“Does sheknow?” I cut in. “About you and me?”
“Ofcoursenot,” Cole scoffs. “You know I’dnever—”
He stops, and I know we’re both thinking about the last time we saw each other, about all the things we never said. My eyes are stinging, and I blink angrily, cuffing the side of my head with my hand as I will the feeling away.
“Where did yougo?” I can barely force the words out. “I called and called and called, but you never —”
“Ezra, I’msorry—” Cole’s eyes are sad, but there’s something fierce in them as he steps towards me, his hands reaching out for thin air. “You have noideahow sorry I am —”
The noise that explodes out of me is somewhere between a snort and a sob, and his words hang in the air, both of us blazing, his eyes flicking down to my mouth.
Then we’re closing the gap between us, our lipscrashing together as we grab for whatever we can find. Cole’s hands are on my face, brushing the stubble on my cheeks, and mine are holding on to his skinny hips as if they’re the last thing keeping me from spinning off the face of the earth. And inside my head I’m thinking it’s a fucking cliche, that I always roll my eyes at scenes like this in movies, at the desperate clinches that come out of nowhere, between two characters who have no business being in each other’s orbit. But even as my brain is spitting out these thoughts, my tongue is claiming Cole’s mouth, one of my hands finding the scant meat of his ass, and I’m eighteen again, rolling him underneath me while he wraps his thighs around my waist. And Cole is walking me backwards, and I feel one of the wooden posts of the swingset digging into my back, and I lean hard against it, letting it center me, even as I’m splitting apart at the seams.
And I can’t say it doesn’t feel good, listening to his reedy moans as I dip my thumbs beneath his waistband, finding the hollows of his hips. I can’t say I haven’t thought about this, haven’t wondered what it would be like to meet him again. Haven’t woken up with his name a strangled cry bursting from my throat. I don’t fucking deserve this, but he’s giving it to me, and I’m too tired to be the bigger person, to tell him all the reasons that he’s making a mistake, all the ways I’m going to disappoint him. So I let him undo my tie and reel me in, and when his fingers find my collar a few momentslater, opening the top two buttons, I tilt my head to the side, groaning as his teeth find my flesh.
And when he slides to the ground — when he drags his open lips down the front of my white shirt — when the knees of those pink trousers hit the dirt in the backyard that was once my entire world — when he presses his face just below my belt and looks up at me with moonbright eyes — I nod and give him permission, because there is no universe where I’ve ever been able to say no to him.
And so he draws me gently out into the cold air, and his mouth is hot and wet, and one of my hands is stretched above my head, wrapped around the wooden support behind me. The other is in his hair, and those waves are just as fine and silky as I remember, supple between my fingers. I’m watching his handsome face, his eyes shut tight as he takes me deep, and I know he’s always been sunshine, that when he was mine, he brightened even my darkest days. But I’m just as sure — Iknowthis, even as my thighs are burning, even as I’m ready to shake apart — that I am not, that I haveneverbeen, that I will never be — good enough for him. That I’ll drag him down as surely as a stone around his neck. And in the moment that my world shatters — in the horrible clarity that follows — I know what I have to do.
He’s climbing to his feet, and he’s kissing me, and I don’t mind that he tastes like me, but I keep my handsat my sides and my lips closed. And when he pulls back to study my face, there’s a line between his brows and I think he sees it too.
But he plays it off as he tucks me back into my trousers and caresses the side of my face, and when he speaks, his whisper is playful and a little hoarse. “So, uh — what do we tell Bree and Seth?”
I take his hand, pressing it against his chest, and leave it there. “We don’t tell them anything — because there’s nothing to tell.”
I might as well have slapped him. “There’s —what?”
“Nothing to tell,” I repeat, folding my arms. “It’s never going to work.”
He opens his mouth, then shuts it, his eyes flashing. Then he opens it once more. “Sorry, it was my mistake. You know, you really are an asshole.”
