by Jude Sierra
Milo is the same as always. Andrew knows he himself has changed—his body finally seems to be letting him grow into it, and what was left of his gangly, coltish and too thin body has stretched into something slim and filled out in good ways. Andrew wonders if Milo noticed that, then shakes his head. Why would he?
It’s dark out, and, when Andrew touches the pane of the window, cold. Too cold for a walk, and cloudy too, so that the night sky blinds his view of the stars. Andrew picks up his journal, rolls off his bed, away from the tempting smell on his pillow, and goes downstairs. The fire his parents built is nothing but glowing embers, but he enjoys them nonetheless. His journal falls open to his last entry, and he takes a few moments to clear his mind before starting the next.
° ° °
WALTHAM FEELS less familiar after Christmas than Andrew expected. He has to work harder to lose himself in the moment. The nights he walks back to his dorm alone, so late sometimes it’s really morning, the air is so stifling, despite the cold, that he imagines the press of the full campus closing in on him. In his bed, skin still painted with the scent and buzz of whatever party he’s left, he’ll ease into sleep, not with the memories of a few hours ago, but of the way the moon paints itself, distorted and quivering in endless motion, on the water of Chickopee, his favorite beach. His heart is always the most open there. Home whispers in a language of familiar longing. Here, in this school skin, he is a different person.
°
Milo is on his way home one night in February, thinking of the email he’ll compose to Andrew, reporting what he’s done and sharing semi-good news, when he decides he’d rather call. It’s late, so he knows the call will be hit-or-miss, but he misses Andrew’s voice.
“Hey,” he says when Andrew picks up. “Is this an okay time?”
“It’s always a good time to call me.”
“Well, no, not really,” Milo says, thinking of the nights Andrew answers drunk, or nights when he doesn’t text back until hours later. Sometimes he over-shares why he’s taken so long. Milo doesn’t much like that, but he can’t tell Andrew what to do, or even why he’s uncomfortable. He isn’t sure why he is, which makes articulating it impossible.
“What’s up?” Andrew asks. He yawns.
“I went to another thing.”
“Oh, awesome! Another movie night?”
“No, more like a mixer thing?”
“That sounds like something straight out of the fifties,” Andrew says, laughing. Milo looks up at his dorm building. It’s so nice out; he’s still getting used to the mildness when he could be home, mired in winter. He doesn’t want to go inside. It’s dark; early nightfalls still press on them.
“Yes, but it wasn’t,” Milo says. “The kids told me about this thing called the Rainbow Floor. A few of them live there.”
“Oh yeah! I remember seeing that on the website. Didn’t I tell you about it?”
“Maybe? I don’t remember, but if it was early last semester, you might have and I forgot. I wasn’t absorbing much.”
“Yeah,” Andrew says softly. “Do you want to live there? Would your father know?”
“No, this is the great part,” Milo says. “They, like, disguise the floor for parent and family weekends as a multicultural floor. Housing Contracts won’t say anything. It’s in the Century dorm, which is nice. There are four-person apartments, a pool, volleyball courts and all sorts of stuff.”
“Wow, that’s swanky. I’m planning on shitty student apartments, houses or crowded dorms. Can I come live with you?”
“Please,” Milo says with feeling, “That would be great.”
“If only.”
Neither speaks for a long moment.
“So do you think you’ll do it?”
“I’m definitely going to check it out.”
“Good,” Andrew says. “Milo?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really proud of you. For going out tonight and everything else.”
Milo watches the stars and treasures the warmth in his stomach and the familiarity of Andrew’s voice. “Thank you.”
° ° °
ANDREW’S SUMMER break ends sooner than Milo’s. Andrew’s worried over it, and tells Milo he hates the thought of leaving him even for a little bit. The months at home have worn Milo by degrees until the carriage and confidence he brought from school have been stripped by his father’s control and words. Occasionally, his father grants Milo nights away from home, no curfew or rules, as a reward for doing so well during his first year of college.
