Chapter 7
NOEL
It’s Saturday again and I’m in the bed of a guy named something like Kyle, or Lyle, or Ryle.
He’s a perfectly inoffensive in that there isn’t anything all that remarkable about him.
He is so unremarkable that I can’t tell you much about him, beyond the fact that he lives with a roommate (who is not currently home) right by Malden Center.
In the darkness of his room, I’ve already forgotten what he looks like.
Sandy brown hair, I think. No idea what color his eyes are.
I wasn’t really looking during all two minutes we spoke before we ditched the niceties.
It’s that unremarkable inoffensiveness that’s appealing; or at least that’s the idea. Something that won’t remind me of anything or anyone at all.
His mouth doesn’t feel like anything, either, on my lips or my neck.
Or my chest, when he pushes my shirt up, and his kisses are sloppy, too wet, and I’m not into him enough to enjoy it, or into him at all, or what we’re doing.
I don’t like the way his body slithers against mine or how his skin feels sort of sticky and smells like sunscreen.
I keep my legs closed and turned to the side so he’s left butting up against my hip, hard as a rock.
Predictably, I am not.
I’m just sort of lying here and letting him do whatever, touch me however.
Making the right sounds at the right times.
When I know things are supposed to feel good, even though they don’t, where his mouth and fingers explore.
His room is so unnaturally fucking dark for a nice, sunny summer afternoon but he’s got blackout curtains, so he told me, and I can only make out his vague, shadowy shape above me.
I don’t usually have sex in the dark. I like to see what’s happening.
And there is a split-second where I’m suddenly back in the dirty alleyway in the middle of the night, being dropped to the ground. My face scraping brick. Jordan sneering at me in one breath and whimpering in anxiety the next. Shoving me with his foot, grabbing at me with his hands.
I didn’t want to do it like this.
You’re so fucking dramatic.
Wake up already.
I make a small sound as I go rigid and dig fingers into the sheets beneath me and then I’m back here in this dark, overly warm bedroom. And Kyle/Lyle/Ryle doesn’t notice my momentary disappearance or when I resurface, but now I struggle to even play along.
When he sucks on my neck, I shrink away and butt his chin with my shoulder. When he bites down on one of my nipples, I bring my knee up into his chest—not hard, just enough to let him know to quit—but he makes this sort of whimpering sound like a kicked dog. Jesus Christ.
“You don’t like that?” he asks me. His sad puppy voice floats down to me as he raises himself up on his forearms.
“No,” I say. Not with you, I don’t say and I shut down my thought process from there before it can branch off into bad places and go down the exact roads I don’t want to go, that I’m very studiously avoiding by being here at all.
“What do you like?” He sounds a little frustrated. “Everything I try, you just keep—”
“I don’t want to be marked up.”
He sighs. “Okay, fine.”
Round two. Ding. I tell myself to behave.
I tell myself that he’s really not all that bad looking, if I reach back all ten minutes to the past to when I saw his face.
He might be quite cute. I think he’s tall?
Definitely has that sort of hair color that’s non-distinct, not brown but not blonde, and what color were his eyes?
Really can’t remember. I just didn’t notice them.
Kyle/Lyle/Ryle pulls away again with a frustrated sigh.
“Maybe we should just…” He runs a hand down my hip and I adjust for him, almost reluctantly, until my legs are spread before him.
He palms my crotch and I guess he expects to find something there, or at least more than the nothing, because he pauses and goes, “Oh.”
I close my eyes and stifle a sigh. “It’s fine. Just keep going, I need a little bit more…” More what? Time? Viagra? A fantasy in which he wasn’t even involved?
“Well, it’s sort of—um, you’re not even into this.”
So I lean forward and grab his dick, which is standing only half-mast now beneath his silky shorts. He makes a small, strangled sound. “Then I guess I’ll just do you.”
“Wait, no.” His hands wrap around my wrists. “Stop. You’re being fucking weird.”
“How am I being weird?” Now I’m the whiny one, stung by the rejection of someone I don’t even really want, I just want to want them and want to be wanted by them. “Who doesn’t want their dick sucked?”
“It’s not that.” And now he’s reaching across me and fumbling with the lamp on his bedside table, and when it snaps on it illuminates him in all his unremarkable and inoffensive glory and suddenly I feel like vomiting.
