“I don’t want to.” I stand on shaking legs. “I don’t want to read it.”
Her voice is soft, pensive. “Don’t you think you owe him that? At the very least?”
“I don’t owe him shit!”
I don’t know if it’s the volume of my voice or the swearing that makes her face redden. Probably both. I unclench my fists. Push up my glasses. I open my mouth to stumble through an apology that doesn’t want to come out, but I hear his Triumph, the lowvroomof it coming closer.
Aunt Amy plucks the envelope up from the table. She takes it over to the drawer and puts it back. She pushes it closed, her fingers lingering on the handle. “You can just write him back to tell him his letters aren’t welcome, Paul. If that’s what you want.”
“I don’t want your advice.”
I know the sting of betrayal I’m feeling is false. And that’s the thing, really and truly: if somebody was on my side, my defender, and in my corner, I’d find them suspicious. I’m not at all careful about what I wish for.
The engine stops. For a few minutes, we both stand in the kitchen, wordless and expectant. A gust of wind comes through her yard and the sunny evening is getting darker as storm clouds roll in just in the nick of time.
“I’ll be back late,” I tell her. “Real late.”
And then I’m out the door, fat raindrops falling, and my feet fumbling forward.
He lets me into his bedroom.
I’d gotten a few glances of it from his sitting room. I was just waiting. I figured he’d make me wait because it’s the most intimate of places. Anyone’s bedroom would be, really, but it’s here he sleeps. It’s here he’s made himself come. It’s here he’s at his most vulnerable, and I tour it like a room in a museum. I circle around a small rectangle of space, around his bed—nightstand on one side, closet door on the other—with a chest of drawers against one wall, a painting of a sailboat on another, a little window, and the door to his bathroom.
He watches me from the doorway, arms braced against the frame. I expect him to tell me any minute that his bed was the very bed some long-dead general slept in during some long-dead war. Or that the painting of the sailboat was the very sailboat that Captain Something-or-Other sailed on when he went on his Last Great Voyage.
Instead, he crawls onto his bed, lies on his side, head propped up on his elbow. I toe off my shoes and mirror his posture.
He looks at me for a long moment before he says, “You okay?”
I run a hand over his bedspread. Deep blue and manly, just a shade darker than his eyes. I nod.
“You sure?” He hooks a foot around mine.
I scoot closer to him till we’re almost nose to nose. “It was a long day.”
“I’ll say.”
“And it’s raining.”
“Sure is.”
I slip my fingers into the waistband of his jeans. His eyes roam all over my face as if he’s reading me. As if I blink and breathe in words and phrases. Sometimes I wish I did, and he could know me, with little effort on my part. He could be the only one.
“I want to take you somewhere this weekend.” His lips brush over my forehead. “Is that okay?”
I nod.
“Your aunt won’t mind?”
I shake my head and when his gaze meets mine, I roll my eyes. “I’m almost twenty. She can’t tell me what to do.”
“Sure. I know that.”
“I’m old enough, you know. I can do whatever I want. Why does everybody always think I’m some kid? Just some stupid kid.”
My fingers tighten in his waistband, and he slides a hand over my shoulder, squeezing. “I didn’t say that. I don’t even think that.” He tries to catch my eyes, but I won’t let him. “What’s wrong, pal? Tell me.”
I don’t want to do this. I’m in his bedroom, on his bed. It’s trust, it’s intimate. I don’t want to let him down or give him regrets. So, I lie and tell him it’s nothing, there’s nothing, and I kiss him deeply so he believes me. So that he believes there’s nothing, really just nothing at all, except me and him.
