Chapter 26
26
SENIOR YEAR
SENIOR YEAR, AT MANUEL’S URGING, I apply to be editor in chief of the Trevian . It’s not a position I particularly want, but my best friend has been oddly pushy about extracurriculars throughout high school. Whenever there’s a charity event, we volunteer. Whenever clubs are looking for more members, he urges me to apply. It’s bizarre; he seems to care about my résumé more than my own mother does.
Two years have passed since Leo ended our relationship, but he never showed back up to the Trevian . Manuel surmises that it was, and I quote, “too painful to see me three times a week, every week,” an idea that, to this day, I find preposterous. Our relationship only lasted a few months, and I’m nowhere near beautiful enough to warrant that level of heartbreak. Manuel—who has known no beauty but the heartbreaking kind, with his own devastating looks—just doesn’t understand what it’s like to be average.
Besides, Leo never acts heartbroken around me. When we pass in the hallway, he nods stiffly at me, as if he feels nothing at all.
All of that is just to say that by the time I apply to be editor in chief of the Trevian , Leo is long gone, along with most of the other more qualified candidates. Which is how I land the position.
At first, I do my work as editor begrudgingly, spending long nights in the newsroom staring glumly out the window, only half listening to the assistant editors. But when the real work begins—when pieces from writers and editors start to come in—I find myself strangely enchanted by the work. By reading stories written in a dozen different voices, with a dozen different purposes—sports news is not academic news, which is not entertainment news, which is certainly not Op-Ed. As I edit, I ensure my changes don’t interrupt the flow of the piece, which means I need to speak with another person’s voice. It’s fascinating, like slipping into someone else’s shoes for an hour.
It doesn’t take long for fascination to turn to obsession. I started reading about writing with voice online. Checked out On Writing by Stephen King from the library. Spent every free period editing articles. Kept a running list of things that needed to be done, both in my head and on paper. Became addicted to the feeling of finishing a task, whether that be editing or formatting or leading a successful meeting—to that little burst of endorphins that came from ticking a little box. It felt wonderful , like for the first time in a long time, I was working toward something, even if I wasn’t quite sure what that something was yet.
I thought about my duties as editor in chief so much that, almost without my even noticing, I thought less and less about the other things. The Worries.
“That’s excellent progress!” says Dr.Droopy when I tell him about this new fixation. It’s not what I expect him to say. I wait for him to go on. He blinks lengthily, then continues, “Achievement is a very normal thing to think about at your age. It’s grounded in reality, not fantasy. Do you see the difference?”
I think for a moment. And then I do.
I see it.
—
WHEN THE FIRST ROUND OF ACT scores release, I call Manuel right away. “Twenty-seven!” I yell as soon as he picks up. “I knew math and science would be a wash, but I got near-perfect scores on the Reading and English sections. How’d you do?”
“Fine.”
“No, but how’d you do ? What was your score?”
“I’m gonna retake it,” he says.
“Okay, sketchball.” I hang up.
I can’t stop thinking about the test. Wondering which questions I missed, how my English skills could be improved. And man, let me tell you: Dr.Droopy was right. The more I think about what I can achieve, the less I obsess over the other things. The scarier things. So, what do I do?
I lean in.
If I want to be a talented editor, I decide, I need to understand language from every possible angle. To feel adjectives and metaphors in my soul. To take language and mold it like clay, bend it to my will. I reread my favorite books, trying to parse apart what makes them so wonderful. I pick up cereal boxes and frozen peas, analyzing the words that were chosen to entice someone into buying them. I pause to puzzle over the advertisements blown up at the local mall, assigning adjectives to their voices, like formal or peppy . I sit next to Speedy every morning, coffee in hand, and open the newspaper, intending to read it front-to-back for the first time in my life; despite being the editor of a high school newspaper, I’ve never been much for the real thing. At first, Speedy looks at me sideways, like he thinks I’m teasing him. When he realizes I’m serious, he tries to hide his smile behind the Wall Street Journal .
Reading quickly becomes not enough. I want to write, too.
Stephen King says that the best way to start writing is to just start ; I open a blank Word document on my computer and record the first thing that comes to mind. Medium tells me that the best way to improve is to put pen to paper every day for at least fifteen minutes; each morning, I set a timer on my phone and sit down at my desk. I dig out my old journal, that behemoth already half-filled with psychotic OCD scribble, and decide that I will give it a new ending. A better ending. I start to detail the things around me. Incidents at the Trevian , conversations with Manuel, lists of homework assignments, stupid fights between Karma and my mom. I stick to reality, the way we would at the paper, and it feels good.
