“Stop being thick,” Walcott said. “I’m trying—with what has to be the least amount of grace of any poet in the history of time—I’m trying to tell you, I’m in love with you.”
He said it so mild and calm and simple that I couldn’t process the words for a second or two. Then I said, “No, you aren’t.”
“I am, though,” he said, holding one hand out toward me like he was offering an apology. “Apparently I’ve been in love with you for years now.”
“No, you have not,” I said, a fringe of anger tickling across my skin, because this declaration felt like a betrayal. “What are you saying? That you’ve been all secretly pining, the whole time, like a trick?” It was too dishonest, and I couldn’t bear it if every disdainful thing I thought about Paula was true for Walcott, too. The idea that Walcott—my Walcott—had kept a secret of such magnitude! If he’d always had some nasty, sexed, romantical agenda, it negated everything we’d ever been. But he was shaking his head, vehement.
“I didn’t know,” Walcott said. “Or I did. But only in the back of my heart. Maybe I felt a kind of waiting? I never thought about it, same way I don’t think about breathing. It was a quiet fact, that we would be an us, eventually. When we were old enough to not eff it up. I’m pretty sure you knew it, too, before all that shit went down at the Kappa house.” I was shaking my head no, but he kept talking. “Then you were in that Circle K, and it occurred to me that you could die. There I was, waiting for us to grow up enough to make our real life happen, and all at once I was looking at a tomorrow with the world still spinning, except you wouldn’t be on it. Natty wouldn’t be on it. So I—”
“Walcott!” I interrupted. “This is a reaction to the stress. This isn’t real.”
He shook his head. “Remember when the cops brought you out? That’s when I understood. I’ve been trying hard to tamp it back, but I can’t. It happened, and it won’t unhappen.”
I remembered. They drove William away in the ambulance, and the cop who looked like Samuel L. Jackson took charge of me. He was escorting us toward his car, when I spotted Walcott talking to another cop near the perimeter. I changed our course, beelining toward him. Walcott’s face looked like it was made out of wallpaper paste. He had drying brownish blood all over his favorite Pixies T-shirt. I still had brown streaks of William’s blood on my hands, and I thought to myself, Oh, look, we match.
Natty spotted Walcott then and came alive in my arms, hollering, “Walcott! Walcott!”
Walcott turned and saw us coming. His face broke into a wide, weird smile, an unreadable look spreading over his face as he watched us coming. It was familiar. I had seen him make this face before, but I couldn’t place it. I sped up, almost running toward him with the cop pacing me.
Just as we reached him, before I could lay hands on him, Walcott turned and doubled up and puked into the grass. He heaved and heaved, with his outsize hands dangling down, his arms braced on his bent knees.
I thought, Oh, man! I’m the only one who got to keep Mimmy’s fantastic rage lunch.
Between heaves, he reared up to look at me and say, “Hi. Oh, hi,” with that weird look still on his face.
The cop went and got him a bottle of water, and then I had to give my statement, so I’d forgotten about trying to place his strange expression.
Standing in the overelegant kitchen, I finally realized where I had seen Walcott make that face before. It was his bad hangover face, from the few times when he had truly overdone it. It was a face he made when he felt poisoned near to death.
The taste of the beer soured in my mouth. It was true, then. He fucking loved me.
He was still talking, and with such calm finality it was absolutely terrifying. “Shandi, I think you were in love with me. Before. Maybe you still are, but you haven’t noticed, because I’ve politely chosen not to be in a hostage situation.” I didn’t say anything, but I guess not saying anything was answer enough. He shrugged and looked away from me, blinking rapidly. “Did I miss the window? Every time I text you, these days, you’re at his house. Are you with him?”
“No. It’s more like—” I stopped talking, finally clueing in, and feeling like an idiot. Walcott hadn’t been objecting to my hunt for the Golem. Walcott had never been dim or missed the point. He was jealous of William.
