Chapter Twelve - 12. The Ending
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Ending
I returned to the ball feeling heavy and exhausted, and the sudden avalanche of pounding music and laughter and clinking bottles felt like a physical weight crashing over me, suffocating me.
I edged my way across the sides of the room until I came across Matty and Emery, heads bowed as they were lost in thought. They looked up, catching me, before I had a chance to escape.
“Archie,” Matty said. His eyes searched my face.
I looked down at my hands. “You know about Taylor.”
“Yeah.” He nudged me sideways, lips lifting, like he was trying to coax a smile from me. “And I was right the whole time.”
“That I was hooking up with my roommate?” I asked, confused.
“That whoever you were hooking up with totally had feelings for you.”
That shocked a laugh out of me. It came out dry and crackly.
Emery was watching me closely. “Have you spoken to him yet?”
“Yeah, in the bathroom.”
“And?” Emery asked.
“It is what it is. He’s leaving and he didn’t bother to tell me.”
Emery frowned. “Did he say why he’s leaving?”
I shrugged like I didn’t care, like the night hadn’t cut me open.
“Got bored of me, I guess.” Maybe it was annoying, sharing a bed with me, when he could have a brand new room to himself.
Maybe he secretly hated the breakfasts I cooked for him every weekend.
Maybe he felt obligated to make those overnight oats for me.
Maybe all the times we had sex recently, he thought to himself, yeah, this isn’t fun anymore.
Emery stroked his face. “Fucking hell.”
I didn’t think he was capable of wearing.
“He didn’t say — of course he didn’t,” he finished, muttering to himself. He looked me in the eye. “Archie, he’s moving out because it hurts.”
“What hurts?”
“He wants you for real,” Emery explained. “Not just whatever domestic-slash-casual-sex thing you’ve got going on. He’s convinced it’s never going to happen, which is stupid because he’s —”
“Never said anything,” I finished.
“Hey now,” Matty said. “It’s hard to express your feelings like that.”
“I think he’s just stubborn,” Emery replied.
Their voices sounded like they were coming from far away. I felt as if I’d woken up in a confusing dream that hard started out as an anxiety-wracked nightmare and had turned into…something more hopeful.
“Where is he anyway?” Matty asked, cutting through the haze of my thoughts.
“He’s probably left,” I murmured. “I…I need to go.” I turned on my heel and pushed through the crowd of bodies.
When I stepped outside into the cool winter air, lawn soft and springy under my feet, a voice from the shadows said, “I voted for you.”
I jumped.
The speaker was a guy smoking as he leaned against the side of the building, the end of his cigarette glowing red in the dark. Next to him, a girl lowered her vape and exhaled a cloud of sickly sweetness. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Me too.”
All I wanted was to run to Valentina Hall, but I made myself nod. “Thank you. I hope you’ve enjoyed the night.”
“Suppose it was worth it for sitting in that godawful lecture theatre for over an hour,” the guy said.
“Your friend made it sound like something we couldn’t miss,” said the girl.
“My friend?” I said.
“Well, I assume he was your friend. Or your campaign manager? That scary looking guy who went around to all the first years, telling them to go watch the speeches.”
My stomach plunged. “And he told you to vote for me?”
Even in the darkness, I could make out their unimpressed expressions. “You think anyone’s just going to make me vote for someone?” said the girl. “Nah, he just said that you were competent and the best choice and blah, blah, blah.”
“Your speech was genuinely good, though,” the guy said.”
“I was like, does this really matter?” the girl said. “But if that guy was putting in the effort to round up commerce students, then yeah, I guess it did, to him.”
“Or to you,” the guy said.
“Anyway, we have appreciated the open bar,” the girl finished. “So good job for that.”
I stuttered out a thank you, told them to have a good night, and headed towards the dorm with more urgency than before.
When I entered the 407, it was so quiet I thought that maybe I had it wrong, and Taylor wasn’t here after all. My room was empty, and so I checked his. He was in bed, huddled on his side, suit still on.
I turned the light on. He didn’t move. I walked over, and settled onto the mattress, near where his socked feet were sticking out the end. My gaze fell on the bed rail, covered in a sprinkle of grey dust. He’d been right.
I broke the silence. “Someone told me what you did.”
He didn’t react.
“You got people to come listen to my speech. You knew how important it was to me, so thank you.” I cleared my throat. “I wouldn’t have won otherwise, so…I’m really grateful you went around intimidating those students.”
“I didn’t intimidate them,” Taylor corrected me, just like I knew he would. His eyes were closed. “I just told them the obvious, that you were the best candidate and they would be stupid not to vote for you.”
