"I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me." --S.E. Hinton
230 days sober
“I thought you’d learned not to piss me off.”
Dave isn’t yelling at me. He hardly ever yells at me, mostly because he doesn’t have to. When every word that comes out of a man’s mouth is a prelude to violence, he can be as soft-spoken as he wants to be. Right now, his tone is measured, and his hand is gripping my throat.
Except it isn’t his hand. It’s my seatbelt, and it’s choking me. I fumble for the latch at my hip, but there isn’t one, only an endless strap of nylon anchoring me in place.
“Please,” I gasp. “I didn’t—it wasn’t me.”
“It’s always you, Garen. It always has been,” Dave says. He’s behind me, choking me with his arm that is also the seatbelt, watching me in the mirror with hazel eyes that are also flashing headlights on the front of a Chevy Tahoe that’s coming closer and closer and closer. “You’ve always been the one who makes me angry enough to lose control. You’ve always been the one who needed to be put in his place. You’ve always been mine, haven’t you, G?”
No, no, no. I’m not saying it aloud, but he can still hear me, just like I can hear his yes, yes, you don’t get to say no to me even though his mouth is too busy biting at my shoulder to say a word. I can’t breathe—not to scream for help, not to beg for mercy, not even to sob. The seatbelt is too tight.
There’s a knife in the cupholder. It is simultaneously the hunting knife that Declan keeps in his boot and the switchblade I’ve been carrying with me since Valentine’s Day and the razor that Ben uses to cut himself, and I lunge for it, desperate to cut myself free.
“Stop struggling,” Dave demands from the backseat. My Ferrari doesn’t have a backseat. The Lexus did, though, and suddenly I’m not battling the seatbelt, I’m fighting Dave himself, and we’re both in the back of his car, and he’s gripping my hips as he snarls again, “Stop struggling.”
I yank the hand on my side away and twist the fingers back as hard as I can.
“The fuck?”
My eyes fly open. Jamie’s bedroom is softly lit by the glow of early morning, and Jamie himself is stirring next to me. He’d probably still be asleep, if not for the fact that Ben is thrashing around on his other side, trying to withdraw the arm flung over Jamie’s chest.
The arm with the hand that must’ve bumped my hip while we all slept. The hand with the fingers that I’m trying to break. I let go. Ben shrinks out of reach and rolls over, burying himself in the blankets and mumbling a sleep-raspy, “You’re an asshole, don’t fucking touch me.”
“Sorry,” I whisper. My heart is pounding so hard, I’d be surprised if he could even hear my apology over it. To be safe, I repeat more loudly, “Sorry.”
Ben grumbles something that might be, “Blow me,” shoves his head under a pillow, and passes out again.
Between us, Jamie sits up and rubs the heels of his hands against his closed eyelids. When he turns to me, I can’t tell if he’s squinting because it’s still too early to be awake, or because he doesn’t have his contact lenses in. He asks, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just—” My personal bar for embarrassment is set pretty high, but being a grown-ass man who utters the words ‘I had a nightmare’ might still clear it. I hope Jamie can’t see that my hand is shaking as I reach for his shoulder and tug him back to the mattress. “I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”
“What time is it?” he asks.
“Time for you to lie the fuck down and let me spoon you,” I say. His laugh is swallowed up in a yawn. I manage to get him properly horizontal again, but the second I roll onto my side, pain explodes down the length of my spine. It’s like the marrow in every bone has been sucked out and replaced with molten lead, leaving me weighted down in agony. If I try to turn my head, I might actually die. I grit my teeth to stop myself from crying, puking, or both. The last time I was in this much pain, at least my body had the decency to put itself in a coma so that I didn’t have to deal with it.
Jamie drifts back to sleep, but I can’t. The second I’m sure he’s out, I slip gingerly out of the bed and retreat to the living room. Only there, in the stillness and silence of complete solitude, do I let out the ragged gasp of pain that has been tearing at my throat since I woke up.
It’s not supposed to be like this. I’m nineteen, I’m in good shape—my body is supposed to bounce back from everything I drag it through. But here I am, laid low from a car crash that the doctor at the hospital guessed would only leave me with minor whiplash. What do people even do when something like this happens? I’m not middle-aged, I don’t have a chiropractor saved to my contacts list. Only real adults with shitty office jobs that keep them hunched over in shittier desk chairs all day have to worry about this kind of thing.
Which is how I end up flat on Jamie’s living room floor, calling my mom at six thirty in the morning and begging for the number of her chiropractor on the Upper West Side.
“Make sure you put down my address for the bill,” she says for the third time. “I know you’re on your father’s insurance, but the office has my information on file already.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
“And after you leave his office, I want you to come over to mine. I have some things I’d like to discuss with you.”
I pantomime putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger. “Can’t. My phone screen cracked during the accident, and I need to get it fixed.”
“You can stop by after that, then.”
“I have to get over to Patton and pick up Taylor’s notes. Our AP Government final is one week from today, and I need to study, unless you’ve suddenly stopped caring about my education.”
“I care very much. That’s one of the things I’d like to discuss with you,” she says.
I put my phone down on my chest so that I can use both hands to mime tying a noose. I’m in the process of hanging myself with the invisible rope when Mom adds, “I’ll buy you lunch.”
Fucking cheater. I sigh and pick up the phone again. “Okay. But I want to go to that Portuguese place on West Seventeenth.”
“Garen, my office is in Carnegie Hill. I am not going all the way to Chelsea for lunch. Be reasonable.”
“I am. I could’ve picked someplace in Brooklyn,” I say.
She relents, but mostly because she’s afraid I might try to make her leave Manhattan, and she avoids that at all costs. We agree to meet at the restaurant, and she makes me promise three times that I’ll actually show up before she lets me end the call.
Making phone calls from the floor is a better prospect than standing up, so I pretend to be my own secretary for a while. First up is the Patton main office, where the administration all have to be awake too goddamn early, same as the students. I let them know I won’t be in today, but that I’ll bring a doctor’s note with me tomorrow so they know I’m not ditching. Lisa the secretary is deeply concerned to hear that a car crash almost took out her favorite delinquent student, so I spend a good twenty minutes reassuring her that I will live to terrorize the Patton faculty another day.
To prove my point, I call Javi and demand that he march his ass across the breakfast hall and tell Sergeant Smitth that I’m sorry for missing PT this morning, but that he’s on crack if he thinks that my fucked up neck and I will be practicing on the obstacle course with everyone else this week. Smitth tries to give me detention, but another drill sergeant points out that he can’t really punish a student who is absent because of a neck injury. He gives Javi detention instead. My third call is to Mom’s chiropractor, Dr. Elkins, who is able to squeeze me in at nine o’clock, and my fourth is to the Portuguese restaurant in Midtown to see if I can get a table for two around noon.
My fifth call is to David Walczyk.
I have no idea why I do it. One second, I’m locking down a lunch reservation, and the next, I’m thumbing open the text that came from the burner phone last night and jabbing the cracked screen’s tiny call button. Fuck this. Fuck Dave. If he wants to destroy my goddamn beautiful car and bash open my friend’s head and practically snap my neck, then he can put up with my wrath afterwards.
My wrath goes to voicemail, because of course it does. He doesn’t have a personalized greeting, which is a standard precaution for phones you buy specifically so that you can send threatening messages to people who have already taken out restraining orders against you. While I’m waiting for the beep, I drum my fingers against the floor because it’s the easiest way to pretend they’re not trembling.
“Hey, Dave. It’s Garen, the guy you tried to murder last night,” I say. “So sorry to bother you on what I’m sure is a super busy morning of stalking, assaulting, and generally tormenting people who are just trying to live their lives. I have a question, though. Do you remember the first time you threatened to kill me?”
This is it. This is going to be the time my mouth finally gets me into a shit heap that I can’t find my way out of. This is going to be the call that gets me killed. If it isn’t, it’s at least going to be the call that makes me vomit.
“Because I do. I remember,” I force myself to continue. “I was fifteen, and you were eighteen. It was January. We had just gotten back from winter break, and you saw Jamie hug me outside of the dining hall. After dinner, you pulled me into a stairwell, grabbed me by the jaw, and squeezed so hard I thought my teeth were going to break, and you said, ‘Garen, you have to share a room with that gangly slut, but if I ever find out that you’ve been sharing his bed, I’ll bash your skull in.’ Not like you didn’t do that anyway, but…” The inner corners of my eyes are burning, but honestly, my tear ducts can get fucked. I won’t let Dave have the satisfaction of hearing me cry. I clear my throat and push onward. “Anyway, I just think it’s funny how you keep getting homicidal over things I haven’t done. You said you’d kill me for sleeping with Jamie, but I wasn’t. You tried to kill me for cheating with Travis last spring, but I hadn’t. And now here you are, running me off the road and turning a classic car into an abstract sculpture piece because you think I torched your rapemobile, but I didn’t do shit, Dave. I was in my friend’s dorm all night, and the cops verified that. Don’t you get embarrassed, popping off over things you made up in your head? Don’t you feel fucking stupid?”
Someone calls my name from down the hall. Shit. I sit up, even though that jump-starts my back pain again, and say quietly into the phone, “Stay away from me, or I swear to god, I will ruin your fucking life.”
I end the call, wishing I could spit in his face instead.
“Garen,” Jamie calls out again. “You better not have left without saying goodbye to me!”
I make tracks back to the bedroom, where Ben is trying to get dressed without waking up enough to open his eyes, and Jamie is trying to convince his cat that she loves him. Zooey is not having it. Every time Jamie reaches out to her, her claws pop out so quickly, they might as well be spring-loaded. To spare us all any more of that, I scoop Zooey off the foot of the bed and lie back down next to Jamie with the kitten bundled in my arms, her baby Wolverine limbs tucked away where they can’t hurt anyone.
Jamie tentatively strokes two fingers over the back of her neck and seems pleased when she makes a noise like a rusty door hinge being forced open, but doesn’t Exorcist her head around to bite him. Ben gets tangled in the legs of his skinny jeans and tips over onto the foot of the bed. He lets out a muffled grunt of displeasure and rolls onto his stomach, like he’s got every intention of going back to sleep with his pants halfway up his thighs.
I love both of these embarrassing idiots so much that I want to barricade the door shut and spend the rest of our lives in bed without anyone else getting in the middle of this—no Dave Walczyk hunting me with his car, or Declan planning out a messy revenge, or Travis always looking so worried for me, or my mom wanting to badger me into planning some future that I’ll inevitably fuck up anyway. Just me and Jamie and Ben; my best friends, my ride or die boys.
“Let’s get married,” I decide.
“Good morning to you, too,” Jamie says.
Ben raises his head from the blankets just enough for his voice to be audible when he says, “Remember last night, when we talked about the need for greater specificity with pronouns if there are more than two people in the bed?”
“Yeah, but I’m talking to both of you,” I say. “Let’s all become those sketchy, fundie Mormons who even the other Mormons don’t like, and then all three of us can get married.”
“I have a sneaking suspicion that any fundamentalist religious sect would be disinclined to sanction a gay threeway, but you’re welcome to Google it, if you doubt me,” Jamie offers. “In the meantime, will you settle for the three of us getting brunch?”
“Take the dick out of your mouth and call it ‘breakfast,’ you fucking stereotype.” I yawn. The minor amount of stretching that requires sends hot sparks of pain into every muscle in my back, and I end up biting off the yawn before it can turn into a gasp.
Jamie frowns. “Are you alright?”
“Sure,” I lie, flashing him a wide smile. “My neck’s just a little sore from the crash. Nothing major, though. I already set up an appointment with this chiropractor my mom sees sometimes, and he’s going to… I dunno, fix whatever got wrenched last night, pop some shit back into alignment. I’ll be fine in a few hours. More than fine, if you’re offering to buy me breakfast first.”
“Of course I’m offering to buy you breakfast,” Jamie huffs. “You think I’d let my two best boys turn me out and not even offer them a meal in the morning?”
“My mistake. You’re a gentleman.” I stretch out a leg and dig my toes into one of Ben’s boxer-clad ass cheeks. “Ben. You alive?”
“Get your foot off of my ass,” Ben says, which is a yes. When my only response to his demand is to smack the ball of my foot down hard on his ass, he heaves a sigh and rolls sideways off the foot of the bed. There’s a soft thud as he hits the floor, then the rustling of fabric as he squirms around out of sight. When he stands a minute later, his jeans have been pulled the rest of the way up, zipped, and buttoned. He frowns down at his belt for so long that Jamie eventually takes pity on him and reaches out to assist.
“I swear, I’ve never met anyone who is so thoroughly useless in the mornings.”