No, it feels better than good. It’s the ultimate distraction.
And, of course, I make a plan for the future.
I spend hours trolling through websites with titles like “So, You Want to Write for a Living” or “12 Word-Minded Careers That Will Take You to the Top.” Through this research, I learn that writing is far from a dying career; in fact, most major companies are in dire need of those talented with words. They’re flush with programmers, spreadsheet makers, and business degree–wielding graduates. What they need—what they always need—is someone to put ideas into words.
They need copywriters.
It’s the first time I’ve heard this word outside the context of Mad Men . The first time I ever considered it as a possible life choice. But the more I think about it—playing with the word in my head, whispering it aloud to see how it sounds coming out of my mouth—the more right it feels. It’s a goal. A concrete directive toward which I can work.
The result is remarkable; the more I plan my future, the less time I have to worry. The less time I have to obsess over other things, scarier things, things less grounded in reality. It’s even more effective than alcohol—and less problematic. I flip through the pages of my journal, damp and heavy with black pen, and wonder: Is this what it feels like to find a passion?
—
WHEN THE SECOND ROUND OF scores come out, I run to Manuel’s house and open the front door. Che and Juli told me long before that I never needed to knock. I take the stairs to his room two at a time and throw open the door.
Manuel is in the middle of putting on his pants. He jumps and nearly trips over his own waistband. “Jesus, Eliot!”
“How’d you do, how’d you do, how’d you do?” I run around the room in search of the envelope. “Where is it?”
Manuel lifts a stack of papers and holds them to his chest. “I did fine.”
“Fine like…better than last time fine?”
“Just fine.”
I try to snatch the papers. He holds them out of my reach. “Jesus, Manuel, why are you being such a freak?”
“I’m not. It’s weird to talk about your test scores.”
“Not with your best friend. When’s the last time I didn’t tell you something?”
Manuel shrugs.
“I told you about accidentally ramming my nose into Jared Marshall’s face under the gym bleachers. I told you about all my psycho-crazy-OCD shit. You know when I’m on my period, for God’s sake.”
He rolls his eyes. “Do I ever.”
“Yeah, well. That’s not my point. My point is that it doesn’t matter if you botched your score. We both know you’re smarter than me. Hell, we both know how messed up the education system is. That test is probably biased toward native English speakers. But you’re still you. You’re still psychotically brilliant.”
His shoulders slacken. His arms unclench. He’s thinking, I can tell. Going into one of his signature trances. I capitalize on the moment to reach around and grab a fistful of ACT results.
“Hey!”
My eyes fall on the box at the top of the page.
Thirty-six.
—
AT DINNER THAT NIGHT, I shovel food numbly into my mouth and quickly excuse myself.
“Where are you going?” asks Mom.
“To write,” I say. But no matter how many other lines I put to paper, I cannot shake the one running through my head: You’re going to lose him. You’re going to lose him. You’re going to…
—
THAT FRIDAY, WHEN MANUEL CALLS and asks if I want to steal some Aguilas from his parents’ fridge and go sit by the lake, I tell him I can’t.
“You can’t?” He sounds baffled. “Do you have another best friend you aren’t telling me about?”
“Of course not,” I say. “But I signed up for this writing group that responds to prompts via email, and I have to get this out by Sunday—”
“ No seas tonta , psycho,” he interrupts. “That can wait until tomorrow.”
“Nope. No can do. I’m a Saturday-night-only girl now. And only if all my work is done.”
You see, if I skip out on one night of work, what’s to stop me from skipping tomorrow, too? What’s to stop me from disregarding the assignment entirely? And all that free time—it can only have one conclusion. A return of the Worries. Of my addiction to worrying.
I didn’t understand that before, but I do now.
See, there are two kinds of cravings: safe and not safe. For a normal human, that distinction is easy. Chocolate cupcake craving? Safe. Heroin craving? Not safe. But when you come from a family of addicts, the line blurs. Craving a chocolate cupcake or a vial of heroin or the horrible familiarity of immediately jumping to the worst-case scenario…they’re the same. They’re all the same. They come from the same place—a hidden place you cannot see or name—and they do the same thing to your mind. They gum up the inside. Clog the pathways through which other thoughts normally pass. And it doesn’t end with sobriety. It lingers in the blood. Festers. Weaves invisibly up the branches of your children, and your children’s children, and so on and so forth, like heartrot up a hardwood trunk.
