CHAPTER EIGHT #2
“Carver, baby, I need a minute,” Scott said, and the baby sounded natural and not strange at all.
“I missed you.”
“I know.”
“You do something to me, you fuck with my head.”
“Me too,” Scott admitted, his voice husky.
Carver could see now that he’d gotten at least a dozen tattoos since he’d last seen him naked; when Scott left for California the only ink he had was a sword-wielding Michael the Archangel in a woodcut style on his right upper thigh.
He had gotten this the day he turned eighteen.
Now he also had a moon, a knife, a scorpion, a yin-yang koi fish, an ouroboros around his left bicep, and several others that were currently obscured.
Across his chest in lowercase script was one that read the light gleams an instant.
Carver did not recognize the quote. He found his head was clearing a little. “Earlier,” he said, “did I say this was your pussy?”
Scott laughed, his breath warm against Carver’s cheek. “Yeah.”
“Christ.”
“It’s all good. At least we weren’t saying the kind of shit we said the first time.”
This comment pulled up no specific memory in Carver’s mind but inexplicably filled him with dread. “What did we say the first time?”
“Uh…” Scott drew his lip into his mouth and worried it with his teeth. “You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Seriously? I think you do.”
“I’m blanking.”
“We said I love you.”
Carver sat bolt upright on the couch. “What?”
Scott withdrew his fingers from Carver, looking like he regretted saying anything. “We agreed afterward that we just got caught up in the moment, that it wasn’t that deep. You seriously don’t remember this?”
There was a hazy, queasy familiarity in Carver, but he insisted: “No, I don’t. I feel like I’d remember that.”
“I don’t know, man, but I know I didn’t make that shit up.”
“How do you know?”
“‘Cause I keep journals.”
Carver stared at Scott where he lay on his side on the cum-splattered sofa, propped up on his elbow with his dark hair messy and his handsome face flushed and beatific.
Then he rose from the couch and dropped to a squat on the floor so he could find his clothes, ignoring the dull ache inside him, possessed as he sometimes was by an intense restlessness.
“Carv,” Scott said, sitting up.
Carver found Scott’s Creeper Lagoon shirt and threw it to him. “What?”
“What’s up, what’s going on?”
“I need fresh air. And a cigarette.”
“Okay?”
“So let’s go outside.”
“So you’re not going back to the house?”
Carver shook his head, which was buzzing, and put his shirt on. “No, but I want a cigarette.”
“Alright, hand me my flannel.”
Carver obeyed, and Scott made sure his cigarettes were in the breast pocket before putting it on.
“I really don’t think I ever said that,” Carver said.
“Well,” Scott said, getting to his feet and pulling his boxers on, “I said it first, so relax. I wasn’t trying to freak you out, here.”
“I’m not freaked out.” Carver stood so he could pull on his jeans, doing his best not to wobble despite his quivering calf muscles. “But if you said it first, maybe you misheard me. Maybe I said I love this or something.”
Scott laughed. “If that were the case, I’d know, and I’d have been so embarrassed I probably would have just walked out. Are you fucking with me right now?”
“Why would I be fucking with you?”
“I don’t know, it’s just hard to believe you could forget something like that.”
“You know I forget shit,” Carver exclaimed breathlessly, gesturing at chest level. “You know I —” He tended to block things out. It was embarrassing to say this aloud. It made him sound unwell. “You know?”
Scott nodded. He knew.
Carver strode toward the doors of the poolhouse and pushed them open, bursting out into the warm night air.
He didn’t bother to check behind himself for Scott as he went around the side of the building and cut a direct path through the grass to the wooded area at the back of the property.
The crickets were even louder now; a dog barked in the distance.
Other than that the neighborhood was silent.
The further they got from the house, the fewer lights there were.
Carver dug his phone out of his pocket and used the flashlight to light his way.
He could hear Scott’s soft steps in the grass behind him.
He stopped when an abandoned and rusted old trampoline came into view, resting in a small clearing and surrounded by trees.
This had been the site of several childhood maimings.
Chip once smacked his face off the frame, chipping an adult tooth and busting out two baby teeth; Conway once misjudged a landing, went off the side and fractured her wrist. Carver got off light with just bruises and one hematoma.
