Eighteen
To his credit, Mason really did show up to the shed on Friday with a notebook and a calculator. No pencil, but he had one of those multicolor pens.
He also showed up with a huge clear bin filled past the brim, mostly with cushions.
His smile nearly split his face when he saw me. “Can I please take a picture?”
“Fuck you,” I said, unceremoniously dropping my massive stuffed goose. Mason rushed forward to catch it.
“You’ll get him dirty!” he said, as if every surface in the shed wouldn’t.
“He was white when I got him,” I said. Mason looked down at the gray goose.
“Oh.”
In his bin were six navy cushions and a rolled-up Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse movie poster. He lined the cushions up on top of the crates against the wall to form a makeshift couch, nestling my goose among them while I hung the poster with a hammer and nails because Mason had forgotten tape.
The first thing he took out of his backpack was not his notebook but a flowerpot with a whale painted on it—seemingly by a kindergartner—that he’d found at the thrift store. He put it on the table, right in the patch of light coming through the hole.
I went into my bag and brought out a pot of my own.
It had been painted with yellow and black stripes and given googly eyes and paper antennae, also by a kindergartner.
The kindergartner was me. It had been a kiddie paint-a-pot kit, a gift from my mom.
Since it was technically mine, it didn’t feel so wrong to take it out of my room.
When I told Mason all of this, he looked at me like I’d hung the moon.
I also took out a small paper packet of California poppy seeds. In turn, Mason took the final item out of his bin, a half-used bag of potting soil. He tore at the hole in the wall until it doubled in size, washing most of the table in light.
“This is so hard,” he whined a while later as he read the instructions on the seed packet.
His hands were covered in dirt, because after overfilling the whale pot, he had scooped the excess out with his fingers to chuck through the wall hole.
Instead of, you know, pouring it back into the bag.
I would’ve thought that was obvious. Mason was constantly proving me wrong.
“It literally could not be any easier,” I said. “You don’t even have to bury the seeds.”
“I just don’t get it. You’ll probably have to show me.”
I took the packet.
“I’m really more of a hands-on learner.”
So I guided his hands in mine, and we sprinkled the seeds onto the soil together. “If you wanted me to touch you,” I told him, “you should have just said so.”
Mason stiffened.
“I mean,” I stammered, but what had I meant? “Look. Now my hands are dirty too.”
Mason mercifully let it drop. I hurried away from his distracting body heat to fetch his water bottle.
I poured water over the seeds, then over his hands and my own, wiping our fingers down with the hem of my hoodie until my face didn’t feel so hot.
His gallon was half-empty when I was done, but at least our hands were spotless.
I crossed to the makeshift couch of crates, discarding my hoodie in a black heap on the ground along the way. Left in my dark undershirt, I took last year’s math notebook out of my backpack. “Get over here.”
“Yes, Professor.”
“Stop that,” I said. The crates shifted under my butt when Mason sat beside me.
He didn’t stop. It turned out Mason wasn’t that bad at algebra. He was just really good at distracting himself.
Mid-problem, he would say something like, “Do I get a special reward if I get it right, sir?” And I would tell him, for the nth time, to Stop that, focus. But his train of thought would already be gone, and we’d have to retrace his work.
If not that, his attention drifted to cracks he hadn’t noticed in the ceiling or to whispering to the goose about how mean a teacher I was or telling me he could already see the seeds sprouting. Mostly, he distracted himself just by looking at me.
“Tell you what,” I said when my patience, thin to begin with, finally gave out. “If we can get through the next six problems without going off topic a single time, we’ll call it a day and make out a bunch. Like, so much.”
Thirty minutes later, Mason flung his notebook away so hard it hit the ceiling, probably leaving a new crack, and pounced.
He wasted no time, mouth open, hands grabbing.
I gave as good as I got; he’d earned it.
I’d earned it for putting up with his shit.
So I took, indulging myself in pushing up his soft sweater, trembling at the contrast of the hard muscle underneath.