He said, “Whatever. I don’t care. I’m asking if there’s room for us to try this out.” He waved his hand forward and back, drawing an invisible connecting line in the air between us.
I was shaking my head, not like no, but more because I couldn’t process. “Walcott, come on. We already did that.”
“Did what?” Walcott said.
“You know,” I said. He shook his head, mystified. He really didn’t. “You know,” I said, but I didn’t have a word for it. What Walcott and I did together, while not exactly pleasant, was too funny and too friendly for that ugly f-word. Had sex? Cold and clinical. Did it? That sounded so giggly-fifties-poodle-skirt, and way too shy. Made love? Puke. “Two years ago? You know!” I yelled, thoroughly frustrated, and I saw understanding finally dawn.
“You’re kidding me, right?” he said.
“No?” I said. “You were there. We did what we did, and neither one of us saw unicorns or rainbows.”
Now he was laughing, but I could see that under that, he was getting angry. “I’m kind of insulted. You’re going to count that?”
I swallowed and looked away. “It was enough to know there isn’t any there there.”
He shoved his hands through his hair, nostrils flaring. “We didn’t even kiss! And have you ever had a there there? With Doug or whatever that other old dude’s name was?”
“Richard,” I said, feeling pretty sure he’d just changed my attraction-meaning there there to a much dirtier euphemism. “That question is cheating. You know I didn’t.”
My former boyfriend, Doug, was the only reason Walcott and I did what we did in the first place. Doug wasn’t some punk college boy. He was an actual man, divorced, with a couple of kids. He had the kind of job that came with health insurance, and he took me to dinner in real restaurants. He didn’t go skateboarding or drink dollar beer and he wasn’t interested in making out in any kind of vehicle. He wanted a grown-up, actual relationship, one that included sex.
I wanted those things, too, but I was too freaked out to give Doug the green light.
My sticking point was, Doug believed I was experienced. He hadn’t met Natty, but he knew Natty existed. In reality, I’d had exactly one boyfriend in high school before Natty happened. His name was Ajay. He had liquid black eyes and a gorgeous smile, but looking back, I mostly picked him because he wasn’t Jewish or any kind of Christian. He was a cute boy I could date without picking a team. We’d eventually broken up because I could only see him every other weekend, but while we lasted, we’d had several epic make-out sessions. I’d let him put his hand under my shirt, over the bra, where he kneaded with delighted disbelief at my booby. It had been super exciting, not really because it felt that great to have my booby treated like a yeast roll, but because we had both been so thrilled that I had let him touch it.
Doug was an adult, dating a mother. He would not expect some fumbling innocent in bed. I panicked over the ugliest logistics. What if it hurt, and I cried? What if I bled? How the hell would I explain that?
So I went to the one person who had always had my back, every living second. I’d let myself into the Cabbagetown rent-a-house Walcott shared with three other English majors. He had a bedroom the size of a walk-in closet, but all his own.
He was sitting on his futon, feverishly tapping at his laptop when I came in and closed the door behind me.
He said, “I’m onto something. Can you give me half an hour?”
“Sure,” I said, “but then I need you to make sex with me.”
The typing stopped. “You need me
to who the what what?”
“Sex,” I said. “I need you to help me have it.”
Walcott nodded, suddenly thoughtful. “Brilliant! Let’s get to it. This sounds like the ideal way for us to never speak again. Can I finish my poem now?”
I said, “I keep thinking I’ll go home with Doug, and then I freak out and don’t.”
He winced at the name. Doug, he always said, sounded like someone’s gray-chest-haired old father. Which Doug was. Well, he was a father. I didn’t know about the chest hair, yet. He did have a little gray in his hair, which I liked. But I couldn’t get from where I was all the way to Doug. Not without Walcott. I begged him, and then I yelled at him. No dice. I whined that I was a dreadful virgin mother-monster who would never have sex or get to be in love for my whole life.
None of that fazed him. What fazed him was when I cried. When I sat there with tears rolling down my face and my hands in my lap and said simply, as sincere as I had ever been, “You always help me, Walcott. Why won’t you help me now?”