Ben can’t even summon the energy for a scowl. He yawns enormously and rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand, transferring what’s left of yesterday’s eyeliner to the inside of his wrist. Even after he’s done rubbing, he doesn’t open his eyes again. “I know. ’m just really tired right now. The other assistant manager at the bookstore moved to Massachusetts last week, so my dad and I are splitting what would’ve been her shifts until we hire someone new. All my term papers are due at the end of this week, and my exams start next Monday. Last semester, I usually caught up on sleep during the weekends, but now I’ve got you and your alarming sex drive to contend with, so I’m busy then, too.”
“Well, unfortunately for me and my sex drive, I’ve committed to flying home on Friday to attend the Savannah Historical Society’s monthly meeting in my father’s stead,” Jamie says. He presses his thumb to the smudge of makeup on Ben’s wrist and rubs it out in slow, gentle circles until there’s nothing left. He lifts Ben’s hand and kisses his palm, then glances up to meet Ben’s half-lidded gaze. “Your term papers will have been turned in, and you’ll have a chance to catch up on your rest before your final exams. And then the following weekend, I have every intention of relieving my own pre-finals stress by coming to New Haven and fucking you into your mattress. You can have a nice, long nap after that, while I’m studying.”
Ben nods wordlessly and clambers back onto the bed to kiss him.
I close my eyes and bury my face against Zooey’s warm, rumbling body. Jamie’s only a few inches away from me. If I wanted to, I could send the cat away and sneak a hand into Jamie’s lap, stroke him to hardness while he kisses his boyfriend. I could get them both naked. I could start up another threesome, make them both late for their classes, make them stay in this bed with me. But Jamie has never kissed the palm of my hand the way I just watched him kiss Ben’s, and Ben has never expressed any desire to lie naked, sated, and sleeping in my bed while I thumbed through a textbook next to him. They didn’t even come to bed last night until after I’d already fallen asleep.
All the soft and fuzzy feelings I had about last night seem to have curdled inside my gut. Gritting my teeth against pain it causes, I squirm upright and off the bed, still clutching the cat to my chest. “I’m going to get Zooey some breakfast. And I’ve gotta be across town soon for that appointment with the chiropractor, so maybe I should take a raincheck on that breakfast and just grab a cup of coffee.”
In the end, I grab three cups of coffee. Jamie brews me a cup in his Keurig before packing Ben into a cab to Grand Central Terminal and shooing me in the direction of the 79th Street Transverse. My thankfully internalized tantrum means I’m dicking around the Upper West Side an hour before my appointment, so I hit the Starbucks on Columbus and West 76th. There are six Starbucks—Starbuckses?—on Columbus Avenue, so half an hour later, I find myself three blocks down, grabbing another cup at the one near West 73rd. Twenty minutes after that, I’m a few blocks over, jittery as hell and getting my neck cracked back into position by a very large doctor with freakishly soft hands. Dr. Elkins laughs at that, thanks me for my inappropriate and accidental compliment, and sends me on my way with a much less painful neck situation and a note requesting that I be excused from physical training until next Monday.
The people at the Verizon store are much less amused by my caffeine buzz. In the time it takes one dude to transfer my data and contacts list to a new iPhone, I knock over a display of earbuds, talk so much that I annoy three separate customers into leaving the store, and take about six hundred selfies on the display phones. My insistence that my overly-caffeinated personality is still preferable to my coked-up one isn’t the winning argument I’d hoped it would be, and all things considered, everyone working there seems pretty psyched when I finally leave.
Caffeine isn’t a serviceable substitute for cocaine, but it’s the only thing I have to distract me while I wait for my mom outside the restaurant. Javi has staged a mutiny among the rest of the squad as revenge for my part in getting him detention, so none of them are responding to my texts. Ben and Jamie are in class, Travis is working, Stohler is probably still sleeping. I’m terrified that my still trembling hands will end up dialing Dave Walczyk’s number so I can scream at him again if I let myself hold my phone for too long. I buy myself a fourth coffee instead and clutch it so desperately that I’m afraid I’ll crumple the paper cup. When Mom finally rolls up in a cab, I quickly drop the cup in the nearest trash can and wipe my coffee-splattered hands against my jeans.
“How are you?” are the first words out of her mouth. She reaches for my shoulder, then seems to think better of it and settles for brushing her fingers against the sleeve of my leather jacket. “Are you still in a lot of pain?”
“I’m doing a lot better than I was when I woke up. Your doc has magic hands,” I say. “I don’t know what his relationship status is, but if he’s single, you should lock that down. Make him my new step-dad.”
She grimaces. “It is my sincerest wish that any stepfathers, stepbrothers, or other step-relatives you might have in the future will keep their magic hands very far away from you. But I’m glad that Dr. Elkins was able to help you.”
The topic of the car accident carries us through being seated, ordering, splitting an appetizer, and into the main dish. Mom goes off about hit-and-run drivers, the piss-poor safety features in classic cars, and the questionable attitude of the insurance agent she spoke to this morning; I nod along and drink my fifth cup of coffee and think, I should’ve learned not to piss him off. A car for a car isn’t really that unfair.
We make it almost all the way through the meal before it finally comes out—the real reason she wanted to see me today. “Last night, I was reading through my schedule for the week, and I saw a note I’d made about your college responses.”
Fuck. The college talk. If I head for the door right now, I wonder if I could make it to the subway station before she caught up to me. Dr. Elkins told me that I won’t be up for physical activity for the rest of the week, but Mom’s wearing four-inch heels. I won’t even have to move that fast to evade her.
“Some of the schools that accepted you have a May first deadline for your response,” she continues. When I don’t reply, she raises her eyebrows. “That’s tomorrow, Garen. In case you weren’t aware.”
“I’m aware,” I say.
“And?” she prompts.
“And what?” I shrug. “You’re supposed to pick the school you want to go to, go online, and fill out the form that says you’re going. If you’re not picking a school, you don’t have to do shit. And I’m not actually going to college, so I don’t have to fill out any forms. I just have to… not show up. They’ll get the message.”
My mom takes an insane amount of pride in being one of the few Uptown New Yorkers without a face full of Botox, but if she could see the baffled creases forming in her forehead right now, she might reconsider the effectiveness of her choice. “What are you talking about? Of course you’re going to college. You applied, you auditioned for all these various music programs. Four different schools accepted you, and now all you have to do is pick which one we’re sending the check to. Your father mentioned that he thought you were leaning toward NYU, but if you don’t—”
“I’m not leaning toward anywhere,” I interrupt. “I never was. Back in October, Dad told me that I had to apply to five schools, so I did. He never told me that I had to go to any of them. So, maybe your post-divorce communication skills aren’t as legit as you thought.”
The confusion is wiped clear from Mom’s face and replaced by a cool, tight anger. She presses her lips together for a moment, like that’ll help her hold in whatever she wants to say to me. My stomach clenches. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat any more of my meal, but I don’t want her to know that I’m this affected by the conversation, so I stab at a piece of my chicken and start shredding it with the tines of my fork. After a minute of silence that seems to drag on forever, Mom finally says, “Don’t do this to me, Garen Michael.”
“Don’t what? Ruin your fantasies about having a son who goes off to college and graduates with honors and gets a great desk job someday? Come on, Mom. That was never going to—”
“No,” she says, leaning in so that the other diners can’t hear the blood-chilling fierceness in her voice. “Don’t put me in a position where I have to pack your backpack for you and send you off to school like you’re still a little boy.”
I sit back in my chair, blinking at her, feeling like I’ve been punched.
“If your father and I have to fill out the paperwork for you, we will do it. If we have to put all of your belongings in a car for you and drive you to your campus in September, we will do it. If we have to check your homework every night like you’re in the fourth grade, we will do it. Your education is too important for us to let you blow it off, just because you don’t feel like checking a box on a form tonight.”
My face is burning. Every word out of her mouth prompts another stab of embarrassment and anger and frustration. If she wants to ignore what I’m actually saying and just treat me like I’m an immature brat, then I can show her what an immature brat really is. “Right. Which one of you is going to quit your job and come live in the dorm with me so you can sit in on all my classes to make sure I’m actually going? Because that’s what you’ll have to do. You can fill out as much paperwork as you want, and you can pay for tuition, and you can drop me off on whatever campus you want, but you can’t force me to actually go to college. I’m not a Sim. You don’t literally control my every move.”
If we weren’t in public, I’m pretty sure that would have earned me a slap upside the head. As it stands, Mom is pretty clearly counting to ten before she speaks. “I don’t understand how you can be so blase about this. You know how important a college education is. You have to know. You can’t surround yourself with the boys you’ve surrounded yourself with and not know. Travis McCall graduated high school a semester early so that he could go to Columbia nine months ahead of schedule. Ben McCutcheon works himself to the bone so that he can afford to go to Yale. Even your little arsonist friend put himself through Patton so that he would have a better shot at getting into West Point, or so you’ve told me. How can you be friends with people like that and still not realize what an incredible opportunity you have here?”
“It’s different,” I snap. “Ben was LHS valedictorian last year. He wants to be a teacher, for fuck’s sake. Obviously he has to go to college to make that happen. Travis is going to be an engineer, and Jamie’s going to be a lawyer, and Declan was hungry as hell to be the first person in his shitty family to graduate high school, let alone make it to college. They want things, Mom. They have, like, actual fucking goals in life, and—”
“You don’t think that you have goals in life?” Mom demands. “There’s plenty that you can do with music, if you have the education to support it. You could be a music teacher, you could work at a record company, you could—”
“I don’t want to be a music teacher!” I burst out. There’s a lull in the surrounding conversations. A few of the other diners turn to look at our table. I squeeze my eyes shut and press my shaking hands flat to the tabletop, hoping that’ll steady me. God knows I don’t want to be that teenage asshole screaming at his mom in the middle of a restaurant. I swallow and repeat, as evenly as I am capable of, “I don’t want to be a music teacher. And I don’t want to work at a record company. And I don’t want to spend the next four years of my life sitting in classrooms and taking notes and studying for exams and hating every second of it, just like I’ve spent the last twelve years of my life. I can’t do it, Mom. Not after everything else that’s happened. Repeating senior year was bad enough. I can’t do college, at least not right now.”
She doesn’t understand. I can see it in her eyes. Maybe she thinks that I’m being needlessly dramatic, or that I’m too stubborn to let the argument die down after it’s gone on this long. There isn’t anything I can say that will convince her to take me seriously, unless I tell her the truth—that I know I’ll fuck up college even worse than I fucked up high school, and I can’t stomach the idea of ruining yet another thing in my life. I won’t be able to handle it. I’ll stop doing the work, or I’ll stop going to classes, or I’ll just flat-out leave campus without telling anyone where I’m going, and I’ll get myself kicked out, just like I got myself kicked out of Lakewood High last spring. And if that happens, if I screw up everything in my life yet again, I don’t know that I’m strong enough to survive it. I’d probably start using again. I’d definitely start drinking again. I’d put a bullet in my head, or I’d pull a Ben and see how a razor feels against my wrist, or I’d call up Dave and beg him to come and just fucking finish me off already. I can’t handle failing at something else. If that means that I don’t even try in the first place, then I guess that’s how it’ll have to be.
And now I feel like I’m going to start crying. Awesome.
“I’m going to go,” I blurt out, shoving my chair back so I can stand.
“Garen,” Mom begins, but I shake my head and swipe my jacket off the back of my chair.
“No, seriously, I’m gonna… I’m just going to go. You and Dad can fill out whatever college paperwork you want, I don’t care. I’ve still got another three weeks of high school left to worry about, so I’m just… whatever. Thanks for lunch.”
A big, angry-looking nineteen-year-old crying into the sleeve of his leather jacket isn’t the weirdest thing on the Six Train on a Monday afternoon. It doesn’t even crack the top ten. That doesn’t make me feel better. Nothing does, really—not blasting my music on the drive back home, or taking Omelette for a walk that’s long enough to exhaust both of us, or getting so far ahead in my syllabus that I won’t have to do another night of homework for the rest of the semester. By the time five o’clock rolls around and I realize that the rest of the squad is probably heading back to their dorm rooms after MLEP, I still feel like an animal that a car has smeared down the highway. What I need right now, more than anything else, is to black out. Stop feeling anything. Stop thinking about anything. Stop being. And since that isn’t an option, I’ll have to settle for blowing off some steam another way.
Forty minutes later, I’m standing in the middle of the second-floor hallway of Whitman Hall, glowering down at Javi Santos. He’s wearing sweatpants and an Adventure Time t-shirt. I think I might actually get arrested if I punch somebody who looks like that, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to.
“If he’s not here or on the obstacle course, then where the fuck is he?” I snarl.
“Well, I’m not entirely sure I’m supposed to tell anyone,” Javi says. “Declan likes to keep people out of his business. Is there something I can do for you instead, maybe?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I echo, bobbing my head and adopting my most earnest expression. “You feel like letting me rage-fuck you for an hour or two, until you’re nothing but a useless, sweaty, moaning heap on the floor? Because that’s kind of what I was hoping Campbell would do for me.”
