put the car in drive and ease it back onto the road. “I thought we’d check out Yellow Springs.”

  “Seriously?” Jamie whispers with reverence. “I’ve wanted to go there forever. Did you know there’s a potter there who uses a kiln that’s over two hundred years old? And one of the watercolor artists there has something hanging in the Louvre? And the glassblower . . .”

  I let Jamie talk as I pull onto the highway, and I feel my lips turn up into a smirk. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Raines is a master at planning dates.

  While I’ll admit that the idea of spending two hours in a car with a shy boy made me a little apprehensive, I’ll also admit that it was a completely unfounded fear.

  Jamie talks all the way to Yellow Springs like I’ve never heard him talk before. About everything, even the stuff that must be difficult. He tells me more about his father, and his father’s disease, and the progression of it over the months before he died. He talks about his mother’s job at the hospital. She’s a neonatal nurse, which is apparently very rewarding but, at times, the hardest of all jobs at the hospital, and it takes an emotional toll on his mom, and sometimes him in turn. I’d had the impression before that his family didn’t have much money, but as I drive he speaks openly about how hard it’s been for him and his mom to handle his father’s medical bills, and I find myself admiring him for working to pitch in, and for the way he’s so unspoiled.

  He gets me talking about my parents, and even though I’m used to their quirkiness, he thinks it’s a riot. I guess to any normal person, living with two eccentrics–slash–college p
rofessors who are hippies that time forgot might be amusing, but to me they’re just Mom and Dad. Still, I tell him how my mother gets herself whipped up into a historian frenzy every time she reads a new thesis on the Founding Fathers, and how my dad does his best writing at three a.m., with a bowl of sugared almonds and a cold Magic Hat #9 on hand.

  By the time we’re swinging around the outer belt of Columbus, we’ve moved on to music (our taste is different enough to be interesting, but not enough to make me cringe), politics (right in line there), and books (not the same at all, but he promises to try a few of my favorites if I give one of his favorite horror novels a chance). Before we pull into the town of Yellow Springs we’ve also discovered that neither of us can sing in tune, that we’re both suckers for cheesy family sitcoms, and that we don’t get the appeal of sushi.

  If I had that stupid list that started this whole thing in my hands, I’d be checking each item off, one by one.

  Yellow Springs hasn’t changed much since the last time I was here, maybe three years ago. It’s like Athens, only grown-up. There’s a sophisticated feel to it all. The pre–Civil War homes and buildings house art galleries, record stores, jewelry shops, libraries, wine cellars, and antique dealers, and the brick streets are alive with collectors and intellectuals and artists.

  I park at the old train depot, which is now a yoga studio, and as Jamie and I climb out of the car, our eyes meet and we grin like idiots. The town feels like a home, a haven, a place where even amateurs like ourselves belong.

  “What first?” I say, taking his hand.

  “The potter? The glassblower? Maybe we could go into that museum over there, the one with the sculpture outside?”

  I look all around myself. I can feel his excitement buzzing like electricity through my hand. And maybe there’s some of mine in there too. “You choose.”

  We start walking, and honestly, I could be happy merely walking the streets all day. Instead, on a cue from a wooden sign, he pulls me a little off the main street through a courtyard with a winding brick path. It meanders around a few shops until coming to a stop outside an old, weathered barn. I’ve never seen a potter work, not in real life anyway, so I have no idea what Jamie’s pulling me toward. Smoke billows in giant black ribbons out of a cylindrical chimney, and through the wide arched doorway of the building I can see flames dancing, orange and red. Even twenty paces away, the heat of the fire licks at my skin.

  There’s a crowd gathered, watching as the potter carefully uses long tongs to pick up pieces of his delicate artwork and lay them inside the giant stove. The crowd is nearly silent, only a few whispers now and then, and after a while I turn to Jamie. He is rapt, studying the whole process with an eager expression on his face that I’ve only seen when he talks about going to art school.

  “Do you do this?”

  “What, me?” he whispers back to me, making it obvious that I shouldn’t have used my full voice to ask. “No. This, um, this isn’t really my medium, you know? But I’ll have to take courses on it at the Institute.”

  The Institute is the art school of his dreams in Chicago. I admit, the last time I was on the Internet, I looked it up. Even without knowing much about art, I could tell it was the place to be for serious students. And okay, maybe when I was online I also looked up art schools in New York City. There are some great ones there, you know, if Jamie would want to, say, be a little closer to NYU. For any particular reason. I squeeze his hand.

  “Tell me how it works.”

  Jamie grins at me, happy to have a moment when he can teach, and starts explaining the process of shaping clay and glazing it and baking it. Most of what he’s saying flies out of my brain, unabsorbed, the minute he says the words out loud, but I memorize the cadences of his speech, the little pauses and lilts that make his words as unique as he is himself.

  Jamie, I decide, would make one hell of a good character for a novel.

