Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
harrison
My fingers smoothed my mustache. Not that it was nearly so big that it needed smoothing. It was simply the last line of defense from falling back to the terrible old habit of biting my nails. I’d stopped doing that the day I’d come out to my parents, a good eight years ago.
My gaze flicked to the clock with Roman numerals on the brown wall opposite the French balcony door. The light of the setting sun made the texture of the clock pop. It was quarter past six, and I still had forty-five minutes to kill before Taylor was supposed to arrive. Make it an hour.
Looking around the place, I noticed the corkboard for one particular reason. The photo in the middle of it was of me hugging Emma from behind, both of us laughing, looking into the vintage Polaroid camera on a day that was, in my memory, as good as any day we’d ever had together.
Seven hundred and forty-three days. That was how many days we’d had.
From the short documentary festival where I’d bumped into her to the day she sat me down with a held-back sigh and a tired look of someone who could no longer do this, all of it happening somewhere behind the curtain, in the dark hallways and hidden nooks and out of the vision of the only member of the audience who sat through it all happily, confident that things were as good as they could be.
I got up on impulse, picked up my keys from the vintage glass bowl in the hallway, and shut the door on my way out. I didn’t have a destination in mind, only time to pass without going insane with no one but my insufferable self to keep me company.
The sidewalk led me under the bare branches of the trees in March, little buds swelling, working up the courage to sprout and unfurl their wondrous leaves, readying to bring life back into the world.
I walked for a long time before remembering to look around beyond the branches and the darkening sky above.
As I blinked myself back to awareness, I realized where I was.
This was the small park between four buildings where Emma and I had spent hours into the night on our first real date.
I’d walked her home, but we’d carried on a few streets further, stopping here because I was telling her about my favorite compositions from Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
She’d kept asking, and I hadn’t even thought that I might have been boring her with it.
Had I been boring her with my flights of fancy for two years?
I turned on my heels and headed back home, resisting the temptation to follow fate’s own guidance and walk to Emma’s building.
Taylor had been right on Sunday when he’d convinced me not to call her.
I’d overreacted to her absence and saw her pass down Whitmore Street on her usual route.
She was fine. Nothing at all had been wrong with her. She’d simply…missed it.
In the months since we’d split up, I had seen her from a distance on too many occasions.
I hadn’t been trying to. I had just happened to be in the places where she took her new boyfriend, and I had just happened to notice them laughing together, her hand reaching for his, the other hand going to his shoulder, his gaze moving to her face, warmth in their eyes making me squirm.
It was dark by the time I reached my brownstone building, and my heart sank when I saw him sitting on the stairs by the front door. “Taylor, I’m so sorry,” I said, spreading my arms a little in surrender. I had no excuse.
“I was starting to think you’d dumped me,” Taylor said, that big smile revealing big, white teeth. “But here you are.”
“I’ve never dumped anyone in my life,” I said as Taylor hopped onto his feet, stepped closer, and hugged me. “Nobody’s around to see it.”
“I hug my male friends,” he said.
It provoked a rumble of laughter from me, and I shook my head.
Taylor followed me up the short flight of stairs to the front door and waited for me to unlock it before joining me in the narrow hallway with a blocky, Art Deco staircase leading up to my apartment.
“What do you mean you’ve never dumped anyone? ”
“Exactly what I said,” I replied. “I’m not the sort of person who can cut things off neatly.”
“You must have been with someone who didn’t turn out to be who you thought they were,” Taylor said.
I wasn’t sure if he understood just how deep that particular dagger cut me. “I’m very good at lying to myself.”
When I looked at him, I could see he wasn’t sure if I was joking. “At least you’re self-aware.”
We reached the top floor without getting winded, and I opened the door to my apartment, dropped the keys into the bowl by the entrance, and flicked on the light in the hallway.
“What did you tell your friends?” I asked.
“That we’re watching some Soviet movie,” Taylor replied.
“That would be a Tarkovsky film,” I said. “And it wouldn’t kill you to actually watch it if you want to be convincing.”
