When I’d been at my parents’ house in Holiday, I’d grabbed the DVDs out of my bedroom. I had been teasing him ever since about how in love I was with Viggo Mortensen and how Will would have to sword fight him to compete for my affection. And I’d extracted the promise from him that when I was finally done for the year, he’d watch them with me. All of them. I couldn’t fucking wait. I also couldn’t wait to tease him about looking like Legolas, who he always referred to as “that elf douche.”
As I stepped out of the elevator on Will’s floor, Mrs. Gemelli was leaving her apartment, flowered silk scarf wrapped around her hair, pink lipstick bleeding into the wrinkles around her lips. We had bonded over fabric softener in the laundry room when I stayed here over January term.
“Hi, Mrs. Gemelli.”
“Hiya, DaVinci. What’s cooking?”
“Just finished up with finals, so I’m free!”
She clapped her hands in front of her, pink press-ons clacking together.
“How’s Toadstool?”
“Oh, the little shit started taking a wee in my shower. It was too much. I put him on Prozac, so that should help. Damn cat’s out of his mind.” She shook her head.
“Wow, I didn’t know they even made Prozac for cats.”
“Honey, this is the twenty-first century. They make Prozac for everyone.” She winked at me and walked slowly to the elevator, her hand resting on my shoulder for just a moment as she passed, light as a leaf, leaving a whisper of violets behind her in the hall.
It was quickly overpowered the second I opened Will’s door, though, the smell of Thai food making my stomach lurch with hunger.
“Did you know they made Prozac for cats?” I asked as Will came over to me.
He kissed me hard. “Uh-huh,” he said, then he kissed me again.
I gave him the highlights while we ate, the most significant of which was that Milton’s roommate had had some kind of breakdown and they’d had to call his parents in the middle of the night. It was horrible and Milton felt awful because he was convinced he should have said something earlier when he noticed that Robbie was staying in the room more—honestly, though, Milton was almost never in their room and they weren’t friends, so I thought he was being too hard on himself.
Will didn’t want to admit it, but he was so into the extras. It was a cool, breezy night and we had the window open, the sounds of the city drifting in to mix with the sounds of the New Zealand-created Middle Earth. Will kept saying “Whoa”—as the timeline for creating the Shire was revealed, as horses galloped over the plain, as huge blocks of foam were carved into the exterior of castle walls. I think he was even kind of developing a crush on Orlando Bloom (out of costume, that was), much to his horror. “He kind of reminds me of you, actually,” Will said. “He’s all… twitchy and soft.”
“It’s strange watching these now,” I said when we’d finished one branch of the extras tree. I hadn’t seen them in a few years and the first time I saw them I’d been a kid. “The way they make all new friends and they’re far from home and everything—it’s like college.” I ducked my head, embarrassed to admit it. “I actually hoped it was what college would be like.” Will raised an eyebrow. “That sense of becoming part of a group, mostly. Of making a place feel like home because of the people there. Well, and, you know, I hoped it would be like the Shire.”
“And does it?”
“New York, not quite yet. But, school? Yeah. And here.” I gestured around his apartment.
He smiled. “You gotta give New York at least another year. Takes that long for the shock to wear off.”
I had been waiting for the right moment—a good opening or the perfect segue, but this wasn’t an essay for school and it was bound to be a hard conversation whenever we had it, so I let the idea of the right moment go. I slid closer to Will and took his hands in mine, the haunting menu screen music hiccoughing momentarily, then the loop restarting.
“Listen,” I said. “I have things. To say.”
Will was immediately on guard, and I squeezed his hands and moved closer.
“No, no, I don’t want to fight, just talk, okay? We’ve kind of been… you know, doing our thing, but we’ve both been so busy we haven’t really talked about what it is.”
“How about we just make out instead?” he offered, but I could tell he knew it wouldn’t work.
“I need to explain something,” I said. “I’m not quite sure how to say it and I don’t want you to get mad, so just listen, okay? Because it sounds wrong if I can’t say the whole thing.”
