Author's Note: Warning for consent issues, including reference to previous sexual assault/trauma, as well as multiple incidents in which Garen asks people to stop touching him (in a sexual manner) and is initially ignored. Further warning for discussion of violence, some sexual content, queer-baiting (sexual overtures made by a straight character towards a gay one, for the amusement of the straight character), and off-screen character death.
"I told her once I wasn't good at anything. She told me survival is a talent." -Susanna Kaysen
165 days sober
“Hey, what can I get for you?” the barista asks with a polite smile.
It should be a simple question, but I find myself scrolling feverishly through my text messages to make sure I’m getting all the orders right. First, my drink, which I still can’t remember and therefore need Travis to text me the name of at least once a week. “I need a large black-eye with caramel flavoring in it. And a… hang on—” I click back to Stohler’s text, “—a large—or, venti, whatever, Americano.”
“Alright. Anything else for you today?”
“Yeah, I also need a venti—” Christ, Alex, what is wrong with you? “—White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino with extra whipped cream. What—is that even a real drink?”
“It is,” the barista says, gnawing on her lip like she’s trying not to laugh at me. Whatever, Alex is the one she should be laughing at. “Is that all?”
“One of those apple things,” I say, nodding towards the dessert case. The thing I want is clearly labeled with its actual name, but I feel like saying the word fritter is just an affront my dignity can’t handle after ordering that last drink. I pay for everything and retreat to the other end of the drink bar to pick at my apple fritter while I wait for the drinks to be made. Stohler is already texting me to bitch about how long it’s taking me to get to the apartment, and Alex is doing the same, whining about how he can’t expect to handle Assassin’s Creed without proper sustenance. I ignore them both and shove my phone back into my pocket, settling for scoping out the other patrons at the Starbucks.
There are a few girls—maybe thirteen or fourteen years old—who are spread out at a large table, slurping at iced drinks with whipped cream. Probably the same frilly shit Alex is getting. A kid who’s way too young to be reading A Game of Thrones is curled up in an armchair, doing just that. A middle-aged man in glasses is clacking away at the keyboard of his laptop and taking infrequent sips of a cup of coffee, probably just to avoid being kicked out. And there, right near the door…
There’s Dave Walczyk, staring down at the textbooks and notebooks he has spread out over his tiny table. He’s halfway through a mug of coffee—an actual, ceramic mug, so I assume he’s been here for a while, and has plans to be here longer still. He’s working on homework, or, I guess he was; right now, he’s sitting completely and utterly still, his eyes unmoving, his shoulders hunched and tense. So, he must have seen me. Or heard me. I wonder if he’s been that still since I first walked in. I wonder how I didn’t see him.
The barista says something at the counter behind me, but I don’t hear her. It’s like my ears are packed through with cotton. Like I can’t hear anything over the pulsing of blood inside my skull. I turn back to her and say softly, “Sorry, what?”
“I said, do you need a tray?” She grabs a cardboard drink tray from a stack near the espresso machine and gives it a little wave. I nod, and she quickly piles the three drinks into the tray, pushing it towards me and saying, “Have a great day.”
“Thanks,” I say, but I wait another minute or so before I pick up the tray, worried it might tumble out of my weak and shaking hands. When I finally turn around, I find that Dave still hasn’t moved. For a long while, I just stand there, watching him, waiting to see if he’s even breathing. Eventually, he chances a glance at me. His eyes snap right back to his book, but it’s enough to get me shaking again.
Because the thing is, Dave’s a fucking psycho, and he terrifies me, and he has hurt me more than anyone else I’ve ever met, but he was… first. Not the first boy I slept with, and not the first boy I loved—those honors belong to James and Travis, respectively—but Dave was definitely somewhere in between. He was the first boyfriend I ever had. First guy to take me out on a date, and open the car door for me, and pay for dinner and a movie. First guy to ever tell me he loved me, first guy to say he wanted a future with me, first guy to make me feel like I mattered. And then, later, the first guy to ever tell me how worthless and pathetic and slutty I was—am. First guy to ever hurt me, to break my heart, even if I’m not sure it was his to begin with.
He’s important. I don’t want him to be, but he is, and maybe that’s why I find myself tightening my grip on the drink tray and stumbling over my boots as I trudge across the room towards him. His attention is on me, but his gaze is locked on the books. Maybe he thinks I’m heading for the exit, which is right next to him, and maybe I should be heading for the exit, but instead, I trip right up to him, set my tray down on the table’s only remaining space, and say, “Hi.” He goes so still, he might as well be catatonic. I fiddle with the straw poking out of Alex’s drink. Nobody speaks. God, I hate silence. I clear my throat and say, “You can talk to me, you know.”
That’s enough to finally spur a response. He closes his textbook and leans back in his seat, looking up at me with tired eyes. “The last time I tried to talk to you, your mom sent the NHPD to my house.”
“That’s because that box was fucking creepy,” I say. I have no idea from where I’m getting the balls to say this. The last time I spoke to him like this—the last time I spoke to him at all—he almost killed me. But there are more than half a dozen witnesses in the room with us, and I know that if he tries to attack me, someone will stop him, or call the cops. So I keep going. “I didn’t even call her, you know that? Jamie did, after I fucking fled to his apartment because I thought you might be like, lurking in my fucking broom closet or something.”
Dave sighs. “I didn’t mean to scare you, G. I thought—it was a present, okay? I filled it with things I know you like because I hoped that maybe you’d reach out to me. I wanted to be sure that you were okay. I wanted to talk to you, that’s all.”
“Did you know I was going to be here?” I say, knowing the words are stupid even as I say them.
Based on the look on Dave’s face, he thinks they’re pretty stupid, too. “Yes, Garen,” he says flatly. “You’re supposed to be living in New York now, but I’ve been sitting here for two hours, pretending to work on a midterm paper, because I somehow knew that you were going to be stopping in at the Starbucks that’s right around the corner from where you know I live. In fact, that’s actually why I live there. I scouted it out three years ago, just hoping you’d someday buy a cup of coffee here.”
“Don’t be mean to me,” I say, voice small.
“Trust me, Garen, I can get a lot meaner than that,” he says.
It’s an automatic, thoughtless reply, and his eyes go wide as soon as the words are out of his mouth. Not as wide as mine, I’d bet. I scramble to pick up the tray so that I can leave—or at least, so that I can go sit in my car and hyperventilate for a few minutes—but Dave throws a hand out as if to grab my wrists. He thinks better of that before he even makes contact, and suddenly we’re both striking the same pose, shoulders hunched and trembling hands raised up in a gesture of surrender.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and he sounds like he maybe means it for real. “Shit, I-I’m sorry, I can’t believe I really said that to you. Just…” He slowly stretches his hand out like he’s doing everything he can not to scare me away. My eyes are darting back and forth between his face and his approaching hand. He closes it over the back of the chair across the table from himself, the one closest to me, and carefully pushes it back a few inches. “Can you—will you sit, please? Can we talk?”
“We’re not supposed to,” I say. “Like, I really feel like you’re misunderstanding some part of this whole ‘no contact order’ thing. Specifically, the part where we have no contact. Which is, you know, all of it.”
“You came up to me,” he points out. “If you want to go, I won’t stop you, I promise. I just want to talk. Please.”
Dating Dave when I was a sophomore was the third-stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Dating him again last year, even though I knew what he was capable of, was the second-stupidest. Sitting down across from him right now? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Ever. I know that, but I still do it.
He lets out a slow, steady breath of relief, then allows the corners of his mouth to twitch upward. Even though it’s a tiny smile, it still cuts a pair of deep dimples into his cheeks—I quickly focus on one of the books on the table instead of his face. Dave doesn’t smile much, but when he does, he looks fucking adorable, and I don’t want to see that.
“How have you been?” he asks. “Last time I saw you, you weren’t, um… in the best place.” He swallows, then admits, “Even before what I did to you.”
“I’m okay,” I say. My voice is so much quieter than it normally is, and I want to choke myself because of it. Every time I try to speak to Dave, I end up sounding like the awkward, inexperienced fifteen-year-old boy he met, instead of the hardened, battle-scarred man I am now. I clear my throat and try to summon a more natural, certain tone as I continue, “Last year was, uh… it was hard on me, I guess? But I have my shit together now.”
“Yeah?” is all Dave says.
Heat rises in my cheeks, and I roll my eyes, but still don’t look at him. “Why, is that so hard to believe?”
His jaw tightens so much that I can hear his teeth grit together even over the cheerful alt rock playing from a speaker somewhere above my head. “It was a single word, Garen. Don’t get—”
“Sorry,” I interrupt. “I know you didn’t mean—I’m fine, is all I’m trying to say. Things are good between me and my parents again. And my friends.” This is the perfect part to finish with. This is when I should stand up, thank him for speaking to me without beating me to a pulp, and walk out. Every rational part of me knows that I shouldn’t say another word, but I’ve got this twisted craving to let him know exactly how much he fucked me up. I want to see if he’s even capable of feeling guilt. I finally meet his eyes dead-on. “I’m five months clean, too.”
Dave blinks at me. “You’re what?” I raise my eyebrows, but don’t repeat myself. He licks his lips, and I try not to blink. “You mean—”
“I mean that I went to rehab,” I cut him off. I wiggle my coffee cup out of the tray and take a long sip, even though it’s hot enough to numb my tongue. “I had to take a ton of painkillers because of what you did to me, and once my prescriptions ran out, I started self-medicating with booze and blow. Shit got out of hand. Dad cut me off, once he realized what I was using his money for, so I—” I break off in a self-conscious little burst of laughter, “I had to fund a habit somehow, and I’m really only good for one thing, right? I mean, that’s what you always told me.”
Dave’s eyes widen. “Garen, I never… if I said that to you, it was only because I was angry. You know me, you know I get--crazy when I’m angry. I say stupid things, horrible things, and I’m sorry for that. Really.”
His apology—however meaningless it probably is—takes the wind out of my sails, and I find myself slouching down in my seat. When I speak again, my voice has returned to that young and vulnerable muttering from before. “It doesn’t even matter anymore, alright? I’m over it. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. I had no idea that you were going through so much. And I had—” He breaks off, licks his lips again, and leans forward so suddenly that it takes everything in me not to flinch back. “Garen, I never meant to hurt you like I did. I know that must be impossible for you to believe, but it’s true. I know I’ve got a temper, alright? I’m working on it. I hated myself for what I did to you, I couldn’t even stand to look at myself in the mirror.”
Guess that makes two of us.
“I started going to therapy,” he admits, and that’s enough to take me by surprise. I search his face to see if he’s full of shit, but I don’t think he is. He just looks tired. “Anger management, mostly. I don’t—I don’t want to be a monster, Garen. I don’t ever want to hurt someone like I hurt you. I loved you so much, and I still—part of me is always going to—” I squeeze my eyes shut, and he must realize that he’s heading down a path that’s going to get him kicked in the balls, because he quickly changes tact. “You’re a good person. You deserved better than how I treated you.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I hitch one shoulder in a half-assed shrug and say nothing. My eyes are still closed, but they fly open when I feel the weight of his hands on my jacket sleeves. He’s got his fingers curled over the leather, carefully pinning my forearms to the top of his textbook, even if he doesn’t realize how caged I feel. My throat closes up, but mostly that just means I can’t tell him to stop, so he doesn’t.
“You don’t have to forgive me for what I did,” he says. “I’d understand if you never wanted to speak to me again. But I need you to know that I’m sorry. Do you hear me?” I nod, and he takes his hands off me, and I can breathe again. “You look like you were on your way somewhere, so I, ah… I shouldn’t keep you. Can I walk you to your car?”
I don’t want him anywhere near the Ferrari. I shake my head. “I’m not going to my car. I’m going to my friends’ apartment.”
“Well, can I walk you there?” he says slowly, patiently, like I’m intentionally being difficult.
I sort of am being difficult, but mostly because the idea of letting him know where Alex and Ben live is a little sickening to me. I shake my head again. “It’s okay. It’s not that far from here, and you’re um… you look busy.”
He looks like he wants to protest. Sure enough, when I stand and pick up my tray, he rises to his feet as well. I take an immediate, instinctive step back, but he either doesn’t notice or deliberately ignores it. “Alright. I need a cigarette, though, so I’ll just walk you out.”
There isn’t any reasonable, calm way to reject that idea, so I let him push his chair in and step after me. I manage two steps towards the door before his hand is on the small of my back, steering me. I hadn’t been unsteady—not until he put his hands on me again. I walk faster, but short of breaking into an honest-to-god run, I can’t really do much to escape. It’s an unseasonably warm day, and the sun has finally come out from behind the clouds that covered it when I went inside. Without thinking about what I’m doing, I shove my coffee tray into Dave’s hands and shrug out of my jacket, slinging it over my arm before I take the tray back. The second Dave’s eyes flicker over me, I know it was a mistake.
“Christ, you look good, G,” he says. I wish I’d worn something other than a long-sleeved shirt that clings to my arms now that I’ve put on muscle weight. Fuck that—I wish I’d worn like, a loose shirt, a flannel button-down, a sweater, a lumpier sweater, a parka. One of those giant bubbles that germaphobes stuff their kids into. An armored tank. Anything to stop Dave from looking at me like he’s hungry as he repeats, “So good.”
“Thanks,” I try to say, but it doesn’t even qualify as a real noise. It’s less than a whisper. Both of my hands are clutching my drink tray, so I have to jerk my head in the direction I’m planning to go. “I should leave. But, um. Y-You can’t send me anything else, okay? No more presents, even if they’re—you can’t contact me at all. My friends are still on high-alert from Valentine’s Day, and if they think you’re breaking the restraining order, they’ll tell my mom, and she’ll call the cops.”
He makes a noise that’s half sigh, half groan, like my terror is an inconvenience to him, or like we’re in this together, us against them. “I know, I know. It’s just—it’s hard. You get that, right? It’s hard not being able to see you, or talk to you. I miss you.”
I don’t tell him to leave me alone. That’s my biggest mistake. I should tell him that I don’t miss him, that I’m so much happier and safer and better without him in my life, but I don’t, and maybe that’s why his hands are on my wrists again. I draw back instantly, but that’s another mistake, because it means I take my left hand off the drink tray and let it flail out to the side, out of reach but out of the way. Without three coffees to serve as a barrier between us now, Dave steps in close and moves his hands to my shoulders, then to the back of my neck. It’s skin on skin, now; I wish I were dead. His hands go higher, tangling in my hair, and that’s even worse, because now he’s got a grip on me, he has something to hold onto if I try to run, and I want him to let go of me, but he doesn’t, and I can feel the corners of my eyes starting to burn, like I’m about to start crying, and why do I always start crying, why do I let myself seem so weak whenever I’m with him?
My breathing hitches, and Dave makes a wounded, desperate sound and moves closer, saying, “Don’t, Garen. Please, don’t cry, you know I hate it when you cry—”
“I’m sorry,” I try to say, and my mouth forms the words, but nothing comes out.
I guess Dave gets what I’m going for anyway, because he shakes his head and shifts up so that he can kiss my forehead. I don’t know why I always forget that he’s actually a little bit shorter than me. He kisses my forehead again, then my cheek, and repeats, “Don’t cry.”
I wouldn’t have to, if he’d just let go of me. He’s trying to comfort me, but I wouldn’t need someone to comfort me, if he’d just leave me alone. His lips are still close, almost touching my cheek; if he wanted to kiss me, all he’d have to do is turn his head. I hope to god he doesn’t turn his head.
My phone buzzes in my pocket—probably Stohler or Alex again—and all at once, I snap out of it. I scramble backwards so suddenly that I almost drop all the coffees, and Dave reaches to steady me, but I yank away from his hands and say, loud enough for people walking by to hear, loud enough for there to be uneasy witnesses, “Don’t fucking touch me. Don’t ever fucking touch me again, or I’ll call the cops, I swear I will.”
“Garen—”
“Everything okay here?” I turn towards the wary stare of a middle-aged woman who has paused with her hand on the Starbucks door. She’s watching me, but I notice that her eyes periodically dart towards Dave, like she wants to be sure he doesn’t make any sudden movements.
I slowly become aware of the fact that my face is cold and a little wet. I drag the wrist of my shirt-sleeve quickly under my eyes, wiping away the dampness that I’m too pathetic to learn how to control. “Everything’s fine,” I say, voice cracking. “Thanks for—I was just leaving.”
The woman still doesn’t open the door. It takes me a moment to realize that she’s waiting to make sure that I have a chance to walk away without Dave following me. I want to thank her, but I don’t know how, so I just turn around and speed off down the sidewalk.
I’m heading the wrong way, but it’s intentional; I don’t want Dave to see where I’m really going, even if it means that I have to circle around blocks and buildings to get to Alex’s place. By the time I get buzzed into the building and get to the apartment, a quarter of his iced drink has melted to murky water, which pisses him off for about three seconds.
“You slow-assed piece of shit,” he says to me, pulling off the cap of his drink so that he can stick his tongue right in the whipped cream. Stohler curls her lip at him in revulsion; his only reply is to exaggerate how much he has to move his head to swirl his tongue around in the cream. She turns back to the xbox, and he adds to me, “You know, Starbucks is literally two blocks from here, I don’t know how—” He stops speaking abruptly, frowning at me. “Dude, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say, but my voice is flat, numb, and I think my eyes are probably still watery. One of my hands is knotted in the hair at the back of my head, trying to scrape away the ghost of Dave’s touch, but I must be pulling harder than I expected, because suddenly, I feel a sharp twinge of pain, and then I’m holding maybe a dozen hairs that I’ve torn straight from my scalp. I stare at them; so do Alex and Stohler. I drop the hairs on the leg of my jeans and return my hand to my hair.
Alex grabs my wrist. “G, what the hell are you doing?”
“I don’t—” I swallow, shake him off me, and reach for my hair again. “I’m not doing anything. I just, um… I kind of ran into someone, while I was at Starbucks?” That’s not right. I try again. “I kind of ran into Dave Walczyk, while I was at Starbucks?”
“Dave—your ex?” Alex says sharply. “The one who—”
“—put me in the hospital, yeah,” I say, and my voice cracks. I blink hard, trying to hold down the panic that I can feel clawing its way up my throat. “It’s not a big deal. H-He didn’t follow me there, or anything. He was there first. I should’ve left when I saw him, but I figured it wasn’t—his younger brother, Charlie is in my squad at Patton, and we’re, uh… we’re friends now, I think. He knows what Dave did to me, and he knows it wasn’t my fault. We uh, we talk sometimes, we hang out. I think he’s trying to make up for what Dave did, and it’s not—I’m used to that. And I think I expected Dave to act the same today. I mean, I was fine. I-I even stopped and um, I said hi to him.”
“You said hi to a guy who used to beat the shit out of you,” Stohler says in disbelief. I nod. “Don’t you have a no-contact order between you two?” I nod again. “Fucking Christ, Anderson.”
“Are you okay?” Alex asks me again. I give a jerky shrug. He gestures towards the television screen, still paused on his game. “Look, we don’t have to do the game day thing, if you don’t want to. We can do whatever you want. Whatever makes you feel, you know…”
Safe.
Comfortable.
Like you don’t have to go out and score some coke just to tolerate this moment.
“I want, uh—” I break off. What I really want is to take a fucking shower. I want to stop feeling like I’ve got his hands on me, my wrist, my shoulders, my back. I want to be invulnerable. I want to be bigger, I want to be stronger, I want to scare the shit out of Dave Walczyk, the way he scares the shit out of me.
Suddenly, I remember being doubled over the kitchen sink in Travis’ house, scrubbing black dye into my scalp, hacking off half my hair with a pair of scissors, snorting enough coke to make my nose bleed, shoving two sharp rings through my lower lip. I remember hobbling all over the ground floor of the house to accomplish these tasks, and I remember not giving a fuck that my ribs were aching, because I remember that all I wanted was to make myself harder to look at. I wanted to look fucked up and ugly and scary. And I want that right now.
“I want to turn myself into someone who Dave Walczyk would never, ever fuck with again,” I say finally, tipping my head back so that I can stare at the ceiling. “I want to look more dangerous than him.”
“Finally, something I can help you with,” Stohler sighs.
Alex frowns at her. “What do you mean?”
“I get stared at for a living,” she says. “And trust me—the first thing you learn when you get into my industry? How to make sure that you can get from the club to the car every night without getting assaulted.”
I slump down in my seat, scrubbing a hand through my hair. “If I knew how to be around Dave without getting assaulted, I wouldn’t be freaking out right now. I’m open to suggestions.”
“Step one,” she says, holding up a single finger. “In order to look dangerous, you have to be dangerous. If this Dave guy is too much of a psycho to stop himself from showing up on your porch on Valentine’s Day, and you’re too much of an idiot to walk away when you see him in public, then you need to be prepared to defend yourself if he puts hands on you again. Open this.”
She shoves her purse across the coffee table at me. I drag the zipper back, then glance at her. She gestures for me to go on. It’s a small purse, maybe the size of a box of tissues. There are only a few things inside: her wallet, her cell phone, her car keys, a small black spray canister, one of those folded compact mirrors, and a retracted switchblade. Stohler reaches over and flips the purse upside down on the table, spilling the contents across it. I turn over the canister so that I can read the label—it’s pepper spray. Stohls gestures towards her keys. “Look at the pink keychain.”
“It’s a kitten,” I say flatly. It’s also ugly as fuck, but I don’t think she’d like to hear that. The keychain is a hard plastic outline of a cat’s head, with pointy ears and big, blank circles where the eyes should be.
“No,” Stohler says, reaching over and slipping two fingers into the eye-holes of the kitten’s face so that the ears jut out from her knuckles. “It’s what I would use to gouge out the eyes of any fucker who tried to attack me.”
“Switches and knuckles are illegal in New York,” I say.
“So is raping a fifteen-year-old boy, but that never stopped your ex,” she shoots back.
A laugh bursts out of my mouth so suddenly that it feels like her words have punched it out of me. It takes everything in me not to deny it, even though that would be pointless—she and Alex have both known about this for months. Everybody knows about it, I guess, except for Travis. And Dave, apparently. But this is the last thing I want to talk about, so I swallow and say, “Fine, fine. I’ve got a switch, I can start carrying it. Is there a step two to this plan?”
She stands up and starts shoving things back into her purse. “Yes. Step two is that we’re going to go to CVS, and we’re going to buy an electric razor, and we’re going to give you a haircut that doesn’t make you look like you’re eagerly awaiting your audition for a boy-band. If you want to look like someone he won’t fuck with, okay. We can do that. And hey, fun fact? The ‘rebellious bad boy’ in the group is still only the ‘rebellious bad boy’ compared to the other members of the boy band.”
“Plus, they’re never really that badass,” Alex points out, words a little bit garbled around the straw in his mouth. “Like, wasn’t the ‘bad boy’ of N*SYNC supposed to be fuckin’ JC Chasez?”
“What, I don’t even get to be Timberlake?” I say.
“Be glad I’m not trying to call you Lance Bass, you big queer.” Alex pauses to take a long, obnoxious slurp of his drink. “Would you rather we cast you in New Kids on the Block? I’m pretty sure that would make you Donnie Wahlberg.”
“How is that better? Everybody knows that Marky Mark is the hot Wahlberg—”
“Congratulations! You’ve successfully named more boy band members than I can, and I was the target audience of the boy band craze of the nineties,” Stohler says. “The fact that this argument is even happening is the exact reason why I’m about to shave your fucking head.”
Alex looks around at her in alarm. “Wait, shave? Like, all of it? I thought you were just going to, you know, shorten it. He’s going to look like a fucking felon if you shave it.”
“Is that not what you’re going for?” Stohler asks me. I don’t say anything. My uncertainty must be written all over my face, because she reaches back into her purse and takes out the little mirror, flipping it open to show me my own face.
I stare at my reflection and try to imagine what I might look like with a mostly shaved head. When I had choppy black hair and snakebites, I would sometimes catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and be… startled, I guess. I didn’t always recognize myself, and I’m not sure how much of that was down to my actual appearance, rather than being high out of my mind and dissociated from reality. Will it feel like that now, even though I’m sober? As it is now, my hair can be a little… distracting. People are so busy looking at the mess of spikes that they don’t notice the sharpness of my jawline, the deep green of my eyes, the scar on the right side of my nose, the other one just under my left eyebrow. Hell, half the guys in the squad didn’t even notice I had a lip ring until I made a remark about how weird it felt when I accidentally knocked it against the mouthpiece of the hookah pipe. Without my hair, I’ll have nothing to hide behind.
“Yeah,” I say finally. “Let’s—I want to do it. But I can’t buzz it any shorter than a four. I need like, at least half an inch all over, or I’ll look like a skinhead, and my mom will be pissed at me.”
“And right now, it’s…” Stohler pauses, frowning, and digs a hand through the spikes on the top of my head, breaking up all the hairspray. “I’d say you’ve got maybe an inch and a half to two inches along the back and sides, then three inches on top?” I shrug. “Jesus, your hair is long.” I shrug again. She smacks me, mostly to prove that she can. “Alright, let’s go. It’s not like I’ve got clippers shoved in my purse, so we’ll have to go buy some.”
Alex unfolds his spindly legs and jogs off down the hall, calling over his shoulder, “Hang on, hang on.” I can hear him trolling around in one of the bedrooms, then the bathroom. Another minute or so later, he comes back, triumphantly waving an electric razor and a handful of blade guards. “No need to buy a new razor, if Ben’s already got one.”
I blink. “Ben and I have basically the same haircut; he just doesn’t spike it. How can he use clippers on his hair?”
“He doesn’t use it for that,” Alex says.
Stohler, who had been reaching out, yanks her hand back like the razor’s made of horse shit. “Nope. We’re going to the store. I am not touching anything that Ben uses to trim the hair on his—”
“It’s for his face,” Alex says quickly. “He uses it once or twice a week so he can keep his facial hair short without having to do a real shave—I think he’s starting to enter his pretentious-Yale-indie-douche phase, ‘cause he has definitely been rocking a hipster beard lately.”
“He’s been in that phase since I met him. One of you, grab a chair from the kitchen,” Stohler says. She takes the razor and inspects the blade guards until she finds the one that will leave me with enough hair to keep me from looking like a Neo-Nazi. She snaps it into place and gestures towards the chair that Alex has retrieved; I sit. “I’m trying to picture the kid in a plaid shirt and some Buddy Holly glasses. Maybe one of those slouchy knitted hats, like he wore on Halloween for the barista costume? I bet he looks like such a little idiot.”
Alex grimaces and flops down on the couch, grabbing the xbox controller and starting his game again. “He actually looks really fucking hot. It’s pretty terrible.”
“So, I take it that means you still wanna hit it?” I say.
“Yeah, I definitely still wanna hit it, but I don’t know,” Alex sighs. “It’s been what, three months since he found out I was into him? Nothing has happened between us. We’re not together, and we’re obviously never going to be together, and I almost ruined our friendship by trying to force it. So, I guess I’m kind of trying to—”
There’s a sudden blast of buzzing near my ear, and then I’m blinking down at a lap of dark hair. Alex and I have both fallen completely silent. Slowly, I reach up to touch the strip of—well, it feels mostly like it’s just my scalp, barely covered by my requested half-inch of hair.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Stohler says cheerfully. “Did I interrupt your girl-talk?”
“We didn’t mean to get feelings near you, Stohls, sorry,” I say, rubbing at my scalp until she bats my hand away. “C’mon, do the rest. I feel lopsided.”
She buzzes off a second section of hair, then a third, carefully tilting my head when she needs to get at me from a new angle. On the sixth strip, my head is halfway shaved, and I’m comfortable enough with the sensation to begin speaking again. “Any hot dudes at your school? Getting over someone by getting under someone is a cliche tactic, but it works.”
“Is that how you’re handling your Travis situation?” Alex snipes, because Alex is an asshole.
I make a face at him. “There is no Travis situation. Things are fine between the two of us. Answer my fucking question.”
He shrugs. “I haven’t met any dudes I’d be into, but there are some cute girls. There’s this one chick in my bio class who I’ve been out with once or twice, but it’s nothing serious. Not like Ben and his guy.”
It’s a good thing that Stohler is surprised enough to step away from me with the razor, because I start choking on a mouthful of my coffee. She gives me a perfunctory slap on the back to assist me, then turns to Alex. “Since when does Ben have any guy, let alone one he’s serious about? Because when I talked to him on Tuesday, he was single.”
“He is,” I say sharply. “He is, Ben’s totally single.”
“Uh, maybe that’s what he says, but it’s bullshit,” Alex says. He crosses the room to the bookshelf next to the television, clears his throat and announces, “I present to you… the Library of Impending Fellatio.” He does some sort of Vanna White impression towards a small collection of books on the shelf. “Every couple of weeks, he gets a mysterious package that I shouldn’t fucking touch, Alex, mind your own fucking business. And he never tells me what’s in it, but I’m not retarded—he gets a new, book-shaped package, and then suddenly there’s a new book on the shelf? Not hard to figure out.”
“He works in a bookstore. He must come home with books all the time,” Stohler says skeptically.
“Yeah, but he kinda leaves those wherever. I can’t take two steps without tripping over a stack of paperbacks from the shop. But when he gets one of these little presents, he disappears into his room for a few hours, then comes out and oh-so-carefully puts a new book right on this shelf.”
I snort. “Dude, has it ever occurred to you that, when he ‘disappears into his room,’ maybe he’s just jerkin’ it?”
Stohler makes a short tutting noise with her tongue. “Not if he’s done this lately. Kid gave up orgasms for Lent. Didn’t he tell you?” I stare blankly back at her. She smirks. “My reaction exactly. Forty days and forty long, torturous nights without even his own hand for comfort. He admitted it last weekend when I was here. On the one hand, congratulations to him for being so devoted to his faith… or whatever. But on the other hand, what kind of nineteen-year-old man voluntarily gives up having orgasms for six weeks?”
“One who’s even more of a masochist than I thought,” I say. I tip my head back and stare up at the ceiling, trying to wrap my mind around the concept. “That’s—I wouldn’t be able to go a week without beating off. Shit, I don’t think I’ve even tried that since I was like, eleven.”
“Seconded,” Alex says.
“Thirded,” Stohler says. “His plan terrified me so much that the day before Lent started, I offered to bring him out for a Fat Tuesday pancake brunch, then made him go to a sex shop with me afterward. I sent that little shit home with a hundred dollars’ worth of porn, lube, and sex toys, and gave him specific instructions to spend the next twelve hours getting himself off in every way possible. He was so humiliated, he couldn’t even speak. It was wonderful. He better have done it, though, or I’m going to kick his ass when he gets out of work.”
“Should’ve just told him to call his little book buddy,” Alex says, gesturing towards the shelf again. “Whoever is sending the books either is nailing him, or wants to be nailing him. It’s like—” He pulls the books off the shelf and starts thumbing through them, listing off, “Book about crazy writers. Another book about crazy writers, specifically: the Beat movement. Book about some crazy dude who wrote a dictionary—”
“I’m sensing a theme,” Stohler says dryly.
