Gretchen shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like her.” And that was Gretchen, as straightforward about her feelings as she was about everything else.
I smiled at her and she smiled back, seeming to shed any uncertainty. “We’ll see how things go. She thinks I’m too young, I think.”
“God, what’s up with that?” I said, thinking back to Tariq’s comment in the park.
“I get where she’s coming from, though, I guess,” Gretchen said, calm logic firmly back in place. “It’s not a personal indictment. But we are at different places in our lives. We’ve had different experiences. We know ourselves differently.”
“Ugh, stop being so annoyingly mature and logical. This is feelings stuff! Feelings stuff isn’t logical.”
“‘Annoyingly mature and logical’—can I quote you on that to Layne?”
“I’m sure she already knows. She’s annoyingly logical too. Clearly you’re meant for each other.”
It was a divisive episode, with Milton and Gretchen taking Noel’s side and Thomas and me in the Felicity camp. Charles, as usual, was only partly paying attention to the content of the show. Today he was stuck on the conviction that they hadn’t shot a scene where it was set because the traffic was going in the wrong direction for that street.
“But don’t you admire how she tells him how she really feels? See—” I turned to Gretchen. “—the radical truth, like Layne says.”
“I… don’t think that’s what she means by that,” Gretchen said.
“Well, okay, but this is still about telling the truth.”
“Mmm, I think there’s a big difference between forcing yourself to look at things honestly and blabbing out your personal truth because it makes you feel good,” Gretchen said.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I think it’s brave to just put it all out there like that. I could never do that; I’d be too scared of rejection.”
“But Felicity doesn’t tell the truth because she’s brave,” said Gretchen. “She tells the truth as a compulsion. She tells the truth because she doesn’t want to have to handle her emotions on her own. She makes people complicit in them.”
“Well, I think she doesn’t know what she wants sometimes too,” Milton chimed in, “so she tells the truth hoping that someone will make the decision for her. Take it out of her hands.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she just wants genuine connections with people. And she doesn’t think you can have that if you don’t tell the truth, even when it’s hard or it makes someone uncomfortable. And she does know what she wants, it’s just different from day to day. Like, she pays attention to how her feelings change. They’re still real, even if they’re not consistent.”
“I like Meghan,” asserted Charles from across the room, perched on the filing cabinet to see the schedule he’d tacked high on the wall.
He was taking a one-credit sports medicine class this semester to fulfill some arcane distribution requirement and was developing systems to integrate movement into his daily schedule, which included putting things around the room in configurations that required him to climb over furniture or jump on top of it to access them.
He’d relocated his underwear to the top of my closet and his socks to under his bed so the two things he’d usually reach for at the same time were as geographically distant as you could get in our room—notably smaller than the dorms in Felicity—and begun plugging his laptop into the farthest outlet from his desk with a system of extension cords that I was certain would one day kill either me or his computer.
“No surprise there,” Milton muttered, looking around. “Your senses of décor are about on par.”
I LET myself into Will’s apartment with the keys I still had from January, sniffing myself to try and determine just how much like milk I smelled. I’d come right from work, figuring Will was just going to pull my clothes off pretty soon after I got there anyway, the way he had the last few times I’d seen him. I had stopped briefly to get a piece of tiramisu, though. Hopefully even if I reeked of coffee shop, the tiramisu would make up for it. It was Will’s favorite, and I knew work stuff had been stressing him out the last few weeks.
He’d been staying late and bringing more work home than usual. He still hadn’t decided what to do about Gus’ offer to go into business for themselves, and he was having a problem with a client whose agent wanted him to produce a cover that would change the face of publishing even though the book she was representing was the third in a pedestrian series.
When I opened the door, I heard a noise from the direction of the bedroom. A low groan. Unmistakably Will. For a moment I held myself suspended in a bubble of fantasy that I was about to walk in on the super hot scene of Will jerking off. He’d be startled to see me at first, but then I’d sit on the edge of the bed and touch him as he pleasured himself. Run my hands over his thighs and between his legs. Suck on his nipples and dip my tongue in his belly button to feel how it changed the way his hand moved on his cock.
Then the bubble burst.
Another groan. This one decidedly not Will.
I should’ve left. I should have taken the tiramisu and backed out the door like I’d never been here at all.
But I didn’t leave. I closed the door behind me carefully and, holding the tiramisu in front of me like a ward, crept toward the bedroom, all the time I’d spent here bent to the purpose of getting there without making a sound so I could see for myself something that Will had insisted upon a hundred times: that he fucked other people.
I pushed the bedroom door open thinking that I knew how I was going to feel because I already felt that way. Gutted. Shredded. Devoured.
But though he had told me a dozen times over the months I’d been here, Will’s words were no inoculation. It was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.
Because I’d only thought about how it would feel to see Will with someone else. I hadn’t thought about how it would be to see another man with Will. Touching him. Kissing him. Doing all the things to him that I did. Making me totally redundant in Will’s life.
