Chapter 6 Tainted Love #2
Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. He said, “I’ll keep it in mind. Love your look today, by the way. Very nineteen-fifties Better Homes & Gardens.”
Her gaze slid down his body, and she wrinkled her nose. Today he was wearing green hotpants, a crushed velvet sport jacket, and chunky glass earrings shaped like lemons. “Er, thank you.”
She didn’t want his compliments. Fine. He headed past her and climbed the stairs.
Hoarse sobs drifted from the second level.
Zedd sat on the welcome mat in ripped jeans and motorcycle boots, his cheek pressed against Cosmo’s door.
Tears and snot ran down his face, and he clutched a striped sweater in a white-knuckled grip. So that’s where that went.
Cosmo stopped at the mat, jaw clenched. “Go away.”
Zedd looked up. His breath ratcheted, coming in wet gasps, and his whole body quaked. Though his throat worked, no sound came out. Dropping the sweater, he snatched the lapels of Cosmo’s jacket and bawled into his stomach. “I thought you were dead!”
“Not until next week.”
Wiping his nose on his sleeve, he said, “But the obituary. I couldn’t believe it, but – but I went to your gallery and your boss said it was real.”
Props to Royce for getting in the spirit, but the obit wasn’t supposed to be printed until Friday, after Cosmo had passed out party invitations. “The obituary was in the paper?”
“On their website. Juan saw it and texted me. I don’t understand. Is it some kind of performance art?”
“Something like that.” Cosmo picked up his missing sweater, then fished for his keys.
Zedd kept his grip on Cosmo’s jacket. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. You’re the love of my life.”
“Uh-huh.” Where the hell did he put his keys?
“I was sitting here thinking about you dead, laying on a tray in a morgue locker, with a sheet pulled up over you and your lips blue.” Zedd rubbed his eye. “And all I could think was that there better be room for two people in that locker, because I was going to crawl in there with you.”
Cosmo paused, hung up on the image. “You were going to break into a morgue and climb into a body locker with me?”
“Yeah.” His breath hitched. “Just shut the door behind me and lay next to you under the sheet.”
“That’s… incredibly romantic.” And the pain and sincerity in Zedd’s face was genuine. Much more authentic than flowers and an impulse tattoo. Sitting up here sobbing against the door couldn’t have been a performance if he’d truly thought Cosmo was dead.
I’ll protect you to the ends of the earth, gorgeous.
Maybe Cosmo had made a mistake. His heart yearned for the love they once had.
For all of the good that had been in their relationship.
For there had been good. Zedd had had such an intense focus on him, and not just on his beauty like everyone else seemed to.
He’d been interested in cracking Cosmo open and seeing all of the dark and dirty things that made him up, and he wanted to share his own with Cosmo.
It hadn’t been Cosmo’s romantic visions of taste-testing pastries and reading books in bed, but it had been raw and true.
Zedd struggled to his feet, gripping the metal balcony railing for support. He searched Cosmo’s face with bloodshot eyes, then caressed his jaw. Cosmo instinctively leaned into the touch and sighed.
“I’m so relieved that you’re okay.” Zedd dropped his hand and turned away, then stuffed his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. “I’ll leave you alone now.”
After fishing out his keys, Cosmo unlocked the door.
An ache throbbed in his chest, and the phantom sensation of Zedd’s caress lingered.
He pressed his nose to the soft wool of his sweater and inhaled a hundred days of eating takeout at Zedd’s window seat while they talked about the tragedies of brilliant musicians.
A hundred nights of falling asleep secure in the arms of another, with love bites purpling on his neck.
Cosmo was a forgettable novelty. He was Duchamp’s snow shovel, and there was no soulmate for him, no love of his life. Not if it wasn’t Zedd.
He drew in a slow breath and swung open the door. “Do you want to come in?”
Cosmo pulled on his missing sweater, then found his hotpants. Zedd let out an obnoxiously loud yawn and shut his eyes, burrowing into the pillows. One of Zedd’s socks hung from the head of a mixed media sculpture. Cosmo frowned and flung the sock at him. “You going to sleep in my bed all day?”
“Better than sleeping with you in a morgue. It would have been nice if you’d given everyone a heads up that the obituary and all this death-planning stuff was just for a party.”
“I didn’t know the obit would be on the website.
” It made things rather awkward. It was a local paper, and no one outside of the city was supposed to see it, but having it on a website meant that anyone could.
