“They’ll be up all night with the caffeine,” I explain.
“Even after snowboarding all day?”
“It was a few hours, not all day,” I say, staring at Kinney, who’s giving me her evil glare. “Trust me.”
After the food comes, sure enough, Kinney stops acting like a pain in the ass. The twins bubble their pop with their straws and twirl butter noodles and pizza cheese around their fingers and pretend the chicken fingers are cigars and it’s dorky but Angus laughs. Which the twins think is totally hot shit; they are crazy and showing off more.
After we get home, Taylor and Kinney want to play video games, so we do that, even though it’s annoying because Kinney keeps making us pause it so she can sneak more snacks into the TV room and I let her but after a while I bust her and say no and then she’s bitchy again. Then I’m not sure if I should make them take a bath or what, because I don’t know the rules of that. I mean, how gross can you get when your sweat doesn’t stink yet?
So, they watch a movie they’ve seen a thousand times, about this time-traveling orphan girl. Taylor looks half asleep, slumped on the other side of Angus, under her ducky blanket. But I’m worried that if I tell them it’s time for bed, they’ll revolt and freak out. That’s how they usually roll with my mom and Jay.
Brandy’s texted me a couple times. I don’t text back. I click the phone off and put it on the bookshelf behind me.
“All right,” Angus says, the second the credits wrap. “That was super good, but we should get you guys to bed.” Taylor is asleep. Kinney is pretending, but I don’t know if Angus can tell. I pick up Taylor, ducky blanket and all, and carry her. She farts as I lift her up, which is funny, but she doesn’t even wake up from that.
It’s kind of miraculous, how we get them into Taylor’s bed. They have to sleep in the same room, even though they each have their own room, but they each have a double bed, because they’ve always slept with someone else and can’t go to sleep on their own. Taylor is pretty much comatose and barely moves once I lay her down. Kinney I’m not sure about, though her eyes are closed. But it’s pretty much the easiest bedtime I can remember for my sisters.
Angus slips downstairs, his feet in socks light and silent. I turn on Taylor’s green swirling pinwheel lamp that they use for a night-light. They both have the same one. If Kinney wakes up without it, she screams. The second I do, though, Kinney wakes up.
Fuck.
“Will?”
“Yeah?” I almost don’t want to answer.
“Is Angus staying over too?”
“Yes,” I say. Though we’ve not talked about this.
“Oh good,” she says. “Let’s have pancakes with him tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. And she curls up toward her sister and shuts her eyes. I stand there for a couple more minutes. Worried any move I make will make her eyes flip open again.
I listen to the whir of the pinwheel light. My sisters’ breathing. Angus turning on the sink in the kitchen. I wait a long time, breathing slow like they are. Like I want to fall asleep standing up. It feels like forever but I want to make sure.
When I get down to the TV room, Angus is on the couch, flipping through the channels, trying to switch the TV from the DVD player, which no one really knows how to do but me and Taylor and Kinney. Jay usually just quietly asks Kinney to fix it for him so he can watch his own channel, or slips upstairs to the bedroom to watch his own simple TV. My mom thinks TV is terrible and never bothers with it until she wants my sisters out of her hair.
“What do you want to watch?” I say, taking the remote from him and sitting down on the other side of the couch and hitting the right buttons to make it go back to being regular TV. My mom and Jay have about three trillion choices of regular channels, plus every sports pass, plus a million pay-per-view things. We could watch an entire show in the time it takes just to scroll through the menu of options. It’s fucking annoying as hell.
Plus I’m annoyed too. With myself. Because we’re alone and I know what I want. But I don’t know how to make it happen.
“Hey,” he says.
“What.”
“Jay got any beer?”
“Probably. But I wouldn’t bother with it.”
“Why?”
I explain how my mom talked to me before they left. Not that Jay counted his beers or anything, but I just didn’t want to deal with it.
“All right.”
“You out of weed?”
“No.”