He banged his laptop shut and set it aside on the dresser. “Gah, okay. Stop crying.” I dried up, and he said, in his thinking voice. “We’ll make the sex, as you say in your oh-so-charming native country, The Land of Super-Crazy, but there have to be some rules. So it doesn’t get all weird and ruin us.”
“Rule one.” I said, “No kissing.”
“Oh, hell yeah, no kissing on the mouth.”
“Not on the anywhere!” I said. “I want to do this straight-up missionary. Fast and dirty, just long enough that I know what it’s like.”
“Right. Get in, get out, nobody gets hurt. So to speak,” he said. “Also, I have to be really drunk.”
I said, “Oh, ouch!”
He grinned. “Not because you aren’t damn cute. You know you are. It’s for later, when you never want to look at me again. I want plausible deniability. My story is, the whole thing is a blur, and I don’t remember what your nipples look like.”
“What about me?”
He turned his mouth down, like thinking, and said, “Mmm . . . I don’t care if you know what my nipples look like.”
“I’m serious,” I said, and smacked him. “Should I get drunk?”
“No. You have to be dead sober. You remember it all, because we’re not doing this twice. Then rule fifty-six . . .” He quirked an eyebrow at my puzzled look and said, “I lost count. Fifty-six is, we go right now. Boom! Done. No thinking, before or after.”
I nodded, and he got up, heading for the kitchen. I put the futon down into a bed, and he came back with a bottle of tequila and a shot glass. He’d already downed one, I could tell from his watery eyes. I took the bottle and poured him another.
He said, “Gimme a minute. I don’t want to puke it all back up and have to start over.”
“Plus puking is not sexy.”
He wiped his reddened eyes and said, in a teacherly and disapproving voice, “Shandi. This is not about being sexy. Can we all get on the same damn page?”
I laughed, and he downed the second one. He did five shots in all, in less than half an hour. Lord, but he was drunk.
Then we did it.
He claimed later he didn’t remember much at all, just as he had said. And this was merciful, because me? I remembered.
I remembered him slurring, “This is weird to do without kissing,” as he placed my hand over the fly of his jeans. There was a wad of something down there, oddly soft.
“Can you even do this? Why is it floppetty?” I asked, but even as I spoke, it stirred, like something waking up. I jerked my hand away.
He started laughing and said, “Don’t be funny. Me laughing will not help the floppetty situation. Take off your shirt.” When I hesitated, he said, “Big talk, but this isn’t going to happen with our clothes on.” He peeled his own shirt off over his head and then pulled his jeans all the way down his endlessly long body. He sat down naked. I was keeping my eyes carefully forward, but what I could make out in my peripheral vision didn’t seem particularly ready to have sex.
I struggled out of my shirt and my bra, and after I tossed them aside, it seemed fair that I should get to look. So I did. In the few seconds my eyes had been covered by my top, Walcott had undergone some changes. Radical ones.
“It’s that easy?” I said, fascinated.
“I’m a nineteen-year-old straight guy, Shandi. Those right there are boobs. Yeah. It’s pretty much that easy.”
I hadn’t ever seen a penis up close in human person before. It was weird-as-hell-looking, like a space alien hiding in my best friend’s pants. But a friendly alien, with a nice color. A nice shape. I leaned down to look at it up close, and me doing that, it got even readier, pushing itself up like a creature with its own life and movement, rising from the familiar long, skinny body I had seen a thousand times in swim trunks.
“Look, if this was for real, there would be kissing here,” he said, waving his hand around like a drunken conductor. “And you know, some rolling around, some rubbing and stuff. And then!” He banged his hands together and then threw them apart, sideways, almost knocking his laptop off the dresser. “Then we would make the sex.”
“Let’s skip to the end,” I said.
“You are like most guys’ dream girlfriend. Skip to the end. Ha!” He started laughing again, and it went down a little. So weird. He looked at himself and then covered his eyes like a long, stringy baby playing naked peek-a-boo. “Watch this,” he said. “Looking at boobs in three, two, one . . . Now!”
