The Anatomy of Perception

by AJ Rose

  “Dude,” I said, a little miffed but trying not to be. “Stop trying so hard.”

  “I know,” he said, backing off. “I’m sorry, it’s just, I’m so glad you’re home. So glad. And I know I’m hovering and being annoying as hell.”

  A fresh wave of guilt stabbed my chest. He’d lived in this place, where I’d fallen apart, alone for the last six weeks. He’d been faced with cleaning up my mess and then staring at the space my absence had forged every single day. I could throw him a bone, right?

  “Lie down with me for a few minutes?” My voice was small, like asking anything of him was so unfair because I’d already asked for everything in desiring his acceptance of the new, breakable me.

  “Of course.” He didn’t hesitate, just stripped off his shirt and jeans and slid between the sheets. I was enticed by all that skin, and while I’d originally intended to just lie down, I too stripped to my underwear, just so I could feel him again.

  “I’m not… up for anything,” I said as I settled into his arms, my head pillowed on his biceps.

  “I know,” he assured, stroking my skin where he could reach and drinking me in as though his skin were a giant sponge and I were a lake. It was heaven.

  “I don’t even know if I could be up for anything if I wanted to be,” I complained. “Drugs fuck with my plumbing.” Yet another deficit I would have to owe him.

  “Don’t worry about that right now,” he said. “We’ll cross that bridge if we have to, okay?”

  “Okay.” I nodded into the crook of his neck and tried to relax. God, he smelled so good, felt so warm and soothing to me, I momentarily forgot that I was a shell of my former self, and that there was still so much work to be done. For a long while, it was just me and him, existing. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, the toll I’d taken on our relationship. Maybe we could bounce back from this.

  When I woke up sometime later, it took me a minute to orient myself and realize Craig wasn’t in bed anymore and I was cold again. He’d slipped out to lock himself in the bathroom, and though he was quiet, I heard his anguished crying through the door.

  There is no bouncing back from this.

  “Dammit, Dane, quit signing me up on dating sites! I don’t want anyone besides you.”

  Ooh, Craig was angry this time. I’d invited someone from Grindr over and the guy hadn’t been pleased when he’d been turned away before he even got in the door. Craig had taken one look at the wife-beater tank top, the basketball shorts that clearly shouted freeballing, and had just shut the door in the dude’s face. A couple unhappy thumps with his fist and a vicious name spat through the cracks, and the guy had left.

  “I wouldn’t call Grindr a dating site, exactly,” I qualified, moving away from him to the living room to curl up in a chair in the fetal position.

  “Why are you doing this?” Craig pleaded.

  “Because you need someone better. Someone who can have sex with you and who can make you feel good and inspire you. You haven’t painted in the near month since I’ve been home.”

  “Yeah, well I kind of have a lot on my mind lately. I get my kicks at work.”

  “Oh, is there someone there you might like to hook up with?” I asked hopefully. “Maybe you could land one of the execs and live out a suit-porn fantasy or something.”

  “Goddammit!” He let out a frustrated groan, not shouting but not happy either. Sometimes I wished he would shout at me. I was really infuriating, I knew. Maybe he’d feel better if we had a spat. Maybe he’d feel better if he could tell me to fuck right off. Maybe I could make him so mad at me, he’d make the choice to end it.

  A blossom of an idea took hold.

  “If you don’t have someone at work, I can keep looking. Online at least. I’m not up for clubbing, though that’s your best bet.”

  “Why are you trying to find me someone else?”

  I sighed, sick of this conversation. “Listen to me, Craig. I’ve answered this before. Two minutes ago, even. You can do better than me. I am dead weight. I am holding you back. Go. Find someone who makes you want to draw on sidewalks again.”

  He let out an anguished curse. “There is only one person on this planet capable of making me fly like that. Stop being an asshole and bring that guy back.”

  “Don’t you get it? I can’t.” I held out my hands, palms up, then slapped them against the chair’s arms and wrapped them around my legs again. “He’s gone, so you should try to find another guy who might make you fly.”