Because of this, for addicts, for true addicts, the type who wear addiction in their very blood, there is no middle ground. It’s all or nothing. You lean into the craving or you cut it out, all of it, even the things just tangentially related to the craving, things you might not have meant to cut. There is no middle ground. Just ask Speedy. If he could have cut cocaine and kept wine, he would have.
So, yes—I used to take Fridays off. But not anymore. I can’t. I might not be an addict, but addiction is in my blood. It’s in all of our blood—me, Karma, Caleb…everyone. It’s curdling, rotting us from the inside out.
And of every way I want to be tied to my family, that’s the very last.
—
FOR SO LONG, I LIVED like this: Chase the thoughts. Feed them. Water them. Let them grow, fester, snake around your mind in a white-grey tumor that will eventually cover it all, every last inch of healthy pink tissue.
But I’m different now. I’ve learned. Don’t chase, Eliot. Let the thoughts float through your head. They aren’t real. They’re just thoughts, and they can’t hurt you. Dig your fingers into the cracks of the crusty grey tumor. Wiggle them apart. Make room. Pull off entire chunks of the cancer that has for so long controlled a life that should be your own. Expose the raw pink tissue beneath. Let it breathe. Let it produce thoughts long unthunk. Pulsing, tender, squishy.
—
IN APRIL, MANUEL GETS A letter from Harvard. We gather around the counter at the Valdecasas house—me, Manuel, Valentina, Che, and Juli, one of the rare nights his parents are actually home—and he opens the envelope, fingers trembling. We all lean over his shoulder. Straining to see his future.
Juli bursts into tears.
“I told you so,” I try to say, but my words are drowned out by his mom’s sobs.
Manuel looks up in shock. “ Dios mío , Mom. Are you okay?”
“It was worth it.” Her face presses to the fabric of her husband’s shoulder. “ Dios mío , Che. It was all worth it.”
—
I GET INTO NONE OF my top choices, all of which are within spitting distance of Boston. I feel a pit open in the base of my stomach. During my morning writing sessions, I push my pen so hard that it tears the paper.
—
AT THE VERY LAST MINUTE, I gain a spot at the University of Michigan, selected from their long waitlist. And by the time high school graduation rolls around, my OCD is…not gone …but under tight control. The most terrifying thoughts have faded to background noise. Dr.Droopy was wrong; my disease can be cured. All I have to do is turn my mind to healthier things, like goal setting and ambition. To lean in. I can’t believe I spent almost a decade obsessing over whether or not I was a liar or a cheater or in love with my brother. All those concerns feel far away. So far away.
“See?” says Speedy on the day of my last appointment with Dr.Droopy. “What did I tell you? No drugs necessary.”
—
AFTER GRADUATION, WE HEAD UP to Canada with the rest of my family. We only have a month on the island before we have to come home and pack our lives into the smallest number of boxes possible. We’ll be apart for the first time since Manuel moved to Chicago, and we’re desperately aware of our own expiration date.
We aren’t worried , though. Of course not. We’re Manny and Eliot. The package deal. We’ve got it all figured out: we’ll visit every month, and after four years, we’ll get our degrees and move to a new city together—it doesn’t matter where, as long as we have each other. Manuel will get a job as an investment banker or rocket scientist or whatever the hell you do after going to Harvard, and I’ll live on his couch.
But before then, we have a month. One month in our favorite place on Earth. That’s it.
We’re going to make the most of it—which includes me putting away my notebook.
We do everything we can. We’re up at eight and done with breakfast by eight thirty. We ski. We hike. We tube. We take out the Periwinkle and buzz out to explore the many deserted islands around us, picking blueberries and talking about nothing. We haul three cans of paint out to the largest rock on Cradle and paint a mural on its bumpy surface. We unroll a pair of paper-thin air mattresses on the beach by Chelsea Morning and spend the night under the stars. The next day, our backs hurt so badly we do nothing but lie on the couch and read old Archie comics.
“Am I having déjà vu?” Mom asks as she cleans our dirty breakfast bowls one morning. “Are you kids twelve years old again?”
“Nah,” I say. “That’s wishful thinking, Grandma. You’re exactly as old as you think you are.”