That settles it: Javi is going to have to see a therapist after this conversation is over. He gapes at me. “Right. Um. I’m not too sure Vanessa would be cool with that. And I’m not actually sure that my ass could, like… survive that. An hour or two, Jesus fucking Christ, man.”
“Javi.”
“Sorry! Look, Declan’s not here. He should be back within the hour, if you wanna wait for him, but I really don’t think I’m supposed to tell anyone where he is. Even though… I mean, he probably won’t be pissed at me if I tell you, since you’re his, you know.” Javi makes a gesture. It means nothing. He clears his throat. “You’re his, uh… boy…” Javi’s brown eyes are the size of pool balls. He seems to be actively realizing that this is a bad idea even as the words leave his mouth. “…friend?”
“I am not his boyfriend,” I say flatly.
Javi nods quickly, but seemingly unable to stop himself, he tries again, “Right, you’re his, uh… love… r?”
“That’s it, I’m getting his gun,” I say, trying to shoulder-check Javi out of the doorway, and from behind me, I can hear someone howling with laughter in the room directly across the hall.
Javi hears it, too. He yanks off one of his Adidas slides, throws it against the door, and snaps something in Spanish. From inside the room, Taylor shouts back, also in Spanish. My grasp of the language is limited to ordering drinks and coming onto people, so I don’t know what they’re saying. I’m guessing it’s probably not very complimentary. I let my forehead fall against the door frame with a loud thunk.
“Are you being this unhelpful because you’re trying to avoid telling me that he’s over at Ward, hooking up with some girl?” I ask. “Because I honestly don’t care. We’re not exclusive, he can fuck whoever he wants to fuck. But if he’s out with somebody right now, he’s not going to be much use to me when he gets back, so I’d be better off just going down the hall and seeing if Ryan Marten’s feeling single tonight.”
Finally, Javi’s able to give me an answer he thinks I’ll be happy with, and he couldn’t look more relieved if he tried. “Garen, I promise you, Declan is not with a girl right now. He’s down in the admin building, meeting with somebody in the guidance office. I have no idea what it’s about. He could be talking to them about some class situation, or they could be trying to get him to do one last student ambassador trip to recruit new students, or he could be in his feelings about something. I swear I don’t know.”
I straighten up, frowning. “He’s meeting with a counselor?”
“Don’t say it like that,” Javi blurts out. “Seriously, man, I don’t want him to think I’m going around telling people that he’s getting counseling, if all he’s really doing is asking somebody a question about college or something.”
The door behind me opens, and Taylor leans one well-defined shoulder against the jamb. “Alright, that’s enough. Garen, get your ass in here before you give Javi a heart attack. We can hang until Declan gets back.”
“Pretty sure you already heard me say what kind of hangout I’m in the mood for right now,” I say. “So, unless you’re trying to tell me that you’re down to fuck, I don’t—”
“I’m not down to do a damn thing except study for the AP Government exam we have in a week,” Taylor says, grabbing my wrist and tugging me away from Javi. “Which is kind of difficult to do when I’ve got you interrogating Santos right outside my door. Come on. Sit down, have a snack, and chill out.” He pulls me into the room and shuts the door before I have a chance to protest again.
It strikes me that this is the first time I’ve been in Taylor and Steven’s room since meeting them. Steven’s side is a shithole; clothing is spilling out of his overstuffed laundry basket and onto the floor, and his desk is so covered in crap that only the vaguest suggestion of a piece of furniture is visible beneath it all. His nightstand is home to a pile of trash, mostly crumpled gum wrappers, potato chip crumbs, and a crusty, balled-up sock. There’s also an open and empty beer can right next to his lamp, which is monumentally stupid. The school employs a couple of hall directors in every dorm on campus, so random room checks aren’t unusual. I doubt Patton would actually expel a student this close to graduation, but I’m still offended that any Whitman squad dude would be dumb enough to leave his contraband out in plain sight.
If Taylor has anything illegal in his room, he has at least had the sense to hide it. His side of the room is, for lack of a better word, cozy. The standard-issue Patton bedsheets are hidden away under an enormous, squishy, gray comforter, and his clothes are all hanging in the closet, with a worn-in Yankees snapback hanging off the doorknob. His bulletin board is fully obscured by photographs; there are a few strangers who might be his family or some friends from home, but I can pick out most of the guys in the squad, as well as a few of the girls from Ward. I’m guessing that most of these pictures are from Declan’s camera, because he’s only in one shot.
On the desk, a Crosley record player is spinning vinyl with the volume turned all the way down. I make a bee-line for it and carefully twist the dial until Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” fills the room. I look back at Taylor, who flops back onto his bed and picks up his AP Government textbook. He shrugs. “Study music. You can change it, if you want. There’s a crate under my bed with the rest of my vinyl.”
“I don’t want to change it,” I say, even as I drop to the floor and drag the aforementioned crate out into the open. The albums are packed in tightly enough that I have to pull a few loose in order to flip through the rest. God, he’s got everything. Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The Beatles’ White Album. Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Nas’s Stillmatic, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, compilation albums for Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. There aren’t any genre boundaries or organizational systems in place; it’s just one big box of really cool shit.
“I hope you weren’t serious about wanting me to study with you, because I’m not moving until I’ve licked every single album cover in this crate,” I warn.
Taylor laughs. “That’s fine. It’ll keep you entertained until Declan gets back.”
I’ve got Straight Outta Compton in one hand and A Night at the Opera in the other, so it feels very fair for me to say, “Declan who? Taylor, you don’t understand. Look at this collection. You and I are getting married.”
“Trust me, G, I am definitely not your type,” he says, shaking his head but still smiling. He turns a page in his textbook. “Do you still have those flash cards you made with all the notes about the different political parties? I keep forgetting which came first, the Free Soil Party or the Liberty Party.”
I shift up onto my knees and lean against the edge of his bed. “The flash cards are at my house, I’ll bring them in tomorrow. Why?”
“I told you. I keep forgetting—”
“No, I mean, why do you say you’re not my type?” I ask. Taylor glances up at me. I bat my lashes. “We’re both so charming and well-muscled. And I wanna do really nasty things to your record collection. I promise you, I’ve had relationships based on fewer similarities.”
Taylor snorts and finally puts down his book. “What, you really want to know? Okay. One”—he puts up a finger—“I’m not straight-up crazy, which is how you seem to like your men. If what you and Declan have going on is any indication, you want somebody who’ll start setting fires and dislocating shoulders the second somebody looks at you sideways, and I don’t do that. Two”—he puts up a second finger—“I chose the school I’m headed to in the fall because it has a good criminal justice program. And based on the way you’re clutching that N.W.A. album under your arm, you—right, exactly,” he says as I turn the album around and tap my finger against the title of the second track, mouthing the words fuck tha police at him. “For a rich white dude, you are incredibly hostile to cops. I mean, I’ve at least got a ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ philosophy in terms of reforming the criminal justice system. Anyway, three”—he puts up another finger—“I’m not into sex. Four—”
“Wait, you’re not into sex with me?” I interrupt, lowering the N.W.A. album. “Or you’re not into sex full-stop?”
Taylor shrugs. “Either.”
That’s… huh. I sit back on my heels and blink up at him. “Have you not had sex? Or do you not want to have it?”
Another shrug, and a repeated, “Either.” When my only response is to continue blinking at him, he clarifies, or at least tries to clarify, “I’m pretty sure that I’m asexual.”
“I thought you said you’re gay.”
“I can’t be both?”
This feels very much like a trick question. When I first figured out that I liked guys, that kind of seemed like it was one of only two options: people were straight, or they weren’t. Then when we were sixteen, Jamie dated a Ward student who had to transfer to a local public school after he came out as transgender. The Ward faculty told him that he could have his masculine pronouns or his spot at an all-girls school, but not both. He left Ward, and suddenly Jamie went from dating someone who I’d thought was a straight girl to dating someone who was apparently a gay guy. Now Taylor is telling me that he likes guys, but doesn’t want to fuck them, and Declan still insists that he’s straight even when he’s got my dick in him, and honestly, as a self-identified gay man who just likes to suck dick, I feel like I am so not qualified to have this conversation.
I say as much to Taylor, and he laughs. “It’s not as complicated as you seem to think it is, I swear. I say I’m gay because I really do like guys. Like, I’m definitely romantically attracted to other men, and I’ve had relationships before. But when it comes to the physical stuff, I’m somewhere on the cusp of asexual and demisexual.”
“This conversation is really threatening my opinion of myself as a sexual genius,” I say. I put the records back in the crate and climb up onto the bed next to him. “What does ‘demisexual’ mean?”
“Means you don’t experience sexual attraction to someone unless you’ve already built up an emotional connection to them,” Taylor explains. He leans back against his pillows and kicks his textbook off the side of the bed so he has room to stretch out. “I’m not, like, grossed out by sex. I’ve fooled around a little bit—probably nothing you’d consider real sex, but I’ve definitely tried some shit. Enough to say a solid, ‘ehhh, no thanks’ to anything that goes below the waist on anybody, guy or girl. Maybe someday I’ll meet a guy who I want to go further with, or I’ll fall for somebody who needs it to be part of a long-term relationship, and we’ll work something out. I don’t know. That’s why I want to leave room for the possibility that I’m demisexual. But for right now, I’d only be interested in having a boyfriend who is comfortable with things ending at making out. Aaaaand I’m guessing that’s not you, so, like I said: reason number three why I am absolutely not your type.”
I tip my head back against the wall, considering his words. Sex has always been such an integral part of my interactions with other guys that it’s kind of difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea of it not being there. Maybe my particular brand of gayness is more dick-centric than most other people’s. Travis and Ben say they only slept together twice in the four months they were together, and that didn’t even happen until after they’d both already said I love you. Everyone in the LHS drama club made it clear that they thought Travis was cheating on Joss Pryce with me, no matter how much I tried to keep my hands to myself, so it’s not like I’m completely unfamiliar with the idea that a romantic relationship can exist without sex.
Besides all of that… Travis. Three nights ago, he told me he was sure that I’d leave him for good if he didn’t stop taking the anti-depressants that kill his sex drive, and I told him the truth—that would never happen. No matter how much I want him, no matter how much he turns me on, no matter how badly I crave the feel of his hands on my body… if he didn’t want to have sex with me, that would be okay. I wouldn’t leave him. I wouldn’t make him. I love him, whether I get to touch him or not.
The album has ended, and the machine is silent and still. I let my head roll on my neck so that I can meet Taylor’s eyes. “You’re a really cool guy, Taylor. And whoever your next boyfriend is, he better treat you right, or I’m going to kick his ass.”
Taylor looks surprised, but not displeased. “Thanks.”
“Unless it’s a few years down the line, ‘cause then you might arrest me for assault,” I add. “Fucking wannabe pig.”
He grins and kicks at my leg. “Shut up and grab my book off the floor, you idiot. You can quiz me.”
I roll my eyes and stand. “Fine. Just let me change the record first.”
232 days sober
It’s hard to decide what the worst part of the aftermath of the car crash is. Losing my beautiful, irreplaceable red baby is pretty high up there. Every time I get behind the wheel of my dad’s boring-as-fuck Mercedes, I’m hit with another pang of misery. The new car doesn’t smell right. The seats aren’t perfectly worn-in to fit the shape of my body. The state-of-the-art stereo system is… cool, I guess, but I miss the musical monstrosity that I’d shelled out some serious money to have retrofitted into the dash of the Testarossa.
There are other shitty things, too. Even after the adjustment from Dr. Elkins, my neck and back still hurt like a motherfucker anytime I move too abruptly. I feel guilty every time I pick up my phone to text Stohler. Tomorrow is her twenty-third birthday, and she has already announced her intention to have a low-key night at Ben and Alex’s apartment because she says the stitches in her forehead are too hideous for her to go out and pick somebody up. Psychologically, I’m… paranoid. There’s no other word for it. The only time I can stop myself from thinking about that text from Dave is when I’m too busy thinking about how goddamn stupid I am for leaving him that voicemail. I’m convinced that he’s going to come back. He might total the Mercedes, too. He might show up at Patton, under the guise of visiting his brother. He might say fuck it and just come to my house, pick the lock on the front door, and murder me in my bed.
Well. Not my bed, actually.
Because that’s the best part—the only even remotely okay part—of the days and nights since the crash: Travis. He has been ferociously attentive to me, barely letting me out of his sight, unless one or both of us needs to go to school or work. We’ve been sleeping in his bed at night, and my week-long reprieve from PT has allowed us to wake up at a normal time and shower together before leaving the house in the morning. Today, he insisted on washing my hair for me, and the entire experience was so embarrassingly erotic that I thought the scrape of his fingertips against my scalp would make me come. It didn’t. The fifteen minutes he spent meticulously lathering every inch of my body with soap did, though.
On Wednesday, he texts me when I’m in MLEP to tell me to meet him and Omelette at the dog park near our house instead of going home after class. When I arrive, it’s hard to say which of them is more excited to see me. It’s also hard to say which one of them licks me more.
