Chapter 4
Blue
I spend the entire morning feeling heavy.
It’s not a hangover. I had two beers last night and went to bed at ten o’clock like somebody’s grandfather, so it isn’t that. It’s something else. It’s a low-frequency hum under my skin that I can’t get rid of, and I’ve been trying since I opened my eyes at six.
I go for a run.
I do six miles up to the river path and back along Wexler and through the park where the leaves are starting to crunch under my feet, and my lungs are burning by mile four because I’m pushing too hard.
I tell myself that pushing too hard is going to do it, sweat it out of me.
I get back to the house at seven-forty, and my shoulder is screaming.
I’m soaked through my hoodie and the thing in my chest is still there.
I do a workout.
I throw the garage door open and turn the heater on.
I get under the bar and rep out four sets of squats, three sets of benches, and a set of clean-and-presses that I’ve got no business doing on a shoulder that took a check on Friday night.
The trainer would kill me if she knew. I do them anyway, and by the end of it, I’m shaking and can’t feel my legs.
I sit on the floor of the garage with my back against the wall, and I think okay, that did it, and then I stand up, and immediately feel that the thing in my chest is still there.
I shower. I eat. I sit in the kitchen at the island with a bowl of oatmeal. I scroll through my phone for fifteen minutes without absorbing a single thing on the screen.
By eleven-thirty, I’m desperate.
Benson comes downstairs in basketball shorts and a Wolves hoodie, hair sticking up, looking like a man who’s been up for two hours doing something that I assume involved his girlfriend. He gets coffee and sits across from me at the island. He pulls his laptop out of his bag and opens it.
I look at him.
I think — and this is how desperate I am, this is how out of my mind I’ve become — Benson’ll know what to do with this. Benson’s a man in a relationship. Benson is, technically, a subject matter expert in the field of being knocked sideways by a woman.
So I say, before I can stop myself, “What’s going on with you and Lucy?”
Benson looks up from his laptop. He looks at me for a second too long.
Benson has known me for two years, and he’s known something is off with me since Friday night, but he hasn’t asked, because he knows not to push.
But he’s reading me now. I see the read happen on his face. He could call me on it, but he doesn’t.
“What do you want to know?”
“Just.” I lift one shoulder. “How it’s going?”
He puts his coffee down.
What follows is twenty minutes I won’t get back.
He explains how his sister didn’t approve of the relationship and the falling out they had, but once he gets that story out of the way, he starts in about Lucy Moss.
Oh, this Lucy Moss sounds like something.
Math genius. Professional at her job. Hardworking.
Shy. Cute. He describes her laugh. He’s into how she takes her coffee.
He’s into the specific way she holds her pencil, and apparently, he’s kept one from their very first tutoring session.
I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Love makes me fucking sick. I’ve known this about myself since I was twelve years old, and I’ll know it until I’m dead. And I don’t know what possessed me to ask the most in-love man in this house about the woman he’s in love with.
I stand up.
“Cool,” I say. “Cool, cool. Glad it’s going well.”
“I haven’t finished.”
“You finished.”
“Blue —”
“I’m gonna run to the store.”
I don’t run to the store. I go upstairs, and I lie on my bed for forty-five minutes. I try to nap, and I can’t, so at two in the afternoon, I get up and cross the hall to take a leak. I stand above the toilet, unzip my jeans, and I look down at my own dick.
A thought arrives in my head that I’m too tired to fight.
Maybe I could release all of this through jacking off.
Maybe if I cum into this toilet really quick, I’ll be able to think straight again.
It’s a stupid thought. A dumb one. But I’m out of ideas for the day, and I refuse to continue twitching out of my own skin.
I start pumping.
The blood rushes. I tilt my head back. I crack my neck. I tell myself to think of anything.
Anything.
My mind goes straight to her.
Fuck.
I swallow. I shut my eyes.
No. Not her.
My dick says, yes, her.
I drop my head and stop pumping.
I think about our first time. There’s no point in fighting it, because I’ve just, in the last sixty seconds, given my body permission to do whatever the fuck it wants, and what it wants is that night.
The party I shouldn’t have been at. The room I shouldn’t have walked into.
The hours we spent talking before either of us touched the other one.
The way she’d looked up at me from the pillow when I’d finally kissed her like she’d been waiting her entire life for it.
Then a week later, I came inside of her.
No condom, like a fucking idiot.
I freaked the fuck out about it.
I pulled her into the shower with me and washed her body off with my hands like I could undo it, like the water could take what I had done and give it back to me as something I could carry, and she’d let me.