  He moved to the steps and stomped up them, probably toward the bathroom so he could lock me out and cry. “I mean it, Dane. No more fucking dating sites.” Storming out of sight, he slammed the bathroom door.

  “Why did you take me off your visitor’s list?” Sabrina demanded, pushing into the loft despite my telling her it wasn’t a good time. Craig wasn’t home and I didn’t like being visited by anyone when he wasn’t there, let alone Sabrina. He hadn’t asked questions when I told him I didn’t want to see her after I’d gotten home, but he’d also been really good about keeping her away. I suppose I should have just put her on the doorman’s banned list.

  “Sabrina, this isn’t a good time,” I said again.

  “It never is. Craig says you’re not up for visitors, you’re away at appointments, you’re sleeping, you’re never free, so I had to sit outside your building and wait for him to leave. You can’t send me away now.”

  Falling in an icy lake couldn’t have frozen me in my tracks faster. “You’ve been watching our building?”

  Threat of danger, check. From a visible source? Yes. Easily neutralized? No. Level of danger? Unknown. Time to panic? Unknown. My pulse picked up speed and my palms slicked with sweat.

  “Dane, I didn’t know when else I could talk to you. I wanted to apologize.”

  I backed into the kitchen, leaning against the far wall, crossing my arms over my chest and putting my foot flat on the wall by my knee, jutting my leg out so no one could invade my space. No one could surprise me from behind and I had my front covered.

  “Go on,” I said cautiously.

  “I was out of line that last time, high on hero-worship and desperate to get Adam to notice me. He already had; he just hadn’t made his move yet. I think he was dating someone and wanted to end it before making an attempt to get to know me better.”

  Still all about her. “Okay, so you don’t need me. Is that all?”

  “Dane,” she pleaded. “I’m here to say I was an asshole and I would like to be friends again.”

  I don’t need friends like you. “I’m not such a great friend to anyone right now. I don’t have a lot of energy left over for other people.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry you feel like you can’t trust me.”

  That’s not an apology for breaking my trust in you. That’s an apology for me feeling like I can’t trust you, which puts the blame back on me. It was amazing how unclouded my judgment was, now that I’d done some deep soul searching and had a professional’s arsenal of tricks in place to recognize when I was being manipulated.

  “Well, you’re not exactly inspiring me to reconsider, barging in here like this when I’ve said it’s a bad time.”

  “I only wanted to apologize, Dane. I miss my friend.”

  In a way, it was nice to hear. And while I knew it would be a very bad move to consider rekindling our friendship after her last threat, she did offer the kind of shallow friendship that wouldn’t set off my guilt. I considered us totally even, so I really owed her nothing.

  While I was mulling over her words, she’d sidled closer to where she was, almost touching my jutted out knee. She wore a black tank top beneath a sweater so lacy you could see through it, and while it could have been slutty, it was actually elegant. A pencil skirt finished off her outfit, giving her a professional demeanor with a hint of sass. Her perfume was powerful, not at all subtle like Holly’s, and it turned my stomach. I dropped my knee and straightened, ready to bolt if she got any closer.


  “Don’t you miss me too?” she asked, rubbing her flat stomach like she was uncomfortable.

  “Sometimes I miss being able to laugh with someone about things I shouldn’t think,” I conceded.

  “There were some good jokes you had to leave unsaid while you were checked into that place, weren’t there?” she asked, her eyes glinting knowingly as she grinned.

  I couldn’t help but grin back. “Yeah, there were some really funny and rude ones I had to swallow. Pity. You’d have liked them.”

  She took another step.

  “How are you?” The question seemed sincere, and though I was wary of her, I was beginning to doubt that maybe she was only visiting for her own purposes. Maybe she was telling the truth: that she wanted to be friends. We’d had the sort of flirty, arm-slung-over-the-shoulder friendship that had relieved pressure in stressful situations, and boy, that sounded nice right about now.

  “I’m okay. Hanging in there.”

  “Getting better? Glad to be home?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded in agreement. “Real food again, not that I have a big appetite anymore. But at least what I do eat is food and not a science experiment.”

