4. Malcolm
MALCOLM
“ Y ou’re being weird.”
Kaylin says this Friday night as I’m literally pulling off my full condom and still breathing heavy. Definitely not what a guy wants to hear after coming. “Did you not…?”
“No. I did.”
“Then what?”
“You just seem pre-occupied. That’s all I meant.”
She’s still wearing her bra, and she sits up in bed against the headboard while I get rid of the condom. When I turn back to her, she pats the mattress in front of her crisscrossed legs. “Talk to me.”
I sigh, plopping my naked ass down. She gives my arm a stroke, and I glance at her briefly.
She’s a cute girl. Always has been. Petite.
Curvy. Soft. Her brown hair was in a perfectly fine bun before we had sex, and now it’s mussed and crooked.
Her large, dark eyes are sincere and concerned.
Because we’ve been together since freshman year of high school, she’s my best friend as well as my girlfriend.
She reads me with laser accuracy most of the time, so I never bother with my bad lying .
“One—I can’t think of a fucking way to make a single dollar out of a hundred dollars. Two—Ryan’s in the internship.”
“Whoa— what ?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. There’s a reason I didn’t mention this earlier in the week, but ever since he and I “talked” and we’re dealing with it by not dealing with it—or he is—I realize I’ve gotta figure my end out somehow.
“ Our Ryan?” she asks in a way that makes me flinch.
“You know what I mean,” she adds.
She means the only Ryan we both know. She means the guy she was sort of dating before I kissed her at a party and plastered her to me like a shield.
She means the stepbrother I used to have who had me dreading every family function for years until his mom divorced my dad.
She also means—because she knows everything there is to know about me—the Ryan who used to be my best friend before he ruined everything by telling me he was in love with me.
Normally, I wouldn’t have told her or anyone about that day because it was so fucking embarrassing, but I’d desperately wanted to get into her pants at the time, and since she was sort of hung up on him, I had to give her a reason to look my way.
“Yeah. That Ryan.”
“How is he?”
“I don’t fucking know,” I grumble. “Still an asshole.”
Kaylin sighs, her hand slipping down my forearm to encircle my wrist. “Have you talked to him?”
“You know, I actually tried. The first day we ignored each other, but I ran into him at a deli Tuesday morning, and I made an effort. He wasn’t having it.”
“Do you think he still…”
“How could he possibly?” I have given Ryan zero reasons to love me in any capacity for the better part of a decade while giving him infinite reasons to hate me with his whole chest. It appears to have worked.
She studies my face, my eyes in particular. “Yeah. I guess. Do you have to work with him?”
“Not really. We huddle in the mornings and have these intern debriefs at the end of the day where we sit in the conference room for twenty minutes with our supervisor, but other than that, no.”
“So, what’s bugging you?”
I fucking wish I could articulate the answer to that. “You tell me.”
She perks up, loving the chance to play therapist. “Any guilt in there anywhere?”
I scowl. “Guilt? For what?”
“I don’t know. For being a douche to him every chance you got. For me . For trying to out him in front of your stepmom?”
I roll my eyes. “I didn’t realize it was some huge secret.”
“You said yourself you never saw him with a guy.”
“That doesn’t mean he isn’t off doing it with dudes.” Miguel immediately comes to mind, but I shove the thought away. “He’s close with his mom—why wouldn’t she know?”
“Because maybe he isn’t gay .”
I laugh. “I wasn’t the one out of my mind on cough medicine that day. I heard exactly what he said.”
“And you majorly over-reacted.”
Yes, I know that. I wasn’t exactly cool with the concept of my stepbrother —the guy who’d been my favorite person ever—who I trusted —flipping the tables on me and making it sexual .
Not that he tried anything. He had the flu.
The cough syrup was strong, and he was running his mouth.
Still, he never took it back. He tried to apologize, but he didn’t take back what he said.
After I shut down his apology, he tried to act like it never happened—like maybe I would forget about it. But how could I? It changed everything . “I just didn’t want him to get the wrong idea—obviously he got it from somewhere.”
Jesus, shut the fuck up, Malcolm. The last thing I need is Kaylin asking questions about the why of everything, which would force me to think about it, too, and I am not going there. I’ve moved on.
“I’m sure the message has been received by now,” she says. “Don’t you?”
“I should certainly fucking hope so.”
“God,” she groans. “I could really do with you being less of a classic homophobe.”
“I am not!”