The night before Andrew has to leave, Milo is granted one of these stays. He asked his father with a gut-churning worry over the lie he was telling—a night with other friends—and also because he so badly needed to be with Andrew before he left. His father smiled and clapped him on the back.
They watch movies late into the night. Andrew’s bought all of Milo’s guilty pleasure snacks and planned the order of movies. Milo laughs at some of his choices, but goes along when he sees Juno, which is his favorite.
“How do you possibly think we’ll stay awake for all this? Or that your attention will last that long?”
“Hope springs eternal,” Andrew replies, voice dry, rolling his eyes.
°
Halfway through The Order of the Phoenix, Andrew turns to Milo. “What’s your plan when you go back?”
Milo turns the volume down and looks up to the ceiling. “Deprogram?”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” Andrew turns toward him, head flat on the pillow. His face is sad. The flickering lights of the movie cast strange shadows. “I still suck at making good friends.”
“God, I wish we weren’t so far from each other,” Andrew says.
Milo takes his hands and folds their arms together until Andrew is on his side, close enough to his body to feel the heat radiating from him. He’s always been so much warmer than Andrew’s near-permanent cold state. They’re both comfortable in silence. It speaks to them and for them.
But there aren’t words for the look in Milo’s eyes when Andrew meets them. It’s too dark to see the color, but bright enough for the intensity of his gaze to spark an electric connection they’ve only shared once, when they kissed.
Neither of them move, and Andrew holds that look, and his breath, for too long. Milo presses his lips together and then licks them and Andrew knows, knows that if he wanted, he could tip into the last layer of space between them and kiss him.
Instead, he closes his eyes and tries to breathe and force his mind into a rational frame. Milo is vulnerable now, and so softly open, and he wants, oh, Andrew wants too badly what he knows he can’t have.
“Drew.” Milo’s whisper is barely audible and so different from his usual voice. Andrew feels the breath of the words and opens his eyes to see Milo closing that space between them; everything else slips away then, when Milo’s damp lips and hot breath touch him. He kisses back by instinct, pushing closer, as close as he can, and when the tenor of the kiss changes —when Milo’s lips tremble from hesitant to passionate—Andrew opens his mouth, sucks lightly at Milo’s bottom lip and then welcomes his tongue. He scarcely dares to breathe, terrified to break whatever spell has been cast on this moment.
It’s only when hunger comes over them, when Milo pushes in roughly and Andrew rolls easily onto his back to accept it, that Milo pulls back. He tightens his hold on Andrew’s hands, but when Andrew opens his eyes, Milo’s eyes are closed and his breathing is rough and uneven. “I can’t,” he says in a graveled voice. His eyelids tremble, and he radiates fear and aching longing.
°
When disappointment sags through Andrew’s body, Milo’s disgust with himself swamps every muscle and bone. His body, so close to Andrew’s, and his lips still savoring the taste of that kiss, wants and wants to keep Andrew on his back, roll over him and surround him with the call of his heart and body.
But it would be impossible. Andrew doesn’t need sex from him—he’s not shy about gett
ing it where and when he wants. And while Milo knows he wants it, and that it would be different between the two of them, the thought of letting this friendship with it’s too-much intimacy slide into something else terrifies him. Milo isn’t the one Andrew deserves, someone clean and capable of healthy love.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, because Andrew deserves to know. He tries to tell himself he can’t feel the pain radiating from Andrew. “All I do is drag you down. You deserve better.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that.” Andrew’s voice breaks, and, deep inside, something breaks in Milo as well.
“I wish I could give you what you want,” Milo whispers. “I’m going away in a few weeks. I can’t make promises, and I don’t want to break this. You’re my best friend, Drew.”
Andrew tips his forehead against his. Everything they should say to each other smothers them both. They don’t speak again.