I lace my fingers together behind my still-only-half-shaved head, because if I touch my phone, I’m not going to be able to stop myself from texting Jamie a string of insults. A stack of books about bipolar poets—that’s his grand seduction attempt? He doesn’t even send notes with these books. These two idiots won’t even talk to each other, but they’re both willing to expend embarrassing amounts of effort to pick out exactly the right books for each other.
“But the theme expands,” Alex says, “because there’s also a book about Jesus—”
“I wish I were dead,” I groan, dragging my hands right over the top of my head and down to cover my face.
“—and one about the history of women and tattooing. I didn’t even know people wrote books about the history of women and tattooing, but apparently, that’s a thing. Like, what kind of guy is lame enough to try to get in somebody’s pants by sending him a shitload of books about fucking grammar and women’s studies?”
Part of me wants to laugh at the fact that Alex is unknowingly calling James goddamn Goldwyn lame, but another part of me is more concerned with… how fucking clueless Alex must be about what Ben really wants in a guy. The three of us may think that books about poetry or grammar or feminist body mods are lame, but I’d bet anything that Ben practically creamed his skinny jeans when he tore off the wrapping on each of those packages.
Stohler must agree with my unspoken judgment, because she arches a brow at Alex and says, “The kind of guy who wants to get in the pants of Ben McCutcheon, I would assume.”
“Bullshit. Garen didn’t have to buy him half a fucking library to get in his pants—”
“Yeah, but that’s all I was trying to do,” I point out. “Maybe I would’ve gotten him a bunch of weird grammar books, if I’d been trying to—” Oh. Oh, shit. “—to, uh. If I’d been trying to date him. Or start a relationship with him. Or get him to invite me home to meet his mama.”
On the final bit, I unthinkingly slip into a mockery of Jamie’s accent, even though he’s not here, and even though neither of the people I’m actually talking to are supposed to know that he’s the one who sent the books. Alex seems to focus more on my words than my tone, because he just rolls his eyes and turns to put the books back on the shelf. Stohler, on the other hand, has paused with her coffee cup raised halfway to her mouth. For a moment, she just frowns at me; then, sparing only a quick glance to be sure Alex is still turned away, she cocks her head to the side and raises one hand as high over her head as she can, like she’s trying to indicate the extremeness of Jamie’s height.
Don’t say anything, I mouth. Her eyebrows shoot upward, but thankfully, she doesn’t freak out. Instead, she just stands, sets her cup down on the table, and announces, “Enough of this gossipy bullshit. Let’s finish your hair.”
It only takes another ten minutes for all of my hair to be neatly, evenly shorn. Just as I’d expected, looking at myself in the bathroom mirror for the first time is kind of a mindfuck. Each of my individual features is more pronounced, more severe. I look older, sharper, harder. I flatten a hand to the back of my head, spreading my fingers and trying to pull, but my hair isn’t long enough to grab onto anymore. I exhale.
Six months sober
“Stop sulking,” Jamie orders, “or I’ll bring you home.”
“I’m not sulking,” I snap. It’s a lie; I’m sulking harder than I’ve ever sulked before. But still, it’s an understandable sulking, and I don’t get why Jamie isn’t being more sympathetic. Since he doesn’t seem to be in the mood to entertain my more emo tendencies right now, I’ve got to come at this topic in a roundabout way. “Today was so weird. Some people from Lakewood wrote on my facebook wall—you know, ‘congrats on being six months clean!’—which seems kind of inappropriately personal for a social networking site, but whatever. And I guess some of the Patton guys saw it, because some of them mentioned it to me. Javi, Charlie, Taylor.”
Jamie adjusts the temperature of the air conditioner by about half a degree, then turns the radio down a little so that he can hear me. “That’s nice.”
“Yeah,” I say, squirming around under the seatbelt so that I can turn to face him. His reaction still isn’t as enthusiastic as I want it to be. “Mom called during my lunch period. She wants to have dinner this weekend. And Dad and I already celebrated last weekend, when I was in town to meet with Doc, but he still called to talk to me after school.”
“They must be proud of you,” Jamie says. He grabs my hand and presses a kiss to the back of it, but I think he’s mostly trying to stop me from playing with the radio. “All of us are.”
I bat my eyelashes at him, and he rolls his eyes. I stick my tongue out, then continue. “Some Connecticut people texted, too. Stohls, Alex, Ben. He’s on spring break this week, so he might come stay with me and Trav for a couple of days, just to hang out.”
“Who, Alexander?” Jamie asks before I can say anything else. “Or the midget?”
“Ben.”
The light ahead of us turns red, and we roll to a stop at it. Like an utter girl, Jamie flips his visor down to check his hair in the mirror. “You talk to Travis at all today?”
I manage an eyeroll that incorporates my entire body, slumping hard against the passenger side door. “God, fuck you, man, you know I haven’t.” He flashes me a smirk and puts the visor back up as the light turns green. I sigh. “Do you know what his plans are?”
“Doesn’t he have work? Or class?”
“Earlier,” I whine. “He had work in the early part of the afternoon, and then he had class until seven, but he didn’t—he just ‘has plans tonight.’ Like, what the fuck, you know? This day is a big deal to me, and it’s like he doesn’t even give a shit. He cared about me being sixty days sober, but that might have just been because it was his birthday. He cared about me being ninety days sober, but maybe that was only because we were still hooking up. I don’t get why he doesn’t care about me being six months sober—”
“I’m sure he does care, G—”
“Six months is one of the last big ones people recognize, you know?” I continue right over him. “It’s—when I was at the LRC for my session, they let me sit in on one of the NA meetings, and everybody made a huge fuss out of this, even though it was still three days early. I got my little blue key tag and everything. Next one is yellow for nine months, and then I get a totally rad glow-in-the-dark one for a full year. But like, the blue one is a big deal. He should care about it.”
Jamie heaves a sigh. “Garen, he cares. I promise you, he cares. Now, I am trying to celebrate with you. If you don’t stop mentioning the fact that Travis isn’t here, I’m going to abandon you on the side of the road. And then I’m going to go find some other recovering addict whose six-month sobriety anniversary I can celebrate. I bet he’d appreciate it more than you.”
“I appreciate it! I do, I totally do,” I assure him. “I just don’t understand why he had to make plans—non-Garen-centric plans—for tonight, instead of some other night.”
“You are so annoying,” Jamie groans. “The next time I collaborate with your idiot friends to plan a surprise adventure for you, I refuse to be the chauffeur. One of them can do that, and I’ll be the one who pretends to forget about your accomplishments. It will be so much more fun for me, I’m sure.”
“You’re such a—” I pause, blink, rewind the last thirty seconds of conversation in my mind. “Wait, this is a surprise adventure? For me? And Travis is in on it?” Jamie shoots me a glare and flicks his turn signal on, so I hastily add, “Don’t leave me on the side of the road. I swear, I’ll shut up, just—where are we going? Is it going to be fun? Will there be food? ‘Cause you promised me dinner, and I’m kind of starving, and if there isn’t food, I’ll be kind of bummed. Who’s going to be there? Is it just going to be you and me and Travis, or are—”
“Hey, what can I get for you?” the barista asks with a polite smile.
It should be a simple question, but I find myself scrolling feverishly through my text messages to make sure I’m getting all the orders right. First, my drink, which I still can’t remember and therefore need Travis to text me the name of at least once a week. “I need a large black-eye with caramel flavoring in it. And a… hang on—” I click back to Stohler’s text, “—a large—or, venti, whatever, Americano.”
“Alright. Anything else for you today?”
“Yeah, I also need a venti—” Christ, Alex, what is wrong with you? “—White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino with extra whipped cream. What—is that even a real drink?”
“It is,” the barista says, gnawing on her lip like she’s trying not to laugh at me. Whatever, Alex is the one she should be laughing at. “Is that all?”
“One of those apple things,” I say, nodding towards the dessert case. The thing I want is clearly labeled with its actual name, but I feel like saying the word fritter is just an affront my dignity can’t handle after ordering that last drink. I pay for everything and retreat to the other end of the drink bar to pick at my apple fritter while I wait for the drinks to be made. Stohler is already texting me to bitch about how long it’s taking me to get to the apartment, and Alex is doing the same, whining about how he can’t expect to handle Assassin’s Creed without proper sustenance. I ignore them both and shove my phone back into my pocket, settling for scoping out the other patrons at the Starbucks.
There are a few girls—maybe thirteen or fourteen years old—who are spread out at a large table, slurping at iced drinks with whipped cream. Probably the same frilly shit Alex is getting. A kid who’s way too young to be reading A Game of Thrones is curled up in an armchair, doing just that. A middle-aged man in glasses is clacking away at the keyboard of his laptop and taking infrequent sips of a cup of coffee, probably just to avoid being kicked out. And there, right near the door…
There’s Dave Walczyk, staring down at the textbooks and notebooks he has spread out over his tiny table. He’s halfway through a mug of coffee—an actual, ceramic mug, so I assume he’s been here for a while, and has plans to be here longer still. He’s working on homework, or, I guess he was; right now, he’s sitting completely and utterly still, his eyes unmoving, his shoulders hunched and tense. So, he must have seen me. Or heard me. I wonder if he’s been that still since I first walked in. I wonder how I didn’t see him.
The barista says something at the counter behind me, but I don’t hear her. It’s like my ears are packed through with cotton. Like I can’t hear anything over the pulsing of blood inside my skull. I turn back to her and say softly, “Sorry, what?”
“I said, do you need a tray?” She grabs a cardboard drink tray from a stack near the espresso machine and gives it a little wave. I nod, and she quickly piles the three drinks into the tray, pushing it towards me and saying, “Have a great day.”
“Thanks,” I say, but I wait another minute or so before I pick up the tray, worried it might tumble out of my weak and shaking hands. When I finally turn around, I find that Dave still hasn’t moved. For a long while, I just stand there, watching him, waiting to see if he’s even breathing. Eventually, he chances a glance at me. His eyes snap right back to his book, but it’s enough to get me shaking again.
Because the thing is, Dave’s a fucking psycho, and he terrifies me, and he has hurt me more than anyone else I’ve ever met, but he was… first. Not the first boy I slept with, and not the first boy I loved—those honors belong to James and Travis, respectively—but Dave was definitely somewhere in between. He was the first boyfriend I ever had. First guy to take me out on a date, and open the car door for me, and pay for dinner and a movie. First guy to ever tell me he loved me, first guy to say he wanted a future with me, first guy to make me feel like I mattered. And then, later, the first guy to ever tell me how worthless and pathetic and slutty I was—am. First guy to ever hurt me, to break my heart, even if I’m not sure it was his to begin with.
He’s important. I don’t want him to be, but he is, and maybe that’s why I find myself tightening my grip on the drink tray and stumbling over my boots as I trudge across the room towards him. His attention is on me, but his gaze is locked on the books. Maybe he thinks I’m heading for the exit, which is right next to him, and maybe I should be heading for the exit, but instead, I trip right up to him, set my tray down on the table’s only remaining space, and say, “Hi.” He goes so still, he might as well be catatonic. I fiddle with the straw poking out of Alex’s drink. Nobody speaks. God, I hate silence. I clear my throat and say, “You can talk to me, you know.”
That’s enough to finally spur a response. He closes his textbook and leans back in his seat, looking up at me with tired eyes. “The last time I tried to talk to you, your mom sent the NHPD to my house.”
“That’s because that box was fucking creepy,” I say. I have no idea from where I’m getting the balls to say this. The last time I spoke to him like this—the last time I spoke to him at all—he almost killed me. But there are more than half a dozen witnesses in the room with us, and I know that if he tries to attack me, someone will stop him, or call the cops. So I keep going. “I didn’t even call her, you know that? Jamie did, after I fucking fled to his apartment because I thought you might be like, lurking in my fucking broom closet or something.”
Dave sighs. “I didn’t mean to scare you, G. I thought—it was a present, okay? I filled it with things I know you like because I hoped that maybe you’d reach out to me. I wanted to be sure that you were okay. I wanted to talk to you, that’s all.”
“Did you know I was going to be here?” I say, knowing the words are stupid even as I say them.
Based on the look on Dave’s face, he thinks they’re pretty stupid, too. “Yes, Garen,” he says flatly. “You’re supposed to be living in New York now, but I’ve been sitting here for two hours, pretending to work on a midterm paper, because I somehow knew that you were going to be stopping in at the Starbucks that’s right around the corner from where you know I live. In fact, that’s actually why I live there. I scouted it out three years ago, just hoping you’d someday buy a cup of coffee here.”
“Don’t be mean to me,” I say, voice small.
“Trust me, Garen, I can get a lot meaner than that,” he says.
It’s an automatic, thoughtless reply, and his eyes go wide as soon as the words are out of his mouth. Not as wide as mine, I’d bet. I scramble to pick up the tray so that I can leave—or at least, so that I can go sit in my car and hyperventilate for a few minutes—but Dave throws a hand out as if to grab my wrists. He thinks better of that before he even makes contact, and suddenly we’re both striking the same pose, shoulders hunched and trembling hands raised up in a gesture of surrender.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and he sounds like he maybe means it for real. “Shit, I-I’m sorry, I can’t believe I really said that to you. Just…” He slowly stretches his hand out like he’s doing everything he can not to scare me away. My eyes are darting back and forth between his face and his approaching hand. He closes it over the back of the chair across the table from himself, the one closest to me, and carefully pushes it back a few inches. “Can you—will you sit, please? Can we talk?”
“We’re not supposed to,” I say. “Like, I really feel like you’re misunderstanding some part of this whole ‘no contact order’ thing. Specifically, the part where we have no contact. Which is, you know, all of it.”
“You came up to me,” he points out. “If you want to go, I won’t stop you, I promise. I just want to talk. Please.”
Dating Dave when I was a sophomore was the third-stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Dating him again last year, even though I knew what he was capable of, was the second-stupidest. Sitting down across from him right now? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Ever. I know that, but I still do it.
He lets out a slow, steady breath of relief, then allows the corners of his mouth to twitch upward. Even though it’s a tiny smile, it still cuts a pair of deep dimples into his cheeks—I quickly focus on one of the books on the table instead of his face. Dave doesn’t smile much, but when he does, he looks fucking adorable, and I don’t want to see that.
“How have you been?” he asks. “Last time I saw you, you weren’t, um… in the best place.” He swallows, then admits, “Even before what I did to you.”
“I’m okay,” I say. My voice is so much quieter than it normally is, and I want to choke myself because of it. Every time I try to speak to Dave, I end up sounding like the awkward, inexperienced fifteen-year-old boy he met, instead of the hardened, battle-scarred man I am now. I clear my throat and try to summon a more natural, certain tone as I continue, “Last year was, uh… it was hard on me, I guess? But I have my shit together now.”
“Yeah?” is all Dave says.
Heat rises in my cheeks, and I roll my eyes, but still don’t look at him. “Why, is that so hard to believe?”
His jaw tightens so much that I can hear his teeth grit together even over the cheerful alt rock playing from a speaker somewhere above my head. “It was a single word, Garen. Don’t get—”
“Sorry,” I interrupt. “I know you didn’t mean—I’m fine, is all I’m trying to say. Things are good between me and my parents again. And my friends.” This is the perfect part to finish with. This is when I should stand up, thank him for speaking to me without beating me to a pulp, and walk out. Every rational part of me knows that I shouldn’t say another word, but I’ve got this twisted craving to let him know exactly how much he fucked me up. I want to see if he’s even capable of feeling guilt. I finally meet his eyes dead-on. “I’m five months clean, too.”
Dave blinks at me. “You’re what?” I raise my eyebrows, but don’t repeat myself. He licks his lips, and I try not to blink. “You mean—”
“I mean that I went to rehab,” I cut him off. I wiggle my coffee cup out of the tray and take a long sip, even though it’s hot enough to numb my tongue. “I had to take a ton of painkillers because of what you did to me, and once my prescriptions ran out, I started self-medicating with booze and blow. Shit got out of hand. Dad cut me off, once he realized what I was using his money for, so I—” I break off in a self-conscious little burst of laughter, “I had to fund a habit somehow, and I’m really only good for one thing, right? I mean, that’s what you always told me.”
Dave’s eyes widen. “Garen, I never… if I said that to you, it was only because I was angry. You know me, you know I get--crazy when I’m angry. I say stupid things, horrible things, and I’m sorry for that. Really.”
His apology—however meaningless it probably is—takes the wind out of my sails, and I find myself slouching down in my seat. When I speak again, my voice has returned to that young and vulnerable muttering from before. “It doesn’t even matter anymore, alright? I’m over it. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. I had no idea that you were going through so much. And I had—” He breaks off, licks his lips again, and leans forward so suddenly that it takes everything in me not to flinch back. “Garen, I never meant to hurt you like I did. I know that must be impossible for you to believe, but it’s true. I know I’ve got a temper, alright? I’m working on it. I hated myself for what I did to you, I couldn’t even stand to look at myself in the mirror.”
Guess that makes two of us.
“I started going to therapy,” he admits, and that’s enough to take me by surprise. I search his face to see if he’s full of shit, but I don’t think he is. He just looks tired. “Anger management, mostly. I don’t—I don’t want to be a monster, Garen. I don’t ever want to hurt someone like I hurt you. I loved you so much, and I still—part of me is always going to—” I squeeze my eyes shut, and he must realize that he’s heading down a path that’s going to get him kicked in the balls, because he quickly changes tact. “You’re a good person. You deserved better than how I treated you.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I hitch one shoulder in a half-assed shrug and say nothing. My eyes are still closed, but they fly open when I feel the weight of his hands on my jacket sleeves. He’s got his fingers curled over the leather, carefully pinning my forearms to the top of his textbook, even if he doesn’t realize how caged I feel. My throat closes up, but mostly that just means I can’t tell him to stop, so he doesn’t.
“You don’t have to forgive me for what I did,” he says. “I’d understand if you never wanted to speak to me again. But I need you to know that I’m sorry. Do you hear me?” I nod, and he takes his hands off me, and I can breathe again. “You look like you were on your way somewhere, so I, ah… I shouldn’t keep you. Can I walk you to your car?”
I don’t want him anywhere near the Ferrari. I shake my head. “I’m not going to my car. I’m going to my friends’ apartment.”
“Well, can I walk you there?” he says slowly, patiently, like I’m intentionally being difficult.
I sort of am being difficult, but mostly because the idea of letting him know where Alex and Ben live is a little sickening to me. I shake my head again. “It’s okay. It’s not that far from here, and you’re um… you look busy.”
He looks like he wants to protest. Sure enough, when I stand and pick up my tray, he rises to his feet as well. I take an immediate, instinctive step back, but he either doesn’t notice or deliberately ignores it. “Alright. I need a cigarette, though, so I’ll just walk you out.”
There isn’t any reasonable, calm way to reject that idea, so I let him push his chair in and step after me. I manage two steps towards the door before his hand is on the small of my back, steering me. I hadn’t been unsteady—not until he put his hands on me again. I walk faster, but short of breaking into an honest-to-god run, I can’t really do much to escape. It’s an unseasonably warm day, and the sun has finally come out from behind the clouds that covered it when I went inside. Without thinking about what I’m doing, I shove my coffee tray into Dave’s hands and shrug out of my jacket, slinging it over my arm before I take the tray back. The second Dave’s eyes flicker over me, I know it was a mistake.
“Christ, you look good, G,” he says. I wish I’d worn something other than a long-sleeved shirt that clings to my arms now that I’ve put on muscle weight. Fuck that—I wish I’d worn like, a loose shirt, a flannel button-down, a sweater, a lumpier sweater, a parka. One of those giant bubbles that germaphobes stuff their kids into. An armored tank. Anything to stop Dave from looking at me like he’s hungry as he repeats, “So good.”
“Thanks,” I try to say, but it doesn’t even qualify as a real noise. It’s less than a whisper. Both of my hands are clutching my drink tray, so I have to jerk my head in the direction I’m planning to go. “I should leave. But, um. Y-You can’t send me anything else, okay? No more presents, even if they’re—you can’t contact me at all. My friends are still on high-alert from Valentine’s Day, and if they think you’re breaking the restraining order, they’ll tell my mom, and she’ll call the cops.”
He makes a noise that’s half sigh, half groan, like my terror is an inconvenience to him, or like we’re in this together, us against them. “I know, I know. It’s just—it’s hard. You get that, right? It’s hard not being able to see you, or talk to you. I miss you.”
I don’t tell him to leave me alone. That’s my biggest mistake. I should tell him that I don’t miss him, that I’m so much happier and safer and better without him in my life, but I don’t, and maybe that’s why his hands are on my wrists again. I draw back instantly, but that’s another mistake, because it means I take my left hand off the drink tray and let it flail out to the side, out of reach but out of the way. Without three coffees to serve as a barrier between us now, Dave steps in close and moves his hands to my shoulders, then to the back of my neck. It’s skin on skin, now; I wish I were dead. His hands go higher, tangling in my hair, and that’s even worse, because now he’s got a grip on me, he has something to hold onto if I try to run, and I want him to let go of me, but he doesn’t, and I can feel the corners of my eyes starting to burn, like I’m about to start crying, and why do I always start crying, why do I let myself seem so weak whenever I’m with him?
My breathing hitches, and Dave makes a wounded, desperate sound and moves closer, saying, “Don’t, Garen. Please, don’t cry, you know I hate it when you cry—”
“I’m sorry,” I try to say, and my mouth forms the words, but nothing comes out.
I guess Dave gets what I’m going for anyway, because he shakes his head and shifts up so that he can kiss my forehead. I don’t know why I always forget that he’s actually a little bit shorter than me. He kisses my forehead again, then my cheek, and repeats, “Don’t cry.”
I wouldn’t have to, if he’d just let go of me. He’s trying to comfort me, but I wouldn’t need someone to comfort me, if he’d just leave me alone. His lips are still close, almost touching my cheek; if he wanted to kiss me, all he’d have to do is turn his head. I hope to god he doesn’t turn his head.
My phone buzzes in my pocket—probably Stohler or Alex again—and all at once, I snap out of it. I scramble backwards so suddenly that I almost drop all the coffees, and Dave reaches to steady me, but I yank away from his hands and say, loud enough for people walking by to hear, loud enough for there to be uneasy witnesses, “Don’t fucking touch me. Don’t ever fucking touch me again, or I’ll call the cops, I swear I will.”
“Garen—”
“Everything okay here?” I turn towards the wary stare of a middle-aged woman who has paused with her hand on the Starbucks door. She’s watching me, but I notice that her eyes periodically dart towards Dave, like she wants to be sure he doesn’t make any sudden movements.
I slowly become aware of the fact that my face is cold and a little wet. I drag the wrist of my shirt-sleeve quickly under my eyes, wiping away the dampness that I’m too pathetic to learn how to control. “Everything’s fine,” I say, voice cracking. “Thanks for—I was just leaving.”
The woman still doesn’t open the door. It takes me a moment to realize that she’s waiting to make sure that I have a chance to walk away without Dave following me. I want to thank her, but I don’t know how, so I just turn around and speed off down the sidewalk.
I’m heading the wrong way, but it’s intentional; I don’t want Dave to see where I’m really going, even if it means that I have to circle around blocks and buildings to get to Alex’s place. By the time I get buzzed into the building and get to the apartment, a quarter of his iced drink has melted to murky water, which pisses him off for about three seconds.
“You slow-assed piece of shit,” he says to me, pulling off the cap of his drink so that he can stick his tongue right in the whipped cream. Stohler curls her lip at him in revulsion; his only reply is to exaggerate how much he has to move his head to swirl his tongue around in the cream. She turns back to the xbox, and he adds to me, “You know, Starbucks is literally two blocks from here, I don’t know how—” He stops speaking abruptly, frowning at me. “Dude, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say, but my voice is flat, numb, and I think my eyes are probably still watery. One of my hands is knotted in the hair at the back of my head, trying to scrape away the ghost of Dave’s touch, but I must be pulling harder than I expected, because suddenly, I feel a sharp twinge of pain, and then I’m holding maybe a dozen hairs that I’ve torn straight from my scalp. I stare at them; so do Alex and Stohler. I drop the hairs on the leg of my jeans and return my hand to my hair.
Alex grabs my wrist. “G, what the hell are you doing?”
“I don’t—” I swallow, shake him off me, and reach for my hair again. “I’m not doing anything. I just, um… I kind of ran into someone, while I was at Starbucks?” That’s not right. I try again. “I kind of ran into Dave Walczyk, while I was at Starbucks?”
“Dave—your ex?” Alex says sharply. “The one who—”
“—put me in the hospital, yeah,” I say, and my voice cracks. I blink hard, trying to hold down the panic that I can feel clawing its way up my throat. “It’s not a big deal. H-He didn’t follow me there, or anything. He was there first. I should’ve left when I saw him, but I figured it wasn’t—his younger brother, Charlie is in my squad at Patton, and we’re, uh… we’re friends now, I think. He knows what Dave did to me, and he knows it wasn’t my fault. We uh, we talk sometimes, we hang out. I think he’s trying to make up for what Dave did, and it’s not—I’m used to that. And I think I expected Dave to act the same today. I mean, I was fine. I-I even stopped and um, I said hi to him.”
“You said hi to a guy who used to beat the shit out of you,” Stohler says in disbelief. I nod. “Don’t you have a no-contact order between you two?” I nod again. “Fucking Christ, Anderson.”
“Are you okay?” Alex asks me again. I give a jerky shrug. He gestures towards the television screen, still paused on his game. “Look, we don’t have to do the game day thing, if you don’t want to. We can do whatever you want. Whatever makes you feel, you know…”
Safe.
Comfortable.
Like you don’t have to go out and score some coke just to tolerate this moment.
“I want, uh—” I break off. What I really want is to take a fucking shower. I want to stop feeling like I’ve got his hands on me, my wrist, my shoulders, my back. I want to be invulnerable. I want to be bigger, I want to be stronger, I want to scare the shit out of Dave Walczyk, the way he scares the shit out of me.
Suddenly, I remember being doubled over the kitchen sink in Travis’ house, scrubbing black dye into my scalp, hacking off half my hair with a pair of scissors, snorting enough coke to make my nose bleed, shoving two sharp rings through my lower lip. I remember hobbling all over the ground floor of the house to accomplish these tasks, and I remember not giving a fuck that my ribs were aching, because I remember that all I wanted was to make myself harder to look at. I wanted to look fucked up and ugly and scary. And I want that right now.
“I want to turn myself into someone who Dave Walczyk would never, ever fuck with again,” I say finally, tipping my head back so that I can stare at the ceiling. “I want to look more dangerous than him.”
“Finally, something I can help you with,” Stohler sighs.
Alex frowns at her. “What do you mean?”
“I get stared at for a living,” she says. “And trust me—the first thing you learn when you get into my industry? How to make sure that you can get from the club to the car every night without getting assaulted.”
I slump down in my seat, scrubbing a hand through my hair. “If I knew how to be around Dave without getting assaulted, I wouldn’t be freaking out right now. I’m open to suggestions.”
“Step one,” she says, holding up a single finger. “In order to look dangerous, you have to be dangerous. If this Dave guy is too much of a psycho to stop himself from showing up on your porch on Valentine’s Day, and you’re too much of an idiot to walk away when you see him in public, then you need to be prepared to defend yourself if he puts hands on you again. Open this.”
She shoves her purse across the coffee table at me. I drag the zipper back, then glance at her. She gestures for me to go on. It’s a small purse, maybe the size of a box of tissues. There are only a few things inside: her wallet, her cell phone, her car keys, a small black spray canister, one of those folded compact mirrors, and a retracted switchblade. Stohler reaches over and flips the purse upside down on the table, spilling the contents across it. I turn over the canister so that I can read the label—it’s pepper spray. Stohls gestures towards her keys. “Look at the pink keychain.”
“It’s a kitten,” I say flatly. It’s also ugly as fuck, but I don’t think she’d like to hear that. The keychain is a hard plastic outline of a cat’s head, with pointy ears and big, blank circles where the eyes should be.
“No,” Stohler says, reaching over and slipping two fingers into the eye-holes of the kitten’s face so that the ears jut out from her knuckles. “It’s what I would use to gouge out the eyes of any fucker who tried to attack me.”
“Switches and knuckles are illegal in New York,” I say.
“So is raping a fifteen-year-old boy, but that never stopped your ex,” she shoots back.
A laugh bursts out of my mouth so suddenly that it feels like her words have punched it out of me. It takes everything in me not to deny it, even though that would be pointless—she and Alex have both known about this for months. Everybody knows about it, I guess, except for Travis. And Dave, apparently. But this is the last thing I want to talk about, so I swallow and say, “Fine, fine. I’ve got a switch, I can start carrying it. Is there a step two to this plan?”
She stands up and starts shoving things back into her purse. “Yes. Step two is that we’re going to go to CVS, and we’re going to buy an electric razor, and we’re going to give you a haircut that doesn’t make you look like you’re eagerly awaiting your audition for a boy-band. If you want to look like someone he won’t fuck with, okay. We can do that. And hey, fun fact? The ‘rebellious bad boy’ in the group is still only the ‘rebellious bad boy’ compared to the other members of the boy band.”
“Plus, they’re never really that badass,” Alex points out, words a little bit garbled around the straw in his mouth. “Like, wasn’t the ‘bad boy’ of N*SYNC supposed to be fuckin’ JC Chasez?”
“What, I don’t even get to be Timberlake?” I say.
“Be glad I’m not trying to call you Lance Bass, you big queer.” Alex pauses to take a long, obnoxious slurp of his drink. “Would you rather we cast you in New Kids on the Block? I’m pretty sure that would make you Donnie Wahlberg.”
“How is that better? Everybody knows that Marky Mark is the hot Wahlberg—”
“Congratulations! You’ve successfully named more boy band members than I can, and I was the target audience of the boy band craze of the nineties,” Stohler says. “The fact that this argument is even happening is the exact reason why I’m about to shave your fucking head.”
Alex looks around at her in alarm. “Wait, shave? Like, all of it? I thought you were just going to, you know, shorten it. He’s going to look like a fucking felon if you shave it.”
“Is that not what you’re going for?” Stohler asks me. I don’t say anything. My uncertainty must be written all over my face, because she reaches back into her purse and takes out the little mirror, flipping it open to show me my own face.
I stare at my reflection and try to imagine what I might look like with a mostly shaved head. When I had choppy black hair and snakebites, I would sometimes catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and be… startled, I guess. I didn’t always recognize myself, and I’m not sure how much of that was down to my actual appearance, rather than being high out of my mind and dissociated from reality. Will it feel like that now, even though I’m sober? As it is now, my hair can be a little… distracting. People are so busy looking at the mess of spikes that they don’t notice the sharpness of my jawline, the deep green of my eyes, the scar on the right side of my nose, the other one just under my left eyebrow. Hell, half the guys in the squad didn’t even notice I had a lip ring until I made a remark about how weird it felt when I accidentally knocked it against the mouthpiece of the hookah pipe. Without my hair, I’ll have nothing to hide behind.
