jesse #2
He laughed again, louder, and shivers ran down my arms. I wasn’t an insecure person.
Not anymore. I’d dragged myself through the mud and had little left to hide or be ashamed of.
Even so, noticing Finn’s laughter, an adult man’s laughter coming from my childhood friend’s mouth, catapulted me back into the hard shell I’d thought I had long gotten out of.
“What about you?” Finn asked. “Aren’t you in a secret society?”
I shook my head. “I’m radically opposed to them. We’re natural enemies, Finny.”
His eyes widened for a fraction of a second. After a beat, he smiled and looked at his coffee. “Nobody’s called me that in a while.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I feel like I’m twelve again.”
“No, it’s good,” he said. Smoothly, he turned his cup around in the saucer and changed the topic. “Do you know anyone here? Most of our friends left after you.”
“Not really,” I admitted. “I didn’t go turning the old stones much.
I only arrived a month ago, got to know my flaky roommate, and explored the campus.
” Then I thought about it a little more, shaking my head.
“That’s a lie. I went back to my old street to see the house.
” I swallowed and shrugged. “It’s not there anymore.
It’s just an empty lot with construction equipment parked in the middle of it. ”
“Really?” Finn asked, apparently gutted. “Ow, man. Remember your room?”
“Sure do,” I said. It was a fond memory, like many of them were. “The ceiling was full of stars glowing in the dark.”
“And planets,” Finn said, lost in the memory. He picked up his coffee and drained the last of it.
I looked at mine, and it was an empty cup. “Let’s go for a walk,” I said. “I love this street.”
Finn didn’t hesitate. He waved at a server and asked for the bill. When the server came around, I went for my phone to pay, but Finn was quicker, paying for us both.
Finn grinned at me like it was a childish prank. “You’ll get the next one,” he said after catching my scolding look.
“Fine,” I agreed. “But I owed you for this, setting you up with a no-show.”
Finn got up and put a hand on my shoulder in a friendly way. “I’m enjoying this, actually. Better than awkward chitchat all the time.”
It was chitchat, that was for sure, but I wasn’t so convinced that it wasn’t awkward. Above all this, above the fact that I could still sit with him in silence and feel like I was home, there was the weight of the past, hanging from a frayed piece of rope, threatening to crush us at any moment.
I waited for him to ask me, but he never did. And I wondered if he cared at all or if asking was simply too much to do just yet.
We stepped outside and the rays of sunshine came through the orange canopy above us. The sunlight made Finn’s hair brighter, and he closed his eyes and lifted his head as if to feel its gentle, golden kiss.
“Lead the way,” he said. “Wherever you want.”
Wherever? Strange how it made me think of wanting to walk ten years into the past and begin correcting my mistakes. “Let’s just stroll under the trees. Nowhere’s as beautiful as here this season.”
Whitmore Street was dotted with cute cafés and residential buildings. Nobody ever made much noise here, and I had a distaste for the types who hedged their money by buying the brownstones on this street, but even I had a weakness for such beauty.
As easily as if no time had passed at all, Finn told me about his high school days.
He was in a debate club, he played football on the team until a knee injury made him a lot more careful about sports, and he fell out of love with astronomy, his once-upon-a-time great passion. “It’s all just mathematics in the end.”
He told me about a couple of our friends who’d gone to high school with him before moving away to study in various corners of the country. He told me about other friends from back in the day, who’d moved away even earlier.
“I don’t know what kept me,” he said. “I guess I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, so I just sat around waiting for something to happen.”
“I sometimes wish we’d never left,” I said.
I should have realized that Finn would pick up on the complexity and the sheer size of a statement like that. “Why? What happened?”
I snort-chuckled. “It’s been a decade, Finny. What hasn’t happened?”
He checked his wristwatch, a nice blue one with silver hands and a brown strap, and shot me a look. “I have time.” He bumped into me with his shoulder, and we laughed.
I didn’t know where to begin, but I wanted to skip the part where leaving this place felt like someone had split me in two and thrown one half away.
“You can imagine what it’s like to be taken across the country at twelve, right?
New school, supposedly new friends, and a whole lot of confusing feelings that took years to work through, all with the emotional intelligence of a teenager high on a hormonal cocktail of angst and testosterone.
To make a very long story short, I didn’t make any friends.
Didn’t really trust myself to stay friends with anyone. ”
“I’m really sorry,” Finn said.
If it had been anyone else, I would have brushed it off as a polite thing to say. But this was Finn saying it, and I knew he was sorry for the boy I’d been.
“Then I came to terms with the fact that I was gay and couldn’t do a thing about it, and life got a little better,” I said, speeding through that part because telling him anything about my sexuality felt like undressing right in front of him.
He had no idea he was the first person I’d fallen in love with.
He had no clue there had never been anyone else for me, not in my heart in any case.
“I went to uni and dipped into some hedonistic ways, focusing a lot more on philosophy and misunderstanding a great deal about it. I made it my whole character, identified with the schools of thought I believed allowed me to screw around without worrying about the consequences, and that blew up in my face. As it should.”
Finn laughed softly and shook his head. “What happened, Jesse?”