I wanted to touch him. I curled my fingers into my pants instead. “Still. Thank you.”
He didn’t react.
“Can you please look at me?” I said.
His eyes opened and he pushed himself into a sitting position. His pillow had left a crease on his cheek, and my fingers itched to smooth it out.
“How about,” I said, “we agree to be honest with each other for the rest of the night?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. A moment later, he nodded.
I nodded too, but nothing was said.
“Are you really going to leave?” I asked.
His focus fell on the bed, smoothing it out with his hands. “I was considering it.”
“You already filled the form out.”
“I forced myself to. I figured it’d be good for me.”
“Because it hurts to be around me.”
Taylor buried his face in his hands.
Please tell me the truth, I pleaded in my head. I can’t do this unless you tell me. I can’t be the only one who gives you my heart on a silver platter.
Eventually, he lowered his hands, but his eyes didn’t quite meet mine. “I thought,” he said, voice so low, I could barely make out the words, “all I wanted was to touch you. But that wasn’t enough. Maybe I’m greedy.”
“What do you want?” I asked.
“I want you to love me.”
“You’re right,” I managed, throat dry. “That is greedy.”
“I love you, Archie.”
I stared. Something hot sluiced through my body. Panic? But I didn’t feel like I was panicking. “You do?” I asked.
He nodded.
“But —” it took all of my brain power to make the words come out — “all the times you denied it —”
“Because I was a coward,” Taylor said. “I didn’t see the point of giving you the opportunity to throw it all in my face. Because you would’ve, and I would’ve deserved it.”
“I wouldn’t have,” I said quietly.
He didn’t respond, but I saw that his fingers were trembling.
“When I saw that you were leaving, it broke my heart,” I admitted.
His gaze flickered to meet mine.
“I don’t want you to go.” I thought telling the truth would be hard, but it was easy, words spilling from my lips. “I want you to stay. I want to keep doing this.” I gestured between us. “Living together. Cooking together. Going to parties and the gym and the supermarket. Sharing the same bed.”
“As fuck buddies.”
My head reared back. What a vulgar term.
“No,” I insisted. “No, it was never like that anyway. Anyone would look at us and see —” I almost stumbled over the word “— boyfriends.”
He was quiet for so long, I felt a seed of doubt.
“If that’s what you want,” I added.
His face cracked into a smile. “Yes. That’s what I want. I was going to move out because I couldn’t handle it, being so close and not having it for real — ”
“I can’t believe you were going to leave,” I said, shaking him and hugging him all at the same time. I pressed my face into the crook of his neck, the suit bed-warm. “I thought you were bored of me. Or that it was all some game.”
“It wasn’t,” Taylor replied, hand rubbing my back. “I’d never be bored of you.”
I pulled back and sniffled. “I think I might cry,” I admitted with a little laugh.
He kissed me. I sighed into it, like I’d spent all night underwater, and now I’d broken the surface. It just felt so right. There was no other way to describe it.
Taylor pulled back, hand stroking my shoulder. “You look so handsome.” He said it with such rawness, my chest clenched.
His hand kept stroking, down the front, fingers brushing the end of my tie. “I wouldn’t want to crease your suit.”
“We should get out of these,” I said. “I don’t know what you were thinking, going to bed in a blazer.”
Taylor laughed properly then. We stripped our clothes off, and together, made our way to the bathroom. In the shower, water slid over the contours of Taylor’s face like teardrops. I reached up and washed the product out of his hair, and he let me.
“You really love me?” I asked, his hair black and silky between my fingers.
“Yes, Archie. I was so obvious about it.”
“You’re right. Maybe I am an idiot.”
He laughed, flashing his teeth, and I thought: he’s perfect.
“I love you, too,” I said.
He stopped laughing, eyes wide, almost frightened. “You do?”
“Yeah,” I said simply. I thought of every shared smile, and kiss, and elbow in the side, and all the scowls we’d exchanged since the beginning of high school. It was like he said: it wasn’t rational. I couldn’t cut it out of me if I tried.
We dried off after our shower and went to my room, lying on the blankets and just staring at each other in the lamp light.
“You were really going to leave?” I asked, reaching out for his hand.
His fingers intertwined with mine. “I thought I had no chance. You made it clear it was just a physical thing.”
“That was your idea!” I replied. “You never gave any indication —”
“I denied everything so hard, it couldn’t have been more obvious.”
“That day I took you to the city —”
“I was losing my shit internally, but it was all a game to you.”