Chapter 31
I’m shaky when I get back to the apartment—half anger, half low blood sugar.
I break one of the cardinal rules of my mom’s apartment and go out on the little balcony to smoke the last of my stash.
It doesn’t make me any calmer, but it does compel me to tear into Mom’s Pepperidge Farm Double Chocolate Nantucket cookies. They make me more jittery.
Houdini’s at the dog sitter, since we’ve been out all day, and without his old man dog grumbling noises, everything in the apartment feels eerily lifeless.
I don’t want to be by myself here. I knock SOS on the shared wall, but I’m not sure he hears it, so I text Nick “come over.” No question mark.
When I swing the door open a minute later and see Nick’s face, the tight, churning feeling in my chest releases.
“Hi.” He’s smiling in this adorably confused way and all I want is to be a person who can text her boyfriend to come over and then actually invite him inside her home. “You okay?”
I reach through the door frame and pull him inside by the T-shirt.
It’s like I’m replaying some high school scene that never quite happened this way.
I kiss him hard on the mouth before he can respond to that.
Maybe he’s caught off guard at first, but he recovers quickly, wrapping his hands around my waist. It feels golden.
“Mom and Perry are staying in one of those giant suites at the Junto,” I say.
“No parents?” he says. “I don’t think I’ve been in this situation since I was seventeen.”
“Should we do it on the sofa?” The truth is, I wasn’t a cool or bold enough teenager to invite a boy over when my mom was out.
“What’s going on?” He’s not literally pushing me away, but he’s definitely pumping the brakes on my apparent horniness.
I run my lips down the left side of his neck. “I just want you.”
“Mmm. The feeling’s mutual.” He kisses the top of my head, pauses, and says, “You smell like weed.”
“Is that kind of doing it for you?”
“It’s bad weed.”
“I know.” I take a step back and look up at him with what I hope is a cute and slightly seductive expression. “Are you going to let that stop you?”
Nick narrows his eyes a little bit, like he’s trying to see me from a slightly different angle. “You could fall into a dumpster and it wouldn’t stop me.”
I lead him farther into the apartment.
I’ve never done this here—had a boy (man? Man.) over to this apartment for illicit purposes. I feel my mother’s vague, unspoken-but-palpable disapproval bleeding through the furniture and the walls.
I keep pulling Nick back, deeper into the apartment. I’m being a little pushy and weird and I need to see what he does with that—how he reacts when I’m not on my best behavior. When I’m feeling a dozen things at once and I need someone to help ground me. Which is a lot of the time, let’s be honest.
I nod my head toward the bathroom. “Want to?”
“In your mom’s shower?” He makes a face.
“It’s my shower, too,” I say.
“Let’s go next door.”
Now it’s my turn for a disapproving look, because Nick shares his bathtub with an almost ten-year-old and I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted toys in there. Not the correct vibes, either.
I shake my head and keep pulling him toward the office. “I don’t want to go next door. I’m an adult. I should be able to have someone over in my own room.”
I know.
I know it’s weird and stupid to do this in here and on a rickety daybed, but I have to feel like I have any space that’s mine and contains things that are important and precious to me. I’ve lived here for five years—doesn’t that make this my home, too?
At least it’s not the floor of a Chili’s.
He looks at me again, as if trying to sort something out.
“Okay.” He stops in the doorway, looking at the space—specifically, my unmade bed—in this new context. “I guess I managed it on a bed this size in college.”
“See?” I pull my shirt over my head and toss it onto the floor as I walk backward, closer to the bed. “I believe in us. We’ll just have to stay extra close to each other. No wild swinging of limbs.”
“That takes away most of my moves,” he says as I take his T-shirt off, tugging it over his head.
I want to scratch my nails down his chest and see all the little ways he reacts to simple touches like that. He truly appreciates that stuff in a way that’s so endearing I wonder if he’s been a little touch starved since the separation.
By the time he backs me against the sad daybed frame, our clothes are littering what little floor space there is in this room.
I forget to hit the light switch, but it doesn’t bother me enough to take a five-second break.
I can ignore the reminders of my actual life, even with the ceiling light illuminating all of them.
I’ve been doing that for the last few years anyway.
I want to take everything further. I want to do something we haven’t done yet—in my space.
“W-wait. I have an idea.” I maneuver myself upright and turn around on my hands and knees. “Sixty-nine?”
“You have the best ideas. You’re very smar—” I don’t catch what he says after that because I’ve scooted myself backward, knees on either side of his chest and then farther back, directly into his face.
“Is it too distracting?” I ask. “Sometimes it’s too—oh shit…”
I think being in my own room emboldens me. Or maybe it’s just a convenient position on a twin bed because you’re right on top of each other.
It’s far from my best work, but I can feel how much he’s enjoying it. No, enjoy is not the right word. You “enjoy” a matcha latte or something. Nick is kind of feral. Which makes me feral-er.
This time feels different from the blow job on his turf. Just feeling like I have turf, even if it’s borrowed, is refreshing.
Nick is very good at showing appreciation and gratitude in the form of muffled groans.
I thrive on positive feedback; I am living my best life. Fuck everything else that happened in the last three hours.
I forgot about condoms. I mean, I possess them.
Somewhere in this room. I just don’t have them at the ready, near my bed, which is really the ideal place for condoms. I have to get up and dig through my duffel bag to find what I believe are my last two, which is a little bit vibe deflating, but this is one aspect of the encounter on which I’m not taking chances.
We try out some different positions on the narrow bed. Nick’s knee slides off the mattress when we attempt missionary and I grip the decorative metal swirly part of the daybed frame for leverage and bend it out of shape.