“I wasn’t under the impression that I would have homework,” Taylor said, stepping into my bedroom. He turned on the light like he was at home. It was the sort of confidence I liked. “Man, it’s like a rainforest in here.”
My bedroom was cluttered with plants. A particularly resilient sansevieria occupied a corner, sprouting its thick, bold stems high from the clay pot, while a pothos spread its vines down from a basket suspended from a hook in the ceiling.
Many of the longer vines were fastened to the small nails along the wall above my bed with its black, wrought-iron frame.
On the many messy surfaces of the bedroom, there was a pot of lavender, a spider plant, a peace lily, and a Boston fern in a round pot on the floor. Orchids occupied the windowsill.
“Did you pick all of these?” Taylor asked.
“Uh-huh,” I replied absent-mindedly as I walked into the kitchen.
He followed, whistling as he entered. The tiles were a colorful collage of mismatched patterns lining the wall with the counter and cabinets, and my dining table was a very old, wooden block on decoratively carved legs with four wrought-iron chairs around it. “Want some wine?”
“It wouldn’t be a date if I said no,” Taylor joked.
I glanced at him over my shoulder. “You know, we don’t have to pretend to be boyfriends when we’re alone.”
“Haven’t you heard of method acting? I thought you were a film student.”
I laughed harder than I intended. “You are going to live in character for three weeks?”
“Don’t be surprised when I start sending you rat tails and cockroaches after we break up,” he said.
The cringe hurt me. “I didn’t think you would know about that.”
“That particular weirdo has gotten away with it for far too long,” Taylor murmured, his hand moving over the surface of the table.
He was a very beautiful guy, I realized all of a sudden.
And it was sudden. I had noticed his good looks before, obviously, but never quite like this.
His locks were a little curlier tonight, swept to one side, and his olive skin had an extra warmth in the light of the Edison bulbs in my kitchen.
I opened a drawer and found a corkscrew, then picked up a bottle of red from the wire-frame holder in the corner of the kitchen counter. I faced Taylor while working on the cork. “What do you want to do?”
A particularly cute expression came over his face. In his girliest, six-year-old voice and best British accent, he said, “Do a backflip.”
I snorted so hard it hurt. “You are impossible.”
“I’ve heard it called adorable.”
“You’re like a depository of pop culture references and stupid memes,” I said.
“Charming,” he said as if I proved his point.
Arresting was the word that came to mind. Intense, contradictory, architectural. I popped the cork from the bottle and placed both on the counter, turning away from him as this strange dawning passed through me.
“Glasses?” Taylor suggested.
“Huh?”
“You look like you forgot the next step,” he said.
I opened the cupboard and took out two wineglasses, poured us each some wine, then turned back to Taylor while avoiding being struck down by his deep-set, liquid-brown eyes. “Here, it’s one of my favorites.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why is one of your favorites? Do you have a speech about the earthiness or something?” he asked. He was teasing me, I was almost sure.
I smiled at him and inclined my head. “It’s nutty, actually, but no, I don’t have a speech about it. I’m not as refined as you think I am. I just like how easily it goes down, and it’s not so dry to give you a headache.”
“Good enough for me,” he said.
“No offense, but I think any craft beer would have done the trick for you.”
Taylor put a hand on his heart and gave me his most adoring look. “You know me so well.” He swirled the wine in his glass, almost spilling it over the edge. “Cheers.”
I lifted my glass, letting it touch his gently before we each had a sip of wine. His eyebrows, dark and expressive, rose high as he judged the wine and nodded his approval.
“Come,” I said. I lifted the tinfoil off a platter of snacks I’d prepared earlier and carried it into the living room with Taylor following.
When I flicked the light on, all the lamps lit.
It had taken me three days of rewiring, filling, mudding, sanding, and painting to get this room to be the way I wanted it.
I had a secret switch for the overhead light that was only there for emergencies, but otherwise existed outside the bubble universe I had made for myself.
The room came to life with its warmth and vintage coziness, a particular mixture of maximalism and mid-century modern design.
“You have a lot of stuff,” Taylor said, a small frown furrowing the space between his eyebrows. He let out a falling whistle.
“I’ve been alive for twenty-three years,” I said. “It piles up.”