All week, it had been sneaky glances and kissing in empty rooms around campus—always rushed in some small dark closet, too abrupt each time it ended.
There was no smooth way to come down from him.
Now, with no reason to hurry, there were so many options.
It would be another half hour before Mason had to leave for the game.
So I groped his chest. I traced the dip of his spine.
I licked the shell of his ear. I found all the places I had missed in the rush, and I found the sounds and shivers I could draw from him if I played them right.
Mason kissed me onto the crates, his grip dragging down my thighs to pry my legs apart.
He settled in between. I trailed my hands under his sweater as far as they would go to feel the backs of his shoulders, the powerful cords shifting under his skin as he hiked my legs around his hips.
Mason sat up suddenly, and I frowned. But he was only tearing off his sweater, tossing it with my hoodie.
He started to descend, but I stopped him with a hand on his hip just to look at him breathing heavily, skin dark in the dim light inside the shed.
“Kieran,” he said dangerously. I was never going to get over his voice if it could sound like that, impatient and husky with want.
“Sorry,” I said, mouth dry.
“You said ‘a bunch,’ ” said Mason. “So let me fucking kiss you.”
He didn’t wait any longer, dropping down. I needed to kiss every inch of him.
I couldn’t, and it was a shame. Skipping over his neck, I kissed his chest instead, uncertain until I noticed Mason quivering above me. He fell onto his forearm, and we both jolted when his hips dropped.
Mason hung his head. He pinched at my shirt. “Off.”
I rolled us over, wild as I straddled him. My shirt joined the pile. I rolled my hips, clueless as to whether any of this was right, but Mason pushed his face into a cushion, so I figured I must be doing okay.
Like that, his neck was bared to me, pretty and begging to be kissed, but I didn’t trust myself. I made it up to him by kissing everywhere else, biting his pecs and licking his sternum, pushing my tongue over the hair below his navel.
“Kieran.”
I raised my head at the rough sound of it. His pupils had swelled wide and seemed bottomless. What remained of his irises was molten gold.
“I want you to touch me,” said Mason. “There. I’m saying it.”
What came next would brand itself inside my skull.
I would remember it endlessly, at all the wrong times.
I remembered as I tried to sleep and when I woke up, alone and too hot in my sheets.
I remembered every time we snuck away during school to kiss and touch and stop—the stopping part was so much harder now that I knew what could happen if we didn’t.
When he sent late-night audio messages, and his voice was raspy with sleep, I remembered the sound of him coming apart under my hands.
And at the end of each week, when we could finally be alone again, he gave me something new to remember.
With each visit, the shed took on a little more of us.
Mason’s ratty old skateboard, my throw blanket, his Men in Black action figures, my half-burned Vanilla Fireside candle.
Mason brought his childhood 49ers jersey, which could have fit Casper, and we mounted it to the wall next to the array of Polaroids Annalisa had taken without my consent over the years.
He wanted to know the names of everyone in the pictures.
“Are you serious?” I laughed as he unfurled a gray rug over the floor. “Your mom is going to ask where all the nice things she bought for your room went.”
“She won’t. I have four rugs. She has a problem.”
I started to wonder how quickly people normally fell in love.
***
“I think I’m in love.”
This was not the first time Annalisa had said this since the Halloween party.
“What’d she say this time?”
Annalisa handed me her phone, buried her face in one of my pillows, and let loose a serious groan.
I read out loud, “ ‘Just found out my sister was the one who killed my childhood betta. It was an accident, but I don’t know if I’ll ever see her the same way.
’ Oh, yeah,” I said. “That’s, yeah, that’s intimate. ”
I got the pillow thrown at me for my sarcasm. “She wants me to know about her family!” said Annalisa. “What should I say?”
She had also asked me this several times over the last three weeks.
“Say anything.”
She started typing, reading aloud. “If you want . . . to get . . . revenge, I . . . know people who . . . have killed before.”