He needed to email the paper and have them take it down.
God forbid someone send the link to Mom.
Stopping in the bathroom, he stared at his reflection. His hair was a bit frazzled, cheeks pink, and lips swollen and chafed from being kissed too hard. After taming his curls, he plucked a marker from the cup on the back of the toilet tank and wrote on the mirror:
YOU LOOK FABULOUS
He had to be careful with how hard he pressed the marker. This new mirror was probably fine, but he was still paranoid about the whole thing crashing down after what happened last week. To think Ximena accused him of breaking the mirror on purpose. Who needed that much bad luck?
That milkshake wasn’t nearly enough to sustain him after an emotional conversation and vigorous makeup sex. He rummaged through the fridge, then called, “How does pizza sound?”
Zedd made a consenting noise. Cosmo found his phone and placed an order, then finished dressing. He tugged at his bare lobe. What happened to his other earring? Searching the floor, he headed into the bathroom, then raised his eyebrows. Beneath his compliment to himself was:
And what do you look like?
“Ha ha.” He hadn’t even seen Zedd get up to use the bathroom.
Sneaky bastard. It was so nice to have things back to normal between them.
It was tempting to tell Déjà, but she’d only yell at him about how Zedd was average and would merely cheat on Cosmo again.
The thought cramped his stomach. Zedd hadn’t even promised that he wouldn’t.
But no, it had to be different this time. Zedd wouldn’t sob on his doorstep and commit to wasting away beside Cosmo’s corpse if he didn’t love him. And if he loved him that much, he wouldn’t hurt him.
The other earring sat on the floor beside the toilet. Cosmo threaded it through his lobe, then turned to the mirror and wrote:
VERY FUNNY ??
He paced through the kitchen and texted Mom that he was not, in fact, dead, and she shouldn’t believe anything that said otherwise.
After hitting send, he decided that more of an explanation was probably warranted lest she still worry.
He sent her another text, stared at the screen for a moment with no reply, then pocketed the phone.
Zedd had written another message on the mirror in the meantime, telling Cosmo that he was beautiful.
With a flutter in his chest, he headed down the block to pick up the pizza.
What was he supposed to do about the party now? The point was for his old life to die so he could move on – without Cinereous Zedd – and be reborn into a better future. But there was no telling what was waiting for him out there. Zedd was what he knew.
His phone rang, “MOM” filling the screen. He answered, and she said, “I’d better be invited to your funeral.”
“If it were real, of course you would be. I’m just having a party. My artsy friends will be there.”
“I’m artsy.”
He rolled his eyes. She was, but her beautiful watercolors of flowers that won blue ribbons at the fair weren’t the same as his trompe-l’?il skulls, or Déjà’s picnic ghosts, or Rye’s chairs made out of barbed wire.
“Remember when I threw a Halloween party and there were chocolate-covered crickets in the snack bowl and a display of jarred pig fetuses I’d stolen from Science class? ”
She made a strangled noise. “Y-yes. Is this the same thing?”
“Absolutely not. That party was terrible. It didn’t even have a theme. But my point is we don’t have the same tastes, and you would still find this party and my friends utterly grotesque, Mother. We’re all weird and gay.”
The bell on the door to the pizza place jingled as he pushed through. Piercing 8-bit sound effects from an arcade game made it hard to hear Mom’s reply. He turned up the volume on his phone as she said, “Did you break up with Zedd again?”
He swallowed and nearly bumped into the person behind him in line. “Why would you say that?”
“Because you always do the most dramatic things when you’re hurting. I might not understand the appeal of decorating with dissected animals–”
“There won’t be anything of the sort this time–”
“–but I want to be there for you no matter what.”
He sighed, tucking the phone against his ear as he picked up his order and left the restaurant.
He loved Mom, but there was a clear divide between the activities he engaged in with her, and the ones he didn’t.
Baking with her on the weekend or going to a flower show?
Absolutely. Taking her to a Snake Milk concert or a showing of an independent horror film in an abandoned warehouse? Definitely not.
Mom was still talking. “And as for the other part, I have a whole stack of erotic sapphic paintings I did in college.”
Cosmo paused, staring at a fire hydrant on the corner. “You’re… You’re bi, Mom?”
“Honey, why do you think I kicked your father out after what he did to you? Aside from the fact that I love you unconditionally and would have done it regardless.”