Carver sat in the grass with his back at the base of a large oak. Scott came over and sat down beside him. In the clear night air it was much more obvious that they both stank of sweat, cum and two kinds of smoke.
Scott lit a cigarette, then handed it to Carver and lit his own. Carver took a grateful drag and rested the back of his head against the tree.
“Maybe I said it,” he admitted, in the hopes that if he acquiesced then his heart might stop racing.
“Look, it doesn’t matter either way,” Scott said without looking at him.
Carver’s heart, unfortunately, had not stopped racing. “You don’t think you meant it?”
“I don’t know.” Scott blew out smoke. It curled and dispersed in the darkness. “Maybe puppy love.”
Carver smoked and didn’t respond, just stared through the trees.
“I mean, what’s love,” Scott continued. “Two people wanting to share their lives? It would be pretty wild to have something that real at eighteen. We hadn’t built anything together, we didn’t know what life even was yet.”
“I don’t know,” Carver muttered. “I think I knew then. I think I was right about what life is.”
“Yeah? Congrats.”
“I mean that in a bad way. I thought it was rote and limited. I was hoping to be wrong.”
“Oh, gotcha. Well, you were, I think.”
“Was I?”
“Life’s definitely not limited, man,” Scott said. “That’s like the one thing it isn’t.”
Carver exhaled smoke and looked at him. Though it was a warm night, the sweat cooling on his skin was draining his body heat.
“I’ve been a lot of places and done a lot of shit,” he said, “and I keep running into the same types of people and the same situations. And most of it’s… flat.”
“Flat how?”
“Flat like, uninteresting. Predictable.”
“I don’t think you’re around good people, then,” Scott said.
“And I don’t mean that in a preachy way, I just mean like…
I don’t know. I find it comforting how similar people are everywhere I go, ‘cause even though a lot of people suck shit, most people are alright. And they’re good in the same ways.
So I know wherever in the world I go, no matter how different things are there, I can find some fellowship.
But rich people…” He sucked his teeth. “I think they’re a little removed from that.
I think if you can pay for help, or pay for fellowship, you’re not gonna extend it as freely. ”
Carver ashed his cigarette in the grass. “Then maybe everyone is fundamentally transactional, and rich people just pay with money while everyone else pays with effort.”
“Sounds like something a finance guy would say.”
“Uh-huh, guilty. Guilty of cliche.”
Scott grinned at him. Carver could see his teeth shining in the darkness, then more of his face as he lifted his cigarette back to his mouth. “I know I’m one to talk. I’m a huge cliche, I always have been.”
“At least it’s a cool cliche.”
“It’s less cool the older I get,” Scott said. “A fact I’m painfully aware of. But this shit becomes your whole life, your whole social circle, especially if you make it your career. And especially if you start young like I did.”
“I never really got why you leaned into it so hard,” Carver said. “You could have pulled off being more publicly multifaceted. You didn’t have to keep it a secret that you wrote poems and shit.”
Scott shut his eyes and winced. “Don’t remind me,” he said, laughing.
“But they were actually good,” Carver insisted, feeling unusually loose-lipped. “You think I’d say that if I didn’t mean it?”
“Look, I, uh… you’re probably right, honestly. I was insecure, and I was… I never had much in the way of family. Most of the appeal of leaning into a cliche is probably that it comes with people, and camaraderie.” Scott shrugged.
Carver was thinking about himself now, and suspected that he was being a hypocrite.
He had stepped into his cliche for similar reasons, though he wasn’t looking for people or camaraderie so much as a way forward — a diagram for his life.
He had gone to Duke with an eye toward snagging a high-paying job, fallen into the finance funnel, and eighteen years later here he was.
He had only ever worked in finance, all his friends were in finance or finance-adjacent, he lived in Tribeca, his wife was a fellow MD.
He’d allowed his career to determine his wardrobe and the food he ate and the haircut he had and the vacations he went on and the type of closet case that he was.
Except it did not determine Scott. Scott, who predated his career, did not fit into his life at all.
Sure, maybe a good amount of the guys he worked with had a friend like Scott, but was his semen currently drying on their leg?
Closeted finance guys fucked other closeted finance guys, or purchased escorts and sugar babies.
Scott was aberrational. He saw Carver in a way that no one else did, and in doing so he punched a big hole in the side of his brain and stepped on through.