“Did you bring it with you?”
He looks at me like I’m an idiot, this well, yeaaaahh look on his face.
“So,” I say. “Let’s smoke out.”
“There’s not much left.”
“But you just bought a bunch from Carl’s roommate?”
He shrugs. I think for the first time, that unless he shared that bag he just bought, that he smokes kind of a lot of weed.
“It’s kind of shit weed,” he says. “Plus, I just don’t feel like it. I feel like drinking. Do you have any popcorn?”
“Yeah,” I say. We go into the kitchen and I do a couple of bags in the microwave while he looks through cupboards.
“Look!” he says. “Boxed wine!”
“God,” I say.
“Ah, who gives a damn,” he says. He gets out two plastic cups, the kind Kinney and Taylor use for their milk at dinnertime, and fills them up.
“Easy on that,” I say.
He hefts the box. “There’s a shit ton in there. They’ll never notice.”
“Want to play cards?” I ask.
I don’t want to go back into the dark TV room again. So we play a few rounds of hearts, but it’s boring with two people.
He gets up for more wine.
“You know the guy who’s living at your dad’s now? That guy whose house we went swimming at?”
“What?”
“Roy,” he says, handing me a full plastic cup again. “What’s his deal, anyway?”
“He’s living at my dad’s?”
“That’s what he said,” Angus says. “Ran into him at this coffee shop in Uptown. I was trying to get a gig there but the guy was a dick. Roy was there, getting coffee or whatever. Told me he was back in town. Helping your dad out. Staying at the house too. His parents are pissed that he bailed on college, I guess.”
“Whoa,” I say. “I mean, I can see why they’d be pissed.” Then I fill Angus in on Roy, the whole secondhand story he told me, about the drugs and the jail and the dead baby and how he’s a lot older and everything.
“He’s twenty-five?” Angus asks. “He’s as old as Carl.”
“Carl’s twenty-five? He seems so much younger. Or older. I can’t decide with him.”
“Roy seems older to me,” Angus says. “But I think that’s only because he has, like, a decent family. Money and stuff. Carl’s had a fucked-up life. Did you know his mom used to make him and his brother eat cat food? And she would beat the shit out of them too. He said she’d hold his hands to the stove fire until he’d blister.”
“What?”
“I know,” he says. “He told me he was happy when she died, because then it was just him and his brother.”
“But didn’t his brother die too?”
“Yeah,” Angus says. “I mean, talk about shit luck. He lived in, like, seven foster homes too. And that was in only two years, before he turned eighteen.”
“How do you know all that shit?”
“His roommate told me,” he says. “I went over there last week.”
I’m surprised he went over there for more pot, especially if it’s crap. But I’m also surprised he’d just go over there alone, without me. Not that I want to supervise his pot deals, but I wouldn’t have done that. I’d have felt shy and weird about it. And anyway, how much fucking weed is he smoking lately?
“Where’d Garrett dig him up, I wonder.”
“Maybe he just applied for a job.”
“Huh,” I say. Swigging more wine. It s
eems like Carl’s been working at Time to Eat his whole life. Like, if Time to Eat were a box that you open up, like a kit you assemble, Carl would just come with the whole set.
But Roy? At my dad’s? What the hell is that?
We play another round of cards. It seems like every game we get sick of even one time: Gin, Gin Rummy, Crazy Eights. Next thing I know we’re playing Go Fish, which is stupid, but I’m feeling a little buzzed.
“So,” Angus says, laying down a match of two sixes. “I went out on a date with a girl last week.”
TWENTY
“WHO?” I ASK. I’m trying not to be shocked.
“You know her,” he says. “She’s in the band.”
“Rubber-ducky girl?”
“Her name is Cora.” He laughs. “Used to be Andrew’s girlfriend, way back.”
“The pussy-stupid guy?”
He laughs again. “Not anymore,” he says.
“So? What the hell? And what about the coffee-shop dude?” I don’t even know what to ask first.