He turns on his heel and marches across the yard, slipping back out the way he came. And once again, I’m alone in the moonlight, one more door closed to me.
I know what you’re thinking, and I know you’re screaming at me to go after him. But this isn’t going to be that kind of story.
Two
The New Guy
September 2012
THE THING IS, I’VE NEVERreally felt like I fit in anywhere.
I guess I was an okay baby — I mean, we all suck as babies, right? I cried a lot and shat myself just like everybody else does. But as we all got older, the other kids justfigured it out, how to be in the world, how to make friends, how to survive. Me, on the other hand? My earliest memory is my first day of preschool, when I spent the whole day standing in the corner holding on to my backpack like I was the new guy in the prison yard. It wasn’t until the next daythat they even convinced me to sit at a table, and two more before they got a word out of me. I’ve never taken the easy road when making life hell for me and everybody else was also an option.
Mom was the only person who ever really got me. Somehow, she could tell I was different, that the world was just a little too loud for me, and she figured out how to turn down the volume. She cut the tags out of all my clothes and set aside plain pasta for me before she mixed the sauce in for Dad and Seth, and after school she would drive me over the bay and take me to sit on the beach, where the roar of the waves and the wind whipping my hair smoothed out the tension in my shoulders that came from sitting still in a hard chair all day, pretending I didn’t want to scream. And when I asked her why I was different, why it was so hard for me when it came so easily to everyone else, she told me not to worry, that the world had a place for all of us and that I shouldn’t feel silly or wrong for needing a little extra space.
And then, when I was fifteen, they found the cancer.
Dad doesn’t know I’ve seen the records.Linda Callahan, age 46. He doesn’t know that I read the words in her medical report, that when she went to see her doctor for routine back pain, they found tumors that had started in her breast and spread to her lymph nodes, then on to her lungs, her spine, her brain. She was gone within six months — six months of homehealth aides who asked too many questions, six months of antiseptic and the smell of vomit, aggressive treatments that went nowhere, until Dad took the dining room table down one day, and then they came and set up a hospital bed in the middle of our house. And that’s when I knew for sure that Mom was going to leave me and I was going to be on my own.
Seth tried, but he was already off at Harvard, the pride of our small town. And Dad — well. Look, I know it’s not his fault, but he and I are just not the same. The day they took my mother’s body out of the house, he turned on the TV, and it’s basically been on ever since, except for the precious hours when I was home from school before he got home from the latest job site, or when he was asleep. When I think of those years after my mother died and before I left the house, all I can remember isnoise— the walls pressing in on me, the crawling underneath my skin, the muddled ache in my head that always made my thoughts weave in on each other. I think Dad means well. He works hard, and I know he loves me, in his way. But it was never supposed to be like that — just him and me. Mom was supposed to be there to cushion our sharp edges.
The first day of my senior year of high school was just like any other day with Dad and me — dragging myself out of bed, getting ready upstairs with my headphones blasting in my ears to drown out the drone of cable news from the living room. When I poundeddownstairs, Dad was sitting on the couch with a bowl of cereal and I saw his mouth move — probablyHave a good day, sonorDon’t be late for your first day— both addressing unlikely scenarios, since I already knew from experience that high school sucked ass and I hadn’t been late since I started taking my bike up the hill rather than relying on Dad to drive me in the van. So I waved in a way I hoped was friendly and cut through the house to the kitchen, where I stowed my lunch in my backpack and then bolted out the back door. Once I was outside, I shut off my iPod and looped my headphones around my neck.
Blessed fucking silence.
Well, not silence exactly. There was the everpresent wind, and the rush of cars making their way along Route 36, and the shrieking of laughing gulls coming over the bay, and beyond that, the ocean. Someone up the hill was already running a lawnmower and our neighbor’s car was idling in the driveway. But compared to the constant rambling of talking heads and advertising jingles inside my house, it was pure heaven.