She had stood there in the steam under the spray with her hands flat on my chest, her hair plastered down her back, and she let me wash her body.
I remember the curve of her waist under my palms. I remember her bright fucking blue eyes looking up at me through wet lashes.
I remember the way I held her after, on the bed, both of us in a towel, my arm under her head, her cheek on my chest, and her hair soaking through my t-shirt.
I grab my dick again.
This greedy fucker.
I pull harder.
I tell myself to focus on the sex part. Focus on the sex part, Golding.
Focus on the way her thighs had felt around my waist, focus on the small sound she made when I first got inside her, focus on the way her hand had gripped my forearm hard enough to leave a mark I’d looked at in the mirror a day later, focus on anything that isn’t the wet hair on my chest.
I keep pumping.
It’s — I think this every time, and I think it now — crazy how much of that night I can still recall.
I didn’t think I’d hold on to it this tight.
I didn’t think I would still, at twenty-one, be the kind of man who jacked off to a single night three Aprils ago.
I’ve fucked a few girls since. There’s been one in particular during sophomore year who was good and patient with me and made it very clear she’d be available again if I wanted.
I’d thanked her and not asked twice. None of them do this to me. None of them have ever done this.
I’m squeezing my balls. Curling my toes against the bathmat. Fuck. I need this so fucking badly. I need the lid to come off something. I need —
The door opens.
“Oh, fuck.” Stanley. “Shit. Shit, I’m sorry —”
I tuck my dick into my pants like a man being arrested at the scene of a crime. My zipper grabs. My face is doing something I can feel without having to see it. My balls have, in the past two seconds, shrunk back into my body like they’re trying to get away from him too.
“What the hell, man?”
Stanley’s shit-eating grin arrives before the rest of his face does. He looks down. I turn my body to hide my crotch. He looks back up. He looks at the toilet, which I’m standing in front of. He looks at me.
He says, with the same deadpan he uses when he’s commenting on hockey —
“Were you just pulling your dick?”
“What?”
“Were you just pulling your dick?”
“Get the fuck out, Stan.”
“No, dude.” He holds up both hands like a man pleading innocence. “I just need to understand. Who jacks off over a toilet?”
“Keep it the fuck down.”
“So you were pulling your dick.”
“Stan.”
“This is fascinating, Blue. This is actually fascinating to me. You go to bed in the middle of a party last night —”
“Stanley.”
“ — and now I catch you, in the middle of the afternoon, on a weekend, the Lord’s day of rest, jerking it into a toilet bowl —”
“It’s not the Lord’s day —”
“ — like a fucking nineteenth-century farmhand —”
“Stan.”
“Tell me one thing.”
I glare at him.
He folds his hands in front of him like a priest. “Tell me, Blue. As your roommate. As your friend. As a man who has just borne witness to something he can’t unsee.
What does jerking off into a toilet accomplish?
I’m not — I’m not judging you, baby Blue.
I just want to understand the logistics. Is it a clean-up thing? Is it a vibe?”
“I’m going to bulldoze you.”
“You can’t bulldoze me. You’ve got dick hands.”
“Move.”
“I genuinely can’t let you out of this bathroom with dick hands —”
I step.
“Ah!” He bolts backward into the hallway. “Dick hands, dick hands, fuck — Cap! —”
“Ermington,” I growl.
“Dick hands —”
He hits the stairs.
I can hear Benson from somewhere downstairs, mild and unbothered. “Who has dick hands?”
“This asshole.” Stanley’s voice, on the landing, pointing up at me. “Is jerking off into the toilet bowl.”
Benson pauses and then he says, “You jerk off over the toilet?”
From the kitchen, Rowan starts rolling in laughter.
“Fuck every single one of you,” I mutter, and I cross the hall. I shut my bedroom door behind me and close my eyes.
I hear Stanley coming up the stairs. He stops outside my door. He doesn’t open it. He doesn’t even try the handle. He just leans, I can hear it, his shoulder against the wood.
“Hey,” he says.
I don’t answer.
“Golding.”
“What?”
“You good.”
His voice has dropped a register. He’s not doing the bit anymore.
This is the part of Stanley that he doesn’t show anyone.
Nobody outside this house gets to see it because Stanley doesn’t let anybody outside this house see it.
He runs his mouth for ninety percent of every interaction and the other ten percent is this — quiet, on the other side of a closed door, asking a real question in a voice that doesn’t expect an answer.
“I’m fine.”