“And you’re grounded.”
“Excellent choice, Wendy. Ground the daughter in a place she can’t leave anyway.”
“Fine. You’re grounded forever, then. No college.” She shakes the excess water from both bowls and lays them on the drying rack. “But seriously, where do you two go all day?”
Without missing a beat, we say, “To the office.”
Karma, reading the newspaper next to Shelly, snorts. “Oh yeah,” she says, “this time they’re definitely making out in the woods.”
Manuel and I look at each other. Our eyes glitter mischievously. Then, in unison, we open our mouths and pretend to gag. Then we fill two Ziploc bags with Oreos (for Manuel) and trail mix (for me) and run out the back door.
—
OUR LAST NIGHT ON THE island, Mom cooks a special dinner, rosemary potatoes with Speedy’s barbecued chicken. She pours two deep glasses of red wine and hands them to Manuel and me. She winks conspiratorially and says, “Better to have your first drink in the safety of home, right?”
We eat by the flickering light of driftwood candelabra. After we scrape our plates clean, Mom proposes a toast to our bright futures. She takes unwarranted pride in Manuel’s Harvard acceptance, as if a decade of being his best friend’s mother lays claim to his brilliance.
After that toast, we’re released from duty. Manuel and I jump up from the table. When we pass my mom, we pause to plant kisses on her head. Then we dump our plates in the sink and hurry out the door. We have plans for the evening: one old bottle of brandy, three-fourths empty, lying in wait on our bedroom floor. The same place it’s been since we left it there three years ago.
Down in Chelsea Morning, I reach one hand under the bed and push the bottle with my fingertips. It rolls out the other side, where Manuel is waiting to grab it. My head pops up on my side. Manny’s pops up on the other. He lifts the bottle. We grin at each other across the bed.
“I have an idea,” he says as we push ourselves up off the floor.
“What?”
“Let’s go to the Fort.”
It’s been years since we last visited our old stronghold. The structure looms ominously at the other edge of the clearing. A series of deep Canadian winters and summers free from regular romp and maintenance allowed a thick coat of spores and moss to sprout from the trunk. The tarp we draped over the entrance lies in a puddle on the ground. The roots, which once stuck proudly into the sky, seem to droop at the edges. The clearing is no longer clear; juniper bushes run wild, mushrooming up in deceptively fluffy patches. We pick our way around them. At the entrance, we stare down into a dark, tiny cave.
“Well,” I say, “this is an absolute shithole.”
“It’s not so bad.” Manuel stoops to shine the flashlight around inside. “Maybe a bit smaller than I remember.”
I snort.
He looks up. “Do you want to go back to the cabin?”
I glance around the unclear clearing. I take in the twigs, the weeds, the juniper bushes waving beneath the bright white moon. I rip them up with my mind—pull them from the earth and toss them into the forest, emptying the space of all its obstacles. I place eleven-year-old Manuel inside it. He’s holding the battery-powered boom box we stole from Sunny Sunday. He pushes a Simon it’s warm. I snuggle into its warmth.
“I had a thought the other day,” Manuel says.
“Oh?” I turn my neck to look at him.
“An answer. To the question you asked me at Karma’s wedding.”
Present Drunk Brain struggles to remember a conversation logged by Past Drunk Brain. “Which question? That was, like…four years ago.”
“You asked whether you need true love for happiness, or if all you need is a go-to. A Person.”
“Ohhhh.” I push myself up onto my elbows and nod emphatically. “Yes. Of course. One of my most profoundest moments.”
Manuel doesn’t laugh. He tugs up a fistful of grass poking its way into the Fort from beneath the tarp.
“Well?” I ask. “What did you decide?”
“I decided…” The grass slips through his fingers. Tumbles into a neat mess on the tarp. “Well…what if they’re the same?”
“What if what’s the same?”
“Your true love and your”—he clears his throat—“your Person. What if your true love and your Person are the same…the same…person?”
My lungs stop.
Manuel and I stare at each other.
We fall into another silence. This one isn’t like the others. It isn’t warm and comfortable and familiar. It’s weighted. It burns. It’s fire in my throat and at the base of my gut.
“Do you…?” Suddenly I’m dying for a different burn—the fire of liquor. I wish the bottle hadn’t rolled out of the Fort. I wish it was on my lap. I wish I could twist open its cap and pour another mouthful straight onto my tongue instead of answering. Maybe it would wash away this burn, the one at the center of my pelvis. The one I’ve ignored for so long. “Do you have a…specific person in mind?”
