Chapter Two - Asher
CHAPTER TWO
Asher
WHAT IN THE hell am I supposed to do with this kid?
I don’t have time for this. Whatever this is, I don’t have time for it, but I need to put a stop to it, so I open the door, ready with a remark, something good, something lecturing, when I see he’s not really a kid after all. Definitely younger than me, but not a kid.
He’s tall, thin, with light stubble on his chin.
Behind black-framed glasses, wide mossy-green eyes look up sorrowfully at me.
It puts me off for a moment, my bravado almost draining like a tub.
He’s dressed directly from the Sears Roebuck, with a collared shirt, ironed and smooth, tucked neatly into his slacks, also ironed and smooth.
For a second there, I want to laugh at this junior square.
His thick curly hair, clipped above his ears, is what I saw all those times I guess he thought he was hiding from me.
Did he seriously think I couldn’t see him?
Weeks ago, I saw him puttering around in my neighbor’s yard and then later that evening reading in a lawn chair.
Two days after that, I saw someone moving in a shrub by the fence and realized they were the same person. Watching me. Spying.
It gets me irritated all over again, and I open my mouth to say so, but he opens his instead.
“I’m really, really sorry.” He looks down and pushes up his glasses. “I was just bored and being stupid. I’m so sorry.” His shoulders slump. “Please don’t tell my aunt.”
I don’t know what to say for a second. The irritation fades as a flush of sheer embarrassment blooms on his cheeks.
There’s just something about him right then, as he looks at me with big puppy eyes.
Something that makes me want to just shrug this off, warn him not to do it again, but maybe not say anything else if he does.
I can tell that I’m not the first man he’s had to apologize to.
Maybe he’s done this before. It makes me curious, rather than angry.
Pushing my door all the way open, I gesture for him to come in.
His cheeks flush deeper and he hesitates.
“It’s cool.” I gesture again. “Just come in for a minute.”
He peers curiously past me, and side-steps inside, like I might reach out and snatch his throat. This won’t do. I don’t want him to be afraid of me.
But I guess yelling at him from the balcony didn’t help.
Just what in the hell was I supposed to do anyway?
I couldn’t ignore him anymore, blatantly watching me, the sun reflecting off his glasses, and did he really, seriously, think I had no idea?
I can’t be sure if it was every evening.
If the clouds roll in, it casts the entire yard in shadow, especially by the fence.
It was often enough, though. I know that.
Often enough to be disconcerting, at the very least.
I go to the icebox and get two beers. I almost toss one to him, but I take a look at his hunched shoulders, fists jammed in his pockets, doing everything he can to not look at me directly, and I think better of it.
So instead I sit on the sofa and slide the can across the coffee table to him.
But he doesn’t reach down in time to catch it and it knocks my ashtray to the floor, ashes covering the shitty rug I found at a second-hand shop.
“Sorry! I’m sorry.” He kneels to pick everything up.
“Don’t worry about it.” I wave him up. “Just leave it. I’ll get it later.” I crack open my beer.
He doesn’t move for a second, just standing there in my tiny sitting room, awkwardly holding the beer and ashtray. I wonder if he’s even had a beer before. He absolutely looks like the kind of fella who doesn’t drink beer. Or anything except milk and maybe the occasional soda pop.
He puts the ashtray back on the table and sits down on another shitty second-hand piece, the armchair, and he perches on the edge like a nervous bird. I watch him for a minute or two. He’s outright refusing to look at me, so I sigh and speak first.
“Can I ask why?”
He swallows. Shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He holds the can of beer in his hands like a candle at a vigil. “I’m just so sorry. I didn’t think you could see me.”
I want to challenge him. Ask why he thought being hidden would make a difference, since he was watching me like some kind of Communist witch-hunter. And he looks like he could be exactly that, let me tell you. He looks like his mother dresses him, and he’ll probably live at home well past thirty.
And yet…
There’s an itch inside me, a desire awakening that I try again and again to put to sleep.
I think of it as the horse charging toward me as a child, and my savior, my older brother, only put himself in harm’s way to save me.
I’ll never forget the screams or the blood.
I’ll never forget the emptiness at knowing that I could never be grateful, but only angry.
He’d forced this loss on me, and what good did it do?
And so I took that emptiness and that unwanted desire and just meshed the two together; made them one creature for me to deal with.
