Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
Two hours later the two of us collapse onto Miles’s couch.
“You are filthy,” I inform him.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve got paint from Jericho’s costume all over you.”
He laughs with his eyes closed. “So do you.”
“Don’t sleep yet.”
“I’m not sleeping.”
I’m pretty sure he’s sleeping. I jump up from the couch and come back from the bathroom with a wet washcloth. His eyes don’t come open even when I plop onto the couch next to him.
“Hold still.”
He does the exact opposite. Reflexively, his eyes burst open and he lunges away from me. I lunge after him on a laugh, stretching across him to swipe at the silver paint on his cheek and neck.
“Ah!” He’s stiff-arming me away from him. “That’s cold!”
“You,” I pant, batting his hand away, and stretching across him, “have paint inside your ear.”
He’s squirming and yelping and sliding off the couch while I scrub at the paint. Eventually we’re a heap on the floor and I’m making good progress on the paint on his neck. I think he’s succumbed to his reality. He’s gone still, watching my eyes while I thoroughly rub down every inch of his face. I’m warm and happy and it strikes me that I should probably feel awkward sitting mostly on top of him, putting my hands just inside the collar of his shirt, but I don’t. I feel…invited.
When he’s all scrubbed clean I sit back on my heels and grin at him. “My work here is done. You’re brand spankin’ new.”
He just sits up and shoots me a dry look. “Come on.” He tugs me into the bathroom and gets a new washcloth, slapping it into my hand. “Make sure you get the inside of your own ears.”
“Hey!” I shout after him as he leaves. “You’re not going to wash me?”
“Pass,” he calls tonelessly. I can hear him open the fridge door.
“Come on! You’re Mr. First Aid Kit. This is totally in your wheelhouse.”
“If you can’t clean your own ears, I quit.”
I laugh and start scrubbing.
I quit, Miles joked. And I laughed because I knew he was joking. Ha ha ha because that’s the last thing he’s ever going to do.
When I emerge back into the living room, he’s feet up on the coffee table and a bowl of ice cream in his lap, flipping channels.
“Hey!” I put my hands on my hips. “Can I have some of that?” I point to the ice cream.
He points to the bowl of ice cream on the coffee table that he already brought for me. We sit side by side and watch infomercials and eat ice cream while the sun comes up behind us.
We wake up late morning. I’m rested, because five hours of sleep is a boon for me. Miles wakes up wrecked, because he’s a solid-nine-or-bust type of guy.
I brush in his bathroom with the toothbrush I keep in his cup and flip his toilet paper because he’s put it on wrong again. When I’m done I fully intend to make him coffee and pancakes, because, come on, he did not need to schlep across the city to help me make friends last night, but by the time I’m out, there’s already a steaming cup of coffee waiting for me and two bowls of cereal.
“You’re disgustingly self-sufficient,” I inform him as I pull up a chair at his table.
“Totally,” he agrees absently, thumbing through yesterday’s paper and then picking up today’s, his reading glasses in place. “People who pour their own cereal are so high and mighty.”
“Thanks for breakfast, by the way.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And for coming to the bar.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And for buying me a car, really top-notch stuff.”
“What would you even do with a car?” he asks over the top of his newspaper. “Besides sit behind the wheel and make vroom-vroom noises.”
“Dang, I thought for sure you weren’t listening. I’d sell it, obviously. And use the money to buy a pair of roller skates. Roller skates are more my speed. “
“Expensive pair of roller skates.”
“They’d be made of NFTs.”
“You have no idea what NFTs are, do you?”
“Does anyone? No! Don’t attempt to explain it.” I stare into nothing as I start in on my cereal and coffee. “Hey, I went to a 5Night concert last night.”
“Was it everything you dreamed it would be?” he asks as he sips coffee. It’s a lighthearted question, but his eyes are carefully trained to my face. He’s sensing that this is a minefield.
The truth is, the concert was amazing, Jericho is the best, I’d do it again in a heartbeat…but. But there’s a pit in my stomach this morning. Because I went to a 5Night concert and there’s only one person in the whole universe who I’d like to tell about it. And I can’t.
“Hey, Miles?” I’ve finished my cereal, so I get up with my coffee and walk around to the couch and plunk down.
“Hm?”
“Do you ever get used to not being able to give updates on your life?”
He pauses. I can feel his eyes on the back of my head. “You mean to my mom and Anders?”
“Yeah.”
He pauses again and I hear him scooch his chair back a few inches from the table. “No. No, that part has always been hard for me. Hey, Mom. Dad finally told Reese about me. I’m moving to New York City to try to help raise Ainsley …so weird that I couldn’t tell her that. I mean…this is the woman who used to ask me what I’d had for lunch that day because she was genuinely curious. She loved knowing the details of my life. Every little boring nothing, she wanted to know. And now…literally every aspect of my life is different and I can’t tell her.”