“Yeah,” I say finally. “Let’s—I want to do it. But I can’t buzz it any shorter than a four. I need like, at least half an inch all over, or I’ll look like a skinhead, and my mom will be pissed at me.”
“And right now, it’s…” Stohler pauses, frowning, and digs a hand through the spikes on the top of my head, breaking up all the hairspray. “I’d say you’ve got maybe an inch and a half to two inches along the back and sides, then three inches on top?” I shrug. “Jesus, your hair is long.” I shrug again. She smacks me, mostly to prove that she can. “Alright, let’s go. It’s not like I’ve got clippers shoved in my purse, so we’ll have to go buy some.”
Alex unfolds his spindly legs and jogs off down the hall, calling over his shoulder, “Hang on, hang on.” I can hear him trolling around in one of the bedrooms, then the bathroom. Another minute or so later, he comes back, triumphantly waving an electric razor and a handful of blade guards. “No need to buy a new razor, if Ben’s already got one.”
I blink. “Ben and I have basically the same haircut; he just doesn’t spike it. How can he use clippers on his hair?”
“He doesn’t use it for that,” Alex says.
Stohler, who had been reaching out, yanks her hand back like the razor’s made of horse shit. “Nope. We’re going to the store. I am not touching anything that Ben uses to trim the hair on his—”
“It’s for his face,” Alex says quickly. “He uses it once or twice a week so he can keep his facial hair short without having to do a real shave—I think he’s starting to enter his pretentious-Yale-indie-douche phase, ‘cause he has definitely been rocking a hipster beard lately.”
“He’s been in that phase since I met him. One of you, grab a chair from the kitchen,” Stohler says. She takes the razor and inspects the blade guards until she finds the one that will leave me with enough hair to keep me from looking like a Neo-Nazi. She snaps it into place and gestures towards the chair that Alex has retrieved; I sit. “I’m trying to picture the kid in a plaid shirt and some Buddy Holly glasses. Maybe one of those slouchy knitted hats, like he wore on Halloween for the barista costume? I bet he looks like such a little idiot.”
Alex grimaces and flops down on the couch, grabbing the xbox controller and starting his game again. “He actually looks really fucking hot. It’s pretty terrible.”
“So, I take it that means you still wanna hit it?” I say.
“Yeah, I definitely still wanna hit it, but I don’t know,” Alex sighs. “It’s been what, three months since he found out I was into him? Nothing has happened between us. We’re not together, and we’re obviously never going to be together, and I almost ruined our friendship by trying to force it. So, I guess I’m kind of trying to—”
There’s a sudden blast of buzzing near my ear, and then I’m blinking down at a lap of dark hair. Alex and I have both fallen completely silent. Slowly, I reach up to touch the strip of—well, it feels mostly like it’s just my scalp, barely covered by my requested half-inch of hair.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Stohler says cheerfully. “Did I interrupt your girl-talk?”
“We didn’t mean to get feelings near you, Stohls, sorry,” I say, rubbing at my scalp until she bats my hand away. “C’mon, do the rest. I feel lopsided.”
She buzzes off a second section of hair, then a third, carefully tilting my head when she needs to get at me from a new angle. On the sixth strip, my head is halfway shaved, and I’m comfortable enough with the sensation to begin speaking again. “Any hot dudes at your school? Getting over someone by getting under someone is a cliche tactic, but it works.”
“Is that how you’re handling your Travis situation?” Alex snipes, because Alex is an asshole.
I make a face at him. “There is no Travis situation. Things are fine between the two of us. Answer my fucking question.”
He shrugs. “I haven’t met any dudes I’d be into, but there are some cute girls. There’s this one chick in my bio class who I’ve been out with once or twice, but it’s nothing serious. Not like Ben and his guy.”
It’s a good thing that Stohler is surprised enough to step away from me with the razor, because I start choking on a mouthful of my coffee. She gives me a perfunctory slap on the back to assist me, then turns to Alex. “Since when does Ben have any guy, let alone one he’s serious about? Because when I talked to him on Tuesday, he was single.”
“He is,” I say sharply. “He is, Ben’s totally single.”
“Uh, maybe that’s what he says, but it’s bullshit,” Alex says. He crosses the room to the bookshelf next to the television, clears his throat and announces, “I present to you… the Library of Impending Fellatio.” He does some sort of Vanna White impression towards a small collection of books on the shelf. “Every couple of weeks, he gets a mysterious package that I shouldn’t fucking touch, Alex, mind your own fucking business. And he never tells me what’s in it, but I’m not retarded—he gets a new, book-shaped package, and then suddenly there’s a new book on the shelf? Not hard to figure out.”
“He works in a bookstore. He must come home with books all the time,” Stohler says skeptically.
“Yeah, but he kinda leaves those wherever. I can’t take two steps without tripping over a stack of paperbacks from the shop. But when he gets one of these little presents, he disappears into his room for a few hours, then comes out and oh-so-carefully puts a new book right on this shelf.”
I snort. “Dude, has it ever occurred to you that, when he ‘disappears into his room,’ maybe he’s just jerkin’ it?”
Stohler makes a short tutting noise with her tongue. “Not if he’s done this lately. Kid gave up orgasms for Lent. Didn’t he tell you?” I stare blankly back at her. She smirks. “My reaction exactly. Forty days and forty long, torturous nights without even his own hand for comfort. He admitted it last weekend when I was here. On the one hand, congratulations to him for being so devoted to his faith… or whatever. But on the other hand, what kind of nineteen-year-old man voluntarily gives up having orgasms for six weeks?”
“One who’s even more of a masochist than I thought,” I say. I tip my head back and stare up at the ceiling, trying to wrap my mind around the concept. “That’s—I wouldn’t be able to go a week without beating off. Shit, I don’t think I’ve even tried that since I was like, eleven.”
“Seconded,” Alex says.
“Thirded,” Stohler says. “His plan terrified me so much that the day before Lent started, I offered to bring him out for a Fat Tuesday pancake brunch, then made him go to a sex shop with me afterward. I sent that little shit home with a hundred dollars’ worth of porn, lube, and sex toys, and gave him specific instructions to spend the next twelve hours getting himself off in every way possible. He was so humiliated, he couldn’t even speak. It was wonderful. He better have done it, though, or I’m going to kick his ass when he gets out of work.”
“Should’ve just told him to call his little book buddy,” Alex says, gesturing towards the shelf again. “Whoever is sending the books either is nailing him, or wants to be nailing him. It’s like—” He pulls the books off the shelf and starts thumbing through them, listing off, “Book about crazy writers. Another book about crazy writers, specifically: the Beat movement. Book about some crazy dude who wrote a dictionary—”
“I’m sensing a theme,” Stohler says dryly.
I lace my fingers together behind my still-only-half-shaved head, because if I touch my phone, I’m not going to be able to stop myself from texting Jamie a string of insults. A stack of books about bipolar poets—that’s his grand seduction attempt? He doesn’t even send notes with these books. These two idiots won’t even talk to each other, but they’re both willing to expend embarrassing amounts of effort to pick out exactly the right books for each other.
“But the theme expands,” Alex says, “because there’s also a book about Jesus—”
“I wish I were dead,” I groan, dragging my hands right over the top of my head and down to cover my face.
“—and one about the history of women and tattooing. I didn’t even know people wrote books about the history of women and tattooing, but apparently, that’s a thing. Like, what kind of guy is lame enough to try to get in somebody’s pants by sending him a shitload of books about fucking grammar and women’s studies?”
Part of me wants to laugh at the fact that Alex is unknowingly calling James goddamn Goldwyn lame, but another part of me is more concerned with… how fucking clueless Alex must be about what Ben really wants in a guy. The three of us may think that books about poetry or grammar or feminist body mods are lame, but I’d bet anything that Ben practically creamed his skinny jeans when he tore off the wrapping on each of those packages.
Stohler must agree with my unspoken judgment, because she arches a brow at Alex and says, “The kind of guy who wants to get in the pants of Ben McCutcheon, I would assume.”
“Bullshit. Garen didn’t have to buy him half a fucking library to get in his pants—”
“Yeah, but that’s all I was trying to do,” I point out. “Maybe I would’ve gotten him a bunch of weird grammar books, if I’d been trying to—” Oh. Oh, shit. “—to, uh. If I’d been trying to date him. Or start a relationship with him. Or get him to invite me home to meet his mama.”
On the final bit, I unthinkingly slip into a mockery of Jamie’s accent, even though he’s not here, and even though neither of the people I’m actually talking to are supposed to know that he’s the one who sent the books. Alex seems to focus more on my words than my tone, because he just rolls his eyes and turns to put the books back on the shelf. Stohler, on the other hand, has paused with her coffee cup raised halfway to her mouth. For a moment, she just frowns at me; then, sparing only a quick glance to be sure Alex is still turned away, she cocks her head to the side and raises one hand as high over her head as she can, like she’s trying to indicate the extremeness of Jamie’s height.
Don’t say anything, I mouth. Her eyebrows shoot upward, but thankfully, she doesn’t freak out. Instead, she just stands, sets her cup down on the table, and announces, “Enough of this gossipy bullshit. Let’s finish your hair.”
It only takes another ten minutes for all of my hair to be neatly, evenly shorn. Just as I’d expected, looking at myself in the bathroom mirror for the first time is kind of a mindfuck. Each of my individual features is more pronounced, more severe. I look older, sharper, harder. I flatten a hand to the back of my head, spreading my fingers and trying to pull, but my hair isn’t long enough to grab onto anymore. I exhale.
Six months sober
“Stop sulking,” Jamie orders, “or I’ll bring you home.”
“I’m not sulking,” I snap. It’s a lie; I’m sulking harder than I’ve ever sulked before. But still, it’s an understandable sulking, and I don’t get why Jamie isn’t being more sympathetic. Since he doesn’t seem to be in the mood to entertain my more emo tendencies right now, I’ve got to come at this topic in a roundabout way. “Today was so weird. Some people from Lakewood wrote on my facebook wall—you know, ‘congrats on being six months clean!’—which seems kind of inappropriately personal for a social networking site, but whatever. And I guess some of the Patton guys saw it, because some of them mentioned it to me. Javi, Charlie, Taylor.”
Jamie adjusts the temperature of the air conditioner by about half a degree, then turns the radio down a little so that he can hear me. “That’s nice.”
“Yeah,” I say, squirming around under the seatbelt so that I can turn to face him. His reaction still isn’t as enthusiastic as I want it to be. “Mom called during my lunch period. She wants to have dinner this weekend. And Dad and I already celebrated last weekend, when I was in town to meet with Doc, but he still called to talk to me after school.”
“They must be proud of you,” Jamie says. He grabs my hand and presses a kiss to the back of it, but I think he’s mostly trying to stop me from playing with the radio. “All of us are.”
I bat my eyelashes at him, and he rolls his eyes. I stick my tongue out, then continue. “Some Connecticut people texted, too. Stohls, Alex, Ben. He’s on spring break this week, so he might come stay with me and Trav for a couple of days, just to hang out.”
“Who, Alexander?” Jamie asks before I can say anything else. “Or the midget?”
“Ben.”
The light ahead of us turns red, and we roll to a stop at it. Like an utter girl, Jamie flips his visor down to check his hair in the mirror. “You talk to Travis at all today?”
I manage an eyeroll that incorporates my entire body, slumping hard against the passenger side door. “God, fuck you, man, you know I haven’t.” He flashes me a smirk and puts the visor back up as the light turns green. I sigh. “Do you know what his plans are?”
“Doesn’t he have work? Or class?”
“Earlier,” I whine. “He had work in the early part of the afternoon, and then he had class until seven, but he didn’t—he just ‘has plans tonight.’ Like, what the fuck, you know? This day is a big deal to me, and it’s like he doesn’t even give a shit. He cared about me being sixty days sober, but that might have just been because it was his birthday. He cared about me being ninety days sober, but maybe that was only because we were still hooking up. I don’t get why he doesn’t care about me being six months sober—”
“I’m sure he does care, G—”
“Six months is one of the last big ones people recognize, you know?” I continue right over him. “It’s—when I was at the LRC for my session, they let me sit in on one of the NA meetings, and everybody made a huge fuss out of this, even though it was still three days early. I got my little blue key tag and everything. Next one is yellow for nine months, and then I get a totally rad glow-in-the-dark one for a full year. But like, the blue one is a big deal. He should care about it.”
Jamie heaves a sigh. “Garen, he cares. I promise you, he cares. Now, I am trying to celebrate with you. If you don’t stop mentioning the fact that Travis isn’t here, I’m going to abandon you on the side of the road. And then I’m going to go find some other recovering addict whose six-month sobriety anniversary I can celebrate. I bet he’d appreciate it more than you.”
“I appreciate it! I do, I totally do,” I assure him. “I just don’t understand why he had to make plans—non-Garen-centric plans—for tonight, instead of some other night.”
“You are so annoying,” Jamie groans. “The next time I collaborate with your idiot friends to plan a surprise adventure for you, I refuse to be the chauffeur. One of them can do that, and I’ll be the one who pretends to forget about your accomplishments. It will be so much more fun for me, I’m sure.”
“You’re such a—” I pause, blink, rewind the last thirty seconds of conversation in my mind. “Wait, this is a surprise adventure? For me? And Travis is in on it?” Jamie shoots me a glare and flicks his turn signal on, so I hastily add, “Don’t leave me on the side of the road. I swear, I’ll shut up, just—where are we going? Is it going to be fun? Will there be food? ‘Cause you promised me dinner, and I’m kind of starving, and if there isn’t food, I’ll be kind of bummed. Who’s going to be there? Is it just going to be you and me and Travis, or are—”
Jamie cranks up the volume on his radio so that he doesn’t have to hear me. I spend the rest of the car ride trying to talk to him over the beat of the dirty south music he’s blasting from the speakers, but the second we make the final turn into the parking lot of our destination and I realize where we are, I lose it at such a volume that even the Escalade can’t drown me out.
“Laser tag!” I yelp. “James, I swear to god, I’m gonna name mine and Stohler’s first turkey-baster baby after you, because you are the greatest, and I love you.”
Laser tag at the Empire State Laser Arena is a Patton Military Academy tradition. Upperclassmen mention it to their underclassmen brothers, friends, or boyfriends, who spend years going there on the regular, and when those underclassmen become upperclassmen, they tell their underclassmen brothers, friends, or boyfriends, and it goes on. On any given weekend, half the school might be here, in large part due to the fact that the arena is a monster. It’s nearly ten thousand square feet of obstacle-ridden, black-lit, dubstep-soundtracked mayhem, and we all take it too seriously, streaking our skin with glow-in-the-dark face paint and breaking out all of our Military Leadership Education training to turn it into all-out war. Friendships have been formed and destroyed in the arena. Being selected for mine and Jamie’s team used to be considered the ultimate invitation to join the Patton social elite. It was an even bigger seal of approval than sleeping with one of us, and for good reason—I’ll fuck anybody with a nice body and a cute face, but we’re both vicious in our selection of laser tag teammates.
“Rein in the enthusiasm a bit, sweetheart,” Jamie says, grinning at me as he pulls into an empty space. “I chose the venue, but the celebration wasn’t my idea.”
“Whose was it?” I ask, even though I think I might know.
He rolls his eyes and points out the windshield. “Wow, Garen, I don’t know. Who have you been bitching about ignoring you the entire car ride?”
I look around, and sure enough, Travis is right there, sitting on the trunk of his car. There are nearly a dozen other people standing in the vicinity, but I can’t even register their faces, because he’s looking right at me and grinning so broadly that the freckles on his nose are crinkling up a little bit. I fling open the car door and tumble out of it, overeager to get over there and talk to him. I wedge myself between his knees and say, “I didn’t know you were planning something for me.”
“Surprise,” he says, sounding for all the world like he’s mocking me. “Congratu—”
That’s all he gets out; the rest turns into a muffled mmpf sort of sound when I kiss him straight on the mouth. My hands are hooked under his knees, and I’ve dragged him off the trunk so that he has to scramble to grip my shoulders and tighten his legs on my waist to keep himself upright. It only lasts a few seconds before I pull away.
“You little shit,” I say, releasing his legs so that he can regain his footing. “I thought you’d forgotten.”
“That’s because you are a raging attention whore and assume you’ve been forgotten anytime someone isn’t staring directly at you,” he says. He’s ducking his head a little, and when I twist to get a better look at his face, I realize it’s because he’s blushing. It’s a good look for him—I press another quick kiss to the corner of his mouth to keep it there.
There’s a snort from behind me, and I turn. Stohler is standing there, hands tucked into the tiny pockets of her fitted hoodie. “Is that how you two greet each other every night, even though you live together now?”
“It’s none of your business what I do to him every night,” I say with an exaggerated leer. “Besides, maybe that’s just how I greet all my friends. Here, watch.”
The rest of the group is made up of Ben and Alex—who are both leaning against the bumper of Stohler’s Mustang—and my Patton squad, so I fling an arm around Steven’s shoulders and smack a loud, showy kiss to his cheek. He wriggles away from me. “Get off me, you jackass.”
“Dude, why are you even here?” I ask, then turn to face Travis again. “How did you get in touch with my Patton guys?”
“That would be my doing,” Jamie says, coming up behind me and hooking his chin over my shoulder. “Though, I’d be lying if I pretended that I did anything more suave than walk into the Whitman dorm, grab an underclassman, and demand to know the room number of whichever senior he was most terrified of.” He pauses and nods briefly towards the rest of the group. “Pleasure to see you again, Mr. Campbell.”
Declan, who is leaning against Taylor’s car, gives him a salute, but says nothing around the cigarette that’s dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Thanks, you guys. This is awesome,” I say. “By which I really mean, this is going to be awesome for me, when I kick everyone’s asses. It’s probably going to suck for you all, though.”
Taylor snorts. “We’ll see about that. You’ve been off in Connecticut for a year now, so I’m betting you’re more than a little out of practice.”
“Is there any kind of preference for how we divide the teams?” Javi asks as our entire group begins to make the trip into the building. “We should try to keep things even. You know, some good shooters and some bad on each side.”
“Jamie and I have to be on the same team,” I interject, before anyone else can get a word in.
Ben rolls his eyes. “Why? Are you concerned that you might not be able to hold hands the whole time, if you’re on opposite teams?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Are you bitter about the fact that holding my hand and his laser gun would leave him without any hand to grope you with?”
Ben stomps hard on my foot, then shoots a sharp glance towards Alex, who is thankfully walking far enough behind us that he probably can’t hear. Jamie, who is still plastered to my side, clears his throat and continues a shade too loudly, “Garen and I have to be on the same team because we become hostile when asked to compete with each other.”
“It’s true,” I sigh. “We tried it once in ninth grade, and the whole night was pretty much a bloodbath. He got kind of hurt—”
“Take responsibility for your actions,” Jamie orders.
“I hurt him,” I amend, chastised, and Sam chuckles. “That—yes, okay, I instigated a physical confrontation that may have—”
“—that did—”
“—that may have contributed to him leaving the arena with a mildly sprained wrist. But I felt really bad about it!” I say quickly, when Travis shoots me a very exasperated look. “And I apologized. And I took over all his jerk-off duties during the two weeks his wrist was out of commission.”
“A more than fair trade,” Jamie agrees. “I have a clumsy left hand and a high sex drive. He was a busy boy.”
“The point is, we need to be on the same team, or people are going to be maimed,” I say. The building houses a sprawling snack bar and lounge area, and I’d kill for some nachos right now, but there are more important matters to attend to. I open the door to the arena’s prep room and wave everyone through ahead of me. “And since he and I are probably better at this than any of you guys, how ‘bout we take the Connecticut dead weight on our team? Me, Jamie, Travis, Ben, Alex, and Stohls versus Javi, Dec, Taylor, Charlie, Steven, and Sam. Fair enough?”
“I resent being referred to as dead weight,” Travis says.
I quirk an eyebrow at him. “Can you shoot?”
“Of course not, but I intend to make myself extremely useful as a human shield. Besides, you—Jesus Christ,” he breaks off, blinking around the room that he has just been led into. “What’s with the fucking war room?”
“This is where the game starts,” I say, with a sweeping gesture towards the room. “We put on our chest-pieces and get our guns, and then each team heads down its own hallway so we’re starting at opposite ends of the arena. So, yeah, just grab a chest-piece and lock yourself into it.”
Charlie unhooks one of the red chest-pieces from the wall and passes it to me with a hesitant smile. It takes every bit of self-control I possess to smile back instead of rolling my eyes. He’s been doing this for weeks now, ever since he saw the hospital pictures and realized just how wrong he was about my relationship with his brother. He’s always the first to pass me lab supplies during chemistry or whatever food I want during mealtime; he always wants to partner me for PT drills in the morning, and he saves me a seat at MLEP almost every evening—I can’t remember the last time I showed up for that class and wasn’t immediately directed to the chair between him and Declan. It’s… weird, I guess, but nice. At least, it’s sure as hell better than the animosity I’d faced from both of them during my first few weeks at school.
“Hey, G?” Travis says, frowning down at his own somewhat lopsided chest-piece. “I’m apparently experiencing some technical difficulties. Would you mind helping me out?”
I pretty much trip over myself in my haste to get close enough to grab at him—I figured out towards the end of sophomore year that helping dudes with their laser tag gear is a shockingly effective pick-up strategy—but the moment I actually take in the harness, I can’t stop myself from rolling my eyes. He has somehow managed to get one of the straps tangled around itself in some sort of knot that looks like it’ll take me ten minutes to untie. For simplicity’s sake, I slip the entire harness off him, replace it on its hook, and crouch down in front of it to work through it from there.
“These harnesses are retarded,” Alex announces. “I quit, I wanna go home.”
“Yeah, they have buckles in weird places. Hang on a sec, and I’ll do yours for you,” I say, but Jamie is already coming over to begin shortening the straps on Alex’s chest-piece.
There’s an awkward moment in which he seemingly realizes what he’s done—that this is the first interaction they’ve had since the diner in November—and then he glances up with a small, mostly neutral smile. “Hello there, Alexander. Been a minute since I’ve seen you.”
“Yeah,” Alex says, meeting his gaze. “You look good.”
“Don’t I always?” Jamie replies. The comment lacks some of the flirtation I’d expect, but Alex must not notice, because the edge of his mouth quirks up a bit.
I glance around to see if Ben is close enough to hear the exchange, but he’s on the other side of the room. Rather than wait for Jamie or me to help him with his harness—and probably grope him in the process—he has taken it upon himself to make small talk with Taylor while my squadmate tightens the straps for him. The exchange is entirely grope-less. Once I’ve finished untangling Travis’ harness and buckling him into it, I turn to help Stohler, but she’s already wearing a perfectly adjusted piece and looking bored.
“I take it you’ve played before,” I say.
She scoffs. “Of course I have. And I’m a fucking boss at it, so your little boarding school buddies should prepare themselves.”
“You can shoot?” Steven says, sounding surprised as he looks around at her.
Stohler raises an eyebrow. “I can,” she agrees, then raises her voice to add, “I can also pistol-whip that ginger with my laser gun, if he looks at my tits one more time.”
Declan makes no effort to disguise the fact that he’s staring at the inch or two of cleavage at the top of her laser gear. He slowly drags his eyes from Stohler’s breasts to her collarbone, up her neck, settling on her mouth for a moment, and finally meeting her eyes. “Do you honestly expect me to believe that getting men to stare at your tits isn’t the entire purpose of a shirt like that? Some might say that you’re aiming for the attention.”
Ben turns to say over his shoulder, “And others might say that you’re a lecher and a narcissist for actually believing that. Do you pick out your clothes because you’re trying to get people to stare at the outline of your junk?”
“Well, clearly you do,” Jamie says, giving Ben’s skinny jeans a look that’s heated enough to leave Alex frowning deeply.
“I swear to Christ, Goldwyn, if I see your eyes travel south of my shoulders again, I will carve them out of your fucking skull, mash them into a paste, and make you eat them,” Ben says.
Javi leans towards Sam and mutters, “Man, public school kids are violent.”
In what I suspect is mostly an attempt to get Alex to stop staring at him like he’s trying to piece something together, Jamie strolls across the room and claps Declan on the shoulder. “Well, if you are trying to get a man to stare at whatever you’re packing, I think you’ve already taken a very important first step by befriending Garen. Once you’ve done that, you essentially just have to show up and let it happen.”
“I can’t help it,” I protest. “And you shouldn’t make fun of me for that. Sex addiction is a serious condition. My rehab center has meetings for it and everything.”
“Have you considered attending one of these meetings?” Stohler asks.
“No point. The guy who runs them is really hot, and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate,” I say earnestly.
Steven scoffs and knocks his elbow against mine. “You’re ridiculous. Get your fuckin’ team out of here. We’ll see you in the arena.”
“Are we really going to forego the great tradition of pre-game shit-talking?” I say, returning to the side of the room where the rest of the red team is already gathered. “C’mon. I bet Campbell’s got some snappy little retort he’s just dying to get in before we start.”
“My aim speaks for itself. I don’t need to shit-talk,” Declan says, examining his laser gun. He pauses, glances up at my team. “What about you? I’ve heard you’ve got quite the mouth on you.”
I flash him a smile that’s maybe a little bit more wolfish than strictly necessary. “Oh, you have no idea.”
“Alright, we’re stopping this right now,” Taylor says sharply. “I refuse to let the shit-talk devolve into Garen shamelessly indulging Dec’s sudden and alarming bicuriosity. Someone, anyone else, speak. How ‘bout you, Goldwyn? Something to set the tone?”
“In the words of our school’s namesake, General George S. Patton,” Jamie says, eying the squad like he plans to skin them, “May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won’t.”
Behind us, Travis leans closer to Ben and whispers, “Do you think they realize that this is a game?”
“Apparently not,” Ben whispers back.
Stohler jabs her gun into my ribs and fires off a few shots. They don’t do anything, but they do make a pretty obnoxious pew pew sort of noise. “Let’s go. You sheepfuckers can resume the dick-measuring contest after the game, once we’ve all seen the scores.”
“Stohler, babe, don’t worry,” I say, flinging an arm around her shoulders and steering our group down the red hallway. “Everyone knows you’ve got the biggest dick here.
“You’re damn right I do,” she agrees.
“So, what’s our strategy?” Jamie asks me. “You take Campbell, I take Santos, let the grunts handle the others?”
“Are we the grunts?” Travis asks, gesturing to Ben, Alex, and Stohler.
“You’re the grunts,” I confirm, then a second later, after we’ve reached the end of the hall where we’re meant to wait, “No, wait. You, Ben, and Alex are the grunts. Stohler’s with Jamie and me. And nah, I was actually thinking we could make their ineptitude work for us.” I hitch my chin towards the door separating us from the blue team. “They’re Patton boys who are used to playing other Patton boys. And Declan’s a tyrant, so he’s probably going to try to keep them to some sort of formation. What if we just kinda… go for it, you know? Let the grunts go apeshit. We all just run around and aim for anything blue.”
Jamie grimaces. “It lacks the poetry of our usual assault tactics.”
“It doesn’t have to,” I say, as Travis mutters a disdainful echo of assault tactics, what the fuck. “Hey, McCutcheon, hit me with some war poetry. I know you’ve got some stashed away in that freaky little brain of yours.”
“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, my friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori,” Ben recites, though his attention is focused on his laser gun. “If I shoot someone on our team, do I still get points?”
Jamie narrows his eyes. “No. You just get beaten for shooting me.”
“If you shoot someone on our team, their gun still goes offline for fifteen seconds, but you don’t get any points on your individual score. And at the end, all our points get tallied up, and whichever team has more is the winner,” I explain. “So, if you shoot anyone—by which I mean, if you shoot Jamie, you’re really just making it so that our team has one less active player for a quarter of a minute. It doesn’t benefit you.”
“Might make you happy, though,” Alex points out.
“Right up until I make him ride in the trunk the whole way back to the house,” Jamie says. At my curious look, he tacks on, “The midget’s going back to your place tonight when I bring you and McCall there. That ‘he might come and stay with us for a few days’ comment you made in the car on the way here? It’s much less hypothetical than you thought it was.”
I throw my arms around Ben, narrowly avoiding giving him a black eye with my chest-piece. “You’re coming to stay with me? This is the best six-months-sober-slash-pre-birthday present ever!”
“Get off me, you assclown,” Ben says, trying to wriggle out of my grasp. I let him, but my enthusiasm still stands. Jamie may be my best friend, and Travis may be everything else, but Ben and I can really hang out; we like the same movies, we like most of the same music, we can go to shows and record stores. And, most importantly--
“You can meet my puppy,” I realize, in a voice so thrilled it’s almost a whisper. Travis frowns at me, and I quickly amend, “Our puppy. The puppy. Omelette.”
“That beast is not a puppy,” Jamie says. “It’s nearly as big as McCutcheon.”
“That’s not—” I start to say, but the door to the arena buzzes and swings open, and suddenly, that’s where all of my focus is. I shove Alex towards it and snap, “Go, get out there, now!”
Jamie bolts out after him, followed by Stohler, then Ben, at a much more reluctant pace. Travis is the last to leave, but not before he gives me a quick peck on the cheek and says, “You take this game way too seriously, dude.”
If any part of me doubts his words, that part is proven hilariously wrong within the first ten minutes of game play. For weeks now, I’ve been back in PT, back on the field, back in marksmanship sessions, but I’m still out of practice. It takes me a while to get back in the swing of things, even though—with all due modesty—I’m still the baddest motherfucker in the arena.
“God fucking damn it, Anderson,” Charlie groans when I black out his chest-piece for the sixth time. “You’re never coming to play with us again!”
I let out a shout of laughter and duck behind him to shield myself from Steven’s wild shots in my direction. “Tough shit, Walczyk, I’m in the squad. You guys are stuck with me.”
Charlie’s chest-piece lights back up, but he doesn’t even have time to turn and try to get a shot at me before one of Steven’s shots hits him instead of me, sending him right back into uselessness. He howls, “Ramsey! I’m on your friggin’ team!”
I take out Steven next, then run away to stalk the arena, wild-eyed, searching for stupid fucking Declan and his stupid fucking smartass mouth. Every time I’m convinced that I’ve found his location, I end up being distracted by the other players. I’ve always been more of an offensive player than a defensive one, but this is different—I feel like I’m hunting him. It takes almost twenty of the thirty minutes of game play before I find him, taking cover behind an obstacle at the edge of the arena and sniping out other players. I’m coming at him from an angle, so he hasn’t seen me yet. It’s perfect. I take aim, fire, and nail him on the first try.