  Her hand settled on my side, just above my waist. I stiffened.

  “You look better than you did last time I saw you,” she said. God, was she sincere? I couldn’t tell, even though she sounded like it.

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, you shaved.” Her hand came up to touch my jaw, and she stepped even closer. There was no way I could mistake her intentions now, and though she wasn’t touching me anymore, she was so close I couldn’t move without possibly knocking into her.

  “The beard itched.” Why couldn’t I tell her to leave?

  Her palms landed on my cheeks and I tried to disappear into the wall at my back. “Don’t be nervous,” she murmured, and I felt her breath across my lips.

  Alarms were going off inside my head, but I couldn’t move. Her touch had me on the verge of panic, and I concentrated on staving that off because it would be utterly humiliating if I had a flashback or panic attack in front of her. Because of her. She’d know she held power over me.

  Then her lips were on mine, and I grimaced, but she didn’t see or feel it, because her eyes were closed, and she was concentrating on prying my lips open with her tongue. I gave a muffled protest, but with my head trapped against the wall, I couldn’t pull back. I had nowhere to go. I put my hands up to push her off me, and she sighed when they landed on her breasts. Taking that as a sign, she hiked up her skirt and leaned fully into me, reaching down to grip my limp dick. When she didn’t get the reaction she wanted, her brow went up in surprise. She was perfectly willing to give more coaxing in the form of more aggressive rubbing and hiking her leg over my hip.

  In that moment, I was thankful for the drugs and their effect on my arousal capabilities, because I still didn’t get hard, even with friction. Thank god for homosexuality combined with anti-depressants.

  My hands found her hips, and I realized she wore no underwear. I wanted to recoil in horror, but instead I pushed at her, keeping my lips clamped shut until she couldn’t maintain the kiss anymore.

  “No,” I grunted.

  “Is there a problem?” she demanded.

  “You,” I whispered just as the door opened and Craig walked in. Something detonated somewhere inside me and I knew, without having to see his face, the beat of silence in the room was only because that explosion had sucked the oxygen from the vicinity, and it would be a moment before it rushed in and all hell broke loose.

  “Get the fuck out!” Craig shouted, for the first time in my memory.

  Sabrina turned and slowly, deliberately, pulled down her skirt, a cruel upturn to her mouth. “This is only the goodbye kiss, dear. Deed’s already done, and he’s too satisfied now to get it up again anyway. I’ll see you at the hospital, Dane.”

  Her gall floored me, and I stared as she disappeared out the door.

  Craig’s face went from rage to stone in two seconds flat as he turned from her to me.

  “Is she lying?” he asked, voice flat, almost whispery, as if his shout had been the only one he could manage.

  There it was: my opportunity to get him to move on to someone who could make him happy. The bloom of an idea I’d had the day of the Grindr guy suddenly opened in a spray of petals and color. This was my way out. Could I stomach him hating me for this?

  What does it matter, as long as he finds someone to make him happy again?

  And so I looked from the door to his barely contained ferocity, and I lied.

  “No. She’s not lying.”

  “Pack your shit. You can get out too,” he said, spitting the words.

  I could only nod, keeping a wide berth between us as I circled past him to the stairs. Ten minutes later, I had my clothes in a duffle, my toiletries in a shave bag, and I had taken a box from the closet that had contained old shoes, which I’d dumped on the floor. He could deal, and I needed the box for my medical texts. Stuffing my phone charger in it after the books, I was out the door and out of my old life in less than fifteen minutes. When I’d gotten down to the living room for my books, Craig was nowhere to be found.

  In the elevator ride to the lobby, I called Holly.

  “Can I stay with you for a couple days? It’s over.”

  It was the right thing to do. Even if it felt like the icicle in my heart was back.

  “Of course, hon. Come on over.”

  “You’re the best.”

  “Not next to you,” Holly said with all the sincerity in the world.

  I said goodbye to Gerald, who waved down a passing cab for me, saying nothing about my burdens, simply wishing me a good day.