“Whoa, okay.” I snatched her phone and deleted the message. “We’ve been over this. No creepy butcher’s-daughter shit. Let’s tone it down. How about something like—”
Annalisa grabbed another pillow and wailed into it.
“What do I do?” she asked me, eyes despairing. “I think she wants to go out soon, like on a date. She keeps hinting at it, but how am I supposed to do that?”
“You’ll be fine,” I said shortly. I couldn’t help a twinge of envy, hearing her talk about going somewhere.
A real date. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the shed, because I did, and sneaking around at school was exhilarating.
But both were constant reminders of what Mason and I were and what we couldn’t be.
At least Annalisa could go out without worrying that someone from school or home would see.
She blinked at me pitifully. I sighed. “You just need to be the one to make the plan. Nothing during the day and nowhere you’d be expected to eat.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about. I don’t know how to talk to her. I can’t even text her without your help.”
“You literally text her all day.”
“My point is,” Annalisa stressed, “I don’t know how to not fuck this up. What if I say some creepy butcher’s-daughter shit and scare her off? I’m not like you. I don’t have all this practice pretending to be normal.”
“Just be yourself, Lisa. She clearly liked you well enough at the party.”
“She liked me when we were drunk.” Annalisa hugged the pillow miserably. “She’s so . . . shiny. I’m nothing like her.”
I knew what that was like.
As if summoned by the thought, Mason texted. Annalisa looked at my phone as I did. Her expression changed in a blink. We both lunged.
“Eat shit,” I snickered when I got to it first. Mason had taken seven pictures of our flowerpots.
There wasn’t much to see, the seedlings hardly sprouted, and yet he’d captured them from seven different angles with the flash on.
I had bet Mason that he would forget to care for them, but he mothered them obsessively.
A new voice message followed. I lifted my backpack from the floor to get my headphones.
“Let me hear,” said Annalisa. I laughed once, loud and sharp. “I show you Lara’s texts all the time.”
“Against my will,” I reminded her. “I don’t even know what it says. You’re not listening.”
“What does it matter? Is he sending you erotic voice memos or something?”
“No.”
Annalisa let it show on her face that she didn’t believe me. I caved, slamming the Play button.
“You know how seeds kind of look like kidneys when they’re sprouting? Well, get this, one of ours looks like a heart. Like a human heart, I’m so serious. Here, wait, I’ll send a close-up . . .”
“Damn, yeah, I forgot how nice his voice is.”
“I know,” I said, pained.
“He’s very, what’s the word? Chipper.”
I saved the close-up shot to my photos. It did look like a heart. “Yeah.”
“But you fit well together?”
I considered. “I think . . . I think Mason takes an interest in people who are different from him. Lara’s like that too. They like us because we’re nothing like them. I’m trying not to question it. You shouldn’t, either.”
“There you go again,” said Annalisa.
“What?” I said defensively. “What am I doing?”
“Being brave,” she said.
Lurking around, kissing in closets, lying to Cella, I felt anything but.
“I meant to thank you,” Annalisa went on. “For the party and for giving me the confidence to try it all out. People. Girls.”
“I hardly did anything. You’re the one who told me to jump right in.”
“But you spoke first,” she said. “One guy gets you questioning and you come to me about it within the week. I’ve known this about myself for years, Kier, and probably would’ve gone years more without ever saying it out loud if you hadn’t made me feel like I could.
Two kisses with a guy and you just . . . said it. You’re scary brave.”
“I’m not.”
“You always have been. Take it from someone who’s always been watching from three steps behind.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “If I’m setting such a good example, follow my lead. Learn from your big cousin.”
Annalisa rolled her eyes. “Help me write this text, will you?”
I refused. What did I know? Lara was probably into creepy butcher’s-daughter shit. Annalisa pouted, but she settled back against my headboard and typed away. She only deleted and restarted once. Then she just hit Send.