Declan’s eyes snap to his darkened, buzzing chest-piece. His gun is still raised, and his mouth is slightly open, like he genuinely cannot believe that anyone managed to get a shot in on him. I can’t hold back the laughter that inspires, and then those eyes are on me, on my still-aimed gun. His mouth clicks shut, and something white-hot flashes over his face as he moves towards me. He won’t be able to shoot me for another fifteen seconds, so I don’t hesitate to raise my gun in a show of surrender as I try to wheedle him, “C’mon, Dec, don’t be like that. I’ve been trying to get that shot in since the game started. You can’t get pissed at me just because I—”
“Not pissed at you,” he says shortly, and then I’ve got the wall at my back and Declan pressed to my front. Our chest-pieces clatter together loudly, and for a second, I think he’s going to fight me. But his hands are wound into fists around the fabric of my t-shirt so that he can pin me into place as he leans in to—fuck, to mouth at my neck. It starts with a simple kiss, but only a second later, his lips part, and I can feel tongue and teeth, and it feels so fucking good. While his mouth works a bruise into the skin just above the collar of my shirt, one of his hands releases my shirt to slip back and grab at my ass.
“Declan, what the fuck?” I manage after a moment. And then, because I don’t want him to think for a second that I might be protesting, I reach up to curve my hand over the back of his head. His hair’s buzzed almost as short as mine, so there’s nothing to really grab onto, but fuck if I’m not gonna try.
“Have I ever told you,” he breathes, pausing to scrape his teeth against my earlobe, “how much it turns me on to watch you shoot?”
“Wh—um, no, can’t say that’s a conversation we’ve ever had,” I gasp out. Christ, I want to kiss him. I squirm in place, trying to find a way to twist so that I can get at his mouth, but he’s still pressing me into the wall.
“Mm.” He shoves a hand between us. “That’s probably because it doesn’t.”
The vibration against my chest shocks me even more than the sudden coldness as Declan steps back. I follow his gaze to my chest-piece which is blacked out and buzzing under the muzzle of his laser gun. I hadn’t even noticed his equipment getting reactivated, which I’m guessing was sort of the point.
“You little shit!” I protest, and he bolts away, grinning madly. I give chase, because he can bet his perfectly-shaped ass that I’m going to get him back the second my gun comes back on, but I lose him in the darkness almost immediately and don’t manage to find him again before the lights come back on and the game ends.
We gather at the edge of the arena to wait for the scores to come up on the wall screen. When they do, it’s accompanied by a bright red background, signaling my team’s victory. I do a brief, celebratory dance. “Third place. Haven’t done this in a year, but I’m still fucking awesome.”
“Not as awesome as I am,” Stohler says, smirking at me and soaking in the glassy-eyed stares of the Patton boys, all of whom seem equally stunned and aroused by her first-place score. “Nor are you as awesome as the ginger kid, it would appear.”
“That’s because the ginger kid is a filthy cheater,” I say, shooting a glare at Declan. He quirks an eyebrow at me, and because I’m both a sore loser and a complete child, I stick my tongue out at him. He returns the gesture, and there’s a brief flash of silver that I’m not expecting, and Jesus fucking Christ, how am I only just now finding out that he has a pierced tongue? I feel myself go rigid; my shock must register on my face, because Declan’s expression turns quizzical for a moment before he realizes that my stare is focused entirely on his mouth. As soon as he understands what has attracted my attention, he grins, bright and nearly feral, then flicks his tongue out enough to let the barbell catch between his front teeth for half a second. Just long enough to make me let out a half-sighed, half-groaned, “Ohmygod.”
He laughs. It’s kind of a mean sound.
“Have you—” I actually have to stop and clear my throat, which is embarrassing, but nearly everyone is still too busy checking their own scores to notice. I step closer to Declan. “Have you had that the whole time I’ve known you?”
“I’ve had it since I was fourteen,” he says, “but I don’t wear it to school. Some of us are actually smart enough to take our facial piercings out before Sergeant Smitth screams at us for having them.” He reaches up and flicks my lip ring, then leans closer to me to add, “I’m surprised you didn’t notice it when it was actually touching your skin.”
I let out a strangled, wounded noise. I’m not even sure what type of noise it’s supposed to be, but it’s definitely enough to draw a bewildered glance from Javi. I quickly step back and turn to face the rest of my team. “So! Uh. What about you guys? Happy with your scores?”
Alex is squinting at the scores. “Honestly, I’m just trying to figure out how the hell Ben did better than two thirds of the Patton guys.”
I blink up at the screen—sure enough, Ben’s name is listed sixth. I turn to stare at him. “Do you have some previously unknown marksmanship skill?” He bites his lip on a smile and shakes his head. I narrow my eyes. “Did you fucking cheat?”
He shakes his head again, but slowly enough to make me suspicious. Jamie darts forward and digs his long fingers into Ben’s side. “You did. You cheated, you little—”
“I didn’t cheat!” Ben protests, trying—and failing, probably because he secretly likes it—to squirm away from Jamie’s hands. “I found myself a strategically sound location and stuck it out there.”
“What does that even mean?” Jamie asks.
“Do you really want to know?” Ben shoots back, and when Jamie doesn’t stop tormenting him, he continues, “Fine, Jesus, get off me and I’ll show you.”
Jamie finally releases him, and Ben heads for the nearest obstacle, a seven-foot structure designed to provide cover to peer around. Travis, who has been watching our entire exchange with a wide smile on his face, follows him, then drops his hands to maybe knee-height and laces his fingers together. Ben carefully situates one of his red Chucks on Travis’ hands and allows himself to be boosted up onto the obstacle. There, he tucks his legs under himself and perches above all of us, like a tiny gargoyle. “I’m just small enough to fit.”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Declan says flatly. “Were you up there the entire game?”
“Yep,” Ben says cheerfully. “You’re all incredibly unobservant. I intend to write a strongly worded letter to your squad sergeant and demand that he add ‘look up, fuckwits’ to your military leadership training.”
“If you didn’t have to worry about dodging a single shot the entire game, shouldn’t you have gotten first place?” Jamie asks.
Ben snorts and kicks his legs out so they’re dangling over the side. “It was a strategy, not a miracle. I still have terrible aim.”
“Terrible aim and a devious streak,” Alex grumbles. “Come on. That snack bar out front looks epic, and I’d murder a kitten for some fries right now.”
Ben looks prepared to just slide off the side of the obstacle, but the idiot will probably break a leg doing that. I grab him by the hips and pull him off, slinging him over my shoulder and walking out of the arena with him in a fireman’s carry. He snaps at me to put him down, and when I ignore him, he starts trying to kick me in the face. Once we make it back to the front room, I have to dump him back on the ground so we can both remove our chest-pieces and return them to the hooks on the walls. He’s still bitching about it ten minutes later, once most of the group has gotten food and scattered themselves over the long table at the edge of the eating area.
I ignore him in favor of wandering over to where Travis is leaning against the counter of the snack bar, waiting for his burger to be cooked and passed over. I steal a sip from his pop, then gesture towards the group. “Thank you, again. For doing this.”
“No problem. I’m glad you had fun,” he says, grinning at me. He’s standing so close that it wouldn’t take much for me to lean in and give him a quick kiss. It could be a… thank you, maybe. It could be just something small and sweet, something we both want, if the way his eyes have dropped to my mouth are any indication. But then Travis’ eyes flit a little lower, and his expression visibly dims. I open my mouth to ask him if something is wrong, but I fall awkwardly silent again when he reaches up to press his fingertips to the still-sensitive mark that Declan left on my neck. “Did you have this when you went in?”
The thing is, there’s no right answer. I got it while we were all inside? I’ve been hooking up with other guys pretty much since we moved in together? It’s not something we’ve talked about, and I don’t think he really expected me to wait for him, but… he hasn’t brought any guys home. Girls, either. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t gotten any in months.
I offer a sheepish smile and say, “It was just one of the guys fighting dirty, trying to distract me so he could shoot me once his gun started functioning again.”
“Worked, didn’t it?” Declan announces, slinging an arm around my shoulders and dislodging Travis’ hand in the process. He looks over at Travis and offers him one of those blank half-smiles he’s so good at. “Don’t worry about it, Travis. I sometimes let my competitive tendencies get the best of me, but I didn’t mean anything by it. Like Anderson said—just playing dirty.” He digs his fingertips into the mark, and I yelp, shoving him away. He laughs and takes off back towards the rest of the Whitman squad.
“I wasn’t worried about it,” Travis mutters. “I just—didn’t realize you and Declan had like, a thing between you—”
“We don’t,” I say quickly. “It’s not like that. The dude’s not even into other guys, I swear.”
Travis cringes, like he’s hating himself for the words even as they come out of his mouth, and says, “Is there any dude who is into other guys? Like, is there somebody you’re hooking up with that I didn’t know about?”
I shove my hands into my pockets and shift my gaze from his face to the menu behind him, just so I won’t have to see his eyes when I admit, “I, uh… I mean, there was a guy a couple weeks ago. Somebody in the squad—the rest of the squad, not this group here—who I was hooking up with, kind of on the regular. We weren’t dating, though.”
“No, right, of course,” Travis says quickly. The snack bar attendant places his food on the counter, and he turns to grab it, flashing me a brief, obviously fake smile as he adds, “That’s fine. I mean, you can hook up with whoever you—I’m not trying to, you know—I’m not jealous.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Garen, I’m not jealous,” he says, more firmly. It sounds like just as much of a lie as it did a minute ago. I open my mouth to reply, but he gives me another bullshit smile and weaves around me, striding off to the table and sinking into a seat between Ben and Charlie.
I sigh and follow, flinging myself down across from Ben and between Taylor and Alex, who’s leaning forward in his seat to ask Jamie, in a pseudo-casual tone, “Heard you and that girl broke up.”
I want to bash my head against the table so that I don’t have to hear this conversation, but that would probably draw too much attention. Across from me, Ben makes a face and leans back in his seat, stretching both his arms out to the sides along the top of the booth, one behind Jamie’s neck and one behind Travis’, but not touching either of them. I raise an eyebrow at him, but before I can say anything, Taylor leans across the table to ask Ben some boring school question. I do my best to tune them out.
“Rachael and I broke up, yes,” Jamie says.
“She dumped him on Valentine’s Day,” I announce, and there’s a collective grimace around the table.
“That’s fucking harsh, Goldwyn,” Javi laughs.
Jamie gives his shoulders a delicate lift, as if to say, what can you do? Alex chews carefully on a French fry, swallows, and continues, “Found anyone new yet?”
“Sure,” Jamie replies, shrugging. “A few boys, a few girls. Rachael and I were together for a few months, so I’ve had a bit of playing to catch up on.
“Anyone you’re serious about?” Alex presses.
Jamie slouches down in his seat just enough to allow his head to loll back. To Alex, I’m sure it looks like he’s only looking up at the ceiling in thought, but all I can see is how still Ben has gone now that Jamie is using his forearm as a headrest.
“There might be someone I find more… interesting than I expected to,” Jamie says carefully.
Alex leans back in his seat. “Oh,” he says, then pauses for a beat. “Lady or gentleman?”
“Gentleman. Well. Man. There’s been nothing gentle about any of our encounters. He’s a bit of an ass, too. I have questionable taste,” Jamie says, and then jolts a little, like he’s just been kicked. He waits until Alex looks back to his fries, then shoots Ben a dirty look, which Ben returns at once.
From the far end of the table, Stohler calls, “What about you, McCutcheon?”
Ben turns sharply to face her. “What? I don’t—I’m not, uh—what about me?”
Always the epitome of subtlety, that one. On his right, Travis tries to hide his exasperation by ducking his head and shoving his burger into his mouth, but the eyeroll is still pretty obvious. Jamie’s mouth is twisted into a self-satisfied smirk, like he’s pleased to have his questionable taste confirmed to everyone at the table.
Stohler just smiles.
“You single?” she asks. He nods slowly. She plugs the top of her straw with the tip of her finger, then pulls it out of her cup so that she can suck the pop from the wrong end. “Still not putting out for that guy who’s been sending you books as the world’s most embarrassing attempt at seduction?”
Ben turns his attention upward, probably praying for patience. “First of all, stop going through my shit every time you come to my apartment. Second, it’s not an attempt at seduction. Third, if it was an attempt at seduction, it wouldn’t be embarrassing.”
“I think it’s totally on point,” I say, digging the toe of my boot into Jamie’s shin under the table as evidence of my continued displeasure with his flirting technique. “I mean, nothing says ‘I wanna eat your ass’ like books about Jesus.”
Ben retracts his arms from the back of the booth and yanks on the strings of his hood until it cinches around his reddened face and conceals his eyes. “I often dream about drowning all of my current friends so that I can start over and find new ones who aren’t terrible people.”
“I’d haunt you,” I say automatically. “And every time you tried to hang out with new people, I’d torment them, and no one would want to be your friend. They’d all call you Poltergeist Ben behind your back, and you’d be sad all the time. Your life is better with me in it.”
“My life is not better with you in it. My life is a prison, and you are the warden of my social experiences,” he says mournfully.
I wiggle my eyebrows at him. “Wish you’d used that metaphor a few months ago. We could’ve incorporated it into some roleplay when I tied you up and made you my bitch.”
Ben lets out an embarrassed whine and tugs harder on the strings until his hoodie has obscured his entire face.
Travis plucks a French fry off Sam’s plate and whips it at my face. “Be nice to him, or when James drives us home, I’m going to tell him to leave you here.”
And then, apropos of absofuckinglutely nothing, Declan says, just quietly enough that I have to strain to hear him, “That’s right, I’d forgotten you’re Garen’s roommate.” He takes a sip of his drink, possibly just for dramatic pause. “Must be strange, living with an ex.”
Travis’ posture is stiff as he turns to peer around Charlie at him. “Strangeness is relative. Personally, I consider it more strange that you give hickeys to other guys, even though you say you’re straight.”
The corner of Declan’s mouth quirks upward. “Are you annoyed that I did it, or annoyed that he liked it?”
“Would you—”
“So, wait, that—” Sam leans around Taylor to gesture towards the mark on my neck, “—that’s from Dec?”
“We didn’t do anything,” I snap. I expect Declan to confirm my statement, but he remains silent.
When I look around, he’s still staring at the side of Travis’ face, even though Travis has turned away from him. His gaze is too focused, too calculating; it sets me on edge that anyone—even somebody I might be starting to consider a friend now—would look at Travis that way. My muscles are tightening under my skin, but before I can move, Charlie digs an elbow into Declan’s ribs and says, “Quit staring like a creep, Dec. We’ve talked about this. Normal people blink.”
Declan’s stare slowly shifts from Travis’s face to Charlie’s. He blinks once, then again, then gives a faint chuckle and turns away. “Right. Sorry.”
“Well, on that note,” Jamie says flatly, nudging Javi so that he can be let out of the booth, “I think it might be a fair time to call it a night. Hey, midget. Do you have a bag or something I should move from Stohler’s car to mine?”
“Yeah. I’ll go with you,” Ben says, giving Travis’ wrist a hard yank so he’ll follow him out of the booth as well.
Stohler pitches Jamie her keys so that he can get into the Mustang, but remains sitting, as do Alex, myself, and the rest of the Patton boys. I keep my head bowed and my attention focused on counting footsteps until I’m sure the others are out of earshot. The moment I hear them clear the building’s front doors, my head snaps up, but Javi is already rounding on Declan.
“Dec, when’s the last time I told you what a cunt you are sometimes?” he demands
Declan considers his answer. “In the arena.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t make this part clear then, but you should knock it the fuck off,” Javi whines. “You always do this when you meet new people. You’re like a little boy who torments the new kid in preschool, just because you’re pissed that your classmates want him to play with them, too.”
Taylor hauls himself to his feet and heads for the door, calling over his shoulder to us, “Honestly, I don’t get how I’m still surprised every time this happens, but I really am.”
“I’m not,” Sam mutters, following him.
There’s a general movement for the rest of the group to follow them, but I don’t stand just yet.
“Not Travis,” I say. Declan doesn’t speak, only cocks his head to the side like my dog does when I try to talk to him in full sentences. “You’re my friend and all, but if you ever try to fuck with Travis’ head again, I’m going to kick the crap out of you. Are we clear?”
Declan’s face is expressionless, but his eyes are bright and delighted, the same way they are every time he manages to piss someone off. I don’t know that he has even a shred of self-preservation instinct in him. But he inclines his head and drawls, “Of course.”
I shove my chair back and head for the exit. Just as I’ve passed through the main doors, Stohler moves to flank me as she mutters, “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that? You have exactly one real chink in your armor, and you just told that dickweed exactly where to find it.”
I shake my head tersely. “No. That’s—Declan’s a fuckin’ shit sometimes, but he and I are on decent terms now. We’re friends, even. You heard Javi, he gets bitchy with new people. He’s not going to do anything to me, or to Travis—I’d fucking kill him if he did, and he knows that now.”
“I hope you’re right,” she says, but she shakes her head, like she doubts very much that I am. She and Alex head for the Mustang, but I head straight for Travis and Jamie, who are standing near the passenger side of the Escalade.
I crowd up close and say, “Hey. So, uh, sorry. About Declan. He’s a dick. Are you—”
“It’s not a big deal. I’m fine, I don’t care,” Travis interrupts. His voice is neutral, but his eyes are doing everything they can to warn me into silence. He turns and calls, “Hey, Ben! Come on!”
Ben, who is in the middle of conversation with Taylor, looks over at us and holds up one finger to signal that we should hold on a minute. He turns back to Taylor, and they speak for another thirty seconds or so before Taylor digs his phone out of his pocket and passes it to Ben, who starts typing something into it.
I raise my eyebrows. “Dude. Is McCutcheon trying to get it in?”
“McCutcheon can hear you,” Ben says loudly. He finishes typing, passes the phone back to Taylor, and flashes him a quick smile before jogging over to the car where the rest of us are waiting. He slugs me in the ribs and says, “I was not trying to get it in, you jackass. Taylor just got accepted to University of New Haven’s criminal justice program, and I said I’d give him my number so he could hit me up this fall, if he wants someone to show him around the city.”
“By ‘show him around the city,’ do you mean ‘give him hot, sloppy blowjobs in his dorm room’?” I ask.
“No, I do not mean that,” Ben says, shoving me into the backseat of the car and climbing in after me. “Jesus, Garen, two guys can talk to each other without it being foreplay. I don’t even think he likes boys.”
But Taylor does like boys, and more importantly, tormenting Ben McCutcheon is my absolute favorite way to amuse myself. I spend the entire drive back to the house listing all the lewd-to-the-point-of-questionable-legality sexual activities I’m sure they could get up to. By the time Jamie parks at the curb in front of the house, Ben is practically howling at me to shut up, shut up, shut up and trying to hit me even though I’ve got him pinned to the inside of his door while I talk. The second the car stops moving, he grabs his backpack and tumbles out of the backseat.
He’s halfway up the front path after Travis when Jamie gets out of the car and says, “Hang back a moment, McCutcheon. I’ve got a favor to ask you.” Travis stops in the middle of unlocking the front door to turn around and make an obscene hand gesture. “Not that kind of favor, you twat. It’s a Garen favor.” Travis raises his eyebrows and repeats the gesture, this time with both hands.
“What’s a Garen favor?” I ask. “Is that like—you know, is it a favor for me, or about me? Will I like it? Do I have to do anything? Can I—”
“You can shut up,” Jamie suggests. When I don’t show any signs of letting my curiosity wane, he rolls his eyes. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’ve got a birthday in two weeks. Do you want me to find you a nice present, or not?”
I light up. Honestly, I had sort of forgotten about my birthday; being six months sober seems like a much bigger deal than turning nineteen. But if anyone can be talkative and idiotic enough to talk his way out of a birthday present, it’s me, so I lunge for the door and slip into the house.
Travis steps after me, but doesn’t close the door behind himself. “It’s cold out. Come inside and talk in the kitchen. I’ll keep that dumbass in the living room so he doesn’t eavesdrop.”
Ben takes exactly four steps into the house before he freezes; Omelette has come bolting down the stairs like a furry lightning strike. Since I’m standing closest to the foot of the stairs, he barrels into my legs and licks furiously at the knee of my jeans before moving on to Travis, who crouches down a little more to scratch him behind the ears. But the moment the dog realizes there is a new person in the house, he becomes so ecstatic that he actually howls.
Ben doesn’t fare much better. His knees hit the ground, and when Omelette crawls all over is lap, he just laughs and digs his fingers into the dog’s fur, scratching deep into his skin so that Omelette flops to the ground and bares his belly for more scratching.
I hitch my chin at Jamie, who’s still lingering in the doorway because he can’t really get around the Great Ben McCutcheon Belly Rub Experience. “If you’d realized that all you needed to do to get him on his knees was be fluffy, you’d probably wax less, huh?”
Jamie steps over Ben—nearly kicking him in the back as he does so—grabs my shoulder, and shoves me towards the living room. “Go. Go watch television or something.”
“I can’t,” I say, making a face. “I have to go to bed so I have some hope of actually functioning when I wake up in like, five hours. We’re doing a ten-mile run in PT tomorrow, and, you know—” I shrug, “—I want the best time. It’s tough as hell to compete with Declan, but I want to destroy him tomorrow.”
“Thought you said you guys were friends,” Travis says with a frown.
Another shrug. “We are. But… I don’t know. He was a snot to you tonight, so I want to put him in his place a little.”
Travis somehow manages to look embarrassed, annoyed, and pleased all at once; it’s a pretty complicated expression, but it looks absolutely adorable on him. I duck my head and scramble up the stairs to my room before I can do something as humiliating as telling him that.
183 days sober
When I head downstairs early the next morning, the television is still playing in the living room. At first, I assume Ben just fell asleep watching it after Jamie left, but when I poke my head around the corner, two things become immediately apparent—Ben never fell asleep, and Jamie never left. I flee to the kitchen, because it’s crazy early, and I haven’t had my coffee, so I’m incredibly unprepared for the sight of the two of them tangled up together on my couch and frantically kissing while my dog snoozes on the floor nearby.
I set about measuring the grounds and water into the machine, then assume my usual perch on the counter next to it while I wait for the coffee to brew. From this angle, I can see that they’re both almost fully clothed, but that Ben—who is pinning Jamie down against the cushions—has his shirt pushed halfway up his torso, exposing the pale skin of his back to Jamie’s nails. They’re grinding against each other, pushing into each other’s space everywhere they can manage, desperate and frustrated enough to suggest that they’ve been doing this for a while.
Jamie wrenches away from the kiss and shoves Ben’s face closer to his neck. When Ben obediently shifts to sink his teeth in, Jamie groans and says, just loudly enough to be heard over the television, “What kind of idiot gives up orgasms for six weeks?”
“What kind of idiot makes a move on someone who gave up orgasms for six weeks?” Ben shoots back. His challenging tone is sort of discredited by how wrecked he looks right now. His cheeks are flushed, and his arms are shaking as he shifts his weight to one side so that he can fumble towards the zipper of Jamie’s jeans. “Just because I can’t get off, doesn’t mean you can’t. It’s fine, I-I can blow you, if you want me t—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jamie says, catching his wrist and stretching out so both their arms are raised above their heads and hanging over the arm of the couch. “Even I’m not selfish enough to ask you to make me come if I can’t reciprocate.”
“How adorable,” I mutter, letting my head fall back against the upper cabinets. Thankfully, the coffee pot gurgles itself into silence, signaling the completion of the brewing process. I dump some of it into one of my oversized mugs and shuffle into the living room.
“Stop frotting in front of my dog, you fucking perverts,” I say. Ben reels back so quickly that only Jamie’s hands on his hips prevent him from hitting the floor. I snort. “Graceful. There’s coffee in the pot, if you’re thirsty. Or you can fuck in my bed, if you bitches are fuckin’ thirsty. Just make sure you change the sheets if you get jizz all over ‘em. Come on, Omelette.”
Omelette rouses himself from sleep and ambles after me out the sliding door into the yard. I sit down on the deck steps and drink my coffee while he trots all over the yard, sniffs everything he encounters, and pisses in half a dozen different locations. Halfway through my cup, the slider opens behind me, and Ben and Jamie join me.
“Sorry about that,” Ben mutters, pulling on his sweatshirt and giving me an embarrassed, guilty smile the moment his head reappears from the neck hole.
“I’m not,” Jamie says. “How long did you watch us, you dirty little voyeur?”
I shrug. “Only long enough to vigorously masturbate to the sound of your tender moans.” I lift my mug. “Guess what kind of cream is in my coffee. Go on, guess.”
“You’re awful,” Jamie says, collapsing onto the deck next to me and sounding like he means it a little more than I’d like.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to ignore it or not, so I wait in silence until Ben hops off the deck and wanders off through the dewy grass to play with Omelette and his squeaky duck. Then I squirm closer to Jamie and knock my shoulder against his. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” he says around a frown that hints otherwise. “I was just thinking.”
“About?” I prompt. He shrugs. I wait. He rolls his eyes and gestures across the yard. “Ben?” I say. He shrugs again. I light a cigarette, take a drag, and pass it to him. “You going to finally ask him out?”
He chokes on a lungful of smoke. I bury my smile in the crook of my arm. When he can finally speak, he forces out, “No. Lord, no. Never. I don’t even like him.”
“He’s the smartest person either of us has ever met. He’s got a bitchy little sense of humor. He’s a polite, young Christian boy, so Mama and Daddy Goldwyn would fuckin’ love him. From what you’ve both told me, the sex isn’t exactly terrible. So, please, tell me which part of that you dislike.”
James makes a face. “I dislike the part where things would get… messy. Complicated. The sex is good, and the conversation is more than, but I’m under no delusions about how it would end. Even in a best-case scenario, he and I would never be able to manage more than a month of dating before we were sick of each other. Then there’d be a huge scene—as there always is—and you’d end up getting dragged into it—as you always do—only this time it would be worse, because you actually give a damn about both parties.”
“Or, taking a less pessimistic viewpoint, the fact that I give a shit about both of you guys might be a good thing,” I point out. “At least, it would mean there’d never be that awkward moment where the person you’re dating is like, ‘you have to stop hanging out with Garen so much, I don’t like him, choose one of us.’”
Jamie scoffs. “Yes, there would be. I don’t care if you two are friends—that moment always comes.”
“Oh, yeah? Ask him,” I say. I make a sweeping gesture towards Ben, who is wrestling the squeaky duck from Omelette’s mouth so he can throw it across the yard for him again. Jamie gives me a dirty look, which I’m sure he hopes will persuade me to drop the issue. It doesn’t; I just narrow my eyes and do my best to communicate exactly how sick of this shit I am.
He heaves a sigh and calls across the yard, “Hey, McCutcheon?”
Ben makes a vague, unimpressed noise that I guess is supposed to imply he’s listening, even though he’s still mostly watching the dog. Well, that’s how Jamie must interpret it, because he continues, “When you were dating McCall, how come you never told him to pick you over Garen?”
It’s a sudden, serious enough question that Ben gives the duck one last kick across the yard, then comes over to sit down on my other side. “Because I’m neither an idiot nor a controlling asshole?” he says carefully. “You know how insufferable they are about one another. They were up each other’s asses, both figuratively and literally, before I was really part of the picture, and I may have been dating Travis, but I knew they were still in love with each other. It wasn’t really my place to throw an ultimatum in there just for shits and giggles.”
“So,” Jamie says in that same slow voice, “I wouldn’t—” He pauses, sits up straighter, and asks in a more certain, animated voice, “Hypothetically, you and I are standing in an elevator that breaks free of its cables and goes crashing to the bottom floor of the building. Neither of us is mortally wounded, but we do both sustain enough brain damage that we decide it might be reasonable for us to maybe… well, go on an… outing. Of sorts. With one another. And no one else.”
“You mean, like, a date?” I say brightly, and Jamie shoots me a warning look and says, “Of course not. Don’t be appalling.”
Ben’s cheeks are turning red, and he must be aware of it, because he draws his legs up to his chest, hunches into his hoodie, and rests his forehead on his knees so that his face is hidden and his voice is muffled when he replies, “Uh-huh. Hypothetically: elevator accident, brain damage, outing. Go on.”
“Alright. Well, let’s say—hypothetically—that this outing was enjoyable for both of us—”
“—because of the brain damage—”
“--exactly, because of the brain damage. And let’s say that one outing turned into, perhaps… a series of outings, extending over a long period of time, during which neither of us was partaking in outings of this nature with other people, and during which we might engage in frequent and enthusiastic bouts of sadomasochistic sex.”
Ben makes a strangled noise, but it’s barely audible over my cheerful, “You mean, like, a relationship? A weird, kinky relationship?”
“For fuck’s sake, Anderson, go inside. You have to get ready for school, anyway,” Jamie snaps.
“Not going anywhere until I hear the end of this ‘hypothetical situation.’ So, go on. I’m listening.”
He huffs another sigh, like he’s regretting every life decision that has led to him sitting on this deck, and grits out, “So, let’s say that all of that were to come to pass. Would I ever have to worry about there being a moment in which you would tell me to choose between you and Garen? Or, if-and-when it failed miserably, would you be a brat and try to demand that Garen choose just one of us to be friends with?”
Oh, Christ. I roll my eyes so hard I’m worried I might get a headache.
But Ben takes it in stride, raising his face long enough to give Jamie a judgmental look and say, “So, you’re saying that in this brain-damaged alternate reality, I like you more than I like Garen? Because in this reality, you seem to have a very shaky understanding of where you rank amongst my friends.”
“Just answer the question,” Jamie groans, flopping back to lie flat on the deck. “If you and I got involved, would there inevitably be some hideous argument in which you demanded that I place more value in a relationship with you than my friendship with Garen, just like there have been in nearly all of my past relationships?”
Ben squint at him. “Uh, no? That would make no sense. You and Garen have been best friends since you were fourteen, and you and I have known each other less than a year. Obviously he’d outrank me. Besides, if I liked you enough to date you, I’d probably just want you to be happy. And if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that you two are happiest when you’re indulging in your creepy, mostly-platonic life-partner bond.”
“It’s not creepy,” Jamie says, frowning.
“It’s absolutely creepy,” Ben argues. “But if someone has a problem with it, that person shouldn’t date either of you. It’s as simple as that. Neither of you makes a secret of the fact that you will choose each other over almost anything, so why would someone date you if they didn’t approve of that? It’d be like someone going after you, even if they’re not into spoiled, preppy douchebags with thick Southern accents. It wouldn’t make sense.”
Jamie narrows his eyes. “That was… almost an appropriate response, right up until that end bit.”
“Take what you can get,” Ben advises, ducking his head to hide the small smile that’s playing at the edges of his mouth. They lapse into silence, and then… actually, that’s it. They just lapse into silence.
“Are you kidding me?” I demand. “You get that fucking close, and the conversation’s over? I feel like I was just balls-deep in a really hot guy, but right when I was getting ready to come, he shoved me off and was like, ‘well, that was fun,’ and fucking peaced out so I had to finish by jerking it alone. Like, what was the point of asking—”
“Jesus Christ on a piece of toast, go inside, Garen, no one wants you out here,” Jamie snaps, sitting up.