The door swung open on a scene so vivid it took me a moment to process the details. Will, on the bed, groaning as a man kissed him, bit his neck, pulled his hair back, hips grinding together, Will in just his underwear, the other man still half dressed. It was both intimate and impersonal, intense physical closeness with purely functional touch.
I must’ve made some horrible, broken sound because Will craned his head around the guy’s shoulder and looked at me. For a moment, I saw something in his eyes that I could read: panic, maybe, or regret. Then his face went blank and shuttered. He struggled underneath the man for a moment before the guy realized he was trying to sit up.
Distantly I heard a wet crunch, and I searched the bed for a detail I’d missed, slowly becoming aware that it was the sound of the tiramisu I’d been holding hitting the ground, its plastic clamshell cracking as it splattered on the floor.
Will shouldered the man to the side and scrambled off the bed, pulling on the same sweatpants that I’d pulled down the other morning when I’d dropped between his knees on the couch and sucked him until he was clutching my hair and cursing at me to let him come, his hands soft afterward, brushing over my cheeks and jaw and settling on my neck as we gazed at each other.
Now when he came over to me, I couldn’t stand to look at him, couldn’t stand the idea that he’d touch me. I wheeled around and made for the front door. He caught up to me before I opened it and I heard the man swear from the bedroom. I hoped he’d cut his foot open on the tiramisu box.
“Leo, wait,” Will said as the man came out of the room, wiping his foot on the rug. He was handsome. Fortyish, with light brown hair and a beard threaded with gray, trim and muscular, and everything I wasn’t. He leaned in the doorway, still shirtless, as if they were going to pick up where they’d left off.
“The kid’s cute. He can join us if you want,” he said, eyes dragging over me. He smiled at me, and I felt a br
ief flicker of flattery before it was replaced with disgust.
“Can you fuck off now, please,” Will told him, never looking away from me.
The man grumbled and went to the bedroom, coming out a minute later fully dressed as Will and I stared at each other. I was cataloging the places I’d seen the man touch him like I was dusting him for fingerprints, each touch standing out, a black spot on his pale skin.
The man crossed between us, patting Will possessively on the ass as he opened the door.
“I left my number on the bed. In case you want to finish what we started.” Will didn’t even look at him.
“Leo,” Will started, his voice unbearably gentle.
I couldn’t help it. I burst into tears. It was the final mortification.
“I told you,” Will said softly, voice strained. “I told you that I wasn’t what you wanted. That you shouldn’t expect anything from me.”
I shook my head furiously. I knew what he’d said, of course I knew. But so many things he’d done said something so different.
“You like me!” I found myself shouting. “I know you do!”
“I do, Leo. I like you so much. Of course I do.”
I knew that I sounded foolish. Childish. That Will had been clear on this point. And yet I couldn’t help myself. All I could process were the starkest reactions. The most basic hurts.
“Then why? Why would you do this?”
“It has nothing to do with you. I—other people—it’s just sex, it doesn’t matter.”
“If it doesn’t matter then stop!” I demanded. I was a hundred yards out of line, I knew, and my voice sounded frenzied.
Will looked down and shook his head.
“That’s not…. Leo, I don’t want to stop.”
“But how? How can you want them if you care about me at all? I would never do that to you. Maybe you’re just scared to admit that we could actually work!”
Will frowned and took a deep breath. “I’m trying not to lose my temper because I know you’re upset. I never promised you anything. In fact, I stood right here and told you that if we went down this road, it was with the knowledge that if things didn’t go the way you wanted then you were choosing it with your eyes open. And you agreed. You agreed that it was okay and that we’d still be friends. You’ve always known who I was. The fact that you didn’t want to admit it to yourself doesn’t make me the bad guy. It doesn’t mean that I’ve betrayed you or broken a promise. Just because you wanted something to be true doesn’t make it true. You don’t get to decide how things go and make them be that way.”
“No, you always decide! Everything’s always on your terms. You decide exactly how close I can get. What I can ask you about and how much I can know you. When I can stay and when I have to go. I’m always waiting for you, hoping that you’ll—”
“I get to decide those things! Everyone gets to set their own terms. That’s how being a goddamned adult works. It’s my fucking apartment, so of course I get to decide when you can stay and when you have to go. And, Jesus, you already know me better than any—”
He broke off, glaring at me.
“And then you just let yourself in here like it’s a damned clubhouse or something, and you see something you don’t want to see and you call me a fucking whore, like it’s not my right to act exactly as I want to in my own house!”
He spun away, grabbing paper towel and squatting down to clean up the tiramisu splattered in the bedroom doorway.
My heart pounded in my throat and my ears rang. I wanted to punch him, kick him, rip at his hair—somehow mar the beauty that mocked me. Make him hurt the way I was hurting right now.
“I think you’re doing it on purpose!” I choked out.
“Yeah, Leo, sure,” he said tiredly. “I orchestrated bringing some guy back here at exactly the moment you were going to burst in completely unexpected just to prove a point to you that I’ve been making from the beginning.”
“No.” I shook my head, eyes squeezed shut. “I think you hurt so much sometimes—hate the world so much—that you think I’ll never understand, so you’re trying to hurt me so much that I turn into someone who can understand.”