“This is gonna sound rich coming from me, but you should really learn to keep your mouth to yourself in public.”
Travis’s laugh is barely a whisper against my skin. He stops sucking a mark into the side of my neck, but only so that he can tilt his head up and scrape his teeth gently across my earlobe. “Why? Do you think we’re scandalizing the other dog parents?”
“Probably,” I murmur. “Not as much as we’ll scandalize them if you step back and somebody sees that I’m halfway hard right now. So, uh, if you wanted to just hang out and hug me for a minute until that stops being an issue, that’d be cool.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to be that guy who gets erections in the dog park,” Travis says. He slips his arms around my waist and pulls me tighter against him. “Is that guy who owns the Bichon Frise still looking at us like he wants to file a lawsuit?”
I peek over Travis’s shoulder and scan the park. The prematurely balding twenty-something who’s wearing a scarf even though it’s a pleasant spring day is glowering at us from one of the benches. I wink at him and grab Travis’s ass with both hands. “Fuck yeah, he is.”
Travis squirms out of my grip and darts away, laughing. “Oh my god. And you think I need to behave myself? Jesus. No wonder Omelette has no manners.”
He’s got a point. Omelette is currently running wide laps around the entire fenced-in park, trying to convince the other dogs to chase him. It’s not working, but that might be because he keeps barking at them. I wouldn’t want to hang out with somebody who kept screaming in my face, either.
Since he obviously doesn’t need us to entertain him, I head over to one of the empty benches and collapse on it, spreading my arms wide across the back. Travis drops down next to me and immediately curls himself into my side. The guy with the Bichon still seems pretty in his feelings about it. I curl my lip in a sneer and stare him down until he looks down at his phone.
“How was school?” Travis asks.
“Sucked.”
“You say that every day.”
“Probably because it sucks every day.” I wish I could have a cigarette right now. “Sergeant Smitth acts like I’m slacking because I can’t practice the obstacle course this week. Most of my teachers are already prepping us for finals, which means I get to spend the next two weeks hearing the abridged version of all the boring shit I already learned this year. My whole squad has lost its shit; Charlie’s a psycho, Sam’s a snitch, Javi’s trying to mother us all into getting along, and I’m, like… weirdly preoccupied by how messy Steve’s room was when I was there on Monday. It was fucking gross, T.”
Travis covers his smile with his hand and makes an attempt at an understanding sound. I elbow him and keep going.
“Taylor’s taking our AP Government exam way more seriously than I am. I figured I’d just go over the notes that I used for all the normal tests this semester, but the dude’s printing up new study guides and doing practice essays and shit. Which just makes me feel like I’m under-preparing, you know? So, I’m probably going to fail, but that’s whatever. A passing score just means that I can get college credit for it, and since I don’t want to go to college anyway, it doesn’t mean anything.”
Travis is apparently the only person left on the planet who can hear me say the words “I don’t want to go to college” and actually accept them. He tips his shoulder, like he’s conceding that I have a point, and says, “Taylor might be over-preparing. I’ve done AP exams before, and they’re not that difficult. You should be fine with rereading your notes. I’ve always done new study guides and a psychotically thorough reexamination of my old assignments, and it’s… probably overkill.”
If the Travis McCall I met a year and a half ago could hear those words coming out of the Travis McCall sitting next to me right now, he’d have a stroke.
“That makes me feel a lot better,” I admit. “Even if it doesn’t matter what score I get, it’s not like I want to fail on purpose.”
Travis nods along almost absently. We sit in silence for nearly a minute before he adds, “Your entire group is a mess, though?”
“Yep,” I say flatly.
“What about Declan?” he asks. “You didn’t mention him.”
No shit, I didn’t mention him. I go out of my way not to mention Declan in front of Travis, or mention Travis in front of Declan. There’s no point, since I know it’s only ever going to piss one of them off, and that’s the last thing I need to deal with right now. But if Travis is asking, it’s not like I can just pretend I didn’t hear the question.
“I don’t even know what Declan’s deal is these days,” I say. “He’s been AWOL on me most of the week. He’s doing some kind of… counseling? I guess? On Monday, Javi told me it was just a meeting in the guidance office, but he went there again yesterday and today, so I think it might be a regular thing. Steven wondered if maybe he was going for anger management. Dec didn’t say yes, but he did try to staple Steve’s hand to the desk, so I can’t rule it out as a possibility.”
Travis snorts. “Good. If anyone needs therapy, it’s that dude.”
“But come on. Anger management?” I protest. “He doesn’t need that.”
“He set somebody’s car on fire a week and a half ago!”
“Yeah, but he did it, like, super calmly.”
Travis rolls his eyes. I don’t care. The idea of Declan needing anger management is fucking laughable. I’ve never met anyone more capable of ruthlessly stamping out his own messy or undesired emotions. It’s like he stops his feelings in their tracks somewhere between his heart and his head, then picks them apart until every single moment is nothing but psychological shrapnel. Some of it is used as internal motivation, some of it gets used as ammunition against other people. Some of it can’t do anything but hurt him, and those are the bits he grinds to dust so that he doesn’t have to bother with them anymore. It isn’t healthy, and it isn’t normal, and it maybe isn’t even sane, but it works for him. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean he’s angry.
If anything, he seems… relaxed. I can’t deny that he has been semi-avoiding me for the past two days, but I don’t think he’s actually upset with me about anything. It almost seems like he’s planning something. Maybe I should be alarmed by that, given some of the plans he has put together in the time I’ve known him, but I actually find the idea sort of comforting. If Declan is formulating some type of retribution against Dave for the crash, or against Charlie and Sam for their part in alerting Dave to my presence in New Haven leading up to it, then I don’t have to think about any of it. I can sit back and let the madness unfold at someone else’s hands. I can let him take care of it.
Trying to explain that line of thinking to someone like Travis is a losing battle, so I don’t even bother. I get up, arm still draped over his shoulders, and steer him across the park. Omelette is taking an intermission from his coked-out circuit of terror to sprawl in the shade under a tree. When he sees us coming, he lets out a joyous staccato of greeting barks.
“Yeah, I know!” I say in the over-enthused voice we use to praise him. Since all we ever do is praise him, even when he’s being a dickhead, this probably isn’t the best training strategy. I can’t help it, though. He’s the sweetest, most important dog alive, and if I can’t be trusted to maintain any amount of discipline over myself, then no one should expect me to maintain it over my dog. I crouch down beside him and scritch behind his ears. “I bet you tired yourself out with all that idiocy. I can relate. You want some water?”
Travis digs around in his backpack until he finds Omelette’s foldable canvas dish and a bottle of water. He fills it up, and Omelette lets out one more bark before stuffing his snout into the dish and going to town.
“We should take a field trip into the city one of these days,” I say. “Central Park has a bunch of dog-friendly areas. He could chase some squirrels, get freaked out by the doggie water fountains, pee on the Balto statue.”
Travis looks horrified. “Omelette would never pee on the Balto statue. He’s part Husky!”
“The Australian Shepherd part can do it, then,” I suggest. I ruffle Omelette’s fur and add, in a thick Australian accent, “Come on, mate. Reckon we should take a piss on a sled dog?”
“I didn’t realize this was a group activity,” Travis says. I grin at him, but before I can shoot back another slick comment of my own, he tacks on, “He could spend plenty of time at the park, if we moved there after you graduate.”
What the fuck? I stop petting the dog and turn my undivided attention on Travis. “I think that moving to Central Park is called, like, being homeless, dude. I know your tuition is expensive, but it’s not—”
He elbows me in the stomach. “No, you asshole. I’m talking about the city. Maybe after you graduate from Patton, we could get a new place that’s closer to the heart of the city. We only signed a six-month lease, so we’ve got to either renew it or find a new place in July anyway. The main draw of Pelham was that it was halfway between your school and mine. Once you’re not driving to the Patton campus every day, there’s no reason for us to be so far away from the city.”
Actually, there are a few thousand reasons.
“Apartments in Manhattan are insanely expensive,” I point out.
“It doesn’t have to be Manhattan. Even moving just close enough that we’re in the Bronx would cut down on my daily commute. If we were near a subway line, I might even sell my car, just so I didn’t have to deal with it.”
There’s something unbearably sexy about hearing Travis McCall, born-and-raised Lakewood boy, casually talking about taking the subway to work every day. There’s something equally hilarious about hearing Travis McCall, born-and-raised Lakewood boy, acting like he would be totally fine with living in the BX.
He clears his throat and looks away, a soft pink flush rising under his freckles. “Besides, the next place we move into can be a lot smaller than the house we live in now. I’d be fine with a one-bedroom apartment.”
My mind goes blank. No more arousal, no more amusement. All I can think about is that one little phrase and everything it would mean. One-bedroom apartment. One-bedroom apartment. One-bedroom apartment. Sleeping in Travis’s bed every night, like I have been since Monday. Having my innuendo-emblazoned graphic tees mixed in with his plain, long-sleeved shirts in a single closet. Knowing that it’s our room, not his or mine. Sharing everything.
Never hearing Declan order me to stay on my side of the bed, only to wake up in the early hours of morning with him plastered against my body and his hand shoved under my shirt, clutching my side like it’s the only thing keeping him grounded.
I swallow, though my mouth is already too dry. “You’re always telling me that we aren’t really a couple, though. And getting a one-bedroom apartment together sounds like it would be setting me up to… forget that again.”
Travis leans back on his elbows, stretching out in the grass. “Good. I want you to forget about it at some point. I’ve always wanted us to be a real couple, but it hasn’t been the right time for it yet. You needed time to focus on yourself and your sobriety. That’s what Dr. Howard said. It’s what you said, at first. And I’ve tried to respect it. But by the time our lease is up, you’ll be nine and a half months clean. It might be hard for me to spend those last two and a half months thinking of us as something other than a couple, but if… if you still want that, I don’t see any reason for us to pretend that’s not where this is headed in September.”
It isn’t a solid commitment. It isn’t a promise. It isn’t an I love you, and for fuck’s sake, that’s what I need right now. So, I say it myself. “I love you.”
He finally looks at me again and smiles slightly. “I know. I love you, too. That’s what I’m saying. Come September, I want us to be in this. For real, this time. No separate bedrooms, no loopholes or stupid restrictions.” He hesitates, then says the words I was kind of hoping he’d forget about. “No other guys. It’s… I’m okay with it now, I guess, because we’re in this weird holding pattern. But if we’re going to be a serious couple somewhere down the line, I want to be in a relationship with you, not you-and-Declan-Campbell.”
It should be easy for me to say yes to him. Since the day we met, all I’ve wanted was for Travis to tell me exactly this—that he wanted me and only me, that we were going to be together for real, that no one else could ever come between us.
But I have Dave Walczyk’s phone number in my recent call list right now, and I have bruises on my body from a car crash he caused. When I met Travis, I thought that the nightmare of having Dave in my life was over. I thought I was finally free, and that I’d never need to protect myself from him again. I could have a normal relationship, even if it was with a guy who was supposed to be my stepbrother. I could be happy. Now, the idea of being anything other than terrified and furious seems like a stretch, and Travis isn’t someone who can help me fix that. He isn’t going to torch cars and ruin friendships to make me feel safe. He isn’t going to come after my enemies with fire, blood, and mayhem. There’s only one person who can do that for me.
I love Travis; I need Declan.
Even though there are signs posted everywhere around the dog park expressly forbidding it, I pull a cigarette out of the pack in my jacket pocket and light it. “Declan reports to West Point for basic training on the first Monday in July. He isn’t really going to… be around after that.”
It’s the closest I can get to promising Travis that I’ll end things with Declan without actually saying as much. He’d probably consider it a lie by omission. I consider it a tactical evasion.
“When is the next time you’ll see him after that?” Travis pushes.
I shrug. “I don’t know. He won’t even have access to his phone for the first six weeks he’s there. It’s impossible for me to make plans to see him when I don’t even know if we’ll still be in contact by the end of summer.”
Abruptly, Travis sits up and scoots closer to me. He rests his forehead against my shoulder, and I can feel something that might be a sigh against my sleeve. “Okay. Good. I know it’s stupid, but you have no idea how much of a relief it is to hear that there’s an end point to your involvement with him. I get that you like him, but he’s… he creeps me the fuck out, honestly. He feels dangerous.”
I know he does. That’s the best part about him.
“We should do it,” I decide. Travis lifts his face and settles his chin on my shoulder. I turn and press a quick kiss to his forehead before taking another drag off my cigarette and looking away. “We should start looking at the logistics of getting a one-bedroom closer to the city.”
“Yeah?” Travis says. I can hear his smile, even if I can’t see it. I close my eyes and let the warmth of that smile block out everything else in my world.
“Yeah.” I grind the lit tip of my cigarette into the earth beneath me and lie, “It’ll be perfect.”
