Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
After the third time, we took turns taking showers and now we were lounging on my bed, me in his Jimi Hendrix T-shirt and him in boxers.
I’d never felt more sated or content in my life. I was basking in the afterglow. If I had a cigarette, I’d smoke it.
Spring rain pattered against the window pane and blew in from the open window. It smelled fresh and clean and earthy.
I nuzzled my nose against the side of Gabriel’s neck and breathed him in.
He smelled like my body wash and Herbal Essence shampoo.
My leg was draped over his waist and his fingers drew lazy designs on my flesh.
I thought maybe he was writing words but couldn’t make out what they were.
Song lyrics. Or a secret message, maybe.
From the living room, Leonard Cohen was singing about getting head on his unmade bed in the Chelsea Hotel. Gabriel thought Leonard Cohen was brilliant. A true poet.
The lyrics were on the dirty side, and I suddenly remembered that only one of us had upheld our end of the bargain.
“Hey.” I propped my head up and looked down at his face. He was so beautiful in the moonlight with his shower-damp hair slicked back. Pure symmetry. “You never told me your dirty secret.”
“Not sure I can top yours, Artful Dodger.” Gabriel squeezed my thigh, probably trying to distract me.
I poked his chest. “A deal’s a deal.”
He plumped up the pillows under his head and squinted at the opposite wall. “Okay, time for a dirty secret.” He paused dramatically and left me hanging for a few seconds. With all the build-up, I was expecting something really juicy. “You’re my dirty secret.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s cheating.”
“How is it cheating?” He held up his hand. “Okay, okay. I’ve got another one.”
“I hope it’s as shameful as mine.”
“It’s much worse,” he said, running his hand down his face and groaning. “I can’t believe I’m even telling you this.”
I smiled, giddy, anticipating a good story.
“For context, my father was in the military, so we moved around a lot,” he said.
“I was a shy kid and the thought of having to make new friends and start over at a new school every two years was pure agony. My father would always tell me, ‘Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and stop your sniveling. Be a man about it . ’”
“Great pep talk. Not even remotely helpful,” I said. “What was your dad like?”
Gabriel thought about it for a minute. “A tough guy. Not a big talker. Never expressed his emotions or showed any affection. I think he was a product of his generation. He loved guns and hunting and fishing and contact sports. Manly things,” he said, and I got the feeling he was quoting his father and didn’t agree.
“But he ended up with a kid who wanted nothing to do with any of that.”
“So he didn’t support your music?”
Gabriel snorted. “He wanted me to enlist in the military. He said it would make a man out of me.”
“You would have been miserable. I can’t even picture it.”
“Neither could I. So I took off,” he said. “Anyway, Rapid City. It’s the first day of school, I’m nine years old, all the kids are gawking at me, and the teacher makes me come to the front of the classroom and introduce myself.”
“What a horrible teacher,” I said. “Give me his or her name and I’ll file a complaint.”
“Reserve your judgment until I finish the story. So I’m standing in front of the classroom with thirty fourth-graders staring at me,” he said.
“My stomach is churning, I’m all shaky and sweating in my little button-up shirt and tie and I’m mumbling.
So the teacher, very stern, a real battleaxe, tells me to speak up and I scream , ‘My name is Gabriel Francis and I have a brain tumor!’”
After a stunned second of silence, I burst out laughing. “ I have a brain tumor ?” I smacked his chest. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“I can’t either. It just came out,” he laughed. “And get this, it was a Catholic school.”
My jaw dropped. “You lied to a nun?”
He nodded somberly. “I’m going to burn in hell.”
“Oh my god, Gabriel! We’re such sinners.” We were both dying laughing. “So then what happened?” I prompted.
“After school, Sister Margaret told me that my father was coming to pick me up and that the adults needed to talk. The principal was a priest and he got involved so all three adults went into the office and left me sitting on a chair outside the door,” he said.
“I was dying . The jig was up and I was waiting for God to smite me down. After I got done bargaining with God, I started singing.”
“A church hymn?”
“Oh yeah. Saints Simon and Garfunkel. If anyone needed a bridge over troubled water, it was me. I had my eyes closed and I thought I was singing quietly but when I opened my eyes, all three adults were gaping at me. My father was so mortified that his face was beet red. Sister Margaret had tears in her eyes and Father McDonald looked like he’d had an epiphany. ”
I fell onto the bed laughing. I could picture it all so clearly. Nine-year-old Gabriel with his big brown eyes and messy hair, with his school tie askew, singing like a little angel, hitting every note with his perfect pitch and tenor vocal range.
Sister Margaret’s beatific smile, her eyes brimming with tears.
Father McDonald’s eyes raised to the heavens, hands folded in prayer.
“At least you weren’t singing ‘Light My Fire,’” I said. “So did you get in trouble?”
“At school? No. I got treated like a prince and their prayers miraculously cured me.”
“Oh my god, Gabriel. That’s awful.” But I was laughing.
“I know.” He laughed. “Father McDonald had me singing solos in the church choir. And Sister Margaret changed my life,” he said solemnly. “She taught me how to play an acoustic guitar and when we left, she let me keep it. So, all in all, Rapid City turned out to be pretty damn great.”
“Music saved your ass.”
“Once again,” he said. “So can we safely assume that my dirty secret was just as bad as yours?”
“Oh no, you definitely won that round,” I said. “But you know what really makes our secrets so dirty? We got rewarded for our thieving and lying.”
“What a pair we are.”
We really were. I’d never felt like this with anyone before. Like I’d known him forever. A best friend and a lover all rolled into one. And yet there was still so much I didn’t know about Gabriel. I wanted to know every little thing there was to know about my new lover.
“Hey,” he said a little while later while I was tracing my finger over his eyebrows and his nose and his lips. It felt so surreal that he was really here in my bed that I couldn’t stop touching him. “So where’s my notebook?”
That damn notebook. How did I keep forgetting about it? I’d been sleeping on it for three years.
I rolled onto my stomach and shoved my hand under the mattress.
When I tossed the notebook into his lap, he tipped his chin and looked down at it but didn’t pick it up.
“Wow. It looks like it’s been through a war.” He handed it back to me without even flipping through the pages. “Keep it. It’s yours. I have hundreds where that came from.” He tucked his hand under his head. “I was just curious to see if you kept it.”
“I keep everything.”
“No kidding.” His gaze wandered to my shelves heaving with books and crates filled with color-coded found objects and treasures. Sketchbooks and textiles and art projects. A sewing machine, mood boards, and canvases rolled into tubes.
It was a spacious bedroom by New York standards but every nook and cranny was filled.
“You should spread out,” he said. “Convert the spare bedroom into your design studio.”
“I can’t.” I shoved the notebook back under the mattress. “I need to find a new roommate.”
I dreaded the thought of living with a stranger, so I kept procrastinating, but it needed to be done soon. I couldn’t afford to pay the rent on my own, not when I’d vowed to put every cent back into my business. And after all my bills were paid, there weren’t a lot of cents left over.
Gabriel wrapped his arm around me and pulled me against him, curling up around me. I couldn’t help thinking how perfectly we fit together.
“You know,” he said, “my lease is up at the end of May.”