And okay, yes, I’m going to be late for PT if I don’t get my gym bag and leave within the next minute, but I’m so completely and utterly done with this bullshit that instead, I take a deep breath and start chanting, “Ask him out, ask him out, ask him out, ask him out, ask him—”
“Fucking fine,” Jamie bursts out, and he leans around me to say to Ben, “Would you like to go out with me tomorrow night?”
Shit. I hadn’t expected him to really do it. I whip around to stare at Ben, who raises his right hand like he’s holding an invisible pen.
“Dear Diary,” he says flatly, pantomiming writing in the air, “Today, something magical happened. Garen verbally abused James into asking me out. I felt so special. Love, Ben.”
“Come on, that was at least a semi-gentlemanly way of asking,” I wheedle. “Considering the way you guys usually talk to each other, that should make you want to like, compose a sonnet in your fuckin’ Moleskine.”
“Oh, my mistake. I didn’t realize that the bare minimum of civility was grounds for poetry,” Ben says. “Would a limerick suffice?”
“I think I warrant a haiku, at the very least,” Jamie admits.
“You are a douchebag,” Ben says, counting off the syllables on his fingers. “But I have no self-respect, and your dick is huge.”
Jamie smirks. “And thus, we find out the real reason you still put up with me. Not that there was much of a doubt.” He hesitates, scratches at the back of his neck, and eventually says, “I probably would have gotten around to asking you out sometime anyway, even if Garen wasn’t such a meddlesome little shit. So, it was a legitimate question, and it still stands. Do you want to go out with me tomorrow?”
“Want’s too strong a word,” Ben says, still counting syllables. “I don’t have other plans, though.” He pauses, looks at Jamie, and adds, “I still won’t put out.”
“There are less than three weeks left to Lent,” Jamie says. “I can wait.”
Ben looks around at him, stares hard for a minute in silence. Jamie just stares back. I try not to let out the annoyed sigh that I can feel building in my lungs, because I’m pretty sure that this is the moment, as long as these two morons can nut up and stop tiptoeing around the prospect of a real date.
Finally, Ben gives a short nod and looks out at where Omelette is trying but failing to tunnel under the edge of the fence. “’Kay.”
“’Kay?” Jamie echoes, and Ben rolls his eyes.
“Okay. Yes, fine. I’ll, um—I’ll go out with you, I guess.”
“This is heart-warming,” I declare, setting my empty coffee mug down on the deck so that I can fling an arm around each of them, but the moment is over before it even begins; they’re already bitching at each other over the top of my head.
“Fine, you guess you’ll go out with me. Sweet Lord, McCutcheon, your enthusiasm is enough to make a boy blush—”
“How am I supposed to react? Were you expecting tears of joy, or—”
“You are so annoying. When I buy you dinner, will you finally use your mouth to do something other than whine? Or should I expect you to continue doing that even whilst you eat?”
“When you what? You’re not buying me dinner, dude, we’re going Dutch. And I sincerely hope you’re not planning on us going anywhere that would require me to wear something besides jeans and Converse, because that’s pretty much all I brought with me—”
“Maybe I’ll take you somewhere you can blend in, like a crust punk show in Williamsburg.”
“I don’t understand—was that an attempt to threaten me? Because I would love to go to a crust punk show in Williamsburg—”
“Well, this is, you know, cute,” I say loudly, waving a hand between them, “I’m gonna go to school now, before I’m late for PT. Try not to kill each other. And when this argument dissolves into frantic handjobs in my living room, don’t get dude juice all over the couch, or Trav’ll be pissed.”
Despite how much I speed on the way to school, I am late to PT, and Sergeant Smitth gives me shit for it in front of everyone. My day doesn’t get better after that. I’m forced to stay behind after dismissal to run laps as punishment, so I end up missing breakfast. There’s a pop quiz during statistics. Halfway through chem lab, Javi accidentally drops a beaker while I’m crouching down to get a set of scales out of the cabinet under our lab station; the beaker lands half on the ground, half on the hand I’m using to brace myself. Glass gets everywhere, and I miss the rest of the class because Mr. DeCarlo sends me up to the infirmary to get tiny glass slivers pulled out of the gash on the back of my hand.
By the end of the day, all I want to do is go home, but I need all the experiment notes I missed. Declan gives me his at the end of MLEP—his version of an apology for being an asshat last night, I figure—but the copy machine in the guidance office is broken. I spend the next hour holed up in the library, copying the notes by hand into my notebook. I trudge up to Whitman Hall and bang my good fist against the door to room two-twelve. Javi answers it, and he seems to be the only one there. I hold up the notebook. “Done with Dec’s notes. Is he around?”
“No, he’s outside, running the obstacle course,” Javi says. At my furrowed brow, he adds, “The course all the seniors have to run as part of the PT final in May? He practices on it during study hours every day.”
“That sounds like the least enjoyable thing ever,” I say.
Javi snorts. “Right? He tried to get me to join him a couple times, but I gave up. He’s more of a tyrant than Smitth is.” He gestures towards the notebook. “You can leave that on his desk, if you want. His backpack’s here, so it doesn’t make much sense to bring it out to the course.”
“Thanks,” I say, stepping into the room and dumping the notebook on the desk that isn’t littered with framed pictures of Javi and Vanessa. When I look back at Javi, he’s shifting guilty from foot to foot and staring at my bandaged hand. I roll my eyes. “Dude, it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”
“Did they at least give you some kind of painkiller in the infirmary?” he asks.
I shrug. “No. Kinda trying to avoid the painkiller thing, you know?”
He ducks his head. “Oh. Right.”
“Shut up, I’m fine,” I say, reaching out and shoving at his shoulder. “When Campbell gets back, tell him I said thanks for the notes. I’ll see you both tomorrow morning.”
But I only make it halfway to my car before curiosity overcomes me, and I find myself changing direction, heading across campus to the obstacle course at the edge of the property. It’s not a small course by any means—equal parts “typical military obstacle course” and “proof of sadism in the PMA administration.” I can’t fathom doing it once, let alone every day.
I hear Declan before I see him; there are sharp inhales and thumping footsteps coming from the far side of the nearest climbing wall. I only have to wait a moment for Declan’s flushed face to appear at the top of the wall. He swings himself over, scrambles down the first few footholds, then drops the remaining six or so feet to the ground. He sees me the moment he turns around, but doesn’t break stride in his path to the horizontal beams he needs to jump over. Once he’s cleared the last one, he sprints towards the final obstacle—the rope climb. He hoists himself up so quickly I nearly miss the whole thing, beats the side of his fist against the support structure once to signal his completion, then shoves a hand into his pocket briefly before returning himself to the ground.
It seems like a moment when I should applaud, but I’m glad I refrain, because his hand returns to his pocket and withdraws a stop watch. He peers down at his time and sneers.
“Disappointed?” I say.
“Often,” he replies. “Javi tell you where to find me?”
I nod. “I stopped by your room to drop off your notes. Thanks again for letting me copy ‘em.”
“Care to pay me back?”
“Depends how you want me to pay,” I say, letting the corner of my mouth hitch into a smirk as I give him a long, steady once-over. His face is still flushed, his chest rising and falling more quickly with his labored breathing. Every inch of him is splattered with mud and sweat.
“Make yourself useful,” he orders. “Time me.”
I accept the stopwatch, but blink down at the numbers frozen on the screen. “Is that your time? Or at least, your most recent time?” He nods once. “Dude, the course is designed to take twelve minutes, but you can pass with anything less than fifteen. If you can do it in ten minutes and six seconds, why the hell are you still practicing?”
“The school record is eight minutes and forty-four seconds,” he says. “I’ve only ever been able to manage nine twenty-two.”
I raise my eyebrows. Last spring, Jamie clocked a ten minute, thirty-nine second course run, and he had one of the best times in the grade. I’m pretty sure the eight minute, forty-four second run happened once in the eighties and hasn’t been touched since. But hey, if Dec wants to drive himself crazy trying to beat it, that’s his prerogative. “Alright, then.” I reset the watch. “Ready? Get set. Go.” I press the start button as he takes off at a dead sprint.
After years at this school, there are a lot of things I used to find sexy, but am now pretty desensitized to. School and military uniforms. Semi-public nudity in the dorms. Flushed, sweat-drenched boys working out or playing sports. I can’t remember the last time I was really turned on by watching a guy physically exert himself outside of a sexual situation, but Christ, Declan running the course is a thing of beauty.
For months now, I’ve been aware of the fact that he has a nice body—freckled skin that runs tight over hard, thick muscle. His arms are toned, his torso slim but well-defined. Everything about him looks solid and healthy and strong. It’s one thing to see that he has an attractive body; it’s another thing entirely to watch him use it. He moves so… recklessly. He runs as fast as he can towards solid obstacles, and when he reaches them, he throws himself onto them or under them or at them, seemingly unaware of how badly he batters his flesh at times. He jerks his limbs around roughly, violently, and his face is twisted into a frustrated grimace. He treats his body like it’s a weak and disappointing vessel, like he knows that everything that’s inside of him is so much faster and stronger than his skin will let him be.
He drags himself up the rope climb faster than I’ve ever seen anyone manage it before. The second his palm connects with the beam at the top, I stop the clock. He looks over at me, but I wait until he has lowered himself carefully to the ground again before I announce, “Ten minutes, four seconds. That’s awe—”
“I’m running it again. Time me, or give me the watch.”
I reset the watch and wave him towards the start line. He takes his time walking over to it, eyes closed, breathing deep. When he finally opens his eyes and gets into a position to start from, I count him off again, and he bolts. This time, he only gets a ten and ten, which only deepens his scowl. He runs it again and gets a ten and nine. Again, and now he’s up to a ten eighteen. He’s panting and shaking , and he’s got his teeth bared like he’s an animal.
“Maybe you should take a break,” I suggest slowly, because that seems like a more appropriate thing to say than we’ve been out here for the better part of an hour, and I’m beginning to think you’re insane.
“You run it,” he demands, breathless. “Go—you—I want to see how long it takes you. Go.”
“Uh. See, I’d sort of prefer not to? I’m still wearing my uniform, and my hand is bandaged, and there’s kind of a lot of mud and water and nastiness involved. It seems like a bad combination, so—”
I break off, because Declan has aimed his unblinking stare straight at me, and it’s intimidating enough to make me want to be silent. Finally, once he’s satisfied that I’m done protesting, he says, “Take off your jacket, shirt, and tie. Tighten up your boot laces. If your bandage gets ruined, you can go to the infirmary and get it set again before you go home. Run the course.”
“I can… do that, I guess?” I say, holding out the stopwatch by the cord so that it dangles between us. Declan grabs it out of my hand and sits down hard on the ground, taking long, desperate gulps from one of the water bottles he must have set out earlier. I strip off my leather jacket, then my necktie, and after a moment of consideration, my button-down, leaving me in just my boots, my uniform pants, and a plain black t-shirt. I empty my pockets, trudge over to the starting point of the course and warn, “Uh, keep in mind, I’ve never actually done this course before, so I might fall on my ass. And if I do, you’re not allowed to make fun of me.”
Instead of agreeing, Declan resets the stopwatch and counts down, “Three. Two. One. Go.”
I take off at a run towards the first set of obstacles, a series of horizontal beams at varying heights with maybe eight feet of distance between each beam. I hop over each of them fairly easily—the course is designed to get harder as it goes on. Next, there’s a long line of tires to stutter-step through, then some higher beams. From there, it’s straight-up awful—tangled cargo nets to climb up, parallel bars to drag myself along like I’m a fucking two-toed sloth, rope bridges to edge along over a miniature pond that’s covered in a green film. I whine aloud when I get to the crawl; it’s supposed to be a thirty-foot stretch of dirt under coils of concertina wire, but it rained for three hours late this morning, so it’s currently a mud crawl.
I stop and turn around to look at Declan, hoping he’ll tell me I can stop, but his face is blank. I sigh and drop to the ground, flattening my body and digging my elbows and the inside of my knees into the wet, sloppy earth. I come out the other side with my entire front caked in mud.
The last big obstacle is a six-foot-tall wall that I have to scramble over, and then I’m slapping my hands down on the wooden beam that marks the end of the first half of the course. From there, it’s all the same, but in reverse, which fucking blows, because it means the first thing I have to do is climb a six-foot wall from a dead stop. I manage it, drop to the ground, and keep going. Luckily, the course gets easier now, except for the last wall and the rope climb right at the end, which sucks a dick. I haven’t done a rope climb in over a year, and my injured hand is already throbbing, half-bandaged and probably going to get infected if I don’t clean it out soon. Declan still isn’t letting up, though, so I try to haul myself up the rope as quickly as I can, ignoring the pain of it.
I slap the top beam and pretty much flail my way back to the ground as Declan says, “Twelve minutes, forty-seven seconds.”
“Not bad, for my first time at it,” I say, shrugging. “I’ll probably forget about it for now, then practice a couple times the week before finals. All I really care about is clocking a time that lets me pass MLEP. The only guys who actually give a shit about their times are the ones who plan to enlist.”
Declan stands up and looks around at me. “What are you planning to do after graduation?”
“No idea,” I say, sprawling out on the grass. “I’ve got some—well, they might be acceptance letters, or they might be rejection letters. Either way, I’ve got a stack of ‘em in my room somewhere. They keep coming in, only I never check the mail, so Travis puts them in my room and tries to get me to open them, but I haven’t even bothered to look at them yet. I mean, I fucking hate school, so I’m really not sure I’m up for another four years of it.” I cock my head to the side. “Why? What are you planning to do?”
“I’m going to West Point,” Declan says, one eyebrow raised just enough to be noticeable. “Now do you understand why getting a good time on this course is important to me?”
“You’re gonna look so cute in your little fatigues, I bet,” I say with a sly smile. When he continues to look unimpressed, I roll my eyes and gesture towards the course again. “If you want to run it again, I’ll work the clock one more time, but then I’m going home. Studying for finals is boring, and that’s what this is, even if it involves a lot more sweat than usual.”
He takes to the course again. The thirteen-minute break has helped him, but not by much; he manages a nine minute, fifty-eight second run, snapping at me to call out the time before he has even come down from the rope climb. The moment the words are out of my mouth, he scrapes himself halfway down the rope and lets go, crumpling to the ground and not moving. He isn’t far enough away to justify standing and running; I scramble onto my hands and knees and crawl over to him, even though my hand is still screaming with every movement.
“Dec,” I say sharply, “Declan, dude, are you good?”
“’m fine,” he breathes, but barely. “I’m just… exhausted. Winded.”
“You’d probably be less winded if you hadn’t just fallen ten feet through the air,” I point out.
He doesn’t reply, only blinks slowly up at me. I suddenly become aware of the fact that I’m still kind of hovering over him, sitting on my heels to one side of him, but with one palm braced on the ground above each of his shoulders. I make to lean back, to give him some breathing room, but when I shift away, he catches my wrist and turns his attention to my failing bandage.
“How’s your hand?”
“Fine.” My voice very nearly breaks; it’s possibly the most humiliating thing to ever happen to me. I clear my throat and sit back on my heels, but Declan hasn’t released my arm. My movement draws him upright, much too close to what I’d consider my personal space bubble. I force another cough into my free fist and repeat, “It’s fine. I’ll take care of it when I get home.”
“Let me look at it,” he urges.
I try to shake him off. “Dude, it’s not a big deal, I can—”
“Let me look at it, Anderson.”
“No. It’s fine,” I try to say, but the ‘fine’ comes out as more of a huff than a word, because Declan shoves me flat onto my back and sprawls out on top of me, pinning my lower body in place with his and bracing one palm against my chest to keep me down while the other tightens around my wrist so that he can bring my hand up for closer inspection. I try to kick him, and when that fails miserably, I whine, “Get the hell off me, you fucking loser.”
He snorts. “Come on, like you haven’t been practically begging me to get on you for months now. I figured you’d be happy about this.”
That right there is way, way too close to the bone. I give a slight wriggle, trying to see if I can flip him off of me without hurting him. It doesn’t work. “Very funny. Seriously, that’s adorable. Shut up.”
“Do you think I don’t see the way you look at me?” he asks. “Do you think I don’t realize just how serious you are when you’re flirting with me at meals, or during MLEP, or when we’re out with the guys?”
And suddenly, this isn’t even remotely fun anymore. I shove at his shoulders and order, “Get off. I want to go home.”
“Hey, it’s not a bad thing,” Declan says, like he’s trying to calm me down, which is stupid, because I’m not fucking freaking out, I just want to leave. He does this—this stupid fucking thing he’s been doing since I shaved my head, where he smooths his hand over what’s left of my hair, like he’s fucking petting me. He does it as a wordless greeting in the morning before PT, he does it when my hair is still damp at breakfast, he does it if we bump into each other in the halls between classes, he does it when he sprawls out in the chair next to mine during MLEP, and he does it now, when he’s got me on my back, squirming underneath his weight. He cocks his head to the side and gives me this little half-smile. “Truthfully, I kind of like it. I mean, when I first started school here, I used to look up to you, you know? I wanted to be like you. And now you’re here, and we’re friends, and you want me. It’s like reading comic books when you’re a kid, and then growing up well enough that Bruce Wayne wants to fuck you in the Batmobile.”
“Glad to be of service, now get off of me, I mean it,” I snap, but he readjusts his stance just enough to slip one of his legs between mine, and then he’s pressing down with his hips, grinding down against me. Completely without my permission, my back arches so sharply that I end up banging my head against the ground.
Like I haven’t spoken at all, Declan ducks down and whispers right next to my ear, “That what you want, Garen? You wanna fuck me in your Ferrari?”
I do, I really, really do, but I know it’s not going to happen. He’s only doing this to tease me, because Declan Campbell is nothing if not a raging fucking narcissist who gets off on knowing that everyone—straight girls, gay boys, whoever—wants his dick. And I never wanted to be this guy; the gay guy who embarrasses the shit out of himself by getting a crush on the straight boy he’s friends with. I’ve never done something this pathetic before. The closest I’ve ever come was falling for Travis back when he still thought he was straight, and that doesn’t count, because he ended up not being straight. But Dec… he’s getting nothing out of this. I can feel him pressed up against me, and he’s still completely soft, not even a twitch of interest in the friction. That’s kind of the worst part.
“If you don’t get off of me within the next like, ten seconds, I swear to god, I’m gonna punch you in the fucking face,” I warn.
He frowns, but it’s a curious frown, not an angry one. “You’re pissed at me. Are you embarrassed?”
“Of course I’m fucking embarrassed,” I hiss.
He slips a hand between us and palms the still-growing hardness at the front of my mud-stained trousers. I might make a sound. He gives me an infuriatingly faint squeeze. “Are you embarrassed because of this?”
“Y-Yeah, it’s because of that, you fucking idiot,” I snap, writhing in place until he moves his hand away again. “Christ, Campbell. I know I joke around with you or whatever, but I kind of try not to be that faggot who shoves his fucking boner at his straight friends. It’s not—I can’t help it, not when you’re on me like this, so if you’d just get off me, I could—”
“I don’t care, Garen,” he tries to reassure me. For the first time since I’ve met him, he seems like my discomfort actually displeases him. It’s a nice change, but it would be a nicer change if he’d get off me, like I’ve asked. Nicer still, if he’d shut the fuck up. “I know you like me. I know you want to sleep with me. It’s fine, I don’t mind. You know I’m not going to treat you any differently from how I treat my straight friends. Alright?”
I close my eyes and force myself to take a slow, deep breath. I’m hoping it will help me calm down, but it doesn’t. My face is still burning and my dick is still rock hard when I say, “Alright. Fine. I get it. Can I go now? Please?”
For a moment, nothing happens, and then I feel what I’m pretty sure is his thumb brushing across my lower lip, like he’s smearing away one of the dots of mud splatter that have left me with an earthy version of his freckles. The touch is surprising enough to make my eyes snap open, but by the time I can focus, he’s already rolling off to the side, freeing me.
“Of course,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s—I’m the one who should be sorry, alright? I didn’t mean to—” I blow out a harsh, exasperated breath, then haul myself to my feet and collect my belongings. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I stop by the locker room to shower, shove my muddy uniform into my gym bag, and change back into my slightly grody PT clothes from this morning. When I get home, Ben is lying on the couch, holding a book in one hand and absently reaching down to scratch the back of Omelette’s neck with the other. He looks up when I enter, then makes a little noise of pained protest when I collapse on top of him and announce, “I am so fucking sick of straight people, I swear to god.”
“Did something happen?” He tries to wriggle in place, but it doesn’t work. At all. “Also, what the fuck, you weigh almost twice as much as me. Get off, before I suffocate.”
Instead of getting off, I bury my face in the front of his hoodie. Almost immediately, I’m hit with a pretty weird sensory experience—he feels like he always does, but instead of smelling, you know, like himself, like he usually does, he smells like Jamie; Jamie’s cologne, Jamie’s shower gel, Jamie’s shampoo. I draw back, blink at his chest, then roll my eyes; if the words ‘Patton Military Academy Varsity Lacrosse Team’ printed in navy letters across the chest of the hoodie weren’t a hint to the real owner, the embroidered Captain on the right bicep and Goldwyn #16 on the left are information enough.
I flop back down on him, but I guess he has appeased me enough for one evening, because he shoves me off him onto the floor. I land right next to Omelette, who thrusts his tongue out and slops it all over my cheek. I duck away from the tongue-bath, but scratch him under the jaw while his tail beats frantically against the carpet.
Ben leans over to peer at me from the edge of the couch. “Why do you suddenly hate straight people?”
I sigh and rub my palm over my face, mostly so I won’t have to make eye contact. “Because they—look, you ever had a straight guy flirt with you because he thinks it’s amusing that you want him, or whatever?” He shakes his head slowly. I sigh again. “Well, Declan is—I don’t know. I guess I’m just sick of it being like, funny to him. I get it, alright? I’m into him, but I’m a guy, and he’s not into guys, so it’s not gonna happen. Doesn’t mean I want to talk about it.”
Ben raises an eyebrow. “Does that mean you’d rather I stopped asking you about it?”
“Kind of,” I admit. For a minute, we both lie there in silence.
“I know something that’ll make you feel better,” he finally says, breaking out of his typical monotone to use a sing-song voice. “Guess what I did today.”
I reach up and pluck at the sleeve of the hoodie. “Honestly? Kind of guessing you did Jamie.”
“Shut up,” he says, ducking out of sight again.
I sit up and grab him by the shoulder, twisting him away from the back of the couch so he’s facing me again. I say, “Come on. You saw him today, right? You guys hung out?”
Slowly, Ben nods. “Sort of. I mean, he mostly just needed my help picking out your birthday present, so he picked me up and we went to the city. Spent maybe two hours doing that. Went back to his place after.” I smirk. He flushes and rolls over to lie facedown on the cushions. “We didn’t—I mean, we didn’t fuck. Not really. But we hooked up, sort of.” He rubs his forehead against the arm of the couch. From this angle, I can see that his eyes are still open, staring hard at the cushion a few inches from his face. “I really fucked up with Lent this year.”
He sounds so… broken up over it, and I have no idea what to say. Sure, I believe in God, and I go to temple on the High Holy Days, but I’m not about to give up orgasms for a month and a half, and I’m sure as hell not about to feel guilty for banging a guy as hot as Jamie.
“Yeah, well, Catholics have that ‘get out of Hell free’ card, right? When you get back to Connecticut this weekend, make sure you do that whole confession and cannibalism thing,” I say. “You know, where you eat the Jesus crackers and drink the Jesus blood wine.”
That’s enough to make Ben lift his head and turn to squint at me. “Are you talking about the Eucharist? It—that’s not cannibalism, you fuckwit.”
“My point is that you don’t need to stress yourself out over this. Whatever you did with Jamie? It’s fine. Forget about it, watch a movie with me or something, do my English homework so I don’t have to. Go on your date tomorrow night, and if you wanna pound it out with Jamie again, do it. Then go home, read your Bible, get your skinny ass to church and run that forgive me, Daddy, I’ve been a bad, naughty boy scene with your priest, and you’ll be fine.”
“You should write the Garen Anderson Translation of the New Testament,” Ben says dryly. “Your religious interpretations of my faith are so enlightening.”
I manhandle him into an upright position and spread myself out over the couch next to him. “I know, I’m such a joy. Now, can we stop talking about boys and braiding each other’s hair? I feel like I’m growing a vagina.”
“Don’t worry. You’re a ridiculous, boy-obsessed mess even as a man,” he assures me. I try to shove him off the couch, but Omelette barks at me in his defense. Grumbling, I have to settle for kicking my legs up onto his lap and making him watch the worst, most mind-numbing reality show I can find.
184 days sober
Five minutes before the end of chem, the classroom loudspeaker buzzes loudly enough to make everyone jump. Mr. DeCarlo picks up the extension on the wall, and all of us immediately dissolve into muttered conversation. At least, we do, right up until he hangs up, turns, and announces, “Anderson. Main office.”
“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” I say immediately. “Call ‘em back, say I’m innocent.”
Javi snorts. “You haven’t been innocent since you were about twelve years old. Learn to lie better.”
“You aren’t in trouble, but you will be, if you don’t do as you’re told,” DeCarlo says sternly.
I roll my eyes, stand, and kick my backpack towards Charlie. “Bring that to lunch for me, will you?”
At his nod of assent, I trudge out of the room, out of the science building, and halfway across campus to the main administrative building. The sprawling layout of Patton is a bitch and a half to deal with, especially on days like today, when it’s been raining on and off all morning. By the time I get to the main office, my blue Oxford is spattered dark with rainwater. I shake off like a puppy as the secretary looks up at me, nods in acknowledgment. “Garen.”
“Lisa. Been a while since we’ve seen each other, huh? You’re looking lovely as ever,” I say. I gesture towards the door separating us from the headmaster’s office. “Should I go right in?”
“No,” she says quietly. “You’re not going to be seeing Headmaster Samuels.”
I blink. “Then why am I here?”
She holds out a yellow Post-It note with something scribbled on it. “There’s a family situation that requires your attention. I’ve been asked to have you call this number to check in.”
I stare down at the Post-It. It starts with Savannah’s nine-one-two area code, so I know immediately that it’s Jamie’s number. I am instantly disturbed. My phone is in my pocket, and it’s been still almost all morning, only buzzing a few times during my earlier classes with texts from some of the guys. I pull it out and check my missed calls, just in case, but Jamie hasn’t tried to contact me at all, so I don’t understand why he’d call the school and have me taken out of class to call him.
Steeling myself for something incredibly weird, I smile my thanks at Lisa and select Jamie’s name from my contacts list. The ringing seems to drag on much longer than it should, and when it finally stops, an unfamiliar male voice says, “James Goldwyn’s phone. Who’s calling?”
“Uh,” I say, thrown, “Garen Anderson? I’m his best friend. I’m at school, and I just got pulled out of class and told to call him. What’s going on?”
“My name is Tom Hall. James is my wife’s nephew. He asked me to call you on his behalf.” There’s a brief hesitation, then Tom says, “There was an incident last night. His mother and father were involved in a car accident on their way home from dinner in town.”
My stomach lurches. “But they’re—I mean, they aren’t hurt too badly, right? He—George and Melissa, they’re okay?”
“I think you should come to his apartment in the city,” Tom says gently.
“They’re okay, right?”
“No.”
I feel like I might be sick. I sit down on the wooden bench just inside the door of the office and rub a palm over what’s left of my hair. I can feel Lisa watching me apprehensively, but I don’t care. There are hundreds of horrific images running through my head right now—missing or ruined, paralyzed limbs; cuts and burns and gaping tears in flesh; brain damage, concussions, amnesia that will stop either of them from even remembering their own son’s name. I clear my throat and ask, “How bad is it?”
“Melissa was killed on impact,” he says, and I find myself doubling over with a shudder, pressing my forehead to my knees. “George was still alive when the paramedics arrived, but his—he suffered a skull fracture, and the bleeding to his brain couldn’t be stopped. By the time they got him to the hospital, he had already died.”
No. No, no, I don’t want this to be true, I want it to be some incredibly twisted trick, but I know it’s not—Jamie jokes about a lot of things, but he loves his parents too much to ever pretend this could happen. He loves them so fucking much. It must be true, and he must be aching.
“Can I talk to Jamie?” I whisper.
“He’s in his bedroom right now. He asked not to be disturbed for the time being.”
He’s already disturbed, you stupid fuck, I want to scream down the line. His parents are dead, and the only people who are there for him right now are you and your idiot wife, who are practically fucking strangers, and he needs me. I take the deepest breath I can manage and say, “I want to talk to my friend. Now.”
“I’m only following James’ wishes. I’m sorry. If you want to speak to him, you’ll have to come to his—”
“Of course I’m going to come there, you—” Another deep breath, another one, another one. “Just—I’m leaving school now, okay? I’ll be there in about an hour. If he comes out of his room, tell him that, yeah? Tell him I’m on my way.”
I hang up before Tom can say anything else that might make me want to punch him in the mouth the second I meet him. I sit up straight and look over at the secretary, who isn’t even pretending to be doing anything other than eavesdropping. “I need to leave school early,” I say. “I don’t—I’m over eighteen, so I think I can sign myself out for the day, but if you need me to call my mom for permission, I can do that.”
I need to do that anyway. I need to call Mom, and I need to call Dad, because they’ve both met George and Melissa Goldwyn, and they’ll want to know. They’ve—we’ve all had dinner together before. All six of us have sat around restaurant tables together, when Jamie and I would get dropped off at Patton at the start of every school year and would immediately refuse to be separated again; when our parents would come to visit for Parents’ Weekend in the spring; when they’d pick us up after our spring finals and Jamie and I would start whining already about how we didn’t want to be apart for the few weeks before I went to visit him in Georgia. And it was always such a good time, hearing the way Jamie’s accent thickens when he’s talking to other people from Savannah, hearing George laugh over how much my mom and I make fun of each other, hearing Melissa and Mom have some doctor-versus-lawyer competition to see who can name-drop their respective med school and law school more times over the course of a single meal. Hearing George and Melissa call me their noisy, Yankee bonus-son. Mom and Dad knew Melissa and George, and they love Jamie, and they need to know.
“All I need you to do is sign out here,” Lisa says quietly, passing a clipboard and a sign-out sheet across the desk. My hand is practically vibrating as I scrawl something remarkably unlike my real signature over the line. “Are you sure that you’re alright to drive, dear? I think it might be better for you to call someone to come pick you up.”
I could—Travis hasn’t left for work yet, so either he or Ben could come get me. But it’ll be half an hour before they can get here, and then another hour to get to Jamie’s place, and he needs me now. I shake my head and trip out of the office and up to the dining hall. The rest of the squad is already well into lunch.
“That was quick,” Sam observes, stretching. “Probably the shortest lecture the headmaster’s ever given you. What were you getting in trouble for, anyway?”
