I filled a glass. Tyler took it in one hand and unscrewed the bottle in the other, working it with his thumb. I dropped the bread in the toaster, cracked the eggs into a pan. “Can I ask you something?”
“Uh-oh, that sounds serious.”
“No, it’s not a big deal. Or it doesn’t have to be.” I paused a moment. “I noticed the prescription. It’s not made out to you. They’re Addison’s?”
“Oh.” Tyler laughed. “He just gets them for me.” I set a plate in front of him, steam rising from the eggs. “This looks so good.”
I grabbed the other plate and sat. “What do you mean? I’m not trying to press, I’m just curious.”
He was already shoveling in forkfuls. “This is really hot,” he said, and laughed, opening his mouth and fanning it so I could see the wet, yellow mash. He gulped some water and let out a satisfied sigh of relief. “That’s better.” He laughed again. “I’ve got the shitty campus health plan. They make you buy it if you don’t have insurance from your parents. So you have to pay for it but it doesn’t cover anything.” He paused. “I know it’s weird my parents don’t have insurance.”
“It’s not weird.”
“I don’t want you to think they’re bad parents. They’re not.”
“Of course not.”
“Addison’s family has this doctor that will basically write up anything, so he gets it for me. It’s kind of sketchy but I wasn’t sure what else to do.”
I felt ashamed; I had been digging. I wanted something of Tyler’s to hold on to. Something secret. And the explanation had been so obvious: He couldn’t afford his medication.
I hadn’t begun to eat and Tyler had already finished his eggs and was wiping the plate with the last of his toast. He folded it up and crammed it into his mouth. He had buttery grease on his chin and spoke through his chewing.
“Do you think I could have some more?”
In the weeks that followed, I gave myself over to this thing between us, whatever it was.Affairseemed inadequate, too thin. It was whatever you name an experience that subsumes you completely,animating each moment and every thought. I offered myself to it and it carried me through my days, which started and ended with both wild alertness and utter exhaustion. It reminded me of the final mile of a marathon when I used to run. And in a sense, I was running.
At some point in my life, sex became rote. I could be with someone and, by the following afternoon, find myself unable to recall the details of what we had done. The acts and scents and bodies bled together, sloughing distinction. But sex with Tyler had woken me up. He burned with excruciating specificity, the outline of our nights sharp and resonant. I had forgotten that sex could be like this and was brought back to my first times, furtive and confusing, each encounter electric with the mere fact of its happening. Even as Tyler and I fucked—my fingers stretching through him, the strain of his legs clamped around mine—I recalled the sex, the pleasure doubling upon itself, the act of it and the idea of it. These are our bodies, I thought, pushing myself into him. This is me.
In class, we acted as if nothing had changed. Tyler came and went as usual, silent and unobtrusive. This Tyler in class, my student, become a separate person from the other Tyler, the one who showed up at my apartment late at night, wired with shiny eyes, the one whose musky sweetness leaked from my pillows and sheets. Whose hair I would find in my shower, a light spark against white tile. Two Tylers for a reality I cleaved in two.
I resigned myself to the strange habits of this second Tyler, who disappeared in the middle of a text exchange only to resume hours later like no time had passed. While my head spun out with disbelief at the things we were doing, and that we were doing anything at all, Tyler seemed to enjoy the sex while it was happeningand be completely untroubled at its completion. If anything about what we were doing startled him, he gave no sign. He would launch into a story as he cleaned himself off, sometimes requesting a glass of water or asking if I could check the internet because his phone was acting weird. I puzzled over his nonreactions and did my best to rein in my spiraling thoughts, frantic with desire and fear. At his age, I’d had sex just a handful of times; I would agree to disrobe only with every source of light extinguished, and even then I removed only the absolute necessities. Tyler, meanwhile, displayed an athletic capacity for sex and, it seemed to me, no shame about any of it (including things I had only discovered well into adulthood, in the far reaches of the web). I felt both compelled and threatened by his comfort in his body; he seemed alien and dangerous, and I was terrified he would discover my own total lack of self-possession.
Nights Tyler stayed over, I found something comforting in his rambling way of talking. Topics would turn on a dime, with no clear thread connecting one to the other. One night, telling a story about a cousin who’d gotten arrested breaking into a neighbor’s house on a dare, he interrupted his own monologue to ask—“Lausson. What kind of name is that?” I explained it was German-Jewish, or it used to be. It had beenLoewesteinwhen my grandfather’s family came over, but it was changed at Ellis Island. “Huh, weird,” he said, and moved on to something else. I let his stories flow around me, a wash of names from high school and Sawyer and cousins and other family members I couldn’t possibly track. And stories about Addison—a joke Addison made, a party that ended with Tyler locked in a closet. I hated to admit the jealousy Addison sparked in me. I pushed the feeling down as swiftly as it appeared but I could feel it calcifying, a stone lodged in the coil of my guts.
He sometimes asked about my research, saying, “Tell me another scary story about your murderers.” I’d share some finding I’d uncovered. That Jeffrey Dahmer’s first teenage crush was a neighbor. From the bedroom window of his childhood home, Dahmer would watch the boy biking around; later, in the same room, he’d kill a hitchhiker he picked up, his first victim. Or Carl Panzram, who, confessing to twenty-one murders in 1928, proclaimed, “For all these things I am not the least bit sorry. I don’t believe in man, God, nor devil. I hate the whole damned human race, including myself.” Tyler would coo, asking for more until I begged off. “I’m going to give myself nightmares,” I’d say. Outside work, and my last name, Tyler seemed to have little curiosity about me. And, in truth, I was fine with that; I worried if he started digging, he would realize there wasn’t much there.
So he surprised me one night when he asked, “Does Stephen know about me?”
We were in bed, his head on my stomach, my hand drawing loops around his bare chest. He raised his eyes to catch mine.
“No. Of course not.” I had never brought Stephen up. It proved an easy omission; I had been avoiding him since the night of the lecture. I wasn’t sure what to do about him, and I wasn’t ready to think about it. “I didn’t realize you knew about him.”
Tyler laughed. “Sawyer students know a lot more than you think.”
As much as Tyler could talk, there was plenty I still didn’t know about him, certainly nothing of his sex life apart from me. I almost asked about Addison, if anything had gone on between them. But I didn’t want to know and maybe that was why I never mentioned Stephen. So I wouldn’t start a conversation I couldn’t get out of.
When time for sleep arrived, Tyler passed out cold in minutes, expanding across the mattress. I’d listen to his muffled snores and fight to hold on to my far wedge of the bed. He slept deeply and I would run my hand down the length of him—the fact that I could, a marvel. And the nights he didn’t stay over, he took off immediately after we finished, mentioning an early practice or a class assignment. There was never any negotiation and the decision to stay or leave was his alone.
I sat at my kitchen table, trying to catch up on grading for my Comp course—I had fallen monstrously behind, the stack of papers growing week by week—when my phone buzzed with a text. I went to the counter and flipped it open—I had kept my old phone and given that number to Tyler. It felt safer, quarantining our communication from the rest of my life. And I liked it, too—this private thing just for us. I had deleted all my old texts and contacts and now there was only him. He was on campus, an evening film screening organized by a friend.
How is it?I asked.
Art films made by Sawyer undergrads. What do you think?
I laughed.You’re a good friend.
Ha I don’t know about that.… Can I come to yours when this is over?