° ° °
FALL COMES with a new room, one not wallpapered with breasts or heavy with the weight either of homophobia, or of the stifling loneliness that plagued him the first year. It will take a few weeks to begin to feel like himself—the new him—again. Milo’s new roommate, Paul, and suitemates, Dave and Will, are a welcome change from Shane. The whole floor is, of course. Milo’s never experienced this level of automatic understanding and community. He doesn’t expect to be best friends or close to anyone just because they all live on Rainbow Floor, but his room is laid out well, and he loves that it’s in an apartment. He shares the space with three other men he doesn’t know, but he likes them all immediately. His first instinct upon moving in is not to try to hide a panic attack. That’s progress.
Once he’s settled in, he organizes his desk, memorizes his schedule and plans a trip to the bookstore. He knows he’ll have to explore the new building soon. For now, though, what he wants is to stretch out on his bed and call Andrew. He rolls onto his bed and thumbs over Andrew’s number, but doesn’t call.
Milo’s first summer home from school passed in a dizzying blur and ended on such a bittersweet note; he wonders how long it will take him to integrate it all and digest it. He plays the best of his summer on a loop, rifling through memories like snapshots—not to find the spaces where he let his father break him down, but to find things to hold on to so far from home.
Lucy and Ted in June, bold in the yellow light of a too-bright bonfire, cajoling everyone out of their clothes and into the water in a blur of Cuervo and laughter. He tries not to remember the long line of Andrew’s spine or the way his skin glowed, because he wasn’t meant to look.
In July Andrew promised to make up for their awkward trip to Provincetown. This time they went with friends. Ted laughed from the backseat at every song Andrew picked as Milo drove. In the rearview mirror he could see Sarah and Lucy squashed next to Ted, one blonde and the other brunette, heads bobbing in time to the music. As they went from one club to club to another, they’d all loosened up, and through the whole night, Andrew stayed with him. By the time they got to the last club, they were all raucous and sweat-dewed from dancing. Milo’s hair began to fall from its hold, and Andrew’s hands were blazing hot, urging him to dance when “Shut up and Dance” came blaring on. A long time ago, when they were kids, Andrew was obsessed with that song with its catching loops and lyrics he couldn’t help but dance to. He remembers the lamp they broke when Andrew turned the music up and forced him to his feet, and laughing the whole time. It was little more than jumping around gracelessly, bumping into each other and laughing loud enough to draw Andrew’s mom up to see what the racket was. She turned the music up louder, kissed them both and went downstairs.
Provincetown that night was like that. Laughing and brave. He danced with Andrew, with his friends and strangers, as if the strings that tied him in his father’s grip, a helpless marionette caught in webs of pain, had been cut. That night he pretended they had.
In August, when even the trees seemed to sweat, he forced Andrew into the woods with planks of plywood and a bag of nails and screws, and a tool belt Andrew cracked up at immediately, to go fix up the old fort. In the winter he’d seen what a wreck the snow and a year of neglect had made of it. Seeing something so important falling apart settled, aching, in his chest and nagged at him until he had to fix it. And fixing it wouldn’t have been the same without Andrew there to complain and swear at him. When the sun dappled between the shifting leaves, trailing shadows over Andrew with his lightened hair and his skin an unbroken smooth tan from days in the sun and in the water, Milo knew he loved this boy so deeply that it seemed impossible to hold it back.
When September called them both away, he mourned his discretion. It hurt them both, but it was better than the hurt he’d inevitably inflict if he took Andrew’s face in rough hands and kept kissing him as sweetly and helplessly as he loves him. When he woke the next morning after that ill-advised kiss, Andrew was boneless and tangled with him, warm and soft and heartbreaking. Staring at the ceiling and feeling too much roiling in his stupid body, he wished for once that Andrew would get mad at him. Because he deserved it, and Andrew’s unwavering forgiveness and understanding seemed like pity for the broken boy he’ll always be.
° ° °
“I KNOW I promised not to judge,” Nat says late one night, “but you’ve been extra…” She’s on Andrew’s beanbag chair with a hand mirror, plucking her eyebrows. The tips of her black hair are white, styled in crazy spiked tufts. Her lips are still stained from the blood red lipstick she wears whenever she leaves her room.
