Fifteen #3
I think of the weepy faces of Precious Moments figurines.
I listen to the sound of the house settling in on itself and the brushing whisper of snowflakes against the windowpane, and soon my heart slows and my body softens.
“Your whole family is great,” he says, somehow able to think about something other than our bodies next to each other. I glance at him—he’s gazing at the ceiling, the soft glow of multicolored lights reflected in his eyes.
“What’s Christmas like at your place?” I ask.
“Quiet. For the past few years, my brothers have come home for Thanksgiving but spent Christmas with their girlfriends, so it’s just been me and my parents. I like this, though.” He gestures at the house around us. “All the people, how comfortable everyone is.”
I roll onto my side to look at him, and to my surprise, he mirrors me and then our faces are inches apart in the warm semidarkness.
We talk like that for a while, about our favorite parts of Christmas, our family traditions, the best gifts we’ve received.
He loves the candlelight and carols at church and always does a white elephant gift exchange with his friends on the day after Christmas.
“I wish it could be like this next year,” I find myself saying. “You being here, I mean. It feels more complete like this. Like our family has been waiting for you to be a part of it.”
He inhales sharply.
“Enzo,” he says, and his forehead comes to rest against mine and he’s so close I can feel his breath on my lips.
Then his palm is on my cheek, his thumb resting on my chin.
His gaze meets mine, and I realize I’ve never been this close to someone else’s eyes before, have never felt so intensely the sensation of seeing and being seen.
For one brilliant second I think we have aligned, that we want the same thing.
And then I notice the tear on his cheek, sliding over his freckles to the bottom of his jaw where it hangs suspended before dropping soundlessly onto his pillow.
I pull back. “Are you okay?”
He blinks and another tear squeezes from his eye. “Just tired.”
“Garrett.” I reach to brush the tear away, but he grabs my hand.
“I’m fine,” he says. He lets go of my hand, and it’s like when the key in a piece of music shifts from major to minor, the warmth fading from the melody, replaced by ice. He shakes his head, a small, almost-imperceptible gesture with a crystal-clear message.
He rolls onto his other side with his back to me, and I do the same. We lie there, back-to-back, and the minutes tick by and the snow whispers against the windowpane and eventually his breath lengthens, and I can tell he’s fallen asleep.
In the morning, I’m awoken by Garrett trying to slide out of bed. With a blast of horror, I realize I have turned onto my other side in the night, and my arm is splayed across his shirtless torso, my face tucked into his shoulder.
“Oh god,” I blurt, because I’m not casual enough to feign sleep while he gingerly tries to pluck my hand off his pec. I sit up, aware that my chin feels faintly moist and that there exists the possibility I drooled on him in the night. I run the back of my hand across my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
He grins at me, his hair haloed in morning sunlight. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, getting out of bed. Then something in his face shifts, like a cloud drifting over the sun, and I remember what happened right before we fell asleep. The contact, the clarity, the tears.
“I’m probably gonna sleep on the living room couch tonight, though,” he says, pulling on his clothes from yesterday. “Last night? We can’t do that again.”
“Do what?” I ask. “Touch each other? Tell each other what we’re actually feeling?”
His head kicks back at this challenge. “Dude, I told you: I was tired and—”
“No,” I interrupt. “I think you let your guard down and now you want to pretend I didn’t see that something’s bothering you. It’s the same thing you did the night after your last football game.”
“What do you mean?”
“You remember,” I say. “And you remember holding my face last night and playing footsie at dinner and watching me all evening.”
He stares at me for almost a full minute.
Then he closes his eyes and lets out a deep breath.
“You’re a great host brother, Enzo,” he tells me softly.
“I’m so lucky I get to live across the hall from you.
It’s a bright spot in a year that I thought would be really shitty.
But in six months I’m going back to Atlanta, and you’ll head out to college after that.
And maybe we’ll text and comment on each other’s posts online. And that’ll be it.”
“What are you getting at?”
“That’s all there is, isn’t it? That’s what the two of us are to each other.”
I suddenly feel tired, like I could climb back beneath the covers and sleep until New Year’s Day. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess that’s what we are.”
He gives me a small, sad smile and leaves. I sit on the edge of my bed with my face in my hands until I’m ready to join my family downstairs. The family in which Garrett does and does not belong.