  When the potter goes inside and the show is over, Jamie leads the way again. We browse through the potter’s store, but that leads into another store, and another, and then we find ourselves in a painting supply store.

  I can tell Jamie’s in heaven, so I hang back and let him browse. He picks out new brushes and colors for himself. When he’s done, he has two bags, and his face is pink with excitement.

  “You’re a kid in a candy store,” I tease, and he flushes darker.

  “I am. Speaking of, there’s an actual candy store across the street. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  I glance out the window and across the brick road, where a store that has displays like the inside of Willy Wonka’s factory awaits. “If what you’re thinking has anything to do with giant lollipops and chocolate, I’m on board. But then I’m going to need some coffee to balance out the sugar.”

  I’m doing pretty well considering how much I drank last night, but the caffeine from this morning has worn off, and I could use a three-hour nap. Again I feel that twinge of guilt about Travis as Jamie takes my hand and leads me across the street, but it’s forgotten the moment we step inside the shop.

  The candy store smells as good as it looks, and even though I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, I kind of want to buy one of everything. Jamie struggles with his decision and finally ends up choosing one of my favorite candies for himself—those little German raspberries. I buy a pound and promise to split the bag with him after the coffee.

  It’s too chilly to sit outside, so we plop down on an old, broken-in couch inside the coffee shop and sip from antique, mismatched china. Jamie digs into the German raspberries and I smile at him. “Having fun?”

  “I’ve wanted to come here forever,” he says wistfully through a mouthful of candy seeds. “Thank you, Sam.”

  “Feels right, doesn’t it? This place?” Jamie nods in agreement. “I think I’d like to settle down in a place like this to write after I finish school in New York.”

  “Yeah. You’d have so many places to sit and scribble. You’d probably be a regular here, and maybe in that little diner we passed by. And I could paint in the courtyards. Or if we bought one of those beautiful old homes, we could make a studio in the attic.” Jamie’s eyes widen as he realizes what he’s saying and quickly backtracks. “I mean, if we both happened to live here. And, um, you know, in the same house or something.”

  “Jamie,” I say, and I reach out to brush my thumb across his cheek, “I think that sounds great.”

  He lowers his gaze so that he’s smiling up at me through his eyelashes. It’s so damned cute that I put my arm around him and he tucks his legs up under himself and snuggles into me in return. We don’t say much more, and the silence isn’t awkward. I just enjoy his company, his smell, the warmth of him pressed against me. But eventually the coffee runs dry and it’s time to move on.

  “Where next?” I ask.

  Jamie pops one more raspberry into his mouth before rolling up the bag. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I have to go to the bookstore. That’s the only place that’s a must for me. But I’m warning you, I’ll spend hours there, so let’s save it for later.”

  Jamie peers out the window. “How about we go in there?”

  I follow his gaze to a jewelry store window that has displays of lovely sterling silver and semiprecious stone rings and bracelets. I’m not a jewelry guy, but I’ve noticed that Jamie wears a Celtic knotted ring on his right hand, so I nod.

  The inside of the store is almost overwhelming. The jewelry is grouped by color and it seems as if silver and sparkling stones are dripping from every inch of the walls, tables, and display cases all around. There’s an older, round woman with spiky white hair behind the counter, working on twisting silver wire around a large amber stone, and she looks up and offers her help, should we need it. I blurt out how impressed I am before I can temper my awe with a little bit of refinement. She smiles at me over the rims of her bifocals.<
br />
  “Thank you, dear. I made it all, so if you can’t find what you’re looking for, I could probably whip something up for you before you skip town.”

  I thank her, unable to imagine something that’s not already here that I could request.

  I’m lost in the blue topaz section of the store when I notice that Jamie’s been paused for quite some time by a particular glass case. I wander over and peer down. The case is full of cross pendants. Some of them are blackened artfully to look like they could be from the Middle Ages, some are bright and shiny; some are thin and fragile looking, while others seem almost muscular, the silver lines wrapping around themselves like thick, sinewy tissue.

  “Which one is your favorite?” I ask him, and Jamie puts his finger on top of the case, indicating the cross in the middle. It’s a pendant, and one of the few crosses that’s not quite delicate, but not overly masculine either. Its metal strands are braided into a Celtic knot that forms the points of the cross, and it’s very similar to the ring Jamie wears.

  “I didn’t know you were religious,” I say, kicking myself for not thinking to ask on the way here, when we’d been knee deep in other subjects like politics and future plans.

  “I’m not.” Jamie continues to stare at the cross, his expression melancholy. “I mean, I’m not anymore. Mom and I used to go to church. Before Dad got sick. Then she stopped going, so we all stopped going. It was hard to get Dad there anyway, but . . . I think she got tired of her prayers going unanswered.”

  His voice has dropped to a whisper, and I reach down and take his hand, running my thumb over the ridges of his knuckles, trying to comfort him as best as I can.

  “It’s a beautiful story, though, isn’t it?” he asks, turning to me, eyes hopeful. “That there was someone who wanted to save us all.”