“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
He slips his fingers through the hair on my chest, his come still on my skin, and I feel a stab of guilt. He caresses me so sweetly. A wave of guilt.
“What is it?” he asks.
“What’s what, pal?”
His fingertips keep touching me, softly. “Is that how you see me?”
“Like what?”
“Like your…friend?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
I put my lips against his hair. “I know what you mean.”
His face nuzzles into my neck, his exhale warm. My skin tingles and forms goosebumps. A part of me tumbles like a fortress and he’s storming my walls.
And another part of me is desperately trying to draw up the bridge.
This is a really stupid thing to let happen right now.
But it’s like he said; I can’t help myself. I want to see him. Really, I’d be content with just that.Seeinghim, like with my eyes in front of me, and he doesn’t even have to be naked. I should be content with just that. I’m not in control anymore. I’m infected, I’m sick, and it’s steering this ship right on over to his aunt’s yard.
I just find myself going over after work. It’s stupid. I forget about doing anything else. I forget to take out the trash, make the bed, empty the ashtray. I didn’t realize how routine I’d gotten until he came along and obliterated it.
We go to the abandoned store a lot just because it’s somewhere to go. I don’t fuck him there, although I’ve thought about it, but it gets really hot inside. Carpenter bees bore into the old wood, hover around us, suspicious. Sweat shines on his upper lip and makes my shirt cling to my back as we move around. Sometimes we talk and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we pick up things we find and show the other one. None of it is that interesting. Except the wooden squirrel.
I was able to twist the nail out of its eye. Paul puts it on top of a high shelf that looks like it used to hold tins of crackers. We only think so because we found one, empty, in the corner. And so the wooden squirrel watches us, with its one “good” eye, a witness as we pass each other, hands brushing, not accidentally.
We pick up all the bottle caps and create a mound of them on the countertop. It isn’t intentional. It’s something to do, and maybe a way to show respect. Make the floor not so cluttered.
In the middle of all that, I start to wonder what he does all day. When I’m gone and his aunt is gone. He told me before that he reads, but that can’t be all he does. I find myself looking at the clock in the garage and wondering what he’s doing that very minute. Some evenings he’s wandering over before I’m even off my bike. It must be dull. I don’t know how he stands it, but I’m curious, so I ask him one day.
He’s lying in the grass in the lot behind the abandoned store. Lying as if he’s going to make a snow angel. I sit next to him, tuck a cigarette behind one ear, then light another.
“I already told you,” he says, clouds reflecting off his glasses. “You asked me before. Remember?”
“Sure,” I say. “But there’s more to it than that, right?”
“I guess. But not really.”
I flick ash off my cigarette. “Do you eat? Watch the television? Listen to the radio?”
He sits up on his elbows. “Why do you want to know?” There’s a hint of a smile on his face, shy and tentative.
“I just do.”
“It’s boring. I don’t do anything.”
“I bet it’s not boring.”
“Oh yeah?”