Will gave me a whatever eyebrow raise and waved me ahead.
I cleared my throat nervously, still unsure how to say everything I wanted to say even though I’d rehearsed it on the subway coming here.
“Okay, so. This thing happened where I was at sunrise yoga—” Will snorted. “No, yeah, I know, anyway, and it was kind of part of my physics project because I was realizing that I could try and measure effects instead of the thing itself, and so I had to convert it to entropy and like what is the flavor of love and then when I was looking at you the other day it was like your… your whole… gorgeousness became this other thing, and I realized what you’d been saying about its effects, and then that made me think about the laws themselves, and that to be laws they have to be applicable for always, but in this scale that’s so massive that it almost doesn’t matter anymore, like the sun kind of massive, and really that’s not the level of constancy that any relationship demands, you know? Or any person. And you’ve been right to say that I don’t know for always, but then the point is that always isn’t the scale that makes any sense to use given where we are right now. So Tonya was right too about it being about the present moment and things are always shifting and changing and there’s no law because the second you learn something you’re changed forever, and then everything’s different anyway, you know?”
Will was silent for a beat and then he nodded. “Yeah, totally.”
“Yeah?” I let out a breath of pure relief.
“No! I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about! Key terms I heard: sunrise yoga, which I really want to refer to a cocktail; flavor of love, which I think was a reality show on VH1; entropy, which I know is a band; and changed forever, which is what I hope this topic is about to be.”
I giggled nervously. That did not go well.
“Can I get like even a Jeopardy category idea of what this conversation is about?”
About fifteen cute, cheesy, romantic answers popped into my head that I knew I could use to change the subject or alleviate the awkwardness. A hundred ways I could give up. And then we could go back to watching the extras, cuddling on Will’s couch, which was pretty perfect just the way it was. But I didn’t.
“The Jeopardy category is ‘Our Relationship.’”
“Ugh, is there anything less than a $100?”
I shook my head. “They’re all Daily Doubles.” I pushed the blanket aside and kind of clambered into his lap. “Will, kiss me.”
He kissed me tentatively, like maybe there was a catch.
“Okay, now lemme try again.”
Will’s sigh was long-suffering but he ran his fingers through my hair. I hadn’t cut it all year and it had gotten pretty long.
“Babe….”
“No, let me. Okay. You tease me about being a romantic. And you’re right. I like to imagine that things make sense. That everything isn’t just chaos and meaninglessness. That things are predictable, or knowable.”
“Like physics.”
“Yeah, like physics. Where there are laws that govern things. Only, the thing about physics laws is that what makes them laws is that they’re so enormous and universal that, yeah, they explain things, but they’re also too big for those explanations to be super useful in the particular. Like, okay, sure, gravity, but, like, if my question is why did I fall down, then yeah, I know it was gravity in the universal sense, but what I mean is what the hell did I just trip over and who the hell left it there.”
br /> Will nodded, fingers still in my hair. Good, he was listening.
“So I’ve been thinking about it. The way being a romantic or whatever is kind of like saying that the universal laws, like gravity, are more important than the particular details, like who left the thing there. When really, it’s a lot more like yoga than like physics. Where it’s all about how things are in the present. Not because the future doesn’t exist or because there’s nothing bigger, but because every day we change just by being in the world and learning about ourselves.”
Will’s expression softened a little.
“And it’s bigger than just you and me, actually. It’s not how I want to be. Thinking that I know some right way to do things that ignores all the other ways. Not leaving room for, like, surprises and new possibilities, and changing my mind. And I definitely don’t want to make someone else feel that way. Anyone else. It’s scary. Not feeling like you know how things should be. But… a good scary, maybe? A necessary scary. It is for me, anyway,” I said when Will jutted his jaw out in a yeah-right-nothing-scares-me expression.
“Okay, so anyway, I’m just gonna say this, and it’s what I want. I’m not saying you have to agree, or even respond right away if you want to think about things or whatever. So. Here goes.”