“You completely are. I hear you and the guys talking. I’ve seen how you act when you see two men on a date.”
I genuinely don’t want to know what she sees in me when that happens.
Latching onto the rest of her statement about our friends, I say, “Look, Jake, Evan, and Henry are way worse than me. Sue us for being straight.”
“I’ve got no problem with you being straight, Mal, but do you have to be so disgusted by queer people?”
“I’m not ,” I say emphatically.
She gives me a glare, and I guess it withers a critical part of my guard.
“Okay—fine—when I see two guys together in public, and I start thinking about it too hard, it freaks me out a little, but that’s just because…” Whoa there, she doesn’t need to know everything.
“You don’t get how a man could find another man attractive?” she asks.
I am not answering that question. We’re not going there.
I have an actual therapist if I ever want to talk about that, which I don’t.
Finally, I manage to gather myself and shut the fuck up.
I get up and pull on my sweatpants. “You know, if you really want to help me with something, think of how I can turn a hundred dollars into ten grand in three months. That would be useful.”
“Gambling?”
I snort. “Yeah?”
“Sure. Start off small, then increase your risk as your winnings improve. People make whole careers out of gambling.”
“I don’t know anything about gambling,” I say while I look for a clean t-shirt.
“YouTube knows all.”
“Yeah, all right. It’s not the worst idea. If I can pass microeconomics, I’m sure I can figure out how to play blackjack and not lose my shirt.”
“I’ll help, I just have to pee first.”
I leave her to it and go to the living room.
If she’s staying, I should order dinner.
Having sex took the edge off my restlessness, but it’s still there.
I pace behind the couch while I scroll for food delivery.
Kaylin reappears, sitting on the couch and pulling up YouTube on the flat screen.
“Thai,” she tells me, and I focus my search.
I put in her order for soup and fried rice then drunken noodles for me.
“Five of the other interns are pooling their money and teaming up,” I inform her.
“They can do that?”
I shrug. “The only rule was no rules.”
“So, are you gonna get with the other two?”
“The other two are Ryan and this woman Bailey who I’m pretty sure wants me to burn slowly in hell for having a Y chromosome.”
“Mal, Jesus.”
“What? Is that homophobic, too?”
“It’s a lot of things, babe. Judgmental being the main one. You only met her a few days ago.”
“Sorry,” I huff, sitting next to her .
“I’m assuming you don’t want to work with anyone else on this.”
“You know how I get.”
“Competitive?”
“Teamwork brings out the worst in me,” I say.
“No. Losing brings out the worst in you. You’re not really setting yourself up for success here. I know you want to work at that place.”
I do want to work at Marks & Baker. I worked hard for this internship, and I love San Francisco.
I want to have a life here, and I can’t do that earning the industry minimum at a bank branch.
So yes, I want to win, and no, I’m not ruling anything out, but being on a team of six?
How am I supposed to stand out that way?
And regardless of whether Kaylin thinks I’m being too judgmental of Bailey— I’m the one on the receiving end of her fuck off vibes every day—I know she’s going this alone no matter what.
Ryan’s just—I shake my head as a full body shudder rattles through me.
“You’re not ruling it out,” Kaylin notes.
“I…” I feel like I’m missing something. It’s a frustrating feeling, and it makes me restless.
But I also feel something else—something I haven’t let myself feel in a long time—and it’s making me equally restless and impatient—like all the answers are right there, waiting for me to stumble on them, and then I’ll be settled.
Then I’ll know what to do. Then I’ll be still.
“Wait—do you think you could work with Ryan on this?”
I shake my head, the stone in my stomach asserting itself heavily.
She goes on. “I mean, I know he wouldn’t want to, but you think you could? Babe…”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Mal. Do you feel bad?”
“No,” I say firmly .
“Are you sure?” she presses, forcing me to actually consider the question. Do I feel bad?
I guess seeing how Ryan turned out after everything—all my rejection and hateful bullying—is sort of a relief.
Like I said, the last time I saw him, he looked like a burned out stoner—a loser.
To know he got his MBA and is all cleaned up—or looks cleaned up anyway—reminds me we all grow up eventually.
The beef I’ve got with him is legit, but if there’s a chance he and I both get jobs at Marks & Baker, do I really want to spend the rest of my career avoiding someone I lost the ability to get along with over something that happened when we were kids?
“He looks different,” I say, annoyed that those are the words I choose. I have no business thinking about what Ryan looks like .
“Yeah?”