“Hey, Lou,” I try, dropping my head to the back of the couch and looking at the ceiling. “I made a friend last night. Maybe three friends. I went to a 5Night concert and Eunho poured water on himself and gave a lap dance to a folding chair. You would have loved it.”
“Sounds enriching.” Miles walks over and places an apple in my hand and comes around to sit on the couch, newspaper in hand.
I laugh and take a bite of the apple. “Hey, Lou. You ruined me for friends. I don’t know how to be casual friends with anyone. You were my soulmate. How do I settle for less?”
He turns a page of the newspaper. “It’s not a contest. There’s no reason to rank friendships.”
“Hey, Lou. Miles is taking me and some new friends camping. Can you even imagine me camping? I’m going to get lost in the mountains and airlifted out. I’ll be on the local news.”
“I’ll attach you to me with a leash. You won’t get lost.”
“Hey, Lou. Miles is taking care of everything. He’s going to make sure I don’t get arrested for weeping at the grocery store.”
“You can weep at the grocery store. That’s not illegal.” He turns another page.
“Hey, Lou. Miles says when you left, you took my heart with you. He says it was like a heart transplant. Only…” I lean forward and thump my chest. My hair falls in a tent around me, blocking out the light. “I don’t know what this new heart is supposed to be living for.”
I hear the paper rustling as he sets it down. My hair gets swept to one side and the light gets in. Miles peeks through the door to the outside world. “That’s okay,” he says in a quiet voice. “You don’t have to know yet.”
The light catches on something sparkly in my hair and I realize there’s a whole swath of silver paint still smeared there.
Paint from a friend, a new friend. From a concert, one I should have seen with Lou. How come we never got to see them in person together? We fell in love with 5Night while we were crammed side by side in a hospital bed, staring at the five-inch screen of my cell phone. How could that possibly have been it? That’s really all we got?
I tug at the silvery section of my hair and toss it over my back. I’m up and striding toward the bathroom. I open the medicine cabinet, searching. I don’t find what I’m looking for so I march back out into the living room, right toward the small desk under the window. Miles is watching me from the couch. I wrench open the desk drawer and find what I need, striding back to the bathroom.
I’m breathing hard in the mirror, lifting the hank of silvery hair, Miles’s scissors opening wide, ready to take a bite out of this fresh pain.
And then he’s there. In the mirror, standing behind me. He reaches around with two hands. One hand on the silver section of my hair and one hand on the scissors, his chest pressing against my back. “Don’t cut your hair, Lenny.”
“I can’t stand to look at it anymore,” I gasp. Tears fill my eyes and he’s just a blur of color and light in the mirror now. “I grew it out because she asked me to, but I’m the one who has to haul it everywhere.”
“Don’t hack it off like this. You wanna do something big? Great. Wonderful. But I can’t let you do this.”
I sag and the scissors are removed from my hand, neatly set aside. The sink starts running and Miles dunks me. I splutter under the water and cough and sob. “You asshole,” I curse him, but there’s no bite. I’m sagging against the porcelain sink, watching the water run silver down the drain. “You keep saying it’s for my own good, you pushing me. Through the list, to make friends. And still I end up like this! Hyperventilating and sick to my stomach. Guess what! None of this is making me miss her less! I’m sick of trying so hard to do this right. So just…just let me do something I’ll regret. I can’t be healthy for you. That’s not fair. It’s too hard.”
He’s quiet. I hear the snick of his shampoo bottle and then he rubs at my hair, my scalp, scouring the silvery part between two hands. When the shampoo is gone, there’s conditioner and I don’t even have the energy to comment on the fact that he’s upgraded from 2-in-1. He deposits me onto the edge of the bathtub and wraps a towel around my shoulders. He carefully combs out my hair and it takes ages. There are knots galore and I shut my eyes and endure it all, both the snaps of pain when he tugs and the delicious buzz of gentle fingers.
I finally open my eyes when I feel him gather my hair back, twisting it carefully into a wet bun at the top of my head. He’s concentrating so hard his tongue is sticking out. He just barely gets a ponytail holder around it all and miraculously it stays. Because my hair is feet long and wet, the bun weighs about five pounds, but I don’t adjust it.
He’s wet from shoulders to belt buckle. The shampoo and conditioner are open and sitting on the edge of the sink, the scissors cast aside on the toilet. I’m just about to apologize for calling him an asshole, but then he speaks.
“You’re right,” he says quietly. “It’s not fair.”
I furrow my brow. “What?”
“I don’t want you to be healthy for me. I want you to be healthy for you. So…if you need to do something you’ll regret…let’s do it. I’m in. Just not your hair.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
I’m breathing hard, standing up, energy back. “Let’s go get a tattoo.”