He looks down. “Yes.”
I become suddenly aware of how hot it is inside the Fort. The liquor and the laughter and the unabashed flailing of bodies—it turned this small space into a makeshift sauna. And the sauna is making me delirious. It’s making me want things that I know I can’t have. It’s even going so far as to make me believe that maybe, just maybe, I can have them, and that simply will not do. It won’t do at all. I need fresh air. I need out.
“Oh!” I say too loudly. “The brandy! I must have knocked it out!” I duck under the tarp and crawl outside. “Don’t worry, just a sec, hold on, I got it!”
Outside, summer is evaporating. Bright moonlight shines on a chilly clearing. I’m not wearing shoes or a jacket. I stoop over to search for the bottle. Cold air, cold moss, cold night. Cold air on my arms, cold moss under my toes, cold night in the sky. I know all that cold is supposed to hurt, but it doesn’t. It bounces off, as if my skin were made of rubber. As if every cell were pumped full of novocaine. That’s exactly how it feels, actually. Like when the dentist stuck a needle into my face last year. I couldn’t feel his drill, not even a bit. My brain knew it was supposed to be in pain; it just didn’t care. That’s what being drunk is like.
A voice laughs behind me. I spin around. Manuel stands outside the Fort, watching me stumble through the weeds. Only then do I realize I said all of that out loud.
I turn hurriedly back and keep searching. “It must be here somewhere. I saw it roll out of the flap earlier, and there’s no way it could have…”
“Eliot.”
I dig one fist into a patch of juniper. My knuckles cry as the needles split them open.
“Eliot.”
“Yes?”
“Stop.”
I stop.
“Turn around.”
I hesitate. Then I rise, slowly, like a gymnast standing on a balance beam. I turn.
Manuel is there. Right there. Right behind me. I have to tilt my head to look him full in the face. My chest seizes. He’s so tall. I forget how tall he is. When we lie on the ground, heads on the same level, just as we were in the Fort, just as we always were before puberty dragged us in two different directions—it’s easy to forget.
Manuel exhales. His breath makes a little grey cloud in the space between us.
I shiver.
“You cold?”
I nod. I am.
He reaches for the bottom of his sweatshirt. I think he’s going to take it off and give it to me. But the sweatshirt is big, big enough for two grown adults to fit inside. Which is exactly what it does; Manuel lifts the bottom and pulls it up and over my head. Then we’re both inside a cotton cave, the two of us, and his body is warm and his T-shirt is soft. I giggle. I wrap my arms around his soft T-shirt. I shimmy upward until my head pops out the neck hole. The cold air hits my face, but again I feel it only as I would in a dream. I keep my cheek glued to his chest. Now we’re really stuck. Two heads in one hole. I giggle again.
“What are you laughing about?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I take a deep breath. I clutch him tighter. Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something. Nothing is the culmination of a decade of friendship. Its logical conclusion. Or maybe its destruction. I don’t know. I can’t know. But I realize, in this moment, after four years of doing everything in my power to avoid ending up exactly where I am now, that if I don’t at least try to find out if there’s something more between us, I’m eventually going to lose my fucking mind.
I tilt my head back and meet his eyes. He sees it. He sees that nothing is something.
He leans down.
When our lips meet for the first time, the moon is so bright I can almost see my reflection in its surface.
Almost.
—
I’VE IMAGINED WHAT IT WOULD be like to kiss Manuel Garcia Valdecasas many times. By accident, usually. A wayward daydream here and a repressed impulse there. That’s the thing about OCD; at any given moment I could simultaneously push down the fear that I wanted to kiss my older brother and the reality that I wanted to kiss my best friend.
But this?
This is real.
You might think it would be weird to make out with your best friend. That it would feel wrong, or there’d be no romantic spark whatsoever. And you know what? You’d be right about one thing: it is weird. It’s weird to kiss your best friend. It’s weird to be wrapped in his arms, the ones you spent your entire life punching like sacks of flour. Your body buzzes with bizarre vertigo, with drunken electricity. You become more and more intoxicated the longer his lips are on you. The farther they travel. It’s weird. It’s weird how good it feels. It’s weird how badly you want him not to stop.