My heart felt like a candle flame guttering in the wind, and my stomach felt like someone had reached in and scooped it hollow. I squeezed my eyes shut the way I used to when Janie and I would ride the wooden roller coaster at Michigan’s Adventure. Just at the apex of the hill, hovering in the air before we slid over the other side and hurtled downward, I would close my eyes and try to identify the exact tipping point when gravity acted on the combined weight of human and machine and dragged us down, screaming.
My voice was a whisper. “I… I love you. I want to be with you. I want to try. I want to figure out a way that we can both get what we want. And I guess I just want to know what it would take for you to want that too.”
My heart was still pounding as my eyes fluttered open and the wave of adrenaline that had carried me through the last few seconds drained away, leaving me shaky and with a weird ringing in my ears. I ventured a quick look at Will. He was frowning.
“Will, did you hear me?”
“I don’t understand,” Will said slowly. And, wow, that was really not the response I wanted.
“Maybe I’m not explaining it well….” I swallowed hard.
“No.” He shook his head frustratedly. “I thought… I….” He sounded confused in a deep way. Like, fundamentally confused. “I guess I thought we… were. After Holiday—after we—” He narrowed his eyes at me. “You said you understood. After you… fucked the geologist or whatever,” he spat out. “You said you understood that I wasn’t trying to hurt you. That night.” He winced. “You… I thought you forgave me for that night.”
Wait, what?
“Forgave you? For the Tiramisu Incident? There was nothing to forgive, Will. I mean, it was awful and I was upset and, okay, fucking heartbroken. But like you said at the time, you didn’t break any promises to me. You had told me what the reality was and I was the one who was out of touch with it.”
Will stood up suddenly, looming over me with his hands on his hips and his eyes fixed on mine.
“But you fucking left!”
“Well, yeah. I was sad as hell and embarrassed and it was too much, thinking of you with another guy. But that doesn’t mean you were wrong.”
“No.” He spun away from me, hands fisted at his sides. “You left me! You… you fucking left me, Leo.” His voice broke. I tried to pull him to face me but he wouldn’t, so I stood up and walked in front of him. All I could see as he stared at the floor was the fall of blond hair and the tip of his nose.
“Hey.”
I tried to tilt his chin up so I could see his face, but he shook me off.
“It was just sex with him.”
“Yeah, I know, Will. You don’t have to—”
Will’s head snapped up and his eyes were a blaze of blue.
“It was just sex. It was nothing. You were my best friend. You were my best fucking friend and I’d told you the truth and you just left me. No more hanging out, no more talking or texts. No more… anything. That one moment meant more to you than every fucking thing we’d shared. That sex meant more to you than it ever could have to me. Because then you were just gone.”
Oh Jesus.
Before the Tiramisu Incident, Will and I had been hanging out all the time, cooking, watching TV shows together, going all over the city together, having a lot of (I thought) hot sex. And all those things meant a ton to me. Had made me deliriously happy, which Will no doubt knew since it’s not like I was super subtle about it. And during that, I had always known Will slept with other people, though I hadn’t let myself think about it. But seeing it in the flesh had in some ways overpowered all the rest of what we’d shared.
And I had left him.
“I—you never said….”
“You told me not to! You told me you didn’t want anything to do with me, Leo. And I understand, right: you were looking out for yourself. You were taking what you needed. And fuck if that isn’t exactly what you should’ve done. It’s what I’d been telling you to do all along. It just….” He jutted his chin out like he was preparing to take a punch and clenched his jaw.
“It hurt you.”
He gave a shrug, absorbing it. It was like everything had polarized. I had hurt Will. I had hurt him with my absence. I had hurt him when I lied and said I could handle things the way they’d been when I knew that I couldn’t. I’d hurt him and he hadn’t said a thing. He’d respected my wishes and left me alone until… what? Until he absolutely couldn’t anymore. And then I was the one he’d called. The first one. The only one.
