When you think of me, think of the lines above. I’ll leave it to you to figure out who the poet was. Little task for you.
Don’t: ever search out what my darkness was. Don’t: mourn me too much. I want you to live, to love, to find the real happiness I never could.
Except… a little bit… with you. And we both know, that wasn’t quite right.
Bye, Jasper, my only love.
Jasper collapsed back into the pillows, sobbing.
After a while, his nose feeling stuffed, his eyes raw, red, and burning, Jasper forced himself to get out of bed to confront making himself some coffee with the french press. He’d figure things out because now he had no other choice. For now, there was no one to make coffee for him.
He’d left Lacy’s note on his own bed, folded neatly. He doubted that he’d share it with anyone, because, really, it was only meant for him. Plus it was solid, concrete proof she’d committed suicide, and he didn’t want to take away the shred of hope her parents had that she accidentally overdosed. Let them have that. He didn’t know about the secrets and lies she obliquely referred to in her letter, but he was pretty sure they had to do with Mom and Dad.
Did it matter now? What her parents had done or not done as she grew up?
He was a little curious, though, futile as that was. Had Lacy been abused?
Did she witness the kind of horror that I did?Jasper pushed the thought away. No one had witnessed what he had growing up. No one had had a childhood like his, steeped in mystery, horror, tragedy, and loss.
Why, losing Lacy, the one person he truly carried about in the world, was simply par for the course. Jasper’s young life had been so filled with trauma, he wondered if there were truly anything else for him out there.
He went into the kitchen. The water in the teakettle was boiling, and the kettle was screaming. He took it off the gas. Lacy always said to heat the water just below the boiling point for the best brew. “If you listen to the kettle, you know when it’s getting ready to whistle.” He could see her eyes and her smile as they stood together in the kitchen, one of many mornings. “It’s kind of like a buildup.”
“Like when a guy I’m with is getting close to coming?”
Lacy shrieked with laughter. “Yeah, something like that.”
He’d already screwed up the first part of making coffee. He thought he could wait, let the boiling water cool a bit, but he was too impatient. He poured the steaming water into the press and gave the resulting dark brown sludge a stir with a wooden spoon. He set the microwave timer for five minutes.
In the living room, for just a moment, he saw Lacy stretched out on the couch. She eyed him and said, “Next time, wait.”
And then, with a blink, he was alone again.
Chapter 6
A LOTcan happen in a few months.
It was now early spring. In Chicago the snow had melted, leaving the ground damp and the earthy areas soggy. There was an aroma to the air, the smell of change even before buds opened. Wet stones and earthworms. Life.
The temperature had risen—but stubbornly, not much—leaving the air slightly warmer, but mitigated by the wet of the thaw and the rain. Even when temperatures were above freezing, you still might feel colder than you had in the winter when it was in the single digits. The wet chill was pervasive.
It was this weather Jasper had described in his last email to Rob. These days almost every morning kicked off with an exchange. Fortunately for Jasper, he didn’t have to use his phone this particular day, because his roommate, a silent fellow who worked at a call center out in the suburb of Northbrook, wasn’t home. Usually, Stan Thomas worked nights, but yesterday, understaffed, his employer had called him in for a day shift. He was only slightly less noticeable when he was actually gone from the apartment, which, to Jasper, was an invaluable plus in a roommate.
Stan being absent allowed Jasper to hop onto the giant iMac Stan had on the desk in his room (which had once been Lacy’s), a room from which he seldom emerged. Stan had all the earmarks of a hermit, including a seeming inability to speak, no friends, a sallow complexion, and the undernourished frame of one Mr. Ichabod Crane. Jasper had no idea what his roomie did in those long, silent hours alone in his room—and didn’t dare imagine.
However, Stan paid his rent on time. He didn’t ever judge (at least out loud) Jasper for his parade of one-night stands or his affinity for anything rainbow-themed. He was the next best thing to living alone, which Jasper would have loved to do. Rents in a city like Chicago made the prospect of living by himself in his own one-bedroom apartment an impossible dream.
Stan was not, as far as Jasper knew, gay. Jasper didn’t know what he was, really. He didn’t seem to be straight either. He showed no interest in either sex, no interest in people, really. Perhaps he was “ace,” or asexual. Jasper had heard the term bandied about online, but with his own raging libido, found the existence of such people hard to imagine, like unicorns or leprechauns.
Stan was as quiet and unobtrusive as an elderly cat. And that suited Jasper just fine, especially when he was out of the house and Jasper could commandeer his desktop computer with its twenty-seven-inch screen. For one thing, PornHub lookedsomuch better there than on his phone.
But that was beside the point. It was nice to be able to read and respond to Rob’s emails on a screen where he could often take in the whole missive without having to scroll. And when Jasper wrote, the words simply appeared morerealon the big Retina display. They even seemed to flow better.
He still had yet to shake the surreal feeling, even after many, many email and text exchanges, that he was actually corresponding withtheMichael Blake.
He and Rob had been writing back and forth now for a couple of months. Jasper had gotten to know the man behind many of his favorite books so much better but had yet to uncover any of the “secrets and lies” Lacy had alluded to in her suicide note.
Jasper wondered if he really needed to know about those. He’d gotten over his initial trepidation about Rob being so much older and richer. Despite things being surreal, he’d even stopped being a fanboy and could view Rob as a real friend, someone he wanted to know better.