“Extra?” Andrew tries to control the edge in his voice.
“Active? Sad?”
Andrew stops tapping his fingers against her desk and looks at her carefully. She’s watching him with unusual kindness. Nat’s a fun friend, but not a soft person by nature. He sighs. The weight of what passed between him and Milo sits so heavily, crouching at all times, ready to steal his breath with its strength.
“Maybe I am.” He lifts a shoulder and wills a familiar sting from his eyes. “Maybe it’s okay for me to do whatever I have to do to forget some things.”
“Andrew…” She puts down the mirror and moves as if to come closer, but he shakes his head. “What happened? What’s going on?”
“I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Can you tell me why you think what you’re doing is going to make you feel better?”
He stares at the assortment of pens and paper and sticky-notes littered on her desk. Studies the laces of his shoes and the rough texture of the cheap carpet she’s covered the linoleum dorm floors with.
“Are you getting what you need?” Nat asks.
“Maybe one thing.” A door opens and slams shut in the corridor, and the sound of chatter and laughter slinks in from the hall. It’s almost dinner time.
“You’re in love with him, and he’s not in love with you, so you sleep around?”
“No,” Andrew snaps.
“No, you’re not in love with him?” Disbelief is clear in her voice.
“No.” His voice cracks with tears. “He is in love with me. I told myself for a really long time that he wasn’t, even when I thought maybe he was.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“He won’t,” he says. It’s simple to him because, intellectually, he understands. He understands Milo’s fear, yes. But also he knows, even when it makes him feel helpless and angry and resentful, that Milo doesn’t trust it will work, that either of them is capable of making a relationship last.
“So this—” She waves her hand. “Is what, sloppy seconds?”
He winces at her words. “No, not exactly. When I’m with him, there’s something I don’t want from anyone else. A way we’re close, and how comfortable it is to be with him, or next to him or holding him.”
“So let me get this straight. What you’re saying is you get your cuddle on with him, but fuck other people because you can’t get that from him?”
Andrew lets her words sink in, because so ba
ldly put they are like a hit to his stomach.
“I never would have put it that way. It’s… the thought of being really intimate, like that, with anyone else, is—” He bites his lip and searches for the words. “It makes my skin crawl.”
“But you’re a horny nineteen-year-old who has to hump like a rabbit?” Nat jokes. She’s trying to lighten the mood, but he doesn’t appreciate it.
“You make it sound gross. And it doesn’t feel that way to me.”
“Explain.”
“I mean, the sex. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like anything wrong, and I don’t like the way you judge me for it. Or anyone else. Sex is sex to me. I enjoy it. I don’t need or want extra strings attached.”
“You don’t want those together one day? If he really can’t love you like you want him to?”
Andrew realizes suddenly he’s clenched his fists hard enough to hurt. “It’s fucked up when you put it that way,” he admits. She doesn’t say anything, but stands and pulls him into a hug. “I can’t stop hoping that one day…” He sighs. “Why can’t I make my heart behave and understand and be patient or kind or realistic?”
“Because we can’t make our hearts do everything we want.”
chapter seven
His mother’s voice is wavering over the phone line and Milo has to duck his head and cover his ear to hear her. It’s loud in Claire’s apartment; the blare of TV and shouted conversation overpower the sound of his mom’s voice.
“Milo…”
“Mom, is everything okay?” Milo half shouts. His mother calls him once a week, dutifully, Wednesday evenings at seven. Gives him boring town gossip and pretends her calls will keep him tethered to her.
Love can’t save someone who won’t be saved, and it’s taken Milo a while to figure out that no matter what he says, she’ll never leave his father. The crushing guilt of leaving her alone with him almost killed him that first year at USC. It’s easier to forget that her acquiescent silence was as damaging as his father’s special brand of abuse. His summer at home made so many things clear to him. With the bond between him and Andrew slackened, Milo feels less and less responsibility to care about the place that used to be home. California might never feel like home either, but it certainly doesn’t hurt the way Santuit does.