He shrugs. “Who knows. She was the one who asked me,” he says. “So we went. Saw a movie. Then we ate pie at this shithole place in Minneapolis.”
“Okay.”
“Then we went to her house and made out for a while. Her parents were home the whole time.”
“Really.”
“Yeah,” he says. “She didn’t seem to give a shit, either. I told her I was gay a million times. But she didn’t seem to care, or think it mattered. Was, like, stuffing my hand down her pants, and her parents were downstairs. Watching TV. It was kind of crazy.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah. Fucking insane. I don’t think Andrew’s missing anything.”
“Dude, what are you doing with her, anyway? What the fuck?”
“I just wanted to see,” he says. “You have that one girl. I’ve never done that. Never even occurred to me. But I figured, she asked, and then she went for it, and then I thought, why not give it a chance.”
“So, did you like it?” I am so embarrassed to ask but I do because I’m tired of fucking waiting for him to get to the goddamn point.
“No,” he says. “But then again, I’ve never liked Cora. So that was working against it, probably.”
I wonder if he got hard with Cora. Even half hard? A quarter hard? Does it matter if you don’t like the person? I can get hard just thinking about touching Brandy like he said he touched Cora. But then, I’m weird. There’s something beyond wrong with me, beyond gay, beyond anything else. I’m addicted or something. To lying. I’m as bad as my dad. Selfish. Bad as my mom too.
“What do you want to play next?” he asks. “Are we down to War? Slapjack?”
He’s waiting me out again. Just like at Jack’s party. If he’s not waiting for me to do it, then I don’t know what he’s doing.
“I’m going to bed, man,” I say, like it’s nothing.
“Okay,” he says.
I take a piss. Brush my teeth—my mouth is red and winey, like I’ve been drinking blood. When I go to my room, Angus is lying on the couch in the TV room, flipping through the channels.
Whatever. This is so fucked up. I’m embarrassed at myself for wanting it. For being so sure of it on the ski lift.
I get in bed and feel like I’m going to be there a thousand years. But I do fall asleep, the TV noise from the other room like some kind of hypnotizing static.
It’s almost like the first time I was at his house. I wake up because Angus is beside me. “Will,” he whispers.
I’ve been dreaming sex stuff. Not with him, or with Brandy, either. Just me, feeling it, hard. Me, looking for it. In a way I’ve never been looking for it in my life: on purpose, walking around, stalking it like some kind of animal.
“Shove over a little,” he says.
And I do, I roll to the inside of the bed until I’m next to the wall. His breath is hot on my neck. I know why he’s here and I’m hard and he knows it, because it’s the second thing he touches, after he touches me right between my shoulder blades, his hand running up my back smooth and quick, pulling my shirt off. And then I roll over and I kiss him. I kiss him so hard. I suck on his tongue.
I say, into his mouth, “I want you to fuck me so bad.” I can’t believe I say it but it comes out and I’m kind of happy about it. One of us should be clear about this, for once.
He smiles, but keeps kissing me. His mouth is sloppy. Wet. Tastes like wine.
Then he says, “No.”
I’m quiet. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s something I would say to Brandy. I think he’s going to leave for a minute, but then he’s standing up, taking off his shirt, undoing his belt, dropping his jeans. Pushing down his boxer briefs. His dick is huge and hard. I can see it in the Christmas lights from the outside of the house blinking in through the window.
“You’re not ready,” he says. “And it kind of hurts.”
I don’t want to know how he knows this. He could have this whole other secret life—he probably has this whole other secret life. But there’s no way I can be jealous.
“How do you know?”
“Because I love you, Will,” he says, and gets back in the bed with me. And then, even though this doesn’t answer the question, I don’t care how he knows what he knows. All I know is I have his dick in my hand, and then in my mouth and then it’s both of us doing that, back and forth. There’s no more waiting around. No more television, no more card games, no more boxed wine. I could laugh out loud I’m so happy to be here, on the other side of all that wondering and waiting.
