“I mean.” He pauses. “I really wanted to see you all day yesterday. And today. And it’s like…you can just come get me and bring me here. Just when you want to.” He pauses again, and he does the glasses push. “It’s like you’re messing with me.”
I’m surprised to feel my cheeks redden. “I’m not messing with you.”
He looks at me with an expression in his eyes that makes me want to cover him like a tent and protect him from the downpour. “I told you I wouldn’t bother you. Just…please don’t mess with me.”
I step toward him, close. “I didn’t realize, pal. You can go if you want. I just wanted to see you.”
“Me too.”
I reach for his hand, and he takes it. “I just thought, like you might need some space or something. Or your aunt might ask you stuff. I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”
“Let me worry about that.” He takes a step closer. “And I’m not expecting you to drop everything or whatever, but if this is just a thing for you, and it’s okay if it is, then at least let me come see you. We don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to talk to me. You don’t —”
I shut him up with a kiss, and instantaneously he melts into me, his body pressing against mine.
I pull away. “This isn’t just a thing for me. All right?”
He stares at me, tongue flicking over his lips.
“Is it just a thing for you?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
I don’t even know whatitactually is. Or whatitcould be.
“You can come here anytime,” I say. “Anytime you want.” He doesn’t reply, so I say, “Sound good?”
There’s a smile in his eyes. “Yes.”
I want to fuck him again, and I hope he isn’t too confused when I take us back to the abandoned shop we were at a few days ago.
It’s his aunt, I think. Being so close and I keep rationalizing it like my neighbors might think something’s up or what if someone stops by, even though no one ever has or ever will. Except him.
And I like sharing this place with him. I always thought the place was ugly, but once I got inside it seemed to grow on me, like an ugly but loyal dog. Each time I drove by, I could count on it to be here. Still abandoned, still quiet, and still ugly.
Paul leans against the dusty counter, looking over at the broken register. “Do you know what happened? Why the place closed up?”
I pick up a piece of shelving and try to put it back into place. “No, not really. Probably got run out by Eckert’s or Woolworth’s I’d imagine. Little places like this can’t really compete.”
It’s what my old man would say, anyway. There was a place just down the road from our farm. Jimmy would walk me and Glen down sometimes and buy us each a Coke. We’d sit on the wooden steps and Jimmy would stand there, and I thought he was rich, and he seemed so big to me. Big in the way a little kid sees a bigger kid — better, stronger, and with a secret mysterious knowledge. I thought that would have to happen to me one day. I’d have to know things, the way they knew them.
But I don’t know anything. I drift. I am a fraud.
The place closed down one winter after a department store came to our little town. My old man hated it. Said it wasn’t right that you could buy toothpaste and handkerchiefs under one roof. What was the world coming to?
Paul picks up something off the counter. It looks like a button. “You think you might fix it up?”
I light a smoke and look around. It amazes me that someone, several someones, built this and just let it go. They spent time and money. Fingers were smashed under hammers, a penny fell from a pocket when the cement was poured, and probably that same someone turned his back on it one day. Put on his hat, shut the door, and let it all buckle and fold under the weight of time.
“Nah.” I find myself standing in front of Paul, still leaning back on the counter. I place a hand on either side of him and lean over him. “It would lose…something.” I try to think of a good word, a way to describe it, but I can’t. “It’ll be worse years from now, I suppose. That is, if someone doesn’t just come by with a bulldozer, ready to put something else here.”
It would be a shame. Not letting a place die off with some dignity, gracefully, and take its sweet damn time. It goes to show that anything is replaceable, really.
I look at Paul, and he’s looking at me.
Maybe not anything.
“You could put something here,” he says.