Will rocked on his heels, dropping to the floor as if the force of my words had propelled him backward.
“Jesus Christ, no,” he said, horrorstruck.
I bit my lip, tears streaming down my face.
“I’m done,” I said. “I can’t do this anymore. It hurts too much.” My voice was ragged, choked. I felt blasted out. Hollow.
Will was still on the floor looking up at me, blond hair mussed, bite marks starting to come out as bruises on his neck, one hand raised as if he could touch me though I was steps away.
“But you knew,” he insisted again, clinging to the sentiment the way he clutched the dirty paper towel in his hand. “You knew from the start.”
His eyes were bright and his voice quavered slightly.
I bit my lip and nodded, suddenly so exhausted that for once I had nothing to say to him.
“Yeah, okay. I guess I did.”
The last thing I saw as the door swung shut was a footprint in tiramisu marring the rug the way the man’s bites marred Will’s skin.
Chapter 11
February/March
THE NEXT month passed in a haze of sleep, forcing myself to eat, going through the motions of attending class, mindlessly making coffee, and, yeah, fine, a lot of crying.
The night I’d walked in on Will with that man, I’d called Daniel sobbing while walking aimlessly. Daniel had gotten freaked out that he couldn’t understand me and then, when I’d calmed down enough to explain what had happened, been so furious at Will that he’d threatened to come down and beat the shit out of him, and Rex had taken the phone away.
When I’d hung up with them, Rex having extracted a promise from Daniel that he would not take the early BoltBus to New York and defend my honor, I collapsed in bed, pulled up the covers, and slept for twenty hours. When I woke up, I had the bizarre synchronicity of having inadvertently set myself on Charles’ schedule. We went to the dining hall together, and he monologued about how the schedules of modernity enslave us, bending our minds and habits to the patterns enforced by business hours, greeting card designations, and department store sales.
“Fuck time,” I’d said. “You think it’s moving you forward, moving you closer to something, but it’s really just happening without you.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Charles had said, like I’d finally seen reason.
Milton had found me in the same stairwell where we’d first met at orientation.
“Oh, hon,” he’d said when I told him. That’s all. He didn’t say he told me so, or that he hated Will—though he said both later on, the former to my annoyance and the latter to my vague and petty satisfaction. He’d just held me while I cried and then taken over my life for the next week, making sure that I ate and slept and went to class.
He dragged me bodily from the dorms one night to go to a movie with him and Gretchen that I didn’t pay attention to and didn’t remember after. I sat between them in the darkness, my friends, and I imagined I was still in the planetarium with Will, and I cried. And then when I got back to my room I YouTubed the planetarium scene from Rebel Without a Cause that Will had mentioned, and I thought how James Dean actually looked a little bit like Will—the sharp angle of the jaw and the eyes that shifted from bravado to uncertainty a little too easily.
Two weeks after the night I’d walked in on Will, he called me to ask how I was. I’d left him a drunken message the night before that I only remembered cringingly when I saw his name appear on my phone. I answered but didn’t say anything at first. Will talked like things were normal between us. He told me about a client at work (screaming fit when he told her she couldn’t have an entirely black cover no matter how edgy her book might be) and about the new Vietnamese place he’d tried in the neighborhood (great bún but bland spring rolls). He told me that he’d been rewatching Firefly a
nd wondered if I’d seen it (of course I had; what kind of tasteless moron did he take me for).
And, finally, when he petered out and lapsed into silence, I took a deep breath, sat up straight, and told Will what I’d realized.
My friends had weighed in. Milton was loudest, as usual. Will is bad for you. He’s a drug and you’re an addict, and you can’t be trusted to make logical, healthy decisions around him, so you should stay the fuck away. But, barring that, just don’t make yourself vulnerable to him. Be as remote and untouchable as he is.
Gretchen was practical and generous: If he’s taking up space in your head, then he’s a part of your life, and you owe it to yourself to figure out how you feel about him. It blended a bit with something that Tonya said in yoga when we were in challenging poses: Find the place where you’re doing work you don’t need to do. Soften your jaw, your eyes, your hands. They aren’t helping you lunge so you don’t need to expend energy on them.
The truth was that Will was a constantly tensed muscle, using energy even when I wasn’t actively engaging with him.
I took a deep breath and told Will, “I guess I kind of thought if I just waited long enough you’d realize that you wanted to be with me.” My voice sounded small and pathetic, but I forced myself to go on. “I know you didn’t promise me that. I know. We really do want different things, I guess. And I’m just making myself pathetic now, so I need to stop.”
Will started to say something, but I didn’t let him. I needed to get it out now or I never would.
“The thing is, I can’t see you. You take up too much… everything. I don’t know how to, I guess, feel things halfway. If you’re always there in the back of my mind—if I’m always so invested in you…. See, I want to give you what you want. You know? I want you to be happy because I—I care about you so much. But I can’t really because giving you what makes you happy makes me so… so fucking miserable.” I took a deep breath, trying not to cry and failing.