Not because he’s ugly, but because I’m seeing him when I don’t want to and it’s terribly confronting.
“Are you okay?” His expression is a strange one. “You look—”
“I’m fine,” I interrupt. “Let’s keep going.”
“Your face is kinda green.”
“It’s not.”
He looks quietly at me for a few seconds. “I don’t think this is gonna work,” he says at last. “You should probably—I don’t know. It’s just not working.”
Now I feel like crying and puking. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“It’s just weird, this whole thing. I’m ninety percent sure you’re not into this.”
Trust me to find the one guy on a hookup app with a shred of empathy. “Are you kicking me out? For real?”
“You’re just kind of lying there like a sex doll, guy. I’m really not into it. I mean,” he adds hastily, “you’re really cute. It’s not that. But—”
“Whatever.”
I get off the bed and grab my bag off the floor.
He didn’t even get as far as undressing me so at least I don’t have to do the whole humiliating act of pulling my clothes on while he stares at me with that weird mixture of pity and revulsion.
All I have to do is shove my feet into my Docs and lace them up as quickly as humanly possible before I seize the handle of his bedroom door and yank it open.
“I hope you feel better,” he calls after me.
I slam the door and do my walk of shame right outside into the late June sunshine. And I didn’t even get fucked for my trouble, which makes it that much worse.
I don’t want to go home and be alone with my thoughts, don’t want to think about what the fuck just happened, so I take the bus to my mother’s house. She hasn’t summoned me, but I might as well.
It’s a twenty-minute ride and a short walk from the stop before I’m standing there, in front of that dilapidated old colonial that is less and less red every year, its wooden siding warped and peeling.
It’s where I grew up. It is the only house I have ever lived in, and I lived here only until I had the means to not live here.
Until I could escape and make myself as scarce as I dared, but not quite scarce enough to cut the cord that still binds me here, however frayed and stretched it might be.
And really, sometimes I think I might as well have never left.
Might as well be tied up in the front yard, kneeling behind rusty chain-link in yellowed crabgrass and snarling my throat raw at anyone who would dare tread the cracked sidewalk beyond.
Like how I used to as a kid—a feral scrawny thing, snapping teeth at a kind word.
The bigger I got the more busted I was. More and more screws falling loose until the sound of them rattling around my skull was fucking unbearable.
Guess it was supposed to be something of a comfort back when my therapist told me I’m a product of my upbringing, all maladaptation and shitty coping that only served to hurt and ostracize me from everyone around me.
Telling me it wasn’t my fault, necessarily, only my responsibility to fix myself up and make myself palatable to the rest of the world.
It wasn’t, though. A comfort. Instead, there was just this mix of rage and despair. Those are feelings I am accustomed to in their intensity, but this was different. This was a furious grief the likes of which I’d never known before: that I was broken in a way that could’ve easily been avoided.
Instead, I’m like this. Too much for anyone. For the people who know me, and for the people who don’t.
I kick open the lopsided gate because it’s the only way to get through, its hinges are rusted so badly, and mount the crumbling steps up to the front door.
It’s only cursory that I knock and announce myself before letting myself in.
The door is never locked. No key necessary, though I still have one, in the event someday Mom does decide to lock the door. Which I don’t think will ever happen.
Through the front hall that reeks of decades worth of cigarette smoke, everything stained yellow, and into the equally yellow living room.
It’s cold in here, the window unit blasting frigid, moist air, and TV is switched on to some reality show or another—Mom loves them; they’re another one of her addictions.
She’s not watching it, though. She’s currently nodding off in her old recliner, mouth hanging, eyes half-shut.
There’s a mostly empty bottle of pills on the coffee table.
I move through the room and sit on the old couch to watch her. The Narcan is under the kitchen sink and I know how to administer it. I’ve done it before. “Hi, Mom,” I say.
She mumbles something. It’s not my name. It might be thing or it, which is what she usually refers to me as. I can’t actually remember the last time she used my name. Whenever it was that I was reduced to an it. I can’t pinpoint that moment in time with any accuracy either.
I wonder if even this particular facet of me is her fault, too. That I was un-personed to the point of becoming some strange and broken in-between of a human, one who people could not decide was boy or girl or something else entirely.