“I’m so sorry, Will. Fuck, I’m so, so sorry I hurt you.” I grabbed his arms and turned him so he was facing me. He sighed, still silent, but his muscles unclenched a little under my palms. I stayed that way until he finally looked at me.
“The thing is, though? When you told me you didn’t want to be around me anymore.”
“Couldn’t. I couldn’t. Not didn’t want to.” It was essential that he understood the difference.
“Okay,” he conceded, “couldn’t. That was the first time I believed that maybe I was wrong about what being in a relationship meant.” He shook his head at himself.
“How do you mean?”
“I always saw them as the Borg, where the two of you just kind of sloshed into one being. Or that you had to sacrifice all the pieces of yourself that didn’t fit with the other person. But you… didn’t. You were totally yourself. Even though you wanted us to be in a relationship. Even though you knew getting upset about it wasn’t what I would want. I don’t know, maybe that makes me a total dick. But it made me kind of hope that it was possible. Autonomy and a relationship.”
“Wow,” I said.
“What, you think it does make me a total dick?”
“No. Well, when you put it like that, I guess it kind of makes you a total dick that you realized it when we broke up. Or—sorry, I mean, not broke up. Stopped being whatever we were being. But, no, I was gonna say, wow, Rex was right.”
“Huh? Rex. About what?”
“Oh, um, well….” I gave a nervous laugh. “I kinda… asked Daniel for advice. About you. Us, I mean. And Rex was there because, duh, he lives there, and he overheard and, yeah. It was the night I got home from Holiday. You were still there and I didn’t want to bug you about like, What Does It All Mean, because you were handling everything with Claire and the kids.
“But I was dying, seriously. Like, chugged five Cokes and couldn’t sit still dying over not knowing where we stood. Point is, Rex told me that just because you seem fearless about being blunt to people doesn’t mean you don’t get scared and resist saying stuff about yourself. Anyway….”
Will was glaring.
“Fuckin’ Rex,” he muttered, shaking his head.
I stepped closer to him and slid my arms around his neck, wanting the closeness, the feel of him. “It’s just… I want… I want you to tell me that stuff.”
“I do,” Will insisted. “I do tell you stuff. I called you about Claire even though you’d told me you basically never wanted to see me again!”
“You’re right.” I bit my lip, trying to figure out how to explain what I meant. “I just… I want…. Okay, you know how you tell me what you want when we’re, uh, you know—”
“Having sex?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes,” Will said, and he wrapped the word around his tongue like a caress, like maybe he thought he was about to distract me from this discussion.
“Right, well, I love when you do that. When you tell me what you want, what you like. Even if I don’t… give it to you right away, I always want to know it. I like knowing where we stand. I feel—I don’t know, free when I don’t have to wonder. I don’t have to worry about whether I’m pleasing you or question where we stand. I’d rather fight with you than not know what you think.”
Will looked uncertain. “But you do know me, that’s what I’m saying. You know me better than… anyone. I mean, hell, you’re a scientist, you collect data. You’re great at figuring it all out.”
“I don’t want to have to conduct a science experiment to know how you feel! Do you know how shitty it is to say that to me? Like it’s one hundred percent my responsibility to… study you? That I’m supposed to look at everything you do and draw my own conclusions and act based on them with no confirmation? Why? Why would you want it to be like that?”
And it hit me with a twist of nausea that this was how Will thought things had to be. That he’d grown up watching for signs of what things might mean. Clues. Were his parents going to be distracted enough with each other that he could take money from them to go buy whatever he wanted at the grocery store? Was Claire in a mood where he needed to tell her this thing or that one in order to handle a situation? Was someone giving him something because of how he looked or on his merit?
Will had become so adept at reading the signs that it never occurred to him to say something if he thought he’d already communicated it in another way. With a gesture or an eye roll, a pattern or a habit. Words were just a redundancy to him. Like the time I pointed out that there were bananas and he got pissy because he could see them.