This desire has hooves that pound into the ground like a hammer on an anvil.
I hear it in the deepest and darkest of my dreams until it’s sprouted two heads, and I can’t ignore it anymore.
My hand with the beer begins to shake. I take a sip and catch the kid in my periphery, watching me. When I turn to him, he looks away.
“You shouldn’t be doing stuff like that around here, pal,” I say to him. “Not too many people like peeping Toms.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, mostly to the ashes on the shitty rug. “I won’t do it again. I swear. Please just don’t say anything to my aunt.” He bites his lower lip.
I don’t like the distress in his voice. Is his aunt a mean lady?
I’ve seen her a couple of times. She didn’t look mean.
And I don’t like how he avoids my gaze. I don’t like how I started all this by dissolving the unspoken fantasy between us.
It’s so stupid, so ridiculous, because in every way he owes me the apology, but now I feel guilty for some inexplicable reason. I feel like I owe him .
I sit back on the sofa and consider something. And I shouldn’t. Absolutely not at all.
“How about this,” I say. I look over at him and wait patiently until he looks back. “Got a Triumph out front. Could use a wash and a polish. If you can do that, we can forget the whole thing.”
He just stares at me, and I can’t tell if he’s confused or what. “It’s the bike.” I nod to the front window. “Right out there.”
“I know what it is.” He looks almost insulted.
“Okay, well. What do you say? Tomorrow’s Saturday, so be here at ten?”
A slight flush appears on his neck, just below his Adam’s apple. I damn the flutter in my chest all the way to hell.
“All right,” he agrees.
I sit back and light a cigarette, a done deal, but there’s silence for a minute or so before he stands up and pushes his glasses up his nose.
“Can I go now?”
I shrug like I could give a shit.
He turns to the door and exits without a word.
I sit for a long time after he’s gone, my already dim sitting room getting dimmer, my lungs filling and emptying as I finish and light another cigarette.
I go pick up the unopened beer and it’s warm where he gripped it for dear life.
He lingers in a way I don’t want him to.
I sit back down, sink deeper and deeper into the sofa cushions, my mind swirling with the fury that someone like him can do this to me. Now. Here.
The nerve.
The fucking nerve.
“Knock it off,” I say to myself. I stand and shake it off and go find one of my girly magazines.
But first a shower. I turn on the water.
Cold.
He’s waiting by my bike at ten sharp.
Another collared shirt, with maroon and white stripes, tucked into gray slacks. His hair is combed behind his ears, not a curl out of place, and his shoes shine.
“What’s so funny?” He frowns at me as I approach.
“You know you’re just gonna get dirty, right?”
He looks down at himself and frowns deeper, that endearing blush appearing once more. My heart hiccups.
I shake my head. “It’s cool, though. I guess I should’ve told you. I haven’t cleaned the garage in ages.”
“Garage?”
“Yeah.” I fasten the snaps on my leather jacket, bought and paid for at the fanciest store downtown.
It’s genuine and a deep ebony and if there was anyone that needed to know, I’d request they make sure I’m buried in it.
“Did you think you were going to do it out here?” I gesture around us. “See a hose anywhere?”
He looks. “Well, no. But —”
“Come on.” I go around to the street side and mount my bike.
I bought the Triumph off some asshole in the neighboring county.
He had two, brand new. One was red, and I hate red.
He really wanted to unload the red one, though, so I haggled and bargained until I bought it for fifty clams off the asking price.
I painted it black the following week. I wanted something that wasn’t too cumbersome.
At least until I can move out to the country, just a log cabin and some records, and I’ll be golden.
The thudding of horses hooves fading into oblivion at last.
I cut on the engine, push up the kick with my heel, and look over at him. He’s chewing on his bottom lip, looking like he might just run on back to his auntie’s.
I try to gather up some sympathy for him.
He’s got to be lonely. There’s no one around his age in this neighborhood.
Or mine for that matter. Or—scratch that—no one my age and also a forever bachelor because there’s no way he can cure the sickness in his heart.
And marrying some dame to quell the thirst will only make me hungry.
I can’t be so low as to fool someone I’ll never love.
“Hop on,” I say to him. There’s just enough room on the seat behind me, and he’ll be the first ever to ride with me. On this bike anyway.
“I’ve never ridden on a motorcycle before,” he says warily.