“Nothing. I’m not in trouble,” I say flatly. My backpack is sitting on my usual chair; I should probably pick that up, shouldn’t I? I dig my keys out of the front pocket and shoulder the bag before turning my blank face towards my friends again. “Taylor, I need you to tell Dr. Stanford I won’t be in Government and Politics this afternoon. And uh, somebody needs to tell Sergeant Smitth I left early. He can check with the office, if he’s pissed about it. They gave me permission.”
Javi twists to frown up at me. “Why, what’s wrong?”
“Jamie needs me,” I say, and then, before any of them can dare to make some smartass comment, I add, “His parents were in a car accident last night, I guess.”
Charlie turns to face me, eyes wide behind his glasses. “How are they?”
“Dead,” is all I can manage to say. My words are met with absolute silence.
“Are you joking?” Steven says finally.
Very slowly, I turn my eyes to meet his. There’s a flutter of movement, like Taylor has just slugged him in the hip under the table. All I can do is stare for a long moment before I say, “No. I’m not.”
The drive to the city… happens. I think. I’m unaware of the entire thing, but it must happen, because one minute, I’m fumbling my key into the ignition of the Ferrari, and the next, I’m rolling into a parking space in the garage under Jamie’s building. Another tenant happens to be heading inside at the same time, and she holds the door for me so that I don’t need to get buzzed in. Unlike the drive from the house to here, the elevator ride from the ground floor to Jamie’s seems like it takes twice as long as usual. When I get to his door, it’s locked, so I have to knock. After a moment, I hear the click of a lock, and then the door is swinging open to reveal a sandy-haired man I’ve never met before.
“Garen?” he says, extending his hand. “Tom Hall. Please, come in.” Like I need his fucking permission. Still, I give him a quick handshake and step into the apartment. He gestures towards the living room, where three people are already seated on the couch and chairs. “This is my wife, Michelle, and our children.”
The children aren’t actually children; it’s a guy and a girl, both my age, maybe a little older. And shell-shocked, crying Michelle looks so much like Melissa Goldwyn, so much like Jamie himself. I feel uncomfortable just looking at her; no wonder Jamie’s hiding.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, then, just a breath later, “I’m going to go see James. He’s in his room, yeah?”
Tom’s nod is all I need, and then I’m striding down the hall. The door to Jamie’s bedroom is shut. I knock once, but don’t wait for his permission before I push it open.
James is standing at the foot of his bed, his back turned to me as he meticulously arranges and rearranges the contents of his suitcase. He’s already dressed for the day, wearing a dark gray, three-piece suit and standing as stiffly as if it were made of armor. He doesn’t turn around when I enter the room, so I follow my instinctive desire to step up behind him and wrap my arms around his middle, tucking my chin over his shoulder. His hands go still on the shoe he’d been holding, and after a moment, he sets the shoe down and covers my forearms with his palms instead.
I refuse to say a single one of those trite condolences that people always throw around when someone dies. I can’t say it’s okay, because it’s not, but I can’t say I’m sorry, because that would force him to be the one to say it’s okay. I can’t ask him for the full story of what happened—I’ll get that from Tom later, I guess, non-blood-relative to non-blood-relative. For now, I have to settle for saying quietly, “I’ll do anything you need me to do. Just tell me what I can do to help you, and I’ll do it. I love you so much. Whatever you need.”
Slowly, he turns his face towards mine. He’s almost blurry this close up, but even once I focus, his expression is still completely and utterly blank. He licks his lips and says, so quietly he’s barely audible, “I need to go home for a while. I need to make arrangements for the funeral, and I need to—the house shouldn’t be empty. Somebody needs to talk to the staff, and I suppose I’ll have to… meet with the lawyers, at some point. To figure out what will happen to it. The house, that is.” He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing under the knot of his tie. “Will you come to Georgia with me?”
“Of course,” I say, nodding. “I figured I’d—I mean, I didn’t wanna stop home long enough to pack a bag, but I’ve got some spare clothes here that I can take, and it’s… my teachers will understand. It’s Patton, and you’re a Patton boy, they’ll understand why I have to be with you now. I can take as much time as you want me to. Do you need me to do anything? Get tickets for the next flight South?”
He shakes his head and shrugs out of my arms, returning his focus to the suitcase open on the bed. “My uncle said he would handle it. We’re all going to fly down together, I guess. Him, us, my aunt Michelle, my cousins. They were the ones who—” He pauses, swallows, and attempts to speak again. “My aunt was the person who the Savannah Police contacted. I suppose she thought it was a message that would best be delivered in person, rather than over the phone.”
“Yeah, obviously,” I say. “I, um—Jamie, seriously, is there anything I can do for you? Please.”
Slowly, he shakes his head again. “No, I’m… I’ll finish packing. And I’ll gather your things from the closet. Would you mind asking Tom if he’s been able to reserve the tickets yet?”
I give him a lingering kiss on the forehead and let myself back out of the room. The moment I reach the end of the hallway, all of the Halls turn to me, like they’re expecting an update. I shove my hands into my pockets. “What’s the flight situation?” I ask. “Are we flying out tonight?”
The daughter quickly wipes the heel of her hand under her eyes and asks, “Are you coming to Savannah, too?”
“Jamie asked me to, so, yes, I’m coming to Savannah,” I say. I don’t add that I would’ve gone, even if he hadn’t asked me. James and I are a package deal. We’ve been inseparable at the best of times, and I can’t begin to think of leaving him alone at a time like this.
“We have a three o’clock flight out of JFK,” Tom answers.
From behind me, I hear the sound of Jamie’s footsteps, then the sound of him readjusting the hold he’s got on his suitcase. He clears his throat and says tonelessly, “We should leave soon, then. It’s only supposed to be half an hour from here to the airport, but… New York traffic being what it is, I’d rather not risk being late.”
“Want me to head downstairs and ask the doorman to get a few cabs?” I offer.
“We have our car here,” Tom says, shaking his head. “It won’t seat six, though. If you’d like to get a cab for yourselves and meets us there, I think that would be a workable plan.”
He seems inclined to handle the Hall portion of the group, which I guess leaves me to handle Jamie and myself. Tom gives me all of the flight information, as well as his own contact info, in case there’s a problem on the way there. As sort of an afterthought, he gives me the rest of the family’s numbers as well—Michelle’s, and the daughter’s and son’s, April and Ethan. I’m not sure why I need four different numbers to be sure I can handle a half hour journey apart, but I dutifully add each one to my contacts list.
Once I’ve completed that task, Tom starts shepherding his kids to the door. He returns for his wife, slipping an arm around her waist to guide her. Michelle pauses in front of Jamie, who is staring at the floor, completely still. After a minute of silence, he finally looks up to meet her eyes. She reaches up to brush her hand over his cheek and whispers, “I know.”
Her husband and kids may speak with a Connecticut non-accent, but her own voice comes out in the sweet drawl of a Georgia native. She doesn’t just look like Melissa; she sounds like her, too. Jamie grits his teeth and nods just once.
It’s a good thing that Tom knows enough to quickly herd her out into the hallway too, because the door barely has time to shut behind them before Jamie turns to me, flings an arm around my neck, and crumples.
“Laser tag!” I yelp. “James, I swear to god, I’m gonna name mine and Stohler’s first turkey-baster baby after you, because you are the greatest, and I love you.”
Laser tag at the Empire State Laser Arena is a Patton Military Academy tradition. Upperclassmen mention it to their underclassmen brothers, friends, or boyfriends, who spend years going there on the regular, and when those underclassmen become upperclassmen, they tell their underclassmen brothers, friends, or boyfriends, and it goes on. On any given weekend, half the school might be here, in large part due to the fact that the arena is a monster. It’s nearly ten thousand square feet of obstacle-ridden, black-lit, dubstep-soundtracked mayhem, and we all take it too seriously, streaking our skin with glow-in-the-dark face paint and breaking out all of our Military Leadership Education training to turn it into all-out war. Friendships have been formed and destroyed in the arena. Being selected for mine and Jamie’s team used to be considered the ultimate invitation to join the Patton social elite. It was an even bigger seal of approval than sleeping with one of us, and for good reason—I’ll fuck anybody with a nice body and a cute face, but we’re both vicious in our selection of laser tag teammates.
“Rein in the enthusiasm a bit, sweetheart,” Jamie says, grinning at me as he pulls into an empty space. “I chose the venue, but the celebration wasn’t my idea.”
“Whose was it?” I ask, even though I think I might know.
He rolls his eyes and points out the windshield. “Wow, Garen, I don’t know. Who have you been bitching about ignoring you the entire car ride?”
I look around, and sure enough, Travis is right there, sitting on the trunk of his car. There are nearly a dozen other people standing in the vicinity, but I can’t even register their faces, because he’s looking right at me and grinning so broadly that the freckles on his nose are crinkling up a little bit. I fling open the car door and tumble out of it, overeager to get over there and talk to him. I wedge myself between his knees and say, “I didn’t know you were planning something for me.”
“Surprise,” he says, sounding for all the world like he’s mocking me. “Congratu—”
That’s all he gets out; the rest turns into a muffled mmpf sort of sound when I kiss him straight on the mouth. My hands are hooked under his knees, and I’ve dragged him off the trunk so that he has to scramble to grip my shoulders and tighten his legs on my waist to keep himself upright. It only lasts a few seconds before I pull away.
“You little shit,” I say, releasing his legs so that he can regain his footing. “I thought you’d forgotten.”
“That’s because you are a raging attention whore and assume you’ve been forgotten anytime someone isn’t staring directly at you,” he says. He’s ducking his head a little, and when I twist to get a better look at his face, I realize it’s because he’s blushing. It’s a good look for him—I press another quick kiss to the corner of his mouth to keep it there.
There’s a snort from behind me, and I turn. Stohler is standing there, hands tucked into the tiny pockets of her fitted hoodie. “Is that how you two greet each other every night, even though you live together now?”
“It’s none of your business what I do to him every night,” I say with an exaggerated leer. “Besides, maybe that’s just how I greet all my friends. Here, watch.”
The rest of the group is made up of Ben and Alex—who are both leaning against the bumper of Stohler’s Mustang—and my Patton squad, so I fling an arm around Steven’s shoulders and smack a loud, showy kiss to his cheek. He wriggles away from me. “Get off me, you jackass.”
“Dude, why are you even here?” I ask, then turn to face Travis again. “How did you get in touch with my Patton guys?”
“That would be my doing,” Jamie says, coming up behind me and hooking his chin over my shoulder. “Though, I’d be lying if I pretended that I did anything more suave than walk into the Whitman dorm, grab an underclassman, and demand to know the room number of whichever senior he was most terrified of.” He pauses and nods briefly towards the rest of the group. “Pleasure to see you again, Mr. Campbell.”
Declan, who is leaning against Taylor’s car, gives him a salute, but says nothing around the cigarette that’s dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Thanks, you guys. This is awesome,” I say. “By which I really mean, this is going to be awesome for me, when I kick everyone’s asses. It’s probably going to suck for you all, though.”
Taylor snorts. “We’ll see about that. You’ve been off in Connecticut for a year now, so I’m betting you’re more than a little out of practice.”
“Is there any kind of preference for how we divide the teams?” Javi asks as our entire group begins to make the trip into the building. “We should try to keep things even. You know, some good shooters and some bad on each side.”
“Jamie and I have to be on the same team,” I interject, before anyone else can get a word in.
Ben rolls his eyes. “Why? Are you concerned that you might not be able to hold hands the whole time, if you’re on opposite teams?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Are you bitter about the fact that holding my hand and his laser gun would leave him without any hand to grope you with?”
Ben stomps hard on my foot, then shoots a sharp glance towards Alex, who is thankfully walking far enough behind us that he probably can’t hear. Jamie, who is still plastered to my side, clears his throat and continues a shade too loudly, “Garen and I have to be on the same team because we become hostile when asked to compete with each other.”
“It’s true,” I sigh. “We tried it once in ninth grade, and the whole night was pretty much a bloodbath. He got kind of hurt—”
“Take responsibility for your actions,” Jamie orders.
“I hurt him,” I amend, chastised, and Sam chuckles. “That—yes, okay, I instigated a physical confrontation that may have—”
“—that did—”
“—that may have contributed to him leaving the arena with a mildly sprained wrist. But I felt really bad about it!” I say quickly, when Travis shoots me a very exasperated look. “And I apologized. And I took over all his jerk-off duties during the two weeks his wrist was out of commission.”
“A more than fair trade,” Jamie agrees. “I have a clumsy left hand and a high sex drive. He was a busy boy.”
“The point is, we need to be on the same team, or people are going to be maimed,” I say. The building houses a sprawling snack bar and lounge area, and I’d kill for some nachos right now, but there are more important matters to attend to. I open the door to the arena’s prep room and wave everyone through ahead of me. “And since he and I are probably better at this than any of you guys, how ‘bout we take the Connecticut dead weight on our team? Me, Jamie, Travis, Ben, Alex, and Stohls versus Javi, Dec, Taylor, Charlie, Steven, and Sam. Fair enough?”
“I resent being referred to as dead weight,” Travis says.
I quirk an eyebrow at him. “Can you shoot?”
“Of course not, but I intend to make myself extremely useful as a human shield. Besides, you—Jesus Christ,” he breaks off, blinking around the room that he has just been led into. “What’s with the fucking war room?”
“This is where the game starts,” I say, with a sweeping gesture towards the room. “We put on our chest-pieces and get our guns, and then each team heads down its own hallway so we’re starting at opposite ends of the arena. So, yeah, just grab a chest-piece and lock yourself into it.”
Charlie unhooks one of the red chest-pieces from the wall and passes it to me with a hesitant smile. It takes every bit of self-control I possess to smile back instead of rolling my eyes. He’s been doing this for weeks now, ever since he saw the hospital pictures and realized just how wrong he was about my relationship with his brother. He’s always the first to pass me lab supplies during chemistry or whatever food I want during mealtime; he always wants to partner me for PT drills in the morning, and he saves me a seat at MLEP almost every evening—I can’t remember the last time I showed up for that class and wasn’t immediately directed to the chair between him and Declan. It’s… weird, I guess, but nice. At least, it’s sure as hell better than the animosity I’d faced from both of them during my first few weeks at school.
“Hey, G?” Travis says, frowning down at his own somewhat lopsided chest-piece. “I’m apparently experiencing some technical difficulties. Would you mind helping me out?”
I pretty much trip over myself in my haste to get close enough to grab at him—I figured out towards the end of sophomore year that helping dudes with their laser tag gear is a shockingly effective pick-up strategy—but the moment I actually take in the harness, I can’t stop myself from rolling my eyes. He has somehow managed to get one of the straps tangled around itself in some sort of knot that looks like it’ll take me ten minutes to untie. For simplicity’s sake, I slip the entire harness off him, replace it on its hook, and crouch down in front of it to work through it from there.
“These harnesses are retarded,” Alex announces. “I quit, I wanna go home.”
“Yeah, they have buckles in weird places. Hang on a sec, and I’ll do yours for you,” I say, but Jamie is already coming over to begin shortening the straps on Alex’s chest-piece.
There’s an awkward moment in which he seemingly realizes what he’s done—that this is the first interaction they’ve had since the diner in November—and then he glances up with a small, mostly neutral smile. “Hello there, Alexander. Been a minute since I’ve seen you.”
“Yeah,” Alex says, meeting his gaze. “You look good.”
“Don’t I always?” Jamie replies. The comment lacks some of the flirtation I’d expect, but Alex must not notice, because the edge of his mouth quirks up a bit.
I glance around to see if Ben is close enough to hear the exchange, but he’s on the other side of the room. Rather than wait for Jamie or me to help him with his harness—and probably grope him in the process—he has taken it upon himself to make small talk with Taylor while my squadmate tightens the straps for him. The exchange is entirely grope-less. Once I’ve finished untangling Travis’ harness and buckling him into it, I turn to help Stohler, but she’s already wearing a perfectly adjusted piece and looking bored.
“I take it you’ve played before,” I say.
She scoffs. “Of course I have. And I’m a fucking boss at it, so your little boarding school buddies should prepare themselves.”
“You can shoot?” Steven says, sounding surprised as he looks around at her.
Stohler raises an eyebrow. “I can,” she agrees, then raises her voice to add, “I can also pistol-whip that ginger with my laser gun, if he looks at my tits one more time.”
Declan makes no effort to disguise the fact that he’s staring at the inch or two of cleavage at the top of her laser gear. He slowly drags his eyes from Stohler’s breasts to her collarbone, up her neck, settling on her mouth for a moment, and finally meeting her eyes. “Do you honestly expect me to believe that getting men to stare at your tits isn’t the entire purpose of a shirt like that? Some might say that you’re aiming for the attention.”
Ben turns to say over his shoulder, “And others might say that you’re a lecher and a narcissist for actually believing that. Do you pick out your clothes because you’re trying to get people to stare at the outline of your junk?”
“Well, clearly you do,” Jamie says, giving Ben’s skinny jeans a look that’s heated enough to leave Alex frowning deeply.
“I swear to Christ, Goldwyn, if I see your eyes travel south of my shoulders again, I will carve them out of your fucking skull, mash them into a paste, and make you eat them,” Ben says.
Javi leans towards Sam and mutters, “Man, public school kids are violent.”
In what I suspect is mostly an attempt to get Alex to stop staring at him like he’s trying to piece something together, Jamie strolls across the room and claps Declan on the shoulder. “Well, if you are trying to get a man to stare at whatever you’re packing, I think you’ve already taken a very important first step by befriending Garen. Once you’ve done that, you essentially just have to show up and let it happen.”
“I can’t help it,” I protest. “And you shouldn’t make fun of me for that. Sex addiction is a serious condition. My rehab center has meetings for it and everything.”
“Have you considered attending one of these meetings?” Stohler asks.
“No point. The guy who runs them is really hot, and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate,” I say earnestly.
Steven scoffs and knocks his elbow against mine. “You’re ridiculous. Get your fuckin’ team out of here. We’ll see you in the arena.”
“Are we really going to forego the great tradition of pre-game shit-talking?” I say, returning to the side of the room where the rest of the red team is already gathered. “C’mon. I bet Campbell’s got some snappy little retort he’s just dying to get in before we start.”
“My aim speaks for itself. I don’t need to shit-talk,” Declan says, examining his laser gun. He pauses, glances up at my team. “What about you? I’ve heard you’ve got quite the mouth on you.”
I flash him a smile that’s maybe a little bit more wolfish than strictly necessary. “Oh, you have no idea.”
“Alright, we’re stopping this right now,” Taylor says sharply. “I refuse to let the shit-talk devolve into Garen shamelessly indulging Dec’s sudden and alarming bicuriosity. Someone, anyone else, speak. How ‘bout you, Goldwyn? Something to set the tone?”
“In the words of our school’s namesake, General George S. Patton,” Jamie says, eying the squad like he plans to skin them, “May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won’t.”
Behind us, Travis leans closer to Ben and whispers, “Do you think they realize that this is a game?”
“Apparently not,” Ben whispers back.
Stohler jabs her gun into my ribs and fires off a few shots. They don’t do anything, but they do make a pretty obnoxious pew pew sort of noise. “Let’s go. You sheepfuckers can resume the dick-measuring contest after the game, once we’ve all seen the scores.”
“Stohler, babe, don’t worry,” I say, flinging an arm around her shoulders and steering our group down the red hallway. “Everyone knows you’ve got the biggest dick here.
“You’re damn right I do,” she agrees.
“So, what’s our strategy?” Jamie asks me. “You take Campbell, I take Santos, let the grunts handle the others?”
“Are we the grunts?” Travis asks, gesturing to Ben, Alex, and Stohler.
“You’re the grunts,” I confirm, then a second later, after we’ve reached the end of the hall where we’re meant to wait, “No, wait. You, Ben, and Alex are the grunts. Stohler’s with Jamie and me. And nah, I was actually thinking we could make their ineptitude work for us.” I hitch my chin towards the door separating us from the blue team. “They’re Patton boys who are used to playing other Patton boys. And Declan’s a tyrant, so he’s probably going to try to keep them to some sort of formation. What if we just kinda… go for it, you know? Let the grunts go apeshit. We all just run around and aim for anything blue.”
Jamie grimaces. “It lacks the poetry of our usual assault tactics.”
“It doesn’t have to,” I say, as Travis mutters a disdainful echo of assault tactics, what the fuck. “Hey, McCutcheon, hit me with some war poetry. I know you’ve got some stashed away in that freaky little brain of yours.”
“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, my friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori,” Ben recites, though his attention is focused on his laser gun. “If I shoot someone on our team, do I still get points?”
Jamie narrows his eyes. “No. You just get beaten for shooting me.”
“If you shoot someone on our team, their gun still goes offline for fifteen seconds, but you don’t get any points on your individual score. And at the end, all our points get tallied up, and whichever team has more is the winner,” I explain. “So, if you shoot anyone—by which I mean, if you shoot Jamie, you’re really just making it so that our team has one less active player for a quarter of a minute. It doesn’t benefit you.”
“Might make you happy, though,” Alex points out.
“Right up until I make him ride in the trunk the whole way back to the house,” Jamie says. At my curious look, he tacks on, “The midget’s going back to your place tonight when I bring you and McCall there. That ‘he might come and stay with us for a few days’ comment you made in the car on the way here? It’s much less hypothetical than you thought it was.”
I throw my arms around Ben, narrowly avoiding giving him a black eye with my chest-piece. “You’re coming to stay with me? This is the best six-months-sober-slash-pre-birthday present ever!”
“Get off me, you assclown,” Ben says, trying to wriggle out of my grasp. I let him, but my enthusiasm still stands. Jamie may be my best friend, and Travis may be everything else, but Ben and I can really hang out; we like the same movies, we like most of the same music, we can go to shows and record stores. And, most importantly--
“You can meet my puppy,” I realize, in a voice so thrilled it’s almost a whisper. Travis frowns at me, and I quickly amend, “Our puppy. The puppy. Omelette.”
“That beast is not a puppy,” Jamie says. “It’s nearly as big as McCutcheon.”
“That’s not—” I start to say, but the door to the arena buzzes and swings open, and suddenly, that’s where all of my focus is. I shove Alex towards it and snap, “Go, get out there, now!”
Jamie bolts out after him, followed by Stohler, then Ben, at a much more reluctant pace. Travis is the last to leave, but not before he gives me a quick peck on the cheek and says, “You take this game way too seriously, dude.”
If any part of me doubts his words, that part is proven hilariously wrong within the first ten minutes of game play. For weeks now, I’ve been back in PT, back on the field, back in marksmanship sessions, but I’m still out of practice. It takes me a while to get back in the swing of things, even though—with all due modesty—I’m still the baddest motherfucker in the arena.
“God fucking damn it, Anderson,” Charlie groans when I black out his chest-piece for the sixth time. “You’re never coming to play with us again!”
I let out a shout of laughter and duck behind him to shield myself from Steven’s wild shots in my direction. “Tough shit, Walczyk, I’m in the squad. You guys are stuck with me.”
Charlie’s chest-piece lights back up, but he doesn’t even have time to turn and try to get a shot at me before one of Steven’s shots hits him instead of me, sending him right back into uselessness. He howls, “Ramsey! I’m on your friggin’ team!”
I take out Steven next, then run away to stalk the arena, wild-eyed, searching for stupid fucking Declan and his stupid fucking smartass mouth. Every time I’m convinced that I’ve found his location, I end up being distracted by the other players. I’ve always been more of an offensive player than a defensive one, but this is different—I feel like I’m hunting him. It takes almost twenty of the thirty minutes of game play before I find him, taking cover behind an obstacle at the edge of the arena and sniping out other players. I’m coming at him from an angle, so he hasn’t seen me yet. It’s perfect. I take aim, fire, and nail him on the first try.
Declan’s eyes snap to his darkened, buzzing chest-piece. His gun is still raised, and his mouth is slightly open, like he genuinely cannot believe that anyone managed to get a shot in on him. I can’t hold back the laughter that inspires, and then those eyes are on me, on my still-aimed gun. His mouth clicks shut, and something white-hot flashes over his face as he moves towards me. He won’t be able to shoot me for another fifteen seconds, so I don’t hesitate to raise my gun in a show of surrender as I try to wheedle him, “C’mon, Dec, don’t be like that. I’ve been trying to get that shot in since the game started. You can’t get pissed at me just because I—”
“Not pissed at you,” he says shortly, and then I’ve got the wall at my back and Declan pressed to my front. Our chest-pieces clatter together loudly, and for a second, I think he’s going to fight me. But his hands are wound into fists around the fabric of my t-shirt so that he can pin me into place as he leans in to—fuck, to mouth at my neck. It starts with a simple kiss, but only a second later, his lips part, and I can feel tongue and teeth, and it feels so fucking good. While his mouth works a bruise into the skin just above the collar of my shirt, one of his hands releases my shirt to slip back and grab at my ass.
“Declan, what the fuck?” I manage after a moment. And then, because I don’t want him to think for a second that I might be protesting, I reach up to curve my hand over the back of his head. His hair’s buzzed almost as short as mine, so there’s nothing to really grab onto, but fuck if I’m not gonna try.
“Have I ever told you,” he breathes, pausing to scrape his teeth against my earlobe, “how much it turns me on to watch you shoot?”
“Wh—um, no, can’t say that’s a conversation we’ve ever had,” I gasp out. Christ, I want to kiss him. I squirm in place, trying to find a way to twist so that I can get at his mouth, but he’s still pressing me into the wall.
“Mm.” He shoves a hand between us. “That’s probably because it doesn’t.”
The vibration against my chest shocks me even more than the sudden coldness as Declan steps back. I follow his gaze to my chest-piece which is blacked out and buzzing under the muzzle of his laser gun. I hadn’t even noticed his equipment getting reactivated, which I’m guessing was sort of the point.
“You little shit!” I protest, and he bolts away, grinning madly. I give chase, because he can bet his perfectly-shaped ass that I’m going to get him back the second my gun comes back on, but I lose him in the darkness almost immediately and don’t manage to find him again before the lights come back on and the game ends.
We gather at the edge of the arena to wait for the scores to come up on the wall screen. When they do, it’s accompanied by a bright red background, signaling my team’s victory. I do a brief, celebratory dance. “Third place. Haven’t done this in a year, but I’m still fucking awesome.”
“Not as awesome as I am,” Stohler says, smirking at me and soaking in the glassy-eyed stares of the Patton boys, all of whom seem equally stunned and aroused by her first-place score. “Nor are you as awesome as the ginger kid, it would appear.”
“That’s because the ginger kid is a filthy cheater,” I say, shooting a glare at Declan. He quirks an eyebrow at me, and because I’m both a sore loser and a complete child, I stick my tongue out at him. He returns the gesture, and there’s a brief flash of silver that I’m not expecting, and Jesus fucking Christ, how am I only just now finding out that he has a pierced tongue? I feel myself go rigid; my shock must register on my face, because Declan’s expression turns quizzical for a moment before he realizes that my stare is focused entirely on his mouth. As soon as he understands what has attracted my attention, he grins, bright and nearly feral, then flicks his tongue out enough to let the barbell catch between his front teeth for half a second. Just long enough to make me let out a half-sighed, half-groaned, “Ohmygod.”
He laughs. It’s kind of a mean sound.
“Have you—” I actually have to stop and clear my throat, which is embarrassing, but nearly everyone is still too busy checking their own scores to notice. I step closer to Declan. “Have you had that the whole time I’ve known you?”
“I’ve had it since I was fourteen,” he says, “but I don’t wear it to school. Some of us are actually smart enough to take our facial piercings out before Sergeant Smitth screams at us for having them.” He reaches up and flicks my lip ring, then leans closer to me to add, “I’m surprised you didn’t notice it when it was actually touching your skin.”
I let out a strangled, wounded noise. I’m not even sure what type of noise it’s supposed to be, but it’s definitely enough to draw a bewildered glance from Javi. I quickly step back and turn to face the rest of my team. “So! Uh. What about you guys? Happy with your scores?”
Alex is squinting at the scores. “Honestly, I’m just trying to figure out how the hell Ben did better than two thirds of the Patton guys.”
I blink up at the screen—sure enough, Ben’s name is listed sixth. I turn to stare at him. “Do you have some previously unknown marksmanship skill?” He bites his lip on a smile and shakes his head. I narrow my eyes. “Did you fucking cheat?”
He shakes his head again, but slowly enough to make me suspicious. Jamie darts forward and digs his long fingers into Ben’s side. “You did. You cheated, you little—”
“I didn’t cheat!” Ben protests, trying—and failing, probably because he secretly likes it—to squirm away from Jamie’s hands. “I found myself a strategically sound location and stuck it out there.”
“What does that even mean?” Jamie asks.
“Do you really want to know?” Ben shoots back, and when Jamie doesn’t stop tormenting him, he continues, “Fine, Jesus, get off me and I’ll show you.”
Jamie finally releases him, and Ben heads for the nearest obstacle, a seven-foot structure designed to provide cover to peer around. Travis, who has been watching our entire exchange with a wide smile on his face, follows him, then drops his hands to maybe knee-height and laces his fingers together. Ben carefully situates one of his red Chucks on Travis’ hands and allows himself to be boosted up onto the obstacle. There, he tucks his legs under himself and perches above all of us, like a tiny gargoyle. “I’m just small enough to fit.”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Declan says flatly. “Were you up there the entire game?”
“Yep,” Ben says cheerfully. “You’re all incredibly unobservant. I intend to write a strongly worded letter to your squad sergeant and demand that he add ‘look up, fuckwits’ to your military leadership training.”
“If you didn’t have to worry about dodging a single shot the entire game, shouldn’t you have gotten first place?” Jamie asks.
Ben snorts and kicks his legs out so they’re dangling over the side. “It was a strategy, not a miracle. I still have terrible aim.”
“Terrible aim and a devious streak,” Alex grumbles. “Come on. That snack bar out front looks epic, and I’d murder a kitten for some fries right now.”
Ben looks prepared to just slide off the side of the obstacle, but the idiot will probably break a leg doing that. I grab him by the hips and pull him off, slinging him over my shoulder and walking out of the arena with him in a fireman’s carry. He snaps at me to put him down, and when I ignore him, he starts trying to kick me in the face. Once we make it back to the front room, I have to dump him back on the ground so we can both remove our chest-pieces and return them to the hooks on the walls. He’s still bitching about it ten minutes later, once most of the group has gotten food and scattered themselves over the long table at the edge of the eating area.
I ignore him in favor of wandering over to where Travis is leaning against the counter of the snack bar, waiting for his burger to be cooked and passed over. I steal a sip from his pop, then gesture towards the group. “Thank you, again. For doing this.”