“I thought you’d learned not to piss me off.”
Dave isn’t yelling at me. He hardly ever yells at me, mostly because he doesn’t have to. When every word that comes out of a man’s mouth is a prelude to violence, he can be as soft-spoken as he wants to be. Right now, his tone is measured, and his hand is gripping my throat.
Except it isn’t his hand. It’s my seatbelt, and it’s choking me. I fumble for the latch at my hip, but there isn’t one, only an endless strap of nylon anchoring me in place.
“Please,” I gasp. “I didn’t—it wasn’t me.”
“It’s always you, Garen. It always has been,” Dave says. He’s behind me, choking me with his arm that is also the seatbelt, watching me in the mirror with hazel eyes that are also flashing headlights on the front of a Chevy Tahoe that’s coming closer and closer and closer. “You’ve always been the one who makes me angry enough to lose control. You’ve always been the one who needed to be put in his place. You’ve always been mine, haven’t you, G?”
No, no, no. I’m not saying it aloud, but he can still hear me, just like I can hear his yes, yes, you don’t get to say no to me even though his mouth is too busy biting at my shoulder to say a word. I can’t breathe—not to scream for help, not to beg for mercy, not even to sob. The seatbelt is too tight.
There’s a knife in the cupholder. It is simultaneously the hunting knife that Declan keeps in his boot and the switchblade I’ve been carrying with me since Valentine’s Day and the razor that Ben uses to cut himself, and I lunge for it, desperate to cut myself free.
“Stop struggling,” Dave demands from the backseat. My Ferrari doesn’t have a backseat. The Lexus did, though, and suddenly I’m not battling the seatbelt, I’m fighting Dave himself, and we’re both in the back of his car, and he’s gripping my hips as he snarls again, “Stop struggling.”
I yank the hand on my side away and twist the fingers back as hard as I can.
“The fuck?”
My eyes fly open. Jamie’s bedroom is softly lit by the glow of early morning, and Jamie himself is stirring next to me. He’d probably still be asleep, if not for the fact that Ben is thrashing around on his other side, trying to withdraw the arm flung over Jamie’s chest.
The arm with the hand that must’ve bumped my hip while we all slept. The hand with the fingers that I’m trying to break. I let go. Ben shrinks out of reach and rolls over, burying himself in the blankets and mumbling a sleep-raspy, “You’re an asshole, don’t fucking touch me.”
“Sorry,” I whisper. My heart is pounding so hard, I’d be surprised if he could even hear my apology over it. To be safe, I repeat more loudly, “Sorry.”
Ben grumbles something that might be, “Blow me,” shoves his head under a pillow, and passes out again.
Between us, Jamie sits up and rubs the heels of his hands against his closed eyelids. When he turns to me, I can’t tell if he’s squinting because it’s still too early to be awake, or because he doesn’t have his contact lenses in. He asks, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just—” My personal bar for embarrassment is set pretty high, but being a grown-ass man who utters the words ‘I had a nightmare’ might still clear it. I hope Jamie can’t see that my hand is shaking as I reach for his shoulder and tug him back to the mattress. “I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”
“What time is it?” he asks.
“Time for you to lie the fuck down and let me spoon you,” I say. His laugh is swallowed up in a yawn. I manage to get him properly horizontal again, but the second I roll onto my side, pain explodes down the length of my spine. It’s like the marrow in every bone has been sucked out and replaced with molten lead, leaving me weighted down in agony. If I try to turn my head, I might actually die. I grit my teeth to stop myself from crying, puking, or both. The last time I was in this much pain, at least my body had the decency to put itself in a coma so that I didn’t have to deal with it.
Jamie drifts back to sleep, but I can’t. The second I’m sure he’s out, I slip gingerly out of the bed and retreat to the living room. Only there, in the stillness and silence of complete solitude, do I let out the ragged gasp of pain that has been tearing at my throat since I woke up.
It’s not supposed to be like this. I’m nineteen, I’m in good shape—my body is supposed to bounce back from everything I drag it through. But here I am, laid low from a car crash that the doctor at the hospital guessed would only leave me with minor whiplash. What do people even do when something like this happens? I’m not middle-aged, I don’t have a chiropractor saved to my contacts list. Only real adults with shitty office jobs that keep them hunched over in shittier desk chairs all day have to worry about this kind of thing.
Which is how I end up flat on Jamie’s living room floor, calling my mom at six thirty in the morning and begging for the number of her chiropractor on the Upper West Side.
“Make sure you put down my address for the bill,” she says for the third time. “I know you’re on your father’s insurance, but the office has my information on file already.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
“And after you leave his office, I want you to come over to mine. I have some things I’d like to discuss with you.”
I pantomime putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger. “Can’t. My phone screen cracked during the accident, and I need to get it fixed.”
“You can stop by after that, then.”
“I have to get over to Patton and pick up Taylor’s notes. Our AP Government final is one week from today, and I need to study, unless you’ve suddenly stopped caring about my education.”
“I care very much. That’s one of the things I’d like to discuss with you,” she says.
I put my phone down on my chest so that I can use both hands to mime tying a noose. I’m in the process of hanging myself with the invisible rope when Mom adds, “I’ll buy you lunch.”
Fucking cheater. I sigh and pick up the phone again. “Okay. But I want to go to that Portuguese place on West Seventeenth.”
“Garen, my office is in Carnegie Hill. I am not going all the way to Chelsea for lunch. Be reasonable.”
“I am. I could’ve picked someplace in Brooklyn,” I say.
She relents, but mostly because she’s afraid I might try to make her leave Manhattan, and she avoids that at all costs. We agree to meet at the restaurant, and she makes me promise three times that I’ll actually show up before she lets me end the call.
Making phone calls from the floor is a better prospect than standing up, so I pretend to be my own secretary for a while. First up is the Patton main office, where the administration all have to be awake too goddamn early, same as the students. I let them know I won’t be in today, but that I’ll bring a doctor’s note with me tomorrow so they know I’m not ditching. Lisa the secretary is deeply concerned to hear that a car crash almost took out her favorite delinquent student, so I spend a good twenty minutes reassuring her that I will live to terrorize the Patton faculty another day.
To prove my point, I call Javi and demand that he march his ass across the breakfast hall and tell Sergeant Smitth that I’m sorry for missing PT this morning, but that he’s on crack if he thinks that my fucked up neck and I will be practicing on the obstacle course with everyone else this week. Smitth tries to give me detention, but another drill sergeant points out that he can’t really punish a student who is absent because of a neck injury. He gives Javi detention instead. My third call is to Mom’s chiropractor, Dr. Elkins, who is able to squeeze me in at nine o’clock, and my fourth is to the Portuguese restaurant in Midtown to see if I can get a table for two around noon.
My fifth call is to David Walczyk.
I have no idea why I do it. One second, I’m locking down a lunch reservation, and the next, I’m thumbing open the text that came from the burner phone last night and jabbing the cracked screen’s tiny call button. Fuck this. Fuck Dave. If he wants to destroy my goddamn beautiful car and bash open my friend’s head and practically snap my neck, then he can put up with my wrath afterwards.
My wrath goes to voicemail, because of course it does. He doesn’t have a personalized greeting, which is a standard precaution for phones you buy specifically so that you can send threatening messages to people who have already taken out restraining orders against you. While I’m waiting for the beep, I drum my fingers against the floor because it’s the easiest way to pretend they’re not trembling.
“Hey, Dave. It’s Garen, the guy you tried to murder last night,” I say. “So sorry to bother you on what I’m sure is a super busy morning of stalking, assaulting, and generally tormenting people who are just trying to live their lives. I have a question, though. Do you remember the first time you threatened to kill me?”
This is it. This is going to be the time my mouth finally gets me into a shit heap that I can’t find my way out of. This is going to be the call that gets me killed. If it isn’t, it’s at least going to be the call that makes me vomit.
“Because I do. I remember,” I force myself to continue. “I was fifteen, and you were eighteen. It was January. We had just gotten back from winter break, and you saw Jamie hug me outside of the dining hall. After dinner, you pulled me into a stairwell, grabbed me by the jaw, and squeezed so hard I thought my teeth were going to break, and you said, ‘Garen, you have to share a room with that gangly slut, but if I ever find out that you’ve been sharing his bed, I’ll bash your skull in.’ Not like you didn’t do that anyway, but…” The inner corners of my eyes are burning, but honestly, my tear ducts can get fucked. I won’t let Dave have the satisfaction of hearing me cry. I clear my throat and push onward. “Anyway, I just think it’s funny how you keep getting homicidal over things I haven’t done. You said you’d kill me for sleeping with Jamie, but I wasn’t. You tried to kill me for cheating with Travis last spring, but I hadn’t. And now here you are, running me off the road and turning a classic car into an abstract sculpture piece because you think I torched your rapemobile, but I didn’t do shit, Dave. I was in my friend’s dorm all night, and the cops verified that. Don’t you get embarrassed, popping off over things you made up in your head? Don’t you feel fucking stupid?”
Someone calls my name from down the hall. Shit. I sit up, even though that jump-starts my back pain again, and say quietly into the phone, “Stay away from me, or I swear to god, I will ruin your fucking life.”
I end the call, wishing I could spit in his face instead.
“Garen,” Jamie calls out again. “You better not have left without saying goodbye to me!”
I make tracks back to the bedroom, where Ben is trying to get dressed without waking up enough to open his eyes, and Jamie is trying to convince his cat that she loves him. Zooey is not having it. Every time Jamie reaches out to her, her claws pop out so quickly, they might as well be spring-loaded. To spare us all any more of that, I scoop Zooey off the foot of the bed and lie back down next to Jamie with the kitten bundled in my arms, her baby Wolverine limbs tucked away where they can’t hurt anyone.
Jamie tentatively strokes two fingers over the back of her neck and seems pleased when she makes a noise like a rusty door hinge being forced open, but doesn’t Exorcist her head around to bite him. Ben gets tangled in the legs of his skinny jeans and tips over onto the foot of the bed. He lets out a muffled grunt of displeasure and rolls onto his stomach, like he’s got every intention of going back to sleep with his pants halfway up his thighs.
I love both of these embarrassing idiots so much that I want to barricade the door shut and spend the rest of our lives in bed without anyone else getting in the middle of this—no Dave Walczyk hunting me with his car, or Declan planning out a messy revenge, or Travis always looking so worried for me, or my mom wanting to badger me into planning some future that I’ll inevitably fuck up anyway. Just me and Jamie and Ben; my best friends, my ride or die boys.
“Let’s get married,” I decide.
“Good morning to you, too,” Jamie says.
Ben raises his head from the blankets just enough for his voice to be audible when he says, “Remember last night, when we talked about the need for greater specificity with pronouns if there are more than two people in the bed?”
“Yeah, but I’m talking to both of you,” I say. “Let’s all become those sketchy, fundie Mormons who even the other Mormons don’t like, and then all three of us can get married.”
“I have a sneaking suspicion that any fundamentalist religious sect would be disinclined to sanction a gay threeway, but you’re welcome to Google it, if you doubt me,” Jamie offers. “In the meantime, will you settle for the three of us getting brunch?”
“Take the dick out of your mouth and call it ‘breakfast,’ you fucking stereotype.” I yawn. The minor amount of stretching that requires sends hot sparks of pain into every muscle in my back, and I end up biting off the yawn before it can turn into a gasp.
Jamie frowns. “Are you alright?”
“Sure,” I lie, flashing him a wide smile. “My neck’s just a little sore from the crash. Nothing major, though. I already set up an appointment with this chiropractor my mom sees sometimes, and he’s going to… I dunno, fix whatever got wrenched last night, pop some shit back into alignment. I’ll be fine in a few hours. More than fine, if you’re offering to buy me breakfast first.”
“Of course I’m offering to buy you breakfast,” Jamie huffs. “You think I’d let my two best boys turn me out and not even offer them a meal in the morning?”
“My mistake. You’re a gentleman.” I stretch out a leg and dig my toes into one of Ben’s boxer-clad ass cheeks. “Ben. You alive?”
“Get your foot off of my ass,” Ben says, which is a yes. When my only response to his demand is to smack the ball of my foot down hard on his ass, he heaves a sigh and rolls sideways off the foot of the bed. There’s a soft thud as he hits the floor, then the rustling of fabric as he squirms around out of sight. When he stands a minute later, his jeans have been pulled the rest of the way up, zipped, and buttoned. He frowns down at his belt for so long that Jamie eventually takes pity on him and reaches out to assist.
“I swear, I’ve never met anyone who is so thoroughly useless in the mornings.”
Ben can’t even summon the energy for a scowl. He yawns enormously and rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand, transferring what’s left of yesterday’s eyeliner to the inside of his wrist. Even after he’s done rubbing, he doesn’t open his eyes again. “I know. ’m just really tired right now. The other assistant manager at the bookstore moved to Massachusetts last week, so my dad and I are splitting what would’ve been her shifts until we hire someone new. All my term papers are due at the end of this week, and my exams start next Monday. Last semester, I usually caught up on sleep during the weekends, but now I’ve got you and your alarming sex drive to contend with, so I’m busy then, too.”