Bang, it was completely ready again.
I said, “How does that even . . .”
“It is what it is.”
He opened his top dresser drawer, and handed me a bottle of lubricant. Then he took out a condom and started working it on.
“Why do you have this stuff?” I asked, reading the label like I thought the lubricant might have basic sex instructions. “You and Jenna broke up a month ago.”
“I am, above all things, a hopeful man,” Walcott said, lolling onto his back. I’d never seen him so drunk. “This is all you now. I’m going to close my eyes and think of England.” He threw one arm over his eyes. “The cliffs! The Cliffs of Dover!”
So it was me on top, methodical and careful, as if I were learning how to use a tampon. The lubricant helped. I felt a weird stretching pressure, and then there we were. I was officially doing it, and it was nothing. I sat there for a minute, until the discomfort faded to an odd fullness. No bells. Not even any tingles. But not painful or scary.
I’d been so preoccupied with the mechanics that I’d almost forgotten Walcott was there. I noticed then that he was breathing weird.
“You okay?” I said, moving myself a little, like an experiment.
“Yeah. Can we be done?” he asked. He sounded slightly strangled.
“I don’t know,” I said. I tried moving again, and it changed his face.
“Let’s be done,” he said.
This was the part I didn’t like remembering. Right then, for really less than a second, I had an awful impulse to not stop. Not because it felt good or because I remotely liked it, but because his skin flushed on his whole chest, and I could tell from how he breathed that he was heading toward something. In that half second, I came to understand that I could push us forward. His body, drunk and helpless, would go forward if I made it, and I wanted that. To be in charge of a man like that. To own him, and it was a mean and vengeful want that had zero to do with sex.
But this was Walcott. I never wanted to do a mean thing to Walcott.
I didn’t want to do a mean sex thing to anyone. Ever.
I said, “Yes, let’s be done.”
I left him and cleaned myself up. I had bled, just a little. I had a weird reaction to seeing those vindicating drops of red on the white Kleenex, like a See, I told you! aimed at
Mimmy and that pastoral counselor, at my dad and that psychologist. But I didn’t dwell. I’d gotten good at never dwelling. I dressed in the bathroom, and when I got back, Walcott had fumbled drunkenly back into his clothes, too, all the way down to his flip-flops. I came and sat by him.
“I know we said no kissing, but thanks,” I said. I leaned over like I was going to kiss his cheek, and instead I licked it, like a sloppy, disgusting dog lick.
He said, “Gah!” and we both laughed, and that was good.
I picked up the tequila bottle and I did three shots, dumping the liquor down into my empty stomach as fast as I dared, putting a tequila-soaked fence around all my new knowledges. Walcott had a bumper shot. We left the apartment and staggered down the road to the place we called Close Indian, having a rambling conversation about sci-fi movies, and we ate what must have been a thousand pounds of shawarma. I crashed at his place, like normal, and by morning, Walcott and me, we were back to being us.
The only thing he ever said about it later was, “I remember enough to be pretty sure it was ungodly bad. Don’t worry, it will be better with Doug.”
It wasn’t, though. It was much the same, only sweatier, with some pawing at each other first. Doug was grunty and gross. He got lost in it while I floated through, untouched even while he touched me. I couldn’t like him, during, not the way I liked him at dinner. It made me feel sick and small and broken and mean. Once was enough. I broke up with Doug, but it wasn’t any different with Richard.
Now, in my kitchen with Walcott telling me ruinous things about loving me, I realized he was right. It was completely unfair to count that night against him. Especially since that absurd event with Walcott was, to date, the nicest sex I’d ever had.
“You can’t be in love with me, Walcott,” I said, almost sternly. “You just can’t.”
“Too late,” he said.
“Walcott,” I said, because it made me feel so helpless, “I don’t know what to tell you. You say you are in love me, but what am I supposed to do with that?”