“No problem. I’m glad you had fun,” he says, grinning at me. He’s standing so close that it wouldn’t take much for me to lean in and give him a quick kiss. It could be a… thank you, maybe. It could be just something small and sweet, something we both want, if the way his eyes have dropped to my mouth are any indication. But then Travis’ eyes flit a little lower, and his expression visibly dims. I open my mouth to ask him if something is wrong, but I fall awkwardly silent again when he reaches up to press his fingertips to the still-sensitive mark that Declan left on my neck. “Did you have this when you went in?”
The thing is, there’s no right answer. I got it while we were all inside? I’ve been hooking up with other guys pretty much since we moved in together? It’s not something we’ve talked about, and I don’t think he really expected me to wait for him, but… he hasn’t brought any guys home. Girls, either. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t gotten any in months.
I offer a sheepish smile and say, “It was just one of the guys fighting dirty, trying to distract me so he could shoot me once his gun started functioning again.”
“Worked, didn’t it?” Declan announces, slinging an arm around my shoulders and dislodging Travis’ hand in the process. He looks over at Travis and offers him one of those blank half-smiles he’s so good at. “Don’t worry about it, Travis. I sometimes let my competitive tendencies get the best of me, but I didn’t mean anything by it. Like Anderson said—just playing dirty.” He digs his fingertips into the mark, and I yelp, shoving him away. He laughs and takes off back towards the rest of the Whitman squad.
“I wasn’t worried about it,” Travis mutters. “I just—didn’t realize you and Declan had like, a thing between you—”
“We don’t,” I say quickly. “It’s not like that. The dude’s not even into other guys, I swear.”
Travis cringes, like he’s hating himself for the words even as they come out of his mouth, and says, “Is there any dude who is into other guys? Like, is there somebody you’re hooking up with that I didn’t know about?”
I shove my hands into my pockets and shift my gaze from his face to the menu behind him, just so I won’t have to see his eyes when I admit, “I, uh… I mean, there was a guy a couple weeks ago. Somebody in the squad—the rest of the squad, not this group here—who I was hooking up with, kind of on the regular. We weren’t dating, though.”
“No, right, of course,” Travis says quickly. The snack bar attendant places his food on the counter, and he turns to grab it, flashing me a brief, obviously fake smile as he adds, “That’s fine. I mean, you can hook up with whoever you—I’m not trying to, you know—I’m not jealous.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Garen, I’m not jealous,” he says, more firmly. It sounds like just as much of a lie as it did a minute ago. I open my mouth to reply, but he gives me another bullshit smile and weaves around me, striding off to the table and sinking into a seat between Ben and Charlie.
I sigh and follow, flinging myself down across from Ben and between Taylor and Alex, who’s leaning forward in his seat to ask Jamie, in a pseudo-casual tone, “Heard you and that girl broke up.”
I want to bash my head against the table so that I don’t have to hear this conversation, but that would probably draw too much attention. Across from me, Ben makes a face and leans back in his seat, stretching both his arms out to the sides along the top of the booth, one behind Jamie’s neck and one behind Travis’, but not touching either of them. I raise an eyebrow at him, but before I can say anything, Taylor leans across the table to ask Ben some boring school question. I do my best to tune them out.
“Rachael and I broke up, yes,” Jamie says.
“She dumped him on Valentine’s Day,” I announce, and there’s a collective grimace around the table.
“That’s fucking harsh, Goldwyn,” Javi laughs.
Jamie gives his shoulders a delicate lift, as if to say, what can you do? Alex chews carefully on a French fry, swallows, and continues, “Found anyone new yet?”
“Sure,” Jamie replies, shrugging. “A few boys, a few girls. Rachael and I were together for a few months, so I’ve had a bit of playing to catch up on.
“Anyone you’re serious about?” Alex presses.
Jamie slouches down in his seat just enough to allow his head to loll back. To Alex, I’m sure it looks like he’s only looking up at the ceiling in thought, but all I can see is how still Ben has gone now that Jamie is using his forearm as a headrest.
“There might be someone I find more… interesting than I expected to,” Jamie says carefully.
Alex leans back in his seat. “Oh,” he says, then pauses for a beat. “Lady or gentleman?”
“Gentleman. Well. Man. There’s been nothing gentle about any of our encounters. He’s a bit of an ass, too. I have questionable taste,” Jamie says, and then jolts a little, like he’s just been kicked. He waits until Alex looks back to his fries, then shoots Ben a dirty look, which Ben returns at once.
From the far end of the table, Stohler calls, “What about you, McCutcheon?”
Ben turns sharply to face her. “What? I don’t—I’m not, uh—what about me?”
Always the epitome of subtlety, that one. On his right, Travis tries to hide his exasperation by ducking his head and shoving his burger into his mouth, but the eyeroll is still pretty obvious. Jamie’s mouth is twisted into a self-satisfied smirk, like he’s pleased to have his questionable taste confirmed to everyone at the table.
Stohler just smiles.
“You single?” she asks. He nods slowly. She plugs the top of her straw with the tip of her finger, then pulls it out of her cup so that she can suck the pop from the wrong end. “Still not putting out for that guy who’s been sending you books as the world’s most embarrassing attempt at seduction?”
Ben turns his attention upward, probably praying for patience. “First of all, stop going through my shit every time you come to my apartment. Second, it’s not an attempt at seduction. Third, if it was an attempt at seduction, it wouldn’t be embarrassing.”
“I think it’s totally on point,” I say, digging the toe of my boot into Jamie’s shin under the table as evidence of my continued displeasure with his flirting technique. “I mean, nothing says ‘I wanna eat your ass’ like books about Jesus.”
Ben retracts his arms from the back of the booth and yanks on the strings of his hood until it cinches around his reddened face and conceals his eyes. “I often dream about drowning all of my current friends so that I can start over and find new ones who aren’t terrible people.”
“I’d haunt you,” I say automatically. “And every time you tried to hang out with new people, I’d torment them, and no one would want to be your friend. They’d all call you Poltergeist Ben behind your back, and you’d be sad all the time. Your life is better with me in it.”
“My life is not better with you in it. My life is a prison, and you are the warden of my social experiences,” he says mournfully.
I wiggle my eyebrows at him. “Wish you’d used that metaphor a few months ago. We could’ve incorporated it into some roleplay when I tied you up and made you my bitch.”
Ben lets out an embarrassed whine and tugs harder on the strings until his hoodie has obscured his entire face.
Travis plucks a French fry off Sam’s plate and whips it at my face. “Be nice to him, or when James drives us home, I’m going to tell him to leave you here.”
And then, apropos of absofuckinglutely nothing, Declan says, just quietly enough that I have to strain to hear him, “That’s right, I’d forgotten you’re Garen’s roommate.” He takes a sip of his drink, possibly just for dramatic pause. “Must be strange, living with an ex.”
Travis’ posture is stiff as he turns to peer around Charlie at him. “Strangeness is relative. Personally, I consider it more strange that you give hickeys to other guys, even though you say you’re straight.”
The corner of Declan’s mouth quirks upward. “Are you annoyed that I did it, or annoyed that he liked it?”
“Would you—”
“So, wait, that—” Sam leans around Taylor to gesture towards the mark on my neck, “—that’s from Dec?”
“We didn’t do anything,” I snap. I expect Declan to confirm my statement, but he remains silent.
When I look around, he’s still staring at the side of Travis’ face, even though Travis has turned away from him. His gaze is too focused, too calculating; it sets me on edge that anyone—even somebody I might be starting to consider a friend now—would look at Travis that way. My muscles are tightening under my skin, but before I can move, Charlie digs an elbow into Declan’s ribs and says, “Quit staring like a creep, Dec. We’ve talked about this. Normal people blink.”
Declan’s stare slowly shifts from Travis’s face to Charlie’s. He blinks once, then again, then gives a faint chuckle and turns away. “Right. Sorry.”
“Well, on that note,” Jamie says flatly, nudging Javi so that he can be let out of the booth, “I think it might be a fair time to call it a night. Hey, midget. Do you have a bag or something I should move from Stohler’s car to mine?”
“Yeah. I’ll go with you,” Ben says, giving Travis’ wrist a hard yank so he’ll follow him out of the booth as well.
Stohler pitches Jamie her keys so that he can get into the Mustang, but remains sitting, as do Alex, myself, and the rest of the Patton boys. I keep my head bowed and my attention focused on counting footsteps until I’m sure the others are out of earshot. The moment I hear them clear the building’s front doors, my head snaps up, but Javi is already rounding on Declan.
“Dec, when’s the last time I told you what a cunt you are sometimes?” he demands
Declan considers his answer. “In the arena.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t make this part clear then, but you should knock it the fuck off,” Javi whines. “You always do this when you meet new people. You’re like a little boy who torments the new kid in preschool, just because you’re pissed that your classmates want him to play with them, too.”
Taylor hauls himself to his feet and heads for the door, calling over his shoulder to us, “Honestly, I don’t get how I’m still surprised every time this happens, but I really am.”
“I’m not,” Sam mutters, following him.
There’s a general movement for the rest of the group to follow them, but I don’t stand just yet.
“Not Travis,” I say. Declan doesn’t speak, only cocks his head to the side like my dog does when I try to talk to him in full sentences. “You’re my friend and all, but if you ever try to fuck with Travis’ head again, I’m going to kick the crap out of you. Are we clear?”
Declan’s face is expressionless, but his eyes are bright and delighted, the same way they are every time he manages to piss someone off. I don’t know that he has even a shred of self-preservation instinct in him. But he inclines his head and drawls, “Of course.”
I shove my chair back and head for the exit. Just as I’ve passed through the main doors, Stohler moves to flank me as she mutters, “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that? You have exactly one real chink in your armor, and you just told that dickweed exactly where to find it.”
I shake my head tersely. “No. That’s—Declan’s a fuckin’ shit sometimes, but he and I are on decent terms now. We’re friends, even. You heard Javi, he gets bitchy with new people. He’s not going to do anything to me, or to Travis—I’d fucking kill him if he did, and he knows that now.”
“I hope you’re right,” she says, but she shakes her head, like she doubts very much that I am. She and Alex head for the Mustang, but I head straight for Travis and Jamie, who are standing near the passenger side of the Escalade.
I crowd up close and say, “Hey. So, uh, sorry. About Declan. He’s a dick. Are you—”
“It’s not a big deal. I’m fine, I don’t care,” Travis interrupts. His voice is neutral, but his eyes are doing everything they can to warn me into silence. He turns and calls, “Hey, Ben! Come on!”
Ben, who is in the middle of conversation with Taylor, looks over at us and holds up one finger to signal that we should hold on a minute. He turns back to Taylor, and they speak for another thirty seconds or so before Taylor digs his phone out of his pocket and passes it to Ben, who starts typing something into it.
I raise my eyebrows. “Dude. Is McCutcheon trying to get it in?”
“McCutcheon can hear you,” Ben says loudly. He finishes typing, passes the phone back to Taylor, and flashes him a quick smile before jogging over to the car where the rest of us are waiting. He slugs me in the ribs and says, “I was not trying to get it in, you jackass. Taylor just got accepted to University of New Haven’s criminal justice program, and I said I’d give him my number so he could hit me up this fall, if he wants someone to show him around the city.”
“By ‘show him around the city,’ do you mean ‘give him hot, sloppy blowjobs in his dorm room’?” I ask.
“No, I do not mean that,” Ben says, shoving me into the backseat of the car and climbing in after me. “Jesus, Garen, two guys can talk to each other without it being foreplay. I don’t even think he likes boys.”
But Taylor does like boys, and more importantly, tormenting Ben McCutcheon is my absolute favorite way to amuse myself. I spend the entire drive back to the house listing all the lewd-to-the-point-of-questionable-legality sexual activities I’m sure they could get up to. By the time Jamie parks at the curb in front of the house, Ben is practically howling at me to shut up, shut up, shut up and trying to hit me even though I’ve got him pinned to the inside of his door while I talk. The second the car stops moving, he grabs his backpack and tumbles out of the backseat.
He’s halfway up the front path after Travis when Jamie gets out of the car and says, “Hang back a moment, McCutcheon. I’ve got a favor to ask you.” Travis stops in the middle of unlocking the front door to turn around and make an obscene hand gesture. “Not that kind of favor, you twat. It’s a Garen favor.” Travis raises his eyebrows and repeats the gesture, this time with both hands.
“What’s a Garen favor?” I ask. “Is that like—you know, is it a favor for me, or about me? Will I like it? Do I have to do anything? Can I—”
“You can shut up,” Jamie suggests. When I don’t show any signs of letting my curiosity wane, he rolls his eyes. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’ve got a birthday in two weeks. Do you want me to find you a nice present, or not?”
I light up. Honestly, I had sort of forgotten about my birthday; being six months sober seems like a much bigger deal than turning nineteen. But if anyone can be talkative and idiotic enough to talk his way out of a birthday present, it’s me, so I lunge for the door and slip into the house.
Travis steps after me, but doesn’t close the door behind himself. “It’s cold out. Come inside and talk in the kitchen. I’ll keep that dumbass in the living room so he doesn’t eavesdrop.”
Ben takes exactly four steps into the house before he freezes; Omelette has come bolting down the stairs like a furry lightning strike. Since I’m standing closest to the foot of the stairs, he barrels into my legs and licks furiously at the knee of my jeans before moving on to Travis, who crouches down a little more to scratch him behind the ears. But the moment the dog realizes there is a new person in the house, he becomes so ecstatic that he actually howls.
Ben doesn’t fare much better. His knees hit the ground, and when Omelette crawls all over is lap, he just laughs and digs his fingers into the dog’s fur, scratching deep into his skin so that Omelette flops to the ground and bares his belly for more scratching.
I hitch my chin at Jamie, who’s still lingering in the doorway because he can’t really get around the Great Ben McCutcheon Belly Rub Experience. “If you’d realized that all you needed to do to get him on his knees was be fluffy, you’d probably wax less, huh?”
Jamie steps over Ben—nearly kicking him in the back as he does so—grabs my shoulder, and shoves me towards the living room. “Go. Go watch television or something.”
“I can’t,” I say, making a face. “I have to go to bed so I have some hope of actually functioning when I wake up in like, five hours. We’re doing a ten-mile run in PT tomorrow, and, you know—” I shrug, “—I want the best time. It’s tough as hell to compete with Declan, but I want to destroy him tomorrow.”
“Thought you said you guys were friends,” Travis says with a frown.
Another shrug. “We are. But… I don’t know. He was a snot to you tonight, so I want to put him in his place a little.”
Travis somehow manages to look embarrassed, annoyed, and pleased all at once; it’s a pretty complicated expression, but it looks absolutely adorable on him. I duck my head and scramble up the stairs to my room before I can do something as humiliating as telling him that.
183 days sober
When I head downstairs early the next morning, the television is still playing in the living room. At first, I assume Ben just fell asleep watching it after Jamie left, but when I poke my head around the corner, two things become immediately apparent—Ben never fell asleep, and Jamie never left. I flee to the kitchen, because it’s crazy early, and I haven’t had my coffee, so I’m incredibly unprepared for the sight of the two of them tangled up together on my couch and frantically kissing while my dog snoozes on the floor nearby.
I set about measuring the grounds and water into the machine, then assume my usual perch on the counter next to it while I wait for the coffee to brew. From this angle, I can see that they’re both almost fully clothed, but that Ben—who is pinning Jamie down against the cushions—has his shirt pushed halfway up his torso, exposing the pale skin of his back to Jamie’s nails. They’re grinding against each other, pushing into each other’s space everywhere they can manage, desperate and frustrated enough to suggest that they’ve been doing this for a while.
Jamie wrenches away from the kiss and shoves Ben’s face closer to his neck. When Ben obediently shifts to sink his teeth in, Jamie groans and says, just loudly enough to be heard over the television, “What kind of idiot gives up orgasms for six weeks?”
“What kind of idiot makes a move on someone who gave up orgasms for six weeks?” Ben shoots back. His challenging tone is sort of discredited by how wrecked he looks right now. His cheeks are flushed, and his arms are shaking as he shifts his weight to one side so that he can fumble towards the zipper of Jamie’s jeans. “Just because I can’t get off, doesn’t mean you can’t. It’s fine, I-I can blow you, if you want me t—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jamie says, catching his wrist and stretching out so both their arms are raised above their heads and hanging over the arm of the couch. “Even I’m not selfish enough to ask you to make me come if I can’t reciprocate.”
“How adorable,” I mutter, letting my head fall back against the upper cabinets. Thankfully, the coffee pot gurgles itself into silence, signaling the completion of the brewing process. I dump some of it into one of my oversized mugs and shuffle into the living room.
“Stop frotting in front of my dog, you fucking perverts,” I say. Ben reels back so quickly that only Jamie’s hands on his hips prevent him from hitting the floor. I snort. “Graceful. There’s coffee in the pot, if you’re thirsty. Or you can fuck in my bed, if you bitches are fuckin’ thirsty. Just make sure you change the sheets if you get jizz all over ‘em. Come on, Omelette.”
Omelette rouses himself from sleep and ambles after me out the sliding door into the yard. I sit down on the deck steps and drink my coffee while he trots all over the yard, sniffs everything he encounters, and pisses in half a dozen different locations. Halfway through my cup, the slider opens behind me, and Ben and Jamie join me.
“Sorry about that,” Ben mutters, pulling on his sweatshirt and giving me an embarrassed, guilty smile the moment his head reappears from the neck hole.
“I’m not,” Jamie says. “How long did you watch us, you dirty little voyeur?”
I shrug. “Only long enough to vigorously masturbate to the sound of your tender moans.” I lift my mug. “Guess what kind of cream is in my coffee. Go on, guess.”
“You’re awful,” Jamie says, collapsing onto the deck next to me and sounding like he means it a little more than I’d like.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to ignore it or not, so I wait in silence until Ben hops off the deck and wanders off through the dewy grass to play with Omelette and his squeaky duck. Then I squirm closer to Jamie and knock my shoulder against his. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” he says around a frown that hints otherwise. “I was just thinking.”
“About?” I prompt. He shrugs. I wait. He rolls his eyes and gestures across the yard. “Ben?” I say. He shrugs again. I light a cigarette, take a drag, and pass it to him. “You going to finally ask him out?”
He chokes on a lungful of smoke. I bury my smile in the crook of my arm. When he can finally speak, he forces out, “No. Lord, no. Never. I don’t even like him.”
“He’s the smartest person either of us has ever met. He’s got a bitchy little sense of humor. He’s a polite, young Christian boy, so Mama and Daddy Goldwyn would fuckin’ love him. From what you’ve both told me, the sex isn’t exactly terrible. So, please, tell me which part of that you dislike.”
James makes a face. “I dislike the part where things would get… messy. Complicated. The sex is good, and the conversation is more than, but I’m under no delusions about how it would end. Even in a best-case scenario, he and I would never be able to manage more than a month of dating before we were sick of each other. Then there’d be a huge scene—as there always is—and you’d end up getting dragged into it—as you always do—only this time it would be worse, because you actually give a damn about both parties.”
“Or, taking a less pessimistic viewpoint, the fact that I give a shit about both of you guys might be a good thing,” I point out. “At least, it would mean there’d never be that awkward moment where the person you’re dating is like, ‘you have to stop hanging out with Garen so much, I don’t like him, choose one of us.’”
Jamie scoffs. “Yes, there would be. I don’t care if you two are friends—that moment always comes.”
“Oh, yeah? Ask him,” I say. I make a sweeping gesture towards Ben, who is wrestling the squeaky duck from Omelette’s mouth so he can throw it across the yard for him again. Jamie gives me a dirty look, which I’m sure he hopes will persuade me to drop the issue. It doesn’t; I just narrow my eyes and do my best to communicate exactly how sick of this shit I am.
He heaves a sigh and calls across the yard, “Hey, McCutcheon?”
Ben makes a vague, unimpressed noise that I guess is supposed to imply he’s listening, even though he’s still mostly watching the dog. Well, that’s how Jamie must interpret it, because he continues, “When you were dating McCall, how come you never told him to pick you over Garen?”
It’s a sudden, serious enough question that Ben gives the duck one last kick across the yard, then comes over to sit down on my other side. “Because I’m neither an idiot nor a controlling asshole?” he says carefully. “You know how insufferable they are about one another. They were up each other’s asses, both figuratively and literally, before I was really part of the picture, and I may have been dating Travis, but I knew they were still in love with each other. It wasn’t really my place to throw an ultimatum in there just for shits and giggles.”
“So,” Jamie says in that same slow voice, “I wouldn’t—” He pauses, sits up straighter, and asks in a more certain, animated voice, “Hypothetically, you and I are standing in an elevator that breaks free of its cables and goes crashing to the bottom floor of the building. Neither of us is mortally wounded, but we do both sustain enough brain damage that we decide it might be reasonable for us to maybe… well, go on an… outing. Of sorts. With one another. And no one else.”
“You mean, like, a date?” I say brightly, and Jamie shoots me a warning look and says, “Of course not. Don’t be appalling.”
Ben’s cheeks are turning red, and he must be aware of it, because he draws his legs up to his chest, hunches into his hoodie, and rests his forehead on his knees so that his face is hidden and his voice is muffled when he replies, “Uh-huh. Hypothetically: elevator accident, brain damage, outing. Go on.”
“Alright. Well, let’s say—hypothetically—that this outing was enjoyable for both of us—”
“—because of the brain damage—”
“--exactly, because of the brain damage. And let’s say that one outing turned into, perhaps… a series of outings, extending over a long period of time, during which neither of us was partaking in outings of this nature with other people, and during which we might engage in frequent and enthusiastic bouts of sadomasochistic sex.”
Ben makes a strangled noise, but it’s barely audible over my cheerful, “You mean, like, a relationship? A weird, kinky relationship?”
“For fuck’s sake, Anderson, go inside. You have to get ready for school, anyway,” Jamie snaps.
“Not going anywhere until I hear the end of this ‘hypothetical situation.’ So, go on. I’m listening.”
He huffs another sigh, like he’s regretting every life decision that has led to him sitting on this deck, and grits out, “So, let’s say that all of that were to come to pass. Would I ever have to worry about there being a moment in which you would tell me to choose between you and Garen? Or, if-and-when it failed miserably, would you be a brat and try to demand that Garen choose just one of us to be friends with?”
Oh, Christ. I roll my eyes so hard I’m worried I might get a headache.
But Ben takes it in stride, raising his face long enough to give Jamie a judgmental look and say, “So, you’re saying that in this brain-damaged alternate reality, I like you more than I like Garen? Because in this reality, you seem to have a very shaky understanding of where you rank amongst my friends.”
“Just answer the question,” Jamie groans, flopping back to lie flat on the deck. “If you and I got involved, would there inevitably be some hideous argument in which you demanded that I place more value in a relationship with you than my friendship with Garen, just like there have been in nearly all of my past relationships?”
Ben squint at him. “Uh, no? That would make no sense. You and Garen have been best friends since you were fourteen, and you and I have known each other less than a year. Obviously he’d outrank me. Besides, if I liked you enough to date you, I’d probably just want you to be happy. And if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that you two are happiest when you’re indulging in your creepy, mostly-platonic life-partner bond.”
“It’s not creepy,” Jamie says, frowning.
“It’s absolutely creepy,” Ben argues. “But if someone has a problem with it, that person shouldn’t date either of you. It’s as simple as that. Neither of you makes a secret of the fact that you will choose each other over almost anything, so why would someone date you if they didn’t approve of that? It’d be like someone going after you, even if they’re not into spoiled, preppy douchebags with thick Southern accents. It wouldn’t make sense.”
Jamie narrows his eyes. “That was… almost an appropriate response, right up until that end bit.”
“Take what you can get,” Ben advises, ducking his head to hide the small smile that’s playing at the edges of his mouth. They lapse into silence, and then… actually, that’s it. They just lapse into silence.
“Are you kidding me?” I demand. “You get that fucking close, and the conversation’s over? I feel like I was just balls-deep in a really hot guy, but right when I was getting ready to come, he shoved me off and was like, ‘well, that was fun,’ and fucking peaced out so I had to finish by jerking it alone. Like, what was the point of asking—”
“Jesus Christ on a piece of toast, go inside, Garen, no one wants you out here,” Jamie snaps, sitting up.
And okay, yes, I’m going to be late for PT if I don’t get my gym bag and leave within the next minute, but I’m so completely and utterly done with this bullshit that instead, I take a deep breath and start chanting, “Ask him out, ask him out, ask him out, ask him out, ask him—”
“Fucking fine,” Jamie bursts out, and he leans around me to say to Ben, “Would you like to go out with me tomorrow night?”
Shit. I hadn’t expected him to really do it. I whip around to stare at Ben, who raises his right hand like he’s holding an invisible pen.
“Dear Diary,” he says flatly, pantomiming writing in the air, “Today, something magical happened. Garen verbally abused James into asking me out. I felt so special. Love, Ben.”
“Come on, that was at least a semi-gentlemanly way of asking,” I wheedle. “Considering the way you guys usually talk to each other, that should make you want to like, compose a sonnet in your fuckin’ Moleskine.”
“Oh, my mistake. I didn’t realize that the bare minimum of civility was grounds for poetry,” Ben says. “Would a limerick suffice?”
“I think I warrant a haiku, at the very least,” Jamie admits.
“You are a douchebag,” Ben says, counting off the syllables on his fingers. “But I have no self-respect, and your dick is huge.”
Jamie smirks. “And thus, we find out the real reason you still put up with me. Not that there was much of a doubt.” He hesitates, scratches at the back of his neck, and eventually says, “I probably would have gotten around to asking you out sometime anyway, even if Garen wasn’t such a meddlesome little shit. So, it was a legitimate question, and it still stands. Do you want to go out with me tomorrow?”
“Want’s too strong a word,” Ben says, still counting syllables. “I don’t have other plans, though.” He pauses, looks at Jamie, and adds, “I still won’t put out.”
“There are less than three weeks left to Lent,” Jamie says. “I can wait.”
Ben looks around at him, stares hard for a minute in silence. Jamie just stares back. I try not to let out the annoyed sigh that I can feel building in my lungs, because I’m pretty sure that this is the moment, as long as these two morons can nut up and stop tiptoeing around the prospect of a real date.
Finally, Ben gives a short nod and looks out at where Omelette is trying but failing to tunnel under the edge of the fence. “’Kay.”
“’Kay?” Jamie echoes, and Ben rolls his eyes.
“Okay. Yes, fine. I’ll, um—I’ll go out with you, I guess.”
“This is heart-warming,” I declare, setting my empty coffee mug down on the deck so that I can fling an arm around each of them, but the moment is over before it even begins; they’re already bitching at each other over the top of my head.
“Fine, you guess you’ll go out with me. Sweet Lord, McCutcheon, your enthusiasm is enough to make a boy blush—”
“How am I supposed to react? Were you expecting tears of joy, or—”
“You are so annoying. When I buy you dinner, will you finally use your mouth to do something other than whine? Or should I expect you to continue doing that even whilst you eat?”
“When you what? You’re not buying me dinner, dude, we’re going Dutch. And I sincerely hope you’re not planning on us going anywhere that would require me to wear something besides jeans and Converse, because that’s pretty much all I brought with me—”
“Maybe I’ll take you somewhere you can blend in, like a crust punk show in Williamsburg.”
“I don’t understand—was that an attempt to threaten me? Because I would love to go to a crust punk show in Williamsburg—”
“Well, this is, you know, cute,” I say loudly, waving a hand between them, “I’m gonna go to school now, before I’m late for PT. Try not to kill each other. And when this argument dissolves into frantic handjobs in my living room, don’t get dude juice all over the couch, or Trav’ll be pissed.”
Despite how much I speed on the way to school, I am late to PT, and Sergeant Smitth gives me shit for it in front of everyone. My day doesn’t get better after that. I’m forced to stay behind after dismissal to run laps as punishment, so I end up missing breakfast. There’s a pop quiz during statistics. Halfway through chem lab, Javi accidentally drops a beaker while I’m crouching down to get a set of scales out of the cabinet under our lab station; the beaker lands half on the ground, half on the hand I’m using to brace myself. Glass gets everywhere, and I miss the rest of the class because Mr. DeCarlo sends me up to the infirmary to get tiny glass slivers pulled out of the gash on the back of my hand.
By the end of the day, all I want to do is go home, but I need all the experiment notes I missed. Declan gives me his at the end of MLEP—his version of an apology for being an asshat last night, I figure—but the copy machine in the guidance office is broken. I spend the next hour holed up in the library, copying the notes by hand into my notebook. I trudge up to Whitman Hall and bang my good fist against the door to room two-twelve. Javi answers it, and he seems to be the only one there. I hold up the notebook. “Done with Dec’s notes. Is he around?”
“No, he’s outside, running the obstacle course,” Javi says. At my furrowed brow, he adds, “The course all the seniors have to run as part of the PT final in May? He practices on it during study hours every day.”
“That sounds like the least enjoyable thing ever,” I say.
Javi snorts. “Right? He tried to get me to join him a couple times, but I gave up. He’s more of a tyrant than Smitth is.” He gestures towards the notebook. “You can leave that on his desk, if you want. His backpack’s here, so it doesn’t make much sense to bring it out to the course.”
“Thanks,” I say, stepping into the room and dumping the notebook on the desk that isn’t littered with framed pictures of Javi and Vanessa. When I look back at Javi, he’s shifting guilty from foot to foot and staring at my bandaged hand. I roll my eyes. “Dude, it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”
“Did they at least give you some kind of painkiller in the infirmary?” he asks.
I shrug. “No. Kinda trying to avoid the painkiller thing, you know?”
He ducks his head. “Oh. Right.”
“Shut up, I’m fine,” I say, reaching out and shoving at his shoulder. “When Campbell gets back, tell him I said thanks for the notes. I’ll see you both tomorrow morning.”
But I only make it halfway to my car before curiosity overcomes me, and I find myself changing direction, heading across campus to the obstacle course at the edge of the property. It’s not a small course by any means—equal parts “typical military obstacle course” and “proof of sadism in the PMA administration.” I can’t fathom doing it once, let alone every day.
I hear Declan before I see him; there are sharp inhales and thumping footsteps coming from the far side of the nearest climbing wall. I only have to wait a moment for Declan’s flushed face to appear at the top of the wall. He swings himself over, scrambles down the first few footholds, then drops the remaining six or so feet to the ground. He sees me the moment he turns around, but doesn’t break stride in his path to the horizontal beams he needs to jump over. Once he’s cleared the last one, he sprints towards the final obstacle—the rope climb. He hoists himself up so quickly I nearly miss the whole thing, beats the side of his fist against the support structure once to signal his completion, then shoves a hand into his pocket briefly before returning himself to the ground.
It seems like a moment when I should applaud, but I’m glad I refrain, because his hand returns to his pocket and withdraws a stop watch. He peers down at his time and sneers.
“Disappointed?” I say.
“Often,” he replies. “Javi tell you where to find me?”
I nod. “I stopped by your room to drop off your notes. Thanks again for letting me copy ‘em.”
“Care to pay me back?”