“Well, unfortunately for me and my sex drive, I’ve committed to flying home on Friday to attend the Savannah Historical Society’s monthly meeting in my father’s stead,” Jamie says. He presses his thumb to the smudge of makeup on Ben’s wrist and rubs it out in slow, gentle circles until there’s nothing left. He lifts Ben’s hand and kisses his palm, then glances up to meet Ben’s half-lidded gaze. “Your term papers will have been turned in, and you’ll have a chance to catch up on your rest before your final exams. And then the following weekend, I have every intention of relieving my own pre-finals stress by coming to New Haven and fucking you into your mattress. You can have a nice, long nap after that, while I’m studying.”
Ben nods wordlessly and clambers back onto the bed to kiss him.
I close my eyes and bury my face against Zooey’s warm, rumbling body. Jamie’s only a few inches away from me. If I wanted to, I could send the cat away and sneak a hand into Jamie’s lap, stroke him to hardness while he kisses his boyfriend. I could get them both naked. I could start up another threesome, make them both late for their classes, make them stay in this bed with me. But Jamie has never kissed the palm of my hand the way I just watched him kiss Ben’s, and Ben has never expressed any desire to lie naked, sated, and sleeping in my bed while I thumbed through a textbook next to him. They didn’t even come to bed last night until after I’d already fallen asleep.
All the soft and fuzzy feelings I had about last night seem to have curdled inside my gut. Gritting my teeth against pain it causes, I squirm upright and off the bed, still clutching the cat to my chest. “I’m going to get Zooey some breakfast. And I’ve gotta be across town soon for that appointment with the chiropractor, so maybe I should take a raincheck on that breakfast and just grab a cup of coffee.”
In the end, I grab three cups of coffee. Jamie brews me a cup in his Keurig before packing Ben into a cab to Grand Central Terminal and shooing me in the direction of the 79th Street Transverse. My thankfully internalized tantrum means I’m dicking around the Upper West Side an hour before my appointment, so I hit the Starbucks on Columbus and West 76th. There are six Starbucks—Starbuckses?—on Columbus Avenue, so half an hour later, I find myself three blocks down, grabbing another cup at the one near West 73rd. Twenty minutes after that, I’m a few blocks over, jittery as hell and getting my neck cracked back into position by a very large doctor with freakishly soft hands. Dr. Elkins laughs at that, thanks me for my inappropriate and accidental compliment, and sends me on my way with a much less painful neck situation and a note requesting that I be excused from physical training until next Monday.
The people at the Verizon store are much less amused by my caffeine buzz. In the time it takes one dude to transfer my data and contacts list to a new iPhone, I knock over a display of earbuds, talk so much that I annoy three separate customers into leaving the store, and take about six hundred selfies on the display phones. My insistence that my overly-caffeinated personality is still preferable to my coked-up one isn’t the winning argument I’d hoped it would be, and all things considered, everyone working there seems pretty psyched when I finally leave.
Caffeine isn’t a serviceable substitute for cocaine, but it’s the only thing I have to distract me while I wait for my mom outside the restaurant. Javi has staged a mutiny among the rest of the squad as revenge for my part in getting him detention, so none of them are responding to my texts. Ben and Jamie are in class, Travis is working, Stohler is probably still sleeping. I’m terrified that my still trembling hands will end up dialing Dave Walczyk’s number so I can scream at him again if I let myself hold my phone for too long. I buy myself a fourth coffee instead and clutch it so desperately that I’m afraid I’ll crumple the paper cup. When Mom finally rolls up in a cab, I quickly drop the cup in the nearest trash can and wipe my coffee-splattered hands against my jeans.
“How are you?” are the first words out of her mouth. She reaches for my shoulder, then seems to think better of it and settles for brushing her fingers against the sleeve of my leather jacket. “Are you still in a lot of pain?”
“I’m doing a lot better than I was when I woke up. Your doc has magic hands,” I say. “I don’t know what his relationship status is, but if he’s single, you should lock that down. Make him my new step-dad.”
She grimaces. “It is my sincerest wish that any stepfathers, stepbrothers, or other step-relatives you might have in the future will keep their magic hands very far away from you. But I’m glad that Dr. Elkins was able to help you.”
The topic of the car accident carries us through being seated, ordering, splitting an appetizer, and into the main dish. Mom goes off about hit-and-run drivers, the piss-poor safety features in classic cars, and the questionable attitude of the insurance agent she spoke to this morning; I nod along and drink my fifth cup of coffee and think, I should’ve learned not to piss him off. A car for a car isn’t really that unfair.
We make it almost all the way through the meal before it finally comes out—the real reason she wanted to see me today. “Last night, I was reading through my schedule for the week, and I saw a note I’d made about your college responses.”
Fuck. The college talk. If I head for the door right now, I wonder if I could make it to the subway station before she caught up to me. Dr. Elkins told me that I won’t be up for physical activity for the rest of the week, but Mom’s wearing four-inch heels. I won’t even have to move that fast to evade her.
“Some of the schools that accepted you have a May first deadline for your response,” she continues. When I don’t reply, she raises her eyebrows. “That’s tomorrow, Garen. In case you weren’t aware.”
“I’m aware,” I say.
“And?” she prompts.
“And what?” I shrug. “You’re supposed to pick the school you want to go to, go online, and fill out the form that says you’re going. If you’re not picking a school, you don’t have to do shit. And I’m not actually going to college, so I don’t have to fill out any forms. I just have to… not show up. They’ll get the message.”
My mom takes an insane amount of pride in being one of the few Uptown New Yorkers without a face full of Botox, but if she could see the baffled creases forming in her forehead right now, she might reconsider the effectiveness of her choice. “What are you talking about? Of course you’re going to college. You applied, you auditioned for all these various music programs. Four different schools accepted you, and now all you have to do is pick which one we’re sending the check to. Your father mentioned that he thought you were leaning toward NYU, but if you don’t—”
“I’m not leaning toward anywhere,” I interrupt. “I never was. Back in October, Dad told me that I had to apply to five schools, so I did. He never told me that I had to go to any of them. So, maybe your post-divorce communication skills aren’t as legit as you thought.”
The confusion is wiped clear from Mom’s face and replaced by a cool, tight anger. She presses her lips together for a moment, like that’ll help her hold in whatever she wants to say to me. My stomach clenches. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat any more of my meal, but I don’t want her to know that I’m this affected by the conversation, so I stab at a piece of my chicken and start shredding it with the tines of my fork. After a minute of silence that seems to drag on forever, Mom finally says, “Don’t do this to me, Garen Michael.”
“Don’t what? Ruin your fantasies about having a son who goes off to college and graduates with honors and gets a great desk job someday? Come on, Mom. That was never going to—”
“No,” she says, leaning in so that the other diners can’t hear the blood-chilling fierceness in her voice. “Don’t put me in a position where I have to pack your backpack for you and send you off to school like you’re still a little boy.”
I sit back in my chair, blinking at her, feeling like I’ve been punched.
“If your father and I have to fill out the paperwork for you, we will do it. If we have to put all of your belongings in a car for you and drive you to your campus in September, we will do it. If we have to check your homework every night like you’re in the fourth grade, we will do it. Your education is too important for us to let you blow it off, just because you don’t feel like checking a box on a form tonight.”
My face is burning. Every word out of her mouth prompts another stab of embarrassment and anger and frustration. If she wants to ignore what I’m actually saying and just treat me like I’m an immature brat, then I can show her what an immature brat really is. “Right. Which one of you is going to quit your job and come live in the dorm with me so you can sit in on all my classes to make sure I’m actually going? Because that’s what you’ll have to do. You can fill out as much paperwork as you want, and you can pay for tuition, and you can drop me off on whatever campus you want, but you can’t force me to actually go to college. I’m not a Sim. You don’t literally control my every move.”
If we weren’t in public, I’m pretty sure that would have earned me a slap upside the head. As it stands, Mom is pretty clearly counting to ten before she speaks. “I don’t understand how you can be so blase about this. You know how important a college education is. You have to know. You can’t surround yourself with the boys you’ve surrounded yourself with and not know. Travis McCall graduated high school a semester early so that he could go to Columbia nine months ahead of schedule. Ben McCutcheon works himself to the bone so that he can afford to go to Yale. Even your little arsonist friend put himself through Patton so that he would have a better shot at getting into West Point, or so you’ve told me. How can you be friends with people like that and still not realize what an incredible opportunity you have here?”
“It’s different,” I snap. “Ben was LHS valedictorian last year. He wants to be a teacher, for fuck’s sake. Obviously he has to go to college to make that happen. Travis is going to be an engineer, and Jamie’s going to be a lawyer, and Declan was hungry as hell to be the first person in his shitty family to graduate high school, let alone make it to college. They want things, Mom. They have, like, actual fucking goals in life, and—”
“You don’t think that you have goals in life?” Mom demands. “There’s plenty that you can do with music, if you have the education to support it. You could be a music teacher, you could work at a record company, you could—”
“I don’t want to be a music teacher!” I burst out. There’s a lull in the surrounding conversations. A few of the other diners turn to look at our table. I squeeze my eyes shut and press my shaking hands flat to the tabletop, hoping that’ll steady me. God knows I don’t want to be that teenage asshole screaming at his mom in the middle of a restaurant. I swallow and repeat, as evenly as I am capable of, “I don’t want to be a music teacher. And I don’t want to work at a record company. And I don’t want to spend the next four years of my life sitting in classrooms and taking notes and studying for exams and hating every second of it, just like I’ve spent the last twelve years of my life. I can’t do it, Mom. Not after everything else that’s happened. Repeating senior year was bad enough. I can’t do college, at least not right now.”
She doesn’t understand. I can see it in her eyes. Maybe she thinks that I’m being needlessly dramatic, or that I’m too stubborn to let the argument die down after it’s gone on this long. There isn’t anything I can say that will convince her to take me seriously, unless I tell her the truth—that I know I’ll fuck up college even worse than I fucked up high school, and I can’t stomach the idea of ruining yet another thing in my life. I won’t be able to handle it. I’ll stop doing the work, or I’ll stop going to classes, or I’ll just flat-out leave campus without telling anyone where I’m going, and I’ll get myself kicked out, just like I got myself kicked out of Lakewood High last spring. And if that happens, if I screw up everything in my life yet again, I don’t know that I’m strong enough to survive it. I’d probably start using again. I’d definitely start drinking again. I’d put a bullet in my head, or I’d pull a Ben and see how a razor feels against my wrist, or I’d call up Dave and beg him to come and just fucking finish me off already. I can’t handle failing at something else. If that means that I don’t even try in the first place, then I guess that’s how it’ll have to be.
And now I feel like I’m going to start crying. Awesome.
“I’m going to go,” I blurt out, shoving my chair back so I can stand.
“Garen,” Mom begins, but I shake my head and swipe my jacket off the back of my chair.
“No, seriously, I’m gonna… I’m just going to go. You and Dad can fill out whatever college paperwork you want, I don’t care. I’ve still got another three weeks of high school left to worry about, so I’m just… whatever. Thanks for lunch.”
A big, angry-looking nineteen-year-old crying into the sleeve of his leather jacket isn’t the weirdest thing on the Six Train on a Monday afternoon. It doesn’t even crack the top ten. That doesn’t make me feel better. Nothing does, really—not blasting my music on the drive back home, or taking Omelette for a walk that’s long enough to exhaust both of us, or getting so far ahead in my syllabus that I won’t have to do another night of homework for the rest of the semester. By the time five o’clock rolls around and I realize that the rest of the squad is probably heading back to their dorm rooms after MLEP, I still feel like an animal that a car has smeared down the highway. What I need right now, more than anything else, is to black out. Stop feeling anything. Stop thinking about anything. Stop being. And since that isn’t an option, I’ll have to settle for blowing off some steam another way.
Forty minutes later, I’m standing in the middle of the second-floor hallway of Whitman Hall, glowering down at Javi Santos. He’s wearing sweatpants and an Adventure Time t-shirt. I think I might actually get arrested if I punch somebody who looks like that, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to.
“If he’s not here or on the obstacle course, then where the fuck is he?” I snarl.
“Well, I’m not entirely sure I’m supposed to tell anyone,” Javi says. “Declan likes to keep people out of his business. Is there something I can do for you instead, maybe?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I echo, bobbing my head and adopting my most earnest expression. “You feel like letting me rage-fuck you for an hour or two, until you’re nothing but a useless, sweaty, moaning heap on the floor? Because that’s kind of what I was hoping Campbell would do for me.”