But I don’t laugh out loud. We have to be quiet, I tell him. He understands. And we are: so quiet. I see his face in the light from the window. A big mess of us sucking and rubbing and rolling over onto each other. I have done things like this, in this same bed, with Brandy, but they are so different. The things Brandy can do are different. The things Angus can do are different. Both different. Both good.
My whole body’s tense and open and shivering and I’m nervous too, for some reason, but at the same time, I’m happy. So happy.
Because I love you, Will.
I come so hard I don’t even know where I am for a while.
When I finally open my eyes, he’s not in the bed. I freak a little: he’s gone? Did I dream it? But then he’s there, again, a blur against the Christmas lights from the window, where the sky is lightening, just by a shade though. I’m lying on my back, stark naked, looking up at him as he wipes me down with a towel from the bathroom. I’m nervous, imagining him naked, in the house. My sisters could have seen him.
“Are they still asleep?” I ask.
“Must be,” he says. His hair is curly and shaggy, a lot longer; it looks like he’s gotten taller. Bigger somehow.
I feel fucking amazing.
I should not feel this good.
Then he bends over and kisses me. Soft, then rough. Tongues. Stubble against stubble. I want him to get back into bed with me and fall asleep. I want it so hard that it almost hurts me. I wonder if he can tell, if he can feel it coming off me, how much I want him to stay.
I’m embarrassed of how much I want to have them both, Brandy and Angus, forever, separately, but forever, always. I can’t stop it, can’t stand it: the way I have to tuck that inside myself so no one sees how much I want. How much I always, always want.
But then he pulls back and wipes himself off with the towel before dropping it on the floor and finding his clothes again. I roll on my stomach as he puts his clothes back on. And then he’s gone. Back on the couch to sleep. Where Kinney and Taylor find him first thing in the morning, like some kind of living Christmas present, and we’re all having pancakes together, pretending everything is normal.
He stays over the second day too. It’s not weird, given the history of us hanging out and how it’s been; a text to his mom and she’s fine with it. I can’t tell him not to. And Taylor and Kinney love it, I swear, because it’s like having new parents, except neither of us ever get that mad at the
m.
He goes home to change clothes after breakfast, brings back the same box of wine that we swiped from my mom, slips it into the fridge.
“What’d you do that for?” I ask, my eye on the TV room where Kinney and Taylor are glued to the TV in their pajamas.
“I kind of finished it off last night after you went to bed.” He grins.
“Where did you get it?” I nod toward the new box. He’s wrapping the old one in a plastic bag and tying it up. He’ll probably stuff it at the bottom of the trash, which gets picked up tomorrow morning. We’ve been doing this sneaking-around shit for a long time, me and Angus. We could write a book on how to get away with shit.
“Must have been on sale,” he says. “We had a bunch of it left over from Christmas.”
I think about what my dad said about where my mom lives, how everything’s the same, how you could drive up to the wrong house if you were drunk and not realize it wasn’t yours until you got into bed.
Brandy texts me again; she also called while Angus stepped out, but I didn’t pick up. She wants me to call her but I can’t make myself do that. She’s upset (are u mad at me? are we breaking up?) so I need to come up with an explanation. Because she’ll probably have called Time to Eat by now. And I’m not the kind of idiot who forgets to charge his phone.
I text her quick that I got stuck watching my sisters. Text her that I’m sorry I didn’t reply. Say that Kinney got sick, which is a lie, but I don’t want Brandy to feel shitty.
She texts back immediately, saying that sucks and that she’s been stuck at home all weekend, the snow’s been terrible and there aren’t any plows on the roads and she’s so bored. I tell her I can call her later. I hope that’s okay.
Angus comes up behind me, where I’m sitting at the table, staring at my phone, and he reaches around my chest and squeezes, then says, soft into my ear, “What do you want to do today, then?”
Cut Both Ways Page 21