We settle into a spooning position, and even though I’m practically teetering off the edge of the bed, I’m sure he won’t let me fall. I love the way I can feel him against my entire body, the way he uses his hands on me.
His breathing is so ragged. I can feel how close he is, probably holding himself back, waiting for me. There’s something so beautiful about that, like he wants to jump into that chasm together.
I do, too. But I also want to stretch this out, claim more borrowed time.
We’re being so loud that I briefly consider the possibility that the neighbors on the other side can hear. And I don’t care. I want to express a genuine emotion in this apartment, not walk (fuck?) on eggshells.
So I finally do. We don’t fit on the daybed, nor do I trust its structural integrity after the last twenty minutes. But Nick keeps spooning me and I don’t intend to move anytime soon.
“I’m going to tighten the screws on this bed frame before I leave,” he says.
“Who said you’re leaving?”
“Come stay at my place,” he says. “It’s safer.”
“I told you, they’re at a hotel for the weekend.”
“No, I meant there’s less risk of a fall in your sleep.”
“Hold me for a few more minutes?” He squeezes me tighter.
“We can do that,” he says as we settle into the quiet.
After a few minutes, he says, “I really didn’t expect this.” He’s talking so close to my left ear—this intimate, vulnerable sound. “In the past couple weeks, it’s like…everything spun around. I mean, I’ve been depressed for most of my life—”
“You’re depressed?” I turn my head to look at him, almost twisting off the edge of the mattress in the process. “You’re like the most well-adjusted person I’ve ever met.”
“Me?” He scoffs. “I’m almost forty years old.
I work seven days a week and I never have enough money to give my daughter the things she wants and I run a business that’s constantly on the knife’s edge of shutting down.
I can keep going—I’ve done it for years.
And in so many ways, I’m lucky, so I don’t acknowledge that something’s missing because I’m ‘okay.’ ”
He closes his mouth and looks at me like he’s waiting for me to speak. And I want to. I want to urge him on. But I stop myself. Because I need to hear him say everything. For once, I feel like the person sitting next to me will actually do that.
“I don’t want to be okay anymore.” He shifts his body a little.
“I want to feel like a whole person. I want to be…I don’t know—infatuated with someone.
When you know it’s too much and you’re probably embarrassing yourself but it feels good to act like a fool.
I want you to run your fingers down my back and take up more than half of my bed.
I want to feel you come and hear the way your voice breaks and your breath in my ear.
I don’t want to have to put my hand over your mouth because you’re too loud. ”
“That kind of does it for me, though.”
“Noted.” He takes a breath. “I’ve been sleepwalking through the last few years.”
“The coma?”
“And maybe that’s how it had to be so I could get my life in order.
I want more than survival mode now. I’m—I’m in love with you.
And it’s such a fucking good feeling, even though I probably look like an idiot saying all this.
And the longer this monologue goes on, the more I think you’re going to slowly back off and start avoiding me in the hallway. ”
I shake my head. “Can you say that again?”
“About the hallway?”
“No.” I roll my eyes. “I think you can guess the part I want to hear again.”
“I’ve been sleepwalking through the last—”
I put my hand over his mouth. “Say you’re in love with me.”
He makes a muffled sound under my palm and I release my hand. “You should have savored it a little more the first time.”
“I’m greedy,” I reply. And it’s true. I do feel like I’m taking a lot, but maybe it’s because someone is finally giving. “I guess we’re not good at savoring after all.”
I reach my hand out to the table beside the daybed, grasping for my water bottle. I feel nothing.
“Want some water?” I ask, forcing myself out of bed.
Nick stretches out as much as he can in my absence.
It feels very wrong to be walking around naked in this specific kitchen, but I can imagine how it would feel right in my own place.
I’m so thirsty that I chug most of a glass of water while I’m filling one for Nick.
“Maybe you should tell me how you feel.” Nick is standing in the living room, watching me set my empty glass down on the kitchen counter.
“What?” I ask, even though I heard him. I walk toward him and hand him his water.
“Tell me how you feel,” he repeats.
My mind flips through a handful of potential responses written in neat, block writing on index cards:
I’m Scared.
I Feel So Fucking Happy With You.
I’m Not Sure About Any of This.
I Think I Love You, Too, but Also I Don’t Trust Myself Because of Everything That Happened In the Last Three Hours. The Last Five Years Really.
“Are you in love with me?” He gently takes the glass out of my hand and sets it down on the coffee table. “Forget about the daybed and the apartment and the fellowships and the rest of the world. Are you in love with me?”
“I think you know the answer to that,” I say.
He grabs at my shoulder. “I’m gonna Vulcan nerve pinch you if you don’t just say it as a sentence.”
I reach out my left hand and touch his cheek and his beard. I run my fingertips over the little scar on his forehead and the wide bridge of his nose and his beard and I just feel the truth. My heart or my gut or whatever internal organ that controls wild, illogical emotions confirms it.
“I’m in love with you.” I grin at him. “More so when I’m not under duress.”
He kisses me and I’m surer than I was two seconds ago.
I can’t see that well in the dim light, but he looks teary eyed. This has to be the first time I’ve ever elicited that much emotion in a man.
He takes a deep breath. “I guess saying everything out loud hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting.”
“I know.” I feel my eyes welling up, too. “You’re the only thing that feels solid to me. It’s like you…”
I don’t know where I’m going with that sentence, but it doesn’t matter, because Nick only hears the following sounds:
The jangle of keys in the front door. In comics, this would be a CLICK CLICK! with a few seconds passing before…
The soft whoosh of the door flying open. Had we been able to use those seconds to escape into the office, we wouldn’t hear:
My mother’s eardrum-piercing, body-jolting shriek.