That settles it: Javi is going to have to see a therapist after this conversation is over. He gapes at me. “Right. Um. I’m not too sure Vanessa would be cool with that. And I’m not actually sure that my ass could, like… survive that. An hour or two, Jesus fucking Christ, man.”
“Javi.”
“Sorry! Look, Declan’s not here. He should be back within the hour, if you wanna wait for him, but I really don’t think I’m supposed to tell anyone where he is. Even though… I mean, he probably won’t be pissed at me if I tell you, since you’re his, you know.” Javi makes a gesture. It means nothing. He clears his throat. “You’re his, uh… boy…” Javi’s brown eyes are the size of pool balls. He seems to be actively realizing that this is a bad idea even as the words leave his mouth. “…friend?”
“I am not his boyfriend,” I say flatly.
Javi nods quickly, but seemingly unable to stop himself, he tries again, “Right, you’re his, uh… love… r?”
“That’s it, I’m getting his gun,” I say, trying to shoulder-check Javi out of the doorway, and from behind me, I can hear someone howling with laughter in the room directly across the hall.
Javi hears it, too. He yanks off one of his Adidas slides, throws it against the door, and snaps something in Spanish. From inside the room, Taylor shouts back, also in Spanish. My grasp of the language is limited to ordering drinks and coming onto people, so I don’t know what they’re saying. I’m guessing it’s probably not very complimentary. I let my forehead fall against the door frame with a loud thunk.
“Are you being this unhelpful because you’re trying to avoid telling me that he’s over at Ward, hooking up with some girl?” I ask. “Because I honestly don’t care. We’re not exclusive, he can fuck whoever he wants to fuck. But if he’s out with somebody right now, he’s not going to be much use to me when he gets back, so I’d be better off just going down the hall and seeing if Ryan Marten’s feeling single tonight.”
Finally, Javi’s able to give me an answer he thinks I’ll be happy with, and he couldn’t look more relieved if he tried. “Garen, I promise you, Declan is not with a girl right now. He’s down in the admin building, meeting with somebody in the guidance office. I have no idea what it’s about. He could be talking to them about some class situation, or they could be trying to get him to do one last student ambassador trip to recruit new students, or he could be in his feelings about something. I swear I don’t know.”
I straighten up, frowning. “He’s meeting with a counselor?”
“Don’t say it like that,” Javi blurts out. “Seriously, man, I don’t want him to think I’m going around telling people that he’s getting counseling, if all he’s really doing is asking somebody a question about college or something.”
The door behind me opens, and Taylor leans one well-defined shoulder against the jamb. “Alright, that’s enough. Garen, get your ass in here before you give Javi a heart attack. We can hang until Declan gets back.”
“Pretty sure you already heard me say what kind of hangout I’m in the mood for right now,” I say. “So, unless you’re trying to tell me that you’re down to fuck, I don’t—”
“I’m not down to do a damn thing except study for the AP Government exam we have in a week,” Taylor says, grabbing my wrist and tugging me away from Javi. “Which is kind of difficult to do when I’ve got you interrogating Santos right outside my door. Come on. Sit down, have a snack, and chill out.” He pulls me into the room and shuts the door before I have a chance to protest again.
It strikes me that this is the first time I’ve been in Taylor and Steven’s room since meeting them. Steven’s side is a shithole; clothing is spilling out of his overstuffed laundry basket and onto the floor, and his desk is so covered in crap that only the vaguest suggestion of a piece of furniture is visible beneath it all. His nightstand is home to a pile of trash, mostly crumpled gum wrappers, potato chip crumbs, and a crusty, balled-up sock. There’s also an open and empty beer can right next to his lamp, which is monumentally stupid. The school employs a couple of hall directors in every dorm on campus, so random room checks aren’t unusual. I doubt Patton would actually expel a student this close to graduation, but I’m still offended that any Whitman squad dude would be dumb enough to leave his contraband out in plain sight.
If Taylor has anything illegal in his room, he has at least had the sense to hide it. His side of the room is, for lack of a better word, cozy. The standard-issue Patton bedsheets are hidden away under an enormous, squishy, gray comforter, and his clothes are all hanging in the closet, with a worn-in Yankees snapback hanging off the doorknob. His bulletin board is fully obscured by photographs; there are a few strangers who might be his family or some friends from home, but I can pick out most of the guys in the squad, as well as a few of the girls from Ward. I’m guessing that most of these pictures are from Declan’s camera, because he’s only in one shot.
On the desk, a Crosley record player is spinning vinyl with the volume turned all the way down. I make a bee-line for it and carefully twist the dial until Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” fills the room. I look back at Taylor, who flops back onto his bed and picks up his AP Government textbook. He shrugs. “Study music. You can change it, if you want. There’s a crate under my bed with the rest of my vinyl.”
“I don’t want to change it,” I say, even as I drop to the floor and drag the aforementioned crate out into the open. The albums are packed in tightly enough that I have to pull a few loose in order to flip through the rest. God, he’s got everything. Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The Beatles’ White Album. Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Nas’s Stillmatic, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, compilation albums for Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. There aren’t any genre boundaries or organizational systems in place; it’s just one big box of really cool shit.
“I hope you weren’t serious about wanting me to study with you, because I’m not moving until I’ve licked every single album cover in this crate,” I warn.
Taylor laughs. “That’s fine. It’ll keep you entertained until Declan gets back.”
I’ve got Straight Outta Compton in one hand and A Night at the Opera in the other, so it feels very fair for me to say, “Declan who? Taylor, you don’t understand. Look at this collection. You and I are getting married.”
“Trust me, G, I am definitely not your type,” he says, shaking his head but still smiling. He turns a page in his textbook. “Do you still have those flash cards you made with all the notes about the different political parties? I keep forgetting which came first, the Free Soil Party or the Liberty Party.”
I shift up onto my knees and lean against the edge of his bed. “The flash cards are at my house, I’ll bring them in tomorrow. Why?”
“I told you. I keep forgetting—”
“No, I mean, why do you say you’re not my type?” I ask. Taylor glances up at me. I bat my lashes. “We’re both so charming and well-muscled. And I wanna do really nasty things to your record collection. I promise you, I’ve had relationships based on fewer similarities.”
Taylor snorts and finally puts down his book. “What, you really want to know? Okay. One”—he puts up a finger—“I’m not straight-up crazy, which is how you seem to like your men. If what you and Declan have going on is any indication, you want somebody who’ll start setting fires and dislocating shoulders the second somebody looks at you sideways, and I don’t do that. Two”—he puts up a second finger—“I chose the school I’m headed to in the fall because it has a good criminal justice program. And based on the way you’re clutching that N.W.A. album under your arm, you—right, exactly,” he says as I turn the album around and tap my finger against the title of the second track, mouthing the words fuck tha police at him. “For a rich white dude, you are incredibly hostile to cops. I mean, I’ve at least got a ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ philosophy in terms of reforming the criminal justice system. Anyway, three”—he puts up another finger—“I’m not into sex. Four—”
“Wait, you’re not into sex with me?” I interrupt, lowering the N.W.A. album. “Or you’re not into sex full-stop?”
Taylor shrugs. “Either.”
That’s… huh. I sit back on my heels and blink up at him. “Have you not had sex? Or do you not want to have it?”
Another shrug, and a repeated, “Either.” When my only response is to continue blinking at him, he clarifies, or at least tries to clarify, “I’m pretty sure that I’m asexual.”
“I thought you said you’re gay.”
“I can’t be both?”
This feels very much like a trick question. When I first figured out that I liked guys, that kind of seemed like it was one of only two options: people were straight, or they weren’t. Then when we were sixteen, Jamie dated a Ward student who had to transfer to a local public school after he came out as transgender. The Ward faculty told him that he could have his masculine pronouns or his spot at an all-girls school, but not both. He left Ward, and suddenly Jamie went from dating someone who I’d thought was a straight girl to dating someone who was apparently a gay guy. Now Taylor is telling me that he likes guys, but doesn’t want to fuck them, and Declan still insists that he’s straight even when he’s got my dick in him, and honestly, as a self-identified gay man who just likes to suck dick, I feel like I am so not qualified to have this conversation.
I say as much to Taylor, and he laughs. “It’s not as complicated as you seem to think it is, I swear. I say I’m gay because I really do like guys. Like, I’m definitely romantically attracted to other men, and I’ve had relationships before. But when it comes to the physical stuff, I’m somewhere on the cusp of asexual and demisexual.”
“This conversation is really threatening my opinion of myself as a sexual genius,” I say. I put the records back in the crate and climb up onto the bed next to him. “What does ‘demisexual’ mean?”
“Means you don’t experience sexual attraction to someone unless you’ve already built up an emotional connection to them,” Taylor explains. He leans back against his pillows and kicks his textbook off the side of the bed so he has room to stretch out. “I’m not, like, grossed out by sex. I’ve fooled around a little bit—probably nothing you’d consider real sex, but I’ve definitely tried some shit. Enough to say a solid, ‘ehhh, no thanks’ to anything that goes below the waist on anybody, guy or girl. Maybe someday I’ll meet a guy who I want to go further with, or I’ll fall for somebody who needs it to be part of a long-term relationship, and we’ll work something out. I don’t know. That’s why I want to leave room for the possibility that I’m demisexual. But for right now, I’d only be interested in having a boyfriend who is comfortable with things ending at making out. Aaaaand I’m guessing that’s not you, so, like I said: reason number three why I am absolutely not your type.”
I tip my head back against the wall, considering his words. Sex has always been such an integral part of my interactions with other guys that it’s kind of difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea of it not being there. Maybe my particular brand of gayness is more dick-centric than most other people’s. Travis and Ben say they only slept together twice in the four months they were together, and that didn’t even happen until after they’d both already said I love you. Everyone in the LHS drama club made it clear that they thought Travis was cheating on Joss Pryce with me, no matter how much I tried to keep my hands to myself, so it’s not like I’m completely unfamiliar with the idea that a romantic relationship can exist without sex.
Besides all of that… Travis. Three nights ago, he told me he was sure that I’d leave him for good if he didn’t stop taking the anti-depressants that kill his sex drive, and I told him the truth—that would never happen. No matter how much I want him, no matter how much he turns me on, no matter how badly I crave the feel of his hands on my body… if he didn’t want to have sex with me, that would be okay. I wouldn’t leave him. I wouldn’t make him. I love him, whether I get to touch him or not.
The album has ended, and the machine is silent and still. I let my head roll on my neck so that I can meet Taylor’s eyes. “You’re a really cool guy, Taylor. And whoever your next boyfriend is, he better treat you right, or I’m going to kick his ass.”
Taylor looks surprised, but not displeased. “Thanks.”
“Unless it’s a few years down the line, ‘cause then you might arrest me for assault,” I add. “Fucking wannabe pig.”
He grins and kicks at my leg. “Shut up and grab my book off the floor, you idiot. You can quiz me.”
I roll my eyes and stand. “Fine. Just let me change the record first.”
232 days sober
It’s hard to decide what the worst part of the aftermath of the car crash is. Losing my beautiful, irreplaceable red baby is pretty high up there. Every time I get behind the wheel of my dad’s boring-as-fuck Mercedes, I’m hit with another pang of misery. The new car doesn’t smell right. The seats aren’t perfectly worn-in to fit the shape of my body. The state-of-the-art stereo system is… cool, I guess, but I miss the musical monstrosity that I’d shelled out some serious money to have retrofitted into the dash of the Testarossa.
There are other shitty things, too. Even after the adjustment from Dr. Elkins, my neck and back still hurt like a motherfucker anytime I move too abruptly. I feel guilty every time I pick up my phone to text Stohler. Tomorrow is her twenty-third birthday, and she has already announced her intention to have a low-key night at Ben and Alex’s apartment because she says the stitches in her forehead are too hideous for her to go out and pick somebody up. Psychologically, I’m… paranoid. There’s no other word for it. The only time I can stop myself from thinking about that text from Dave is when I’m too busy thinking about how goddamn stupid I am for leaving him that voicemail. I’m convinced that he’s going to come back. He might total the Mercedes, too. He might show up at Patton, under the guise of visiting his brother. He might say fuck it and just come to my house, pick the lock on the front door, and murder me in my bed.
Well. Not my bed, actually.
Because that’s the best part—the only even remotely okay part—of the days and nights since the crash: Travis. He has been ferociously attentive to me, barely letting me out of his sight, unless one or both of us needs to go to school or work. We’ve been sleeping in his bed at night, and my week-long reprieve from PT has allowed us to wake up at a normal time and shower together before leaving the house in the morning. Today, he insisted on washing my hair for me, and the entire experience was so embarrassingly erotic that I thought the scrape of his fingertips against my scalp would make me come. It didn’t. The fifteen minutes he spent meticulously lathering every inch of my body with soap did, though.
On Wednesday, he texts me when I’m in MLEP to tell me to meet him and Omelette at the dog park near our house instead of going home after class. When I arrive, it’s hard to say which of them is more excited to see me. It’s also hard to say which one of them licks me more.