But the weirdest part of all is how quickly the past falls away. How seamlessly he goes from being your best friend to something more. The memories and classifications and limitations that slotted him into the role of Purely Platonic—all of that, gone in an instant. As if you might open your eyes and find an entirely new person above you.
So I do. I crack my eyes open, just a little, just to check. Just to make sure I’m not losing my mind. And I’m not. In fact, just after I open my eyes, Manuel does the same, and we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of locking eyes while so close our pupils cross.
“Freak,” I mumble into his mouth. “Stop staring at me.”
He laughs.
Let me tell you something about the Fort: it’s small. Very small. In fact, you never truly realize how small a space is until you try to make out with someone enormous inside it. When Manuel lifts my body beneath him, to turn over or shift onto our sides, I’m acutely aware of the way his legs scrunch at the knees, the way his spine curls to make itself as compact as possible. We could go back, of course. Back to where there’s more space. Back to our cabin, to my bed. Back to a world in which we were just friends.
No, thanks.
He’s delicate, but things escalate quickly. Shirts come off. Pants come off. Suddenly we’re two bodies in undergarments so thin they might as well not exist. The heat below my stomach rises. The darkness behind my eyelids starts to spin. I understand now that this is what a decade of friendship has driven toward. I’m happy, I’m drunk, I’m terrified, I’m invisible.
And then, from nothing, from nowhere, a face flashes through my mind.
Henry.
Henry’s face, as vivid and unmistakable as a shot of brandy.
Jesus , I think. Near naked, at peak sexual arousal— that’s what pops into your mind? What are you, an incestuous freak?
And as soon as I think it…
Oh no. Oh shit.
You’re in love with your dead brother.
No, don’t be an idiot. That’s insane.
But you pictured his face while you were aroused. That’s all the evidence you need.
That’s fake. That’s a fake belief. That’s false. That’s poison.
But as soon as I think it, it can’t be unthought. The ticker flashes back to life, scrolling hatred across the backs of my eyelids. DISGUST in all caps. I try to argue with it, but I can’t.
All of this is happening in my head. Manuel can’t hear any of it. I don’t pull back from him. I keep kissing, as if nothing is wrong. Because nothing is wrong…right? My head is just doing what it does. What it’s always done. Or at least, what it’s done for so long I can’t remember what it’s like to live any other way.
I try to relax. To focus on the present. I sink out of my head and into my body, the way Dr.Droopy tells me to. What’s happening here? What do I feel now? Here is the Fort. Now is my best friend’s mouth on my bare chest.
But they’re coming. The unwanted certainties. The intrusive thoughts. Once the ticker starts, it’s impossible to stop. You’re here , I tell myself. I picture Manuel’s face, his furrowed brow, his dimpled smile. But it’s no use. Henry is back. His furrowed brow, his dimpled smile. But, no, that’s not right, that can’t be right. Who is who? I don’t know, I can’t tell. Their faces blend. Maybe it’s the booze. Maybe it’s me. I’m here in this Fort, but I’m somewhere else, too. I’m laughing with my best friend. Which best friend? I don’t know. I don’t know.
“Eliot?” Manuel has stopped kissing me. “Shit. Are you okay?”
I open my eyes. I see a blurry outline. I recognize brown skin and a tuft of dark hair. I blink, and it’s then that I realize I’m crying.
“Oh my God. Did I hurt you?” Manuel cradles my face in his hands. He retracts them almost immediately, as if afraid he’ll hurt me further. “Am I…did I do something wrong? Are we…do you not want to…?”
“No, no,” I say. “No, it’s not that. It’s…” Tears flood my face. I know I’m scaring him. I don’t mean to. I try to explain. “It’s…it’s the thoughts. They’re just…”
Manuel understands. He tucks me into his chest. “Shhh.”
I take one heavy, rattling breath, and then I come to pieces against his body. The sobs are as all-consuming as our laughter. I give myself over to them, let them carry me, the same way joy carried me. I ride their momentum. And then they shrink, turning from great waves of sorrow to shallow ripples. I breathe in again. My nose leaves a trail of snot on his skin.
“I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not sure why.
“Don’t apologize, Eliot. Don’t you ever apologize for something that’s not your fault.”
We lie there in silence. It’s a new kind of silence. A third kind. This one trembles. It feels as delicate as a castle built of sand.
“I love you,” I whisper into this third silence. “And not in the way I usually mean it.”
Manuel’s arms tighten. “I’ve never meant it any other way.”