jesse #3
“Nothing,” I said and looked at him. “Nothing ever happened. No matter what we do, we’re always here to serve the chemistry in our brains, the bacteria in our gut, and the social structures that keep us in our place.”
Now he threw his head back and laughed out loud, which warmed me more than I was willing to admit.
“But I screwed my way through three years of studies, barely holding my sanity from shattering, and I knew it was time to run away. I knew I couldn’t keep going in circles, waking up hungover and sore with no memory of what happened the night before, in the company of guys who felt the same way.
But here’s the funny part. The more aware you become of just how crappy your crappy habits are, the more you give in.
It depressed me to see the state of my life, so I buried those feelings deeper under all the hooking up and drinking and an occasional mushroom that made me see a whole pantheon of gods. All gods are horny, by the way.”
“All of them?” Finn asked in mock disbelief.
“All of them. Every single one.”
“Even…?”
“Him especially,” I said.
“Oh, wow. See, I never knew that,” Finn said, dead serious. “But when you think about it, the whole virgin thing starts making sense. We’re so going to hell after this, by the way.”
“Pfft, I’ve sold my soul to the devil a while back,” I said.
“Got anything nice in return?”
“Mm, sure did. I sold it to never again hear, ‘But who’s to say what’s really true?’ from a freshman.”
Finn laughed louder, poking my ribcage with his elbow like he used to. “That’s cruel. And funny.”
“What’s cruel is how much we think we know when we know nothing,” I said. “The more I learn, the bigger the pile of things I don’t know becomes. Seriously, I look forward to the day when I’ve learned everything and finally know nothing at all.”
Finn was bending over with laughter, which made me feel a lot better than it should have.
The bottom edge of Finn’s fitted T-shirt moved up the small of his back, revealing two inches of skin and the waistband of his underwear peeking from his pants, and my entire body tensed.
Seeing him, even like this, even in passing, and getting knocked out by the reminder that he was twenty-two and hot as hell was potent enough to make me lose my balance for a moment.
He was still the cheerful, slightly mischievous, ever-teasing kid I’d always known, but he also wasn’t. What he was today did things to me far worse than what an innocent and childish infatuation ever could have.
When Finn looked, I had fallen a few paces behind, glued to the sidewalk and fighting for air. A small frown touched his eyebrows. “All good?”
I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Perfect.” The heat in my cheeks was such that I knew I was radiating it visibly, but I couldn’t exactly dunk my head into a barrel of water without raising more suspicions.
“You sure?” Finn said. “You’ve gone a weird color.”
“I overdid it at the gym,” I said. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. I’d done an extra set of everything because I’d had time to kill, and now my arms were heavy and my face was hot, and I could blame all of it on the workout if I had to. “Blood’s all in the wrong places.”
He didn’t believe me. I could tell because he didn’t say anything, just looked at me a beat too long, then let it go. That was worse than being caught. Being caught, I could have argued with.
We kept walking. He told me about a professor who graded like he was personally offended by the essays, and about Peanut eating half of Bennet’s clipboard and being completely fine, which somehow led to a story about the corkboard that I only half followed because I was watching the way he talked with his hands.
I told him philosophy was mostly men finding long words for things their grandmothers already knew.
He laughed at that, then went quiet and thoughtful, like I’d said something worth chewing on, which I hadn’t.
A guy was hosing down the front steps of one of the brownstones I’d once told Finn I hated. Finn caught me scowling at it and grinned. He remembered. Of course he remembered.
Our hands bumped. Just knuckles. I put mine in my pocket.
“Cold?” Finn asked.
“A little,” I said. It was warm out. I was still sweating, but he nodded anyway.
I made a fist around some loose change at the bottom of my pocket and held on to it like it would keep my hand busy.
We got to the corner where Whitmore turned ordinary again, and he stopped.
“Tomorrow,” he said. We’d agreed on it already, though I’d somehow hoped that this afternoon would excuse me. It didn’t. He looked at me so hopefully that it was difficult to think.
“I’ll be there,” I said. Strangely, having agreed to it, I found myself wanting to be there.
He went one way, and I went the other. I took the long route back with my hand still in my pocket.
Somewhere across town, there was an empty lot where my old bedroom used to be, the glow-in-the-dark stars long gone, and I didn’t think about that.
I didn’t think about the things that had filled that boy’s head all day and all night long.
I thought about the two inches of his back.