Chapter 21 #2
my hands in the kitchenette sink, Efraín asks, “Have you been keeping track?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What you said before,” Efraín clarifies. “That it wasn’t the worst thing I’d said about you. You keep track.”
“It’s not like I have some master list of the Top Ten Things Efraín Hates About Me.” Just like I have definitely, absolutely
never made a list of the top ten things I hate about him.
I let him take his turn at the sink. The faucet sputters on, then off again. Efraín pumps the soap dispenser, rubbing gel
over his hands with minimal lathering. I watch with morbid fascination as he rinses the soapy smear.
I’m about to issue my indignant point of order—the CDC recommends at least twenty seconds because lathering creates soap bubbles, which carry away contaminants—when he turns to me. Something about the intent inked in his otherwise illegible expression glues my lips shut.
“I get that you’re anxious about blowback. From the buttons. I get that you can’t just turn that off, but you don’t need to be. I meant what I said. You’re not alone in this.”
This might kill me. The searing heat in his gaze, the sotto voce tenor of his voice, the diminishing space between us. Every conversation
with Efraín is a battle—but this? His warpath is erratic. I retreat a few steps across the kitchenette. My breath comes out
ragged. “You can’t say things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Things you don’t mean.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means—” I shake my head. “It means, you say I’m not alone in this, but I don’t know what ‘this’ means. Because pronoun
buttons as the union’s next action? Doesn’t make sense. I know you don’t think it matters, whether the right thing is the
rational thing, but I don’t understand why you want to do this.”
“Because I care.”
“But you care about everything. Every cause under the sun—and beyond it. The environmental cost of rocket launches, the danger of space privatization, and—”
“I care about you.”
“You care about everyone—”
Efraín opens his mouth to interject, but I don’t give him the chance.
“—and everyone’s grievances. Secure scheduling for TJ. Health insurance for Jaime. The sick leave policy for Blake. Meanwhile,
Lola doesn’t get misgendered, and I’m the only one who’s—” I swallow the word suffering because what a fucking joke. “I’m the one complaining about the button ban. So in the great trolley problem that is late capitalism, the union should be taking on the projects
that benefit the largest number of workers. We should be—”
“Your safety isn’t a thought experiment.” Efraín seethes with vitriol that sends me reeling, like I’ve had a near miss with a bullet train.
I lean against the refrigerator as if the cold will leach the heat from my blood, break the fever of my muddled thoughts.
Every time I think I understand any of this, I uncover a new layer to this nesting puzzle box.
“I know it isn’t,” I mutter. “That’s why I tried to handle this quietly—to take care of it alone. It was safer that way.”
“Safer for you, or more comfortable for everybody else?”
No one bothered to flip on the light on this side of the apartment.
There’s just one letterbox window, the corner streetlamp casting a diffuse sodium haze over Efraín’s silhouette.
Half his face is aglow like wildfire, but his eyes are hooded in shadow.
His hair is loose, soft black waves obscuring the line where he ends and the night begins.
Efraín has always been a rebel with a thousand causes, but I was never supposed to be one of them. He corrects light misgendering,
sure, but that costs him nothing, barely worth writing off as a charitable donation. The unbearable kindness he’s offering
tonight is an entirely different tax bracket.
I just want this to make sense. I need him to make sense.
“You’re right, okay?” He’s two steps closer, but no nearer an explanation. “Yes, I care about everyone, but not like I care
about you.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Seriously, Elisha?” he asks, whisper-soft. “You don’t have any idea?”
His hand alights on my face, his knuckles grazing my cheekbone before he cups my cheek. And I can’t breathe, but I can feel
him, in every freckle and mole, in every speck of peach fuzz I wish were stubble, in every cell of this skin that so often
feels like a secondhand costume.
I feel his touch, and I feel . . . warm. Not where he’s touching me, but throughout my whole body. Warm, like the thermostat’s
been cranked up on the hottest night of the year.
My face is hot, presumably flushed and blotchy, and sweat percolates all over my skin. My chest has gone tight, and I’m dizzy. Is this what heat stroke feels like? No, heart palpitations are just karmic retribution for overdosing on caffeine when anxious, verging on overwhelm.
Do I have any idea what this means?
Efraín’s hand on my face, his gaze locked on mine, his whole body curved down toward me, so much closer than I realized, all
while he’s trying to convince me that he cares about me, not just as a string of common nouns—a friend-human-fellow-worker—but as a proper noun, Elisha Goldstein, set apart
from other proper nouns. He’s trying to convince me that he, Efraín Juarez Reyna, cares like—
No, absolutely not. It doesn’t make sense. Somewhere, I’ve fallen prey to a logical fallacy, and now I’m trapped in this paradox
where he says he cares when I know he doesn’t.
“Coldhearted,” I recite, drumming my fingers against the fridge. “Selfish. Self-absorbed. Cynical. Complicit. Oblivious. Asleep.
