He peers curiously past me, and side-steps inside, like I might reach out and snatch his throat. This won’t do. I don’t want him to be afraid of me.
But I guess yelling at him from the balcony didn’t help. Just what in the hell was I supposed to do anyway? I couldn’t ignore him anymore, blatantly watching me, the sun reflecting off his glasses, and did he really,seriously,think I had no idea? I can’t be sure if it was every evening. If the clouds roll in, it casts the entire yard in shadow, especially by the fence. It was often enough, though. I know that. Often enough to be disconcerting, at the very least.
I go to the icebox and get two beers. I almost toss one to him, but I take a look at his hunched shoulders, fists jammed in his pockets, doing everything he can to not look at me directly, and I think better of it. So instead I sit on the sofa and slide the can across the coffee table to him. But he doesn’t reach down in time to catch it and it knocks my ashtray to the floor, ashes covering the shitty rug I found at a second-hand shop.
“Sorry! I’m sorry.” He kneels to pick everything up.
“Don’t worry about it.” I wave him up. “Just leave it. I’ll get it later.” I crack open my beer.
He doesn’t move for a second, just standing there in my tiny sitting room, awkwardly holding the beer and ashtray. I wonder if he’s even had a beer before. He absolutely looks like the kind of fella who doesn’t drink beer. Or anything except milk and maybe the occasional soda pop.
He puts the ashtray back on the table and sits down on another shitty second-hand piece, the armchair, and he perches on the edge like a nervous bird. I watch him for a minute or two. He’s outright refusing to look at me, so I sigh and speak first.
“Can I ask why?”
He swallows. Shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He holds the can of beer in his hands like a candle at a vigil. “I’m just so sorry. I didn’t think you could see me.”
I want to challenge him. Ask why he thought being hidden would make a difference, since he was watching me like some kind of Communist witch-hunter. And he looks like he could be exactly that, let me tell you. He looks like his mother dresses him, and he’ll probably live at home well past thirty.
And yet…
There’s an itch inside me, a desire awakening that I try again and again to put to sleep. I think of it as the horse charging toward me as a child, and my savior, my older brother, only put himself in harm’s way to save me. I’ll never forget the screams or the blood. I’ll never forget the emptiness at knowing that I could never be grateful, but only angry. He’d forced this loss on me, and what good did it do?
And so I took that emptiness and that unwanted desire and just meshed the two together; made them one creature for me to deal with. This desire has hooves that pound into the ground like a hammer on an anvil. I hear it in the deepest and darkest of my dreams until it’s sprouted two heads, and I can’t ignore it anymore. My hand with the beer begins to shake. I take a sip and catch the kid in my periphery, watching me. When I turn to him, he looks away.
“You shouldn’t be doing stuff like that around here, pal,” I say to him. “Not too many people like peeping Toms.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, mostly to the ashes on the shitty rug. “I won’t do it again. I swear. Please just don’t say anything to my aunt.” He bites his lower lip.
I don’t like the distress in his voice. Is his aunt a mean lady? I’ve seen her a couple of times. She didn’t look mean. And I don’t like how he avoids my gaze. I don’t like how I started all this by dissolving the unspoken fantasy between us. It’s so stupid, so ridiculous, because in every way he owesmethe apology, but now I feel guilty for some inexplicable reason. I feel like I owehim.
I sit back on the sofa and consider something. And I shouldn’t. Absolutely not at all.
“How about this,” I say. I look over at him and wait patiently until he looks back. “Got a Triumph out front. Could use a wash and a polish. If you can do that, we can forget the whole thing.”
He just stares at me, and I can’t tell if he’s confused or what. “It’s the bike.” I nod to the front window. “Right out there.”
“I know what it is.” He looks almost insulted.
“Okay, well. What do you say? Tomorrow’s Saturday, so be here at ten?”
A slight flush appears on his neck, just below his Adam’s apple. I damn the flutter in my chest all the way to hell.
“All right,” he agrees.
I sit back and light a cigarette, a done deal, but there’s silence for a minute or so before he stands up and pushes his glasses up his nose.
“Can I go now?”
I shrug like I could give a shit.
He turns to the door and exits without a word.
I sit for a long time after he’s gone, my already dim sitting room getting dimmer, my lungs filling and emptying as I finish and light another cigarette. I go pick up the unopened beer and it’s warm where he gripped it for dear life. He lingers in a way I don’t want him to. I sit back down, sink deeper and deeper into the sofa cushions, my mind swirling with the fury that someone like him can do this to me. Now. Here.
The nerve.
The fuckingnerve.