  As I rode to Holly’s apartment, watching the city I’d called home for going on seven years, I let myself grieve, and that icicle became a sharp knife, sawing off half my heart and leaving it in Queens with the memory of a man I loved enough not to drag into the pits of Hell with me.

  I only hoped one day he would understand.

  Present Day

  “You gentlemen have a good trip,” Gerald said, slamming the trunk after having deposited Craig’s overnight bag beside mine. I shook his hand with a ten-dollar bill folded in my palm, smiling genuinely at the man.

  “Thanks. Keep the cuckoos away while we’re gone.”

  He tipped his hat at me and playfully clicked his heels. “That’s m’job.”

  I laughed as I got in the driver’s seat and looked over my shoulder to pull out of the loft’s loading zone into traffic. For 9:00 a.m. on a Thursday, there were quite a few cars on the road. I was a bundle of nerves, mainly for the purpose of the trip, but also because I hadn’t driven a lot since moving to New York. Thankfully, the 495 entrance was only a few blocks from the loft, and once I was on the highway, I was fine.

  Craig seemed to understand this, and mostly kept conversation light or simply hummed along with the playlist he’d shuffled up on his iPod as soon as we’d gotten in the car. He knew we were going to West Virginia, but he wasn’t completely aware of why. It was time to tell him.

  “So, I know I told you I wanted to visit my mother’s and brother’s graves and maybe meet Sherrilyn, Dylan’s wife, but there’s another reason I’m going back to that place.” I swallowed, and my palms got slick. Craig seemed unfazed, plucking my hand from the wheel and twining our fingers in his lap.

  “Okay.”

  “My dad’s in prison about forty-five minutes from where I grew up. I’m not sure I’ve got the balls, but while we’re there, I thought maybe I could pay him a visit.”

  Studying my profile while I drove with more concentration than was actually required for the traffic conditions, Craig merely raised my knuckles to his lips.

  “Whatever you need,” he promised. “I knew when you asked me to go back to West Virginia with you, it would be to reconcile with your past. However you need to do that, I’ll be by your side.”

  I smiled at him, grateful, th
en put my eyes back on the road. I really should get a car. Driving was more fun than I remembered, but then again, maybe it was the company. Craig turned up the volume, and we spent the first couple hours of the six-and-a-half-hour drive playing music trivia with the songs on his iPod, well into Pennsylvania. We stopped just outside Harrisburg for lunch, and a food coma sent Craig into nap land for a portion of the drive. When he awoke, he took over the last two hours, assuring me that since I’d gotten a rental car with the GPS, he’d be able to get us into the state no matter how many different highways we had to take, and urging me to get my own nap in.

  “You look like you could use the rest. Did you sleep at all last night?”

  Pulling off the highway at a cluster of gas stations and fast food restaurants, we swapped sides and I laid the seat back while he smoothly navigated back to the highway.

  “Not as much as I should have for the drive,” I admitted. “A cat nap won’t hurt.”

  But I’d underestimated my depth of fatigue, and I didn’t rouse again until we were slowing to turn off Highway 50, the GPS bleating at us to go left in so many feet. Blearily, I looked around at the naked trees and the bland winter landscape, trying to get my bearings. A lot had changed in the nearly fourteen years since I’d left and never looked back. Sure, there were still landmarks I recognized, places I’d frequented as a teenager, or neighborhoods I’d remembered going through to hang out with friends, but a lot of the commercial real estate was far more built up than I recalled.

  The hotel was nice, one of those extended stay places, but it was nearly brand new. Not wanting to cause issues when we checked in, I’d not bothered to fix the reservation from two standard queen beds to a single king. The clerk didn’t bat an eye at giving a key to one room to two grown men, and Craig made no mention of the separate beds, at least not in front of anyone. I wouldn’t have minded if he had, except I couldn’t be sure if the townspeople were any more accepting now than they had been when I’d grown up there.

  Once inside the room, I dropped my bag on the bed near the window and drew Craig to me, hooking my hands at the small of his back.