“This is gonna sound rich coming from me, but you should really learn to keep your mouth to yourself in public.”
Travis’s laugh is barely a whisper against my skin. He stops sucking a mark into the side of my neck, but only so that he can tilt his head up and scrape his teeth gently across my earlobe. “Why? Do you think we’re scandalizing the other dog parents?”
“Probably,” I murmur. “Not as much as we’ll scandalize them if you step back and somebody sees that I’m halfway hard right now. So, uh, if you wanted to just hang out and hug me for a minute until that stops being an issue, that’d be cool.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to be that guy who gets erections in the dog park,” Travis says. He slips his arms around my waist and pulls me tighter against him. “Is that guy who owns the Bichon Frise still looking at us like he wants to file a lawsuit?”
I peek over Travis’s shoulder and scan the park. The prematurely balding twenty-something who’s wearing a scarf even though it’s a pleasant spring day is glowering at us from one of the benches. I wink at him and grab Travis’s ass with both hands. “Fuck yeah, he is.”
Travis squirms out of my grip and darts away, laughing. “Oh my god. And you think I need to behave myself? Jesus. No wonder Omelette has no manners.”
He’s got a point. Omelette is currently running wide laps around the entire fenced-in park, trying to convince the other dogs to chase him. It’s not working, but that might be because he keeps barking at them. I wouldn’t want to hang out with somebody who kept screaming in my face, either.
Since he obviously doesn’t need us to entertain him, I head over to one of the empty benches and collapse on it, spreading my arms wide across the back. Travis drops down next to me and immediately curls himself into my side. The guy with the Bichon still seems pretty in his feelings about it. I curl my lip in a sneer and stare him down until he looks down at his phone.
“How was school?” Travis asks.
“Sucked.”
“You say that every day.”
“Probably because it sucks every day.” I wish I could have a cigarette right now. “Sergeant Smitth acts like I’m slacking because I can’t practice the obstacle course this week. Most of my teachers are already prepping us for finals, which means I get to spend the next two weeks hearing the abridged version of all the boring shit I already learned this year. My whole squad has lost its shit; Charlie’s a psycho, Sam’s a snitch, Javi’s trying to mother us all into getting along, and I’m, like… weirdly preoccupied by how messy Steve’s room was when I was there on Monday. It was fucking gross, T.”
Travis covers his smile with his hand and makes an attempt at an understanding sound. I elbow him and keep going.
“Taylor’s taking our AP Government exam way more seriously than I am. I figured I’d just go over the notes that I used for all the normal tests this semester, but the dude’s printing up new study guides and doing practice essays and shit. Which just makes me feel like I’m under-preparing, you know? So, I’m probably going to fail, but that’s whatever. A passing score just means that I can get college credit for it, and since I don’t want to go to college anyway, it doesn’t mean anything.”
Travis is apparently the only person left on the planet who can hear me say the words “I don’t want to go to college” and actually accept them. He tips his shoulder, like he’s conceding that I have a point, and says, “Taylor might be over-preparing. I’ve done AP exams before, and they’re not that difficult. You should be fine with rereading your notes. I’ve always done new study guides and a psychotically thorough reexamination of my old assignments, and it’s… probably overkill.”
If the Travis McCall I met a year and a half ago could hear those words coming out of the Travis McCall sitting next to me right now, he’d have a stroke.
“That makes me feel a lot better,” I admit. “Even if it doesn’t matter what score I get, it’s not like I want to fail on purpose.”
Travis nods along almost absently. We sit in silence for nearly a minute before he adds, “Your entire group is a mess, though?”
“Yep,” I say flatly.
“What about Declan?” he asks. “You didn’t mention him.”
No shit, I didn’t mention him. I go out of my way not to mention Declan in front of Travis, or mention Travis in front of Declan. There’s no point, since I know it’s only ever going to piss one of them off, and that’s the last thing I need to deal with right now. But if Travis is asking, it’s not like I can just pretend I didn’t hear the question.
“I don’t even know what Declan’s deal is these days,” I say. “He’s been AWOL on me most of the week. He’s doing some kind of… counseling? I guess? On Monday, Javi told me it was just a meeting in the guidance office, but he went there again yesterday and today, so I think it might be a regular thing. Steven wondered if maybe he was going for anger management. Dec didn’t say yes, but he did try to staple Steve’s hand to the desk, so I can’t rule it out as a possibility.”
Travis snorts. “Good. If anyone needs therapy, it’s that dude.”
“But come on. Anger management?” I protest. “He doesn’t need that.”
“He set somebody’s car on fire a week and a half ago!”
“Yeah, but he did it, like, super calmly.”
Travis rolls his eyes. I don’t care. The idea of Declan needing anger management is fucking laughable. I’ve never met anyone more capable of ruthlessly stamping out his own messy or undesired emotions. It’s like he stops his feelings in their tracks somewhere between his heart and his head, then picks them apart until every single moment is nothing but psychological shrapnel. Some of it is used as internal motivation, some of it gets used as ammunition against other people. Some of it can’t do anything but hurt him, and those are the bits he grinds to dust so that he doesn’t have to bother with them anymore. It isn’t healthy, and it isn’t normal, and it maybe isn’t even sane, but it works for him. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean he’s angry.
If anything, he seems… relaxed. I can’t deny that he has been semi-avoiding me for the past two days, but I don’t think he’s actually upset with me about anything. It almost seems like he’s planning something. Maybe I should be alarmed by that, given some of the plans he has put together in the time I’ve known him, but I actually find the idea sort of comforting. If Declan is formulating some type of retribution against Dave for the crash, or against Charlie and Sam for their part in alerting Dave to my presence in New Haven leading up to it, then I don’t have to think about any of it. I can sit back and let the madness unfold at someone else’s hands. I can let him take care of it.
Trying to explain that line of thinking to someone like Travis is a losing battle, so I don’t even bother. I get up, arm still draped over his shoulders, and steer him across the park. Omelette is taking an intermission from his coked-out circuit of terror to sprawl in the shade under a tree. When he sees us coming, he lets out a joyous staccato of greeting barks.
“Yeah, I know!” I say in the over-enthused voice we use to praise him. Since all we ever do is praise him, even when he’s being a dickhead, this probably isn’t the best training strategy. I can’t help it, though. He’s the sweetest, most important dog alive, and if I can’t be trusted to maintain any amount of discipline over myself, then no one should expect me to maintain it over my dog. I crouch down beside him and scritch behind his ears. “I bet you tired yourself out with all that idiocy. I can relate. You want some water?”
Travis digs around in his backpack until he finds Omelette’s foldable canvas dish and a bottle of water. He fills it up, and Omelette lets out one more bark before stuffing his snout into the dish and going to town.
“We should take a field trip into the city one of these days,” I say. “Central Park has a bunch of dog-friendly areas. He could chase some squirrels, get freaked out by the doggie water fountains, pee on the Balto statue.”
Travis looks horrified. “Omelette would never pee on the Balto statue. He’s part Husky!”
“The Australian Shepherd part can do it, then,” I suggest. I ruffle Omelette’s fur and add, in a thick Australian accent, “Come on, mate. Reckon we should take a piss on a sled dog?”
“I didn’t realize this was a group activity,” Travis says. I grin at him, but before I can shoot back another slick comment of my own, he tacks on, “He could spend plenty of time at the park, if we moved there after you graduate.”
What the fuck? I stop petting the dog and turn my undivided attention on Travis. “I think that moving to Central Park is called, like, being homeless, dude. I know your tuition is expensive, but it’s not—”
He elbows me in the stomach. “No, you asshole. I’m talking about the city. Maybe after you graduate from Patton, we could get a new place that’s closer to the heart of the city. We only signed a six-month lease, so we’ve got to either renew it or find a new place in July anyway. The main draw of Pelham was that it was halfway between your school and mine. Once you’re not driving to the Patton campus every day, there’s no reason for us to be so far away from the city.”
Actually, there are a few thousand reasons.
“Apartments in Manhattan are insanely expensive,” I point out.
“It doesn’t have to be Manhattan. Even moving just close enough that we’re in the Bronx would cut down on my daily commute. If we were near a subway line, I might even sell my car, just so I didn’t have to deal with it.”
There’s something unbearably sexy about hearing Travis McCall, born-and-raised Lakewood boy, casually talking about taking the subway to work every day. There’s something equally hilarious about hearing Travis McCall, born-and-raised Lakewood boy, acting like he would be totally fine with living in the BX.
He clears his throat and looks away, a soft pink flush rising under his freckles. “Besides, the next place we move into can be a lot smaller than the house we live in now. I’d be fine with a one-bedroom apartment.”
My mind goes blank. No more arousal, no more amusement. All I can think about is that one little phrase and everything it would mean. One-bedroom apartment. One-bedroom apartment. One-bedroom apartment. Sleeping in Travis’s bed every night, like I have been since Monday. Having my innuendo-emblazoned graphic tees mixed in with his plain, long-sleeved shirts in a single closet. Knowing that it’s our room, not his or mine. Sharing everything.
Never hearing Declan order me to stay on my side of the bed, only to wake up in the early hours of morning with him plastered against my body and his hand shoved under my shirt, clutching my side like it’s the only thing keeping him grounded.
I swallow, though my mouth is already too dry. “You’re always telling me that we aren’t really a couple, though. And getting a one-bedroom apartment together sounds like it would be setting me up to… forget that again.”
Travis leans back on his elbows, stretching out in the grass. “Good. I want you to forget about it at some point. I’ve always wanted us to be a real couple, but it hasn’t been the right time for it yet. You needed time to focus on yourself and your sobriety. That’s what Dr. Howard said. It’s what you said, at first. And I’ve tried to respect it. But by the time our lease is up, you’ll be nine and a half months clean. It might be hard for me to spend those last two and a half months thinking of us as something other than a couple, but if… if you still want that, I don’t see any reason for us to pretend that’s not where this is headed in September.”
It isn’t a solid commitment. It isn’t a promise. It isn’t an I love you, and for fuck’s sake, that’s what I need right now. So, I say it myself. “I love you.”
He finally looks at me again and smiles slightly. “I know. I love you, too. That’s what I’m saying. Come September, I want us to be in this. For real, this time. No separate bedrooms, no loopholes or stupid restrictions.” He hesitates, then says the words I was kind of hoping he’d forget about. “No other guys. It’s… I’m okay with it now, I guess, because we’re in this weird holding pattern. But if we’re going to be a serious couple somewhere down the line, I want to be in a relationship with you, not you-and-Declan-Campbell.”
It should be easy for me to say yes to him. Since the day we met, all I’ve wanted was for Travis to tell me exactly this—that he wanted me and only me, that we were going to be together for real, that no one else could ever come between us.
But I have Dave Walczyk’s phone number in my recent call list right now, and I have bruises on my body from a car crash he caused. When I met Travis, I thought that the nightmare of having Dave in my life was over. I thought I was finally free, and that I’d never need to protect myself from him again. I could have a normal relationship, even if it was with a guy who was supposed to be my stepbrother. I could be happy. Now, the idea of being anything other than terrified and furious seems like a stretch, and Travis isn’t someone who can help me fix that. He isn’t going to torch cars and ruin friendships to make me feel safe. He isn’t going to come after my enemies with fire, blood, and mayhem. There’s only one person who can do that for me.
I love Travis; I need Declan.
Even though there are signs posted everywhere around the dog park expressly forbidding it, I pull a cigarette out of the pack in my jacket pocket and light it. “Declan reports to West Point for basic training on the first Monday in July. He isn’t really going to… be around after that.”
It’s the closest I can get to promising Travis that I’ll end things with Declan without actually saying as much. He’d probably consider it a lie by omission. I consider it a tactical evasion.
“When is the next time you’ll see him after that?” Travis pushes.
I shrug. “I don’t know. He won’t even have access to his phone for the first six weeks he’s there. It’s impossible for me to make plans to see him when I don’t even know if we’ll still be in contact by the end of summer.”
Abruptly, Travis sits up and scoots closer to me. He rests his forehead against my shoulder, and I can feel something that might be a sigh against my sleeve. “Okay. Good. I know it’s stupid, but you have no idea how much of a relief it is to hear that there’s an end point to your involvement with him. I get that you like him, but he’s… he creeps me the fuck out, honestly. He feels dangerous.”
I know he does. That’s the best part about him.
“We should do it,” I decide. Travis lifts his face and settles his chin on my shoulder. I turn and press a quick kiss to his forehead before taking another drag off my cigarette and looking away. “We should start looking at the logistics of getting a one-bedroom closer to the city.”
“Yeah?” Travis says. I can hear his smile, even if I can’t see it. I close my eyes and let the warmth of that smile block out everything else in my world.
“Yeah.” I grind the lit tip of my cigarette into the earth beneath me and lie, “It’ll be perfect.”