“Depends how you want me to pay,” I say, letting the corner of my mouth hitch into a smirk as I give him a long, steady once-over. His face is still flushed, his chest rising and falling more quickly with his labored breathing. Every inch of him is splattered with mud and sweat.
“Make yourself useful,” he orders. “Time me.”
I accept the stopwatch, but blink down at the numbers frozen on the screen. “Is that your time? Or at least, your most recent time?” He nods once. “Dude, the course is designed to take twelve minutes, but you can pass with anything less than fifteen. If you can do it in ten minutes and six seconds, why the hell are you still practicing?”
“The school record is eight minutes and forty-four seconds,” he says. “I’ve only ever been able to manage nine twenty-two.”
I raise my eyebrows. Last spring, Jamie clocked a ten minute, thirty-nine second course run, and he had one of the best times in the grade. I’m pretty sure the eight minute, forty-four second run happened once in the eighties and hasn’t been touched since. But hey, if Dec wants to drive himself crazy trying to beat it, that’s his prerogative. “Alright, then.” I reset the watch. “Ready? Get set. Go.” I press the start button as he takes off at a dead sprint.
After years at this school, there are a lot of things I used to find sexy, but am now pretty desensitized to. School and military uniforms. Semi-public nudity in the dorms. Flushed, sweat-drenched boys working out or playing sports. I can’t remember the last time I was really turned on by watching a guy physically exert himself outside of a sexual situation, but Christ, Declan running the course is a thing of beauty.
For months now, I’ve been aware of the fact that he has a nice body—freckled skin that runs tight over hard, thick muscle. His arms are toned, his torso slim but well-defined. Everything about him looks solid and healthy and strong. It’s one thing to see that he has an attractive body; it’s another thing entirely to watch him use it. He moves so… recklessly. He runs as fast as he can towards solid obstacles, and when he reaches them, he throws himself onto them or under them or at them, seemingly unaware of how badly he batters his flesh at times. He jerks his limbs around roughly, violently, and his face is twisted into a frustrated grimace. He treats his body like it’s a weak and disappointing vessel, like he knows that everything that’s inside of him is so much faster and stronger than his skin will let him be.
He drags himself up the rope climb faster than I’ve ever seen anyone manage it before. The second his palm connects with the beam at the top, I stop the clock. He looks over at me, but I wait until he has lowered himself carefully to the ground again before I announce, “Ten minutes, four seconds. That’s awe—”
“I’m running it again. Time me, or give me the watch.”
I reset the watch and wave him towards the start line. He takes his time walking over to it, eyes closed, breathing deep. When he finally opens his eyes and gets into a position to start from, I count him off again, and he bolts. This time, he only gets a ten and ten, which only deepens his scowl. He runs it again and gets a ten and nine. Again, and now he’s up to a ten eighteen. He’s panting and shaking , and he’s got his teeth bared like he’s an animal.
“Maybe you should take a break,” I suggest slowly, because that seems like a more appropriate thing to say than we’ve been out here for the better part of an hour, and I’m beginning to think you’re insane.
“You run it,” he demands, breathless. “Go—you—I want to see how long it takes you. Go.”
“Uh. See, I’d sort of prefer not to? I’m still wearing my uniform, and my hand is bandaged, and there’s kind of a lot of mud and water and nastiness involved. It seems like a bad combination, so—”
I break off, because Declan has aimed his unblinking stare straight at me, and it’s intimidating enough to make me want to be silent. Finally, once he’s satisfied that I’m done protesting, he says, “Take off your jacket, shirt, and tie. Tighten up your boot laces. If your bandage gets ruined, you can go to the infirmary and get it set again before you go home. Run the course.”
“I can… do that, I guess?” I say, holding out the stopwatch by the cord so that it dangles between us. Declan grabs it out of my hand and sits down hard on the ground, taking long, desperate gulps from one of the water bottles he must have set out earlier. I strip off my leather jacket, then my necktie, and after a moment of consideration, my button-down, leaving me in just my boots, my uniform pants, and a plain black t-shirt. I empty my pockets, trudge over to the starting point of the course and warn, “Uh, keep in mind, I’ve never actually done this course before, so I might fall on my ass. And if I do, you’re not allowed to make fun of me.”
Instead of agreeing, Declan resets the stopwatch and counts down, “Three. Two. One. Go.”
I take off at a run towards the first set of obstacles, a series of horizontal beams at varying heights with maybe eight feet of distance between each beam. I hop over each of them fairly easily—the course is designed to get harder as it goes on. Next, there’s a long line of tires to stutter-step through, then some higher beams. From there, it’s straight-up awful—tangled cargo nets to climb up, parallel bars to drag myself along like I’m a fucking two-toed sloth, rope bridges to edge along over a miniature pond that’s covered in a green film. I whine aloud when I get to the crawl; it’s supposed to be a thirty-foot stretch of dirt under coils of concertina wire, but it rained for three hours late this morning, so it’s currently a mud crawl.
I stop and turn around to look at Declan, hoping he’ll tell me I can stop, but his face is blank. I sigh and drop to the ground, flattening my body and digging my elbows and the inside of my knees into the wet, sloppy earth. I come out the other side with my entire front caked in mud.
The last big obstacle is a six-foot-tall wall that I have to scramble over, and then I’m slapping my hands down on the wooden beam that marks the end of the first half of the course. From there, it’s all the same, but in reverse, which fucking blows, because it means the first thing I have to do is climb a six-foot wall from a dead stop. I manage it, drop to the ground, and keep going. Luckily, the course gets easier now, except for the last wall and the rope climb right at the end, which sucks a dick. I haven’t done a rope climb in over a year, and my injured hand is already throbbing, half-bandaged and probably going to get infected if I don’t clean it out soon. Declan still isn’t letting up, though, so I try to haul myself up the rope as quickly as I can, ignoring the pain of it.
I slap the top beam and pretty much flail my way back to the ground as Declan says, “Twelve minutes, forty-seven seconds.”
“Not bad, for my first time at it,” I say, shrugging. “I’ll probably forget about it for now, then practice a couple times the week before finals. All I really care about is clocking a time that lets me pass MLEP. The only guys who actually give a shit about their times are the ones who plan to enlist.”
Declan stands up and looks around at me. “What are you planning to do after graduation?”
“No idea,” I say, sprawling out on the grass. “I’ve got some—well, they might be acceptance letters, or they might be rejection letters. Either way, I’ve got a stack of ‘em in my room somewhere. They keep coming in, only I never check the mail, so Travis puts them in my room and tries to get me to open them, but I haven’t even bothered to look at them yet. I mean, I fucking hate school, so I’m really not sure I’m up for another four years of it.” I cock my head to the side. “Why? What are you planning to do?”
“I’m going to West Point,” Declan says, one eyebrow raised just enough to be noticeable. “Now do you understand why getting a good time on this course is important to me?”
“You’re gonna look so cute in your little fatigues, I bet,” I say with a sly smile. When he continues to look unimpressed, I roll my eyes and gesture towards the course again. “If you want to run it again, I’ll work the clock one more time, but then I’m going home. Studying for finals is boring, and that’s what this is, even if it involves a lot more sweat than usual.”
He takes to the course again. The thirteen-minute break has helped him, but not by much; he manages a nine minute, fifty-eight second run, snapping at me to call out the time before he has even come down from the rope climb. The moment the words are out of my mouth, he scrapes himself halfway down the rope and lets go, crumpling to the ground and not moving. He isn’t far enough away to justify standing and running; I scramble onto my hands and knees and crawl over to him, even though my hand is still screaming with every movement.
“Dec,” I say sharply, “Declan, dude, are you good?”
“’m fine,” he breathes, but barely. “I’m just… exhausted. Winded.”
“You’d probably be less winded if you hadn’t just fallen ten feet through the air,” I point out.
He doesn’t reply, only blinks slowly up at me. I suddenly become aware of the fact that I’m still kind of hovering over him, sitting on my heels to one side of him, but with one palm braced on the ground above each of his shoulders. I make to lean back, to give him some breathing room, but when I shift away, he catches my wrist and turns his attention to my failing bandage.
“How’s your hand?”
“Fine.” My voice very nearly breaks; it’s possibly the most humiliating thing to ever happen to me. I clear my throat and sit back on my heels, but Declan hasn’t released my arm. My movement draws him upright, much too close to what I’d consider my personal space bubble. I force another cough into my free fist and repeat, “It’s fine. I’ll take care of it when I get home.”
“Let me look at it,” he urges.
I try to shake him off. “Dude, it’s not a big deal, I can—”
“Let me look at it, Anderson.”
“No. It’s fine,” I try to say, but the ‘fine’ comes out as more of a huff than a word, because Declan shoves me flat onto my back and sprawls out on top of me, pinning my lower body in place with his and bracing one palm against my chest to keep me down while the other tightens around my wrist so that he can bring my hand up for closer inspection. I try to kick him, and when that fails miserably, I whine, “Get the hell off me, you fucking loser.”
He snorts. “Come on, like you haven’t been practically begging me to get on you for months now. I figured you’d be happy about this.”
That right there is way, way too close to the bone. I give a slight wriggle, trying to see if I can flip him off of me without hurting him. It doesn’t work. “Very funny. Seriously, that’s adorable. Shut up.”
“Do you think I don’t see the way you look at me?” he asks. “Do you think I don’t realize just how serious you are when you’re flirting with me at meals, or during MLEP, or when we’re out with the guys?”
And suddenly, this isn’t even remotely fun anymore. I shove at his shoulders and order, “Get off. I want to go home.”
“Hey, it’s not a bad thing,” Declan says, like he’s trying to calm me down, which is stupid, because I’m not fucking freaking out, I just want to leave. He does this—this stupid fucking thing he’s been doing since I shaved my head, where he smooths his hand over what’s left of my hair, like he’s fucking petting me. He does it as a wordless greeting in the morning before PT, he does it when my hair is still damp at breakfast, he does it if we bump into each other in the halls between classes, he does it when he sprawls out in the chair next to mine during MLEP, and he does it now, when he’s got me on my back, squirming underneath his weight. He cocks his head to the side and gives me this little half-smile. “Truthfully, I kind of like it. I mean, when I first started school here, I used to look up to you, you know? I wanted to be like you. And now you’re here, and we’re friends, and you want me. It’s like reading comic books when you’re a kid, and then growing up well enough that Bruce Wayne wants to fuck you in the Batmobile.”
“Glad to be of service, now get off of me, I mean it,” I snap, but he readjusts his stance just enough to slip one of his legs between mine, and then he’s pressing down with his hips, grinding down against me. Completely without my permission, my back arches so sharply that I end up banging my head against the ground.
Like I haven’t spoken at all, Declan ducks down and whispers right next to my ear, “That what you want, Garen? You wanna fuck me in your Ferrari?”
I do, I really, really do, but I know it’s not going to happen. He’s only doing this to tease me, because Declan Campbell is nothing if not a raging fucking narcissist who gets off on knowing that everyone—straight girls, gay boys, whoever—wants his dick. And I never wanted to be this guy; the gay guy who embarrasses the shit out of himself by getting a crush on the straight boy he’s friends with. I’ve never done something this pathetic before. The closest I’ve ever come was falling for Travis back when he still thought he was straight, and that doesn’t count, because he ended up not being straight. But Dec… he’s getting nothing out of this. I can feel him pressed up against me, and he’s still completely soft, not even a twitch of interest in the friction. That’s kind of the worst part.
“If you don’t get off of me within the next like, ten seconds, I swear to god, I’m gonna punch you in the fucking face,” I warn.
He frowns, but it’s a curious frown, not an angry one. “You’re pissed at me. Are you embarrassed?”
“Of course I’m fucking embarrassed,” I hiss.
He slips a hand between us and palms the still-growing hardness at the front of my mud-stained trousers. I might make a sound. He gives me an infuriatingly faint squeeze. “Are you embarrassed because of this?”
“Y-Yeah, it’s because of that, you fucking idiot,” I snap, writhing in place until he moves his hand away again. “Christ, Campbell. I know I joke around with you or whatever, but I kind of try not to be that faggot who shoves his fucking boner at his straight friends. It’s not—I can’t help it, not when you’re on me like this, so if you’d just get off me, I could—”
“I don’t care, Garen,” he tries to reassure me. For the first time since I’ve met him, he seems like my discomfort actually displeases him. It’s a nice change, but it would be a nicer change if he’d get off me, like I’ve asked. Nicer still, if he’d shut the fuck up. “I know you like me. I know you want to sleep with me. It’s fine, I don’t mind. You know I’m not going to treat you any differently from how I treat my straight friends. Alright?”
I close my eyes and force myself to take a slow, deep breath. I’m hoping it will help me calm down, but it doesn’t. My face is still burning and my dick is still rock hard when I say, “Alright. Fine. I get it. Can I go now? Please?”
For a moment, nothing happens, and then I feel what I’m pretty sure is his thumb brushing across my lower lip, like he’s smearing away one of the dots of mud splatter that have left me with an earthy version of his freckles. The touch is surprising enough to make my eyes snap open, but by the time I can focus, he’s already rolling off to the side, freeing me.
“Of course,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s—I’m the one who should be sorry, alright? I didn’t mean to—” I blow out a harsh, exasperated breath, then haul myself to my feet and collect my belongings. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I stop by the locker room to shower, shove my muddy uniform into my gym bag, and change back into my slightly grody PT clothes from this morning. When I get home, Ben is lying on the couch, holding a book in one hand and absently reaching down to scratch the back of Omelette’s neck with the other. He looks up when I enter, then makes a little noise of pained protest when I collapse on top of him and announce, “I am so fucking sick of straight people, I swear to god.”
“Did something happen?” He tries to wriggle in place, but it doesn’t work. At all. “Also, what the fuck, you weigh almost twice as much as me. Get off, before I suffocate.”
Instead of getting off, I bury my face in the front of his hoodie. Almost immediately, I’m hit with a pretty weird sensory experience—he feels like he always does, but instead of smelling, you know, like himself, like he usually does, he smells like Jamie; Jamie’s cologne, Jamie’s shower gel, Jamie’s shampoo. I draw back, blink at his chest, then roll my eyes; if the words ‘Patton Military Academy Varsity Lacrosse Team’ printed in navy letters across the chest of the hoodie weren’t a hint to the real owner, the embroidered Captain on the right bicep and Goldwyn #16 on the left are information enough.
I flop back down on him, but I guess he has appeased me enough for one evening, because he shoves me off him onto the floor. I land right next to Omelette, who thrusts his tongue out and slops it all over my cheek. I duck away from the tongue-bath, but scratch him under the jaw while his tail beats frantically against the carpet.
Ben leans over to peer at me from the edge of the couch. “Why do you suddenly hate straight people?”
I sigh and rub my palm over my face, mostly so I won’t have to make eye contact. “Because they—look, you ever had a straight guy flirt with you because he thinks it’s amusing that you want him, or whatever?” He shakes his head slowly. I sigh again. “Well, Declan is—I don’t know. I guess I’m just sick of it being like, funny to him. I get it, alright? I’m into him, but I’m a guy, and he’s not into guys, so it’s not gonna happen. Doesn’t mean I want to talk about it.”
Ben raises an eyebrow. “Does that mean you’d rather I stopped asking you about it?”
“Kind of,” I admit. For a minute, we both lie there in silence.
“I know something that’ll make you feel better,” he finally says, breaking out of his typical monotone to use a sing-song voice. “Guess what I did today.”
I reach up and pluck at the sleeve of the hoodie. “Honestly? Kind of guessing you did Jamie.”
“Shut up,” he says, ducking out of sight again.
I sit up and grab him by the shoulder, twisting him away from the back of the couch so he’s facing me again. I say, “Come on. You saw him today, right? You guys hung out?”
Slowly, Ben nods. “Sort of. I mean, he mostly just needed my help picking out your birthday present, so he picked me up and we went to the city. Spent maybe two hours doing that. Went back to his place after.” I smirk. He flushes and rolls over to lie facedown on the cushions. “We didn’t—I mean, we didn’t fuck. Not really. But we hooked up, sort of.” He rubs his forehead against the arm of the couch. From this angle, I can see that his eyes are still open, staring hard at the cushion a few inches from his face. “I really fucked up with Lent this year.”
He sounds so… broken up over it, and I have no idea what to say. Sure, I believe in God, and I go to temple on the High Holy Days, but I’m not about to give up orgasms for a month and a half, and I’m sure as hell not about to feel guilty for banging a guy as hot as Jamie.
“Yeah, well, Catholics have that ‘get out of Hell free’ card, right? When you get back to Connecticut this weekend, make sure you do that whole confession and cannibalism thing,” I say. “You know, where you eat the Jesus crackers and drink the Jesus blood wine.”
That’s enough to make Ben lift his head and turn to squint at me. “Are you talking about the Eucharist? It—that’s not cannibalism, you fuckwit.”
“My point is that you don’t need to stress yourself out over this. Whatever you did with Jamie? It’s fine. Forget about it, watch a movie with me or something, do my English homework so I don’t have to. Go on your date tomorrow night, and if you wanna pound it out with Jamie again, do it. Then go home, read your Bible, get your skinny ass to church and run that forgive me, Daddy, I’ve been a bad, naughty boy scene with your priest, and you’ll be fine.”
“You should write the Garen Anderson Translation of the New Testament,” Ben says dryly. “Your religious interpretations of my faith are so enlightening.”
I manhandle him into an upright position and spread myself out over the couch next to him. “I know, I’m such a joy. Now, can we stop talking about boys and braiding each other’s hair? I feel like I’m growing a vagina.”
“Don’t worry. You’re a ridiculous, boy-obsessed mess even as a man,” he assures me. I try to shove him off the couch, but Omelette barks at me in his defense. Grumbling, I have to settle for kicking my legs up onto his lap and making him watch the worst, most mind-numbing reality show I can find.
184 days sober
Five minutes before the end of chem, the classroom loudspeaker buzzes loudly enough to make everyone jump. Mr. DeCarlo picks up the extension on the wall, and all of us immediately dissolve into muttered conversation. At least, we do, right up until he hangs up, turns, and announces, “Anderson. Main office.”
“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” I say immediately. “Call ‘em back, say I’m innocent.”
Javi snorts. “You haven’t been innocent since you were about twelve years old. Learn to lie better.”
“You aren’t in trouble, but you will be, if you don’t do as you’re told,” DeCarlo says sternly.
I roll my eyes, stand, and kick my backpack towards Charlie. “Bring that to lunch for me, will you?”
At his nod of assent, I trudge out of the room, out of the science building, and halfway across campus to the main administrative building. The sprawling layout of Patton is a bitch and a half to deal with, especially on days like today, when it’s been raining on and off all morning. By the time I get to the main office, my blue Oxford is spattered dark with rainwater. I shake off like a puppy as the secretary looks up at me, nods in acknowledgment. “Garen.”
“Lisa. Been a while since we’ve seen each other, huh? You’re looking lovely as ever,” I say. I gesture towards the door separating us from the headmaster’s office. “Should I go right in?”
“No,” she says quietly. “You’re not going to be seeing Headmaster Samuels.”
I blink. “Then why am I here?”
She holds out a yellow Post-It note with something scribbled on it. “There’s a family situation that requires your attention. I’ve been asked to have you call this number to check in.”
I stare down at the Post-It. It starts with Savannah’s nine-one-two area code, so I know immediately that it’s Jamie’s number. I am instantly disturbed. My phone is in my pocket, and it’s been still almost all morning, only buzzing a few times during my earlier classes with texts from some of the guys. I pull it out and check my missed calls, just in case, but Jamie hasn’t tried to contact me at all, so I don’t understand why he’d call the school and have me taken out of class to call him.
Steeling myself for something incredibly weird, I smile my thanks at Lisa and select Jamie’s name from my contacts list. The ringing seems to drag on much longer than it should, and when it finally stops, an unfamiliar male voice says, “James Goldwyn’s phone. Who’s calling?”
“Uh,” I say, thrown, “Garen Anderson? I’m his best friend. I’m at school, and I just got pulled out of class and told to call him. What’s going on?”
“My name is Tom Hall. James is my wife’s nephew. He asked me to call you on his behalf.” There’s a brief hesitation, then Tom says, “There was an incident last night. His mother and father were involved in a car accident on their way home from dinner in town.”
My stomach lurches. “But they’re—I mean, they aren’t hurt too badly, right? He—George and Melissa, they’re okay?”
“I think you should come to his apartment in the city,” Tom says gently.
“They’re okay, right?”
“No.”
I feel like I might be sick. I sit down on the wooden bench just inside the door of the office and rub a palm over what’s left of my hair. I can feel Lisa watching me apprehensively, but I don’t care. There are hundreds of horrific images running through my head right now—missing or ruined, paralyzed limbs; cuts and burns and gaping tears in flesh; brain damage, concussions, amnesia that will stop either of them from even remembering their own son’s name. I clear my throat and ask, “How bad is it?”
“Melissa was killed on impact,” he says, and I find myself doubling over with a shudder, pressing my forehead to my knees. “George was still alive when the paramedics arrived, but his—he suffered a skull fracture, and the bleeding to his brain couldn’t be stopped. By the time they got him to the hospital, he had already died.”
No. No, no, I don’t want this to be true, I want it to be some incredibly twisted trick, but I know it’s not—Jamie jokes about a lot of things, but he loves his parents too much to ever pretend this could happen. He loves them so fucking much. It must be true, and he must be aching.
“Can I talk to Jamie?” I whisper.
“He’s in his bedroom right now. He asked not to be disturbed for the time being.”
He’s already disturbed, you stupid fuck, I want to scream down the line. His parents are dead, and the only people who are there for him right now are you and your idiot wife, who are practically fucking strangers, and he needs me. I take the deepest breath I can manage and say, “I want to talk to my friend. Now.”
“I’m only following James’ wishes. I’m sorry. If you want to speak to him, you’ll have to come to his—”
“Of course I’m going to come there, you—” Another deep breath, another one, another one. “Just—I’m leaving school now, okay? I’ll be there in about an hour. If he comes out of his room, tell him that, yeah? Tell him I’m on my way.”
I hang up before Tom can say anything else that might make me want to punch him in the mouth the second I meet him. I sit up straight and look over at the secretary, who isn’t even pretending to be doing anything other than eavesdropping. “I need to leave school early,” I say. “I don’t—I’m over eighteen, so I think I can sign myself out for the day, but if you need me to call my mom for permission, I can do that.”
I need to do that anyway. I need to call Mom, and I need to call Dad, because they’ve both met George and Melissa Goldwyn, and they’ll want to know. They’ve—we’ve all had dinner together before. All six of us have sat around restaurant tables together, when Jamie and I would get dropped off at Patton at the start of every school year and would immediately refuse to be separated again; when our parents would come to visit for Parents’ Weekend in the spring; when they’d pick us up after our spring finals and Jamie and I would start whining already about how we didn’t want to be apart for the few weeks before I went to visit him in Georgia. And it was always such a good time, hearing the way Jamie’s accent thickens when he’s talking to other people from Savannah, hearing George laugh over how much my mom and I make fun of each other, hearing Melissa and Mom have some doctor-versus-lawyer competition to see who can name-drop their respective med school and law school more times over the course of a single meal. Hearing George and Melissa call me their noisy, Yankee bonus-son. Mom and Dad knew Melissa and George, and they love Jamie, and they need to know.
“All I need you to do is sign out here,” Lisa says quietly, passing a clipboard and a sign-out sheet across the desk. My hand is practically vibrating as I scrawl something remarkably unlike my real signature over the line. “Are you sure that you’re alright to drive, dear? I think it might be better for you to call someone to come pick you up.”
I could—Travis hasn’t left for work yet, so either he or Ben could come get me. But it’ll be half an hour before they can get here, and then another hour to get to Jamie’s place, and he needs me now. I shake my head and trip out of the office and up to the dining hall. The rest of the squad is already well into lunch.
“That was quick,” Sam observes, stretching. “Probably the shortest lecture the headmaster’s ever given you. What were you getting in trouble for, anyway?”
“Nothing. I’m not in trouble,” I say flatly. My backpack is sitting on my usual chair; I should probably pick that up, shouldn’t I? I dig my keys out of the front pocket and shoulder the bag before turning my blank face towards my friends again. “Taylor, I need you to tell Dr. Stanford I won’t be in Government and Politics this afternoon. And uh, somebody needs to tell Sergeant Smitth I left early. He can check with the office, if he’s pissed about it. They gave me permission.”
Javi twists to frown up at me. “Why, what’s wrong?”
“Jamie needs me,” I say, and then, before any of them can dare to make some smartass comment, I add, “His parents were in a car accident last night, I guess.”
Charlie turns to face me, eyes wide behind his glasses. “How are they?”
“Dead,” is all I can manage to say. My words are met with absolute silence.
“Are you joking?” Steven says finally.
Very slowly, I turn my eyes to meet his. There’s a flutter of movement, like Taylor has just slugged him in the hip under the table. All I can do is stare for a long moment before I say, “No. I’m not.”
The drive to the city… happens. I think. I’m unaware of the entire thing, but it must happen, because one minute, I’m fumbling my key into the ignition of the Ferrari, and the next, I’m rolling into a parking space in the garage under Jamie’s building. Another tenant happens to be heading inside at the same time, and she holds the door for me so that I don’t need to get buzzed in. Unlike the drive from the house to here, the elevator ride from the ground floor to Jamie’s seems like it takes twice as long as usual. When I get to his door, it’s locked, so I have to knock. After a moment, I hear the click of a lock, and then the door is swinging open to reveal a sandy-haired man I’ve never met before.
“Garen?” he says, extending his hand. “Tom Hall. Please, come in.” Like I need his fucking permission. Still, I give him a quick handshake and step into the apartment. He gestures towards the living room, where three people are already seated on the couch and chairs. “This is my wife, Michelle, and our children.”
The children aren’t actually children; it’s a guy and a girl, both my age, maybe a little older. And shell-shocked, crying Michelle looks so much like Melissa Goldwyn, so much like Jamie himself. I feel uncomfortable just looking at her; no wonder Jamie’s hiding.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, then, just a breath later, “I’m going to go see James. He’s in his room, yeah?”
Tom’s nod is all I need, and then I’m striding down the hall. The door to Jamie’s bedroom is shut. I knock once, but don’t wait for his permission before I push it open.
James is standing at the foot of his bed, his back turned to me as he meticulously arranges and rearranges the contents of his suitcase. He’s already dressed for the day, wearing a dark gray, three-piece suit and standing as stiffly as if it were made of armor. He doesn’t turn around when I enter the room, so I follow my instinctive desire to step up behind him and wrap my arms around his middle, tucking my chin over his shoulder. His hands go still on the shoe he’d been holding, and after a moment, he sets the shoe down and covers my forearms with his palms instead.
I refuse to say a single one of those trite condolences that people always throw around when someone dies. I can’t say it’s okay, because it’s not, but I can’t say I’m sorry, because that would force him to be the one to say it’s okay. I can’t ask him for the full story of what happened—I’ll get that from Tom later, I guess, non-blood-relative to non-blood-relative. For now, I have to settle for saying quietly, “I’ll do anything you need me to do. Just tell me what I can do to help you, and I’ll do it. I love you so much. Whatever you need.”
Slowly, he turns his face towards mine. He’s almost blurry this close up, but even once I focus, his expression is still completely and utterly blank. He licks his lips and says, so quietly he’s barely audible, “I need to go home for a while. I need to make arrangements for the funeral, and I need to—the house shouldn’t be empty. Somebody needs to talk to the staff, and I suppose I’ll have to… meet with the lawyers, at some point. To figure out what will happen to it. The house, that is.” He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing under the knot of his tie. “Will you come to Georgia with me?”
“Of course,” I say, nodding. “I figured I’d—I mean, I didn’t wanna stop home long enough to pack a bag, but I’ve got some spare clothes here that I can take, and it’s… my teachers will understand. It’s Patton, and you’re a Patton boy, they’ll understand why I have to be with you now. I can take as much time as you want me to. Do you need me to do anything? Get tickets for the next flight South?”
He shakes his head and shrugs out of my arms, returning his focus to the suitcase open on the bed. “My uncle said he would handle it. We’re all going to fly down together, I guess. Him, us, my aunt Michelle, my cousins. They were the ones who—” He pauses, swallows, and attempts to speak again. “My aunt was the person who the Savannah Police contacted. I suppose she thought it was a message that would best be delivered in person, rather than over the phone.”
“Yeah, obviously,” I say. “I, um—Jamie, seriously, is there anything I can do for you? Please.”
Slowly, he shakes his head again. “No, I’m… I’ll finish packing. And I’ll gather your things from the closet. Would you mind asking Tom if he’s been able to reserve the tickets yet?”
I give him a lingering kiss on the forehead and let myself back out of the room. The moment I reach the end of the hallway, all of the Halls turn to me, like they’re expecting an update. I shove my hands into my pockets. “What’s the flight situation?” I ask. “Are we flying out tonight?”
The daughter quickly wipes the heel of her hand under her eyes and asks, “Are you coming to Savannah, too?”
“Jamie asked me to, so, yes, I’m coming to Savannah,” I say. I don’t add that I would’ve gone, even if he hadn’t asked me. James and I are a package deal. We’ve been inseparable at the best of times, and I can’t begin to think of leaving him alone at a time like this.
“We have a three o’clock flight out of JFK,” Tom answers.
From behind me, I hear the sound of Jamie’s footsteps, then the sound of him readjusting the hold he’s got on his suitcase. He clears his throat and says tonelessly, “We should leave soon, then. It’s only supposed to be half an hour from here to the airport, but… New York traffic being what it is, I’d rather not risk being late.”
“Want me to head downstairs and ask the doorman to get a few cabs?” I offer.
“We have our car here,” Tom says, shaking his head. “It won’t seat six, though. If you’d like to get a cab for yourselves and meets us there, I think that would be a workable plan.”
He seems inclined to handle the Hall portion of the group, which I guess leaves me to handle Jamie and myself. Tom gives me all of the flight information, as well as his own contact info, in case there’s a problem on the way there. As sort of an afterthought, he gives me the rest of the family’s numbers as well—Michelle’s, and the daughter’s and son’s, April and Ethan. I’m not sure why I need four different numbers to be sure I can handle a half hour journey apart, but I dutifully add each one to my contacts list.
Once I’ve completed that task, Tom starts shepherding his kids to the door. He returns for his wife, slipping an arm around her waist to guide her. Michelle pauses in front of Jamie, who is staring at the floor, completely still. After a minute of silence, he finally looks up to meet her eyes. She reaches up to brush her hand over his cheek and whispers, “I know.”
Her husband and kids may speak with a Connecticut non-accent, but her own voice comes out in the sweet drawl of a Georgia native. She doesn’t just look like Melissa; she sounds like her, too. Jamie grits his teeth and nods just once.
It’s a good thing that Tom knows enough to quickly herd her out into the hallway too, because the door barely has time to shut behind them before Jamie turns to me, flings an arm around my neck, and crumples.