Hyperrational. Goody Two-Shoes. Anal retentive. Brownnoser. Fuck, that’s eleven, but—oh, I forgot, so fucking pedantic—”
“Fucking hell, Elisha.” His free hand catches mine, curls his fingers around mine, and all at once, he tilts my face up until
the crown of my head slams against the fridge, and he arches down and crashes his lips against mine.
Because that’s what the kiss is: a head-on collision, straight from my blind spot. A burst of heat-pressure-friction, then
it’s gone, before I have time to process how he tastes or smells or feels. He pulls back so damn fast, I get whiplash.
I stare up at him, dazed. My cheek is bare, my hand empty. But, no, there’s a cat-shaped magnet denting my skull, and my lips are tingling. That happened. It wasn’t a dream sequence. I couldn’t have imagined this.
“Fuck,” Efraín whispers, wrecked, as if more passed between us than one chaste kiss. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Do you regret it?” I ask, surprising no one more than myself.
“Not—” He shakes his head, biting his lip like he’s shredding evidence. “I shouldn’t have done it like that.”
“How should you have done it?”
He lifts his hand—the one that was on my cheek—and plants his palm flat against the fridge door, just beside my head. “I should’ve
said—the part I regret was saying those things. Well, most of them. I stand by that last one.”
I scrunch my nose, rewinding the ticker tape and coming up broke.
“So fucking pedantic,” he murmurs, hot against the shell of my ear. “Drives me crazy.”
“In a good way?”
When he nods, his hair brushes my temple. “Should’ve said that first. Should’ve said all the quiet parts out loud. Should’ve
asked—”
I surge up on my tiptoes and reach up to pull him down because turnabout is fair play, and I kiss him. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know how I’m feeling, I don’t know if I’m thinking at all because this is objectively crazy. He’s too fucking tall, and my fists tangle in his silky hair.
His arms immediately, instinctively move to stabilize me, one around my waist, his hand cupping my cheek again. He’s burnt
kettle corn and coconut lip balm. He’s a lightning strike in a midsummer storm. He’s the answer to a question I never thought
to ask.
Gravity pulls us apart before I’m ready, but he doesn’t let me go. He straightens up but holds me close.
His eyes are lovely, dark, and deep.
I am so utterly lost. Yes, he cares, he kissed me, but what does that mean?
“For the record,” I say, winded, “I still don’t understand.”
“Which part? That I care about you? That I want you to be safe? That I want to make pronoun buttons to keep you safe, to make
sure you feel safe, to make you feel cared for—”
“That,” I admit. “The feeling part. I don’t know what that means.”
“The feeling part,” Efraín echoes. “That’s the whole—it’s all feeling.”
That’s the problem.
I don’t know what it’s like to care like that.
With your whole body. I care in the abstract.
I intellectualize. Empathy is a conscious cognitive process, not an instinct.
That was the trouble with Naomi’s hair. As much as I care about my sister—because I do, of course, I care about her—I couldn’t process the care to catalyze a reaction.
Because I only ever felt the injustice of it all intellectually; the care never breached the blood-brain barrier, never flooded my veins until I was emotionally compelled to act. I didn’t feel Naomi’s injury as if it were my own. “An injury to one is an injury to all” is a principle I might
believe in, yes, but it comes from my head, not my heart. I can reason myself out of it when push comes to shove.
But Efraín cares viscerally. Every injury, every injustice a stigmata. He feels with his whole body.
I feel his heat against my chest, his arms wound around me, and I feel this in my whole body. I feel his care. Not because he said it, not because he kissed me quiet, but because he wants to make buttons. Because they matter to me. Because I matter to him.
He grabs my wrist and presses my hand against his chest, my palm over his heart. “Do you get it yet?”
Given the low scoop of his tank, half my hand rests against his bare skin, my thumb over his sternum, bristly curls tickling
my skin. A foreign sensation, not unpleasant. Then there’s his heart, the steady thumpa-thumpa vibrating against my palm.
I assume he’s making this gesture metaphorically, to make some point based on the widespread cultural misconception of the heart as the center of emotion, rather than the limbic system, but the gesture is not without significance.
Because the heart—the hub pumping blood throughout the body—is vital.
Letting another access it is a dangerous display of vulnerability; it’s proof of trust itself.
I still don’t understand. I may never understand.
I don’t like not knowing things. I know omniscience is a futile aspiration. I know the sum of everything I know—everything
I will ever know—approximates the percentage of visible stars in the night sky. I know I could spend a lifetime studying data from the
most powerful telescopes on earth, and even then, I would only ever see a fraction of the observable universe. There are four
hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, most I’ll never see—but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking at the sky.
It doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying to draft a star chart in Efraín’s eyes or trying to decode this feeling.
I don’t know what this means, but I know I don’t want to stop.