The Bookseller's Boyfriend

by Heidi Cullinan

  “I can work with that.” Matt sighed. “Honestly, with the way everything is going, I’m going to need that much time.”

  “Certainly no need to rush.” Jacob turned to the others. “Can we please talk about something else now?”

  They planned their respective business baskets for a little while, but eventually they declared it was late and everyone took their leave. As Matt and Rasul chatted near the door, Gus pulled Jacob back.

  “Hey, I was meaning to tell you. You might want to go pop onto the Instagram of that model he used to date. She’s posting some interesting stuff.” When Jacob cut a glance to Rasul, Gus shook his head. “No. Don’t get him involved yet. I don’t want to harsh his groove. But maybe log in sometime and check. I’m probably overthinking things, but I wanted to give somebody a heads-up.”

  “Got it,” Jacob said.

  Rasul didn’t have the haunted look he’d had when he arrived anymore, and as Jacob bid him goodbye, Rasul assured him with a peck on his cheek that he was great now and was hurrying home to get some writing in before he had to go to bed.

  When Jacob got home, he didn’t go to bed, either. After feeding the cats, he curled up on the couch with his iPad and purchased Moana.

  He’d seen the movie when it first came out, going with Matt and Gus because, as they’d lamented, the Lin-Manuel Miranda–penned songs in it were as close as they were going to get to Hamilton. Never had it occurred to Jacob to identify with the heroine, however, not on the level Rasul suggested. So he revisited the tale with new eyes that night before he went to bed.

  It was a great film, and the music, especially the Miranda-penned songs, were amazing. To his astonishment, he was able to see why Rasul compared him to Moana. He had left his island wanting to see the world. He had decided home was better, but that perhaps home could be slightly more open-minded. Even his loss was represented, in several ways. And he did relate to the idea that he could only venture forward with the backing of his people. The ones he got along with, and the ones he struggled to accept.

  What got him, as always, was when Moana gave Te Fiti her heart back.

  He’d wept in the theater without knowing why, but revisiting the scene now, it resonated all the way into his core, into his own heart. Because despite what Rasul had said, Jacob had been Te Fiti. It was Rasul, through his work, who had walked boldly up to him and shown him who he was, reminded him that only he defined who he was. That despite loss and devastation, he could make himself okay.

  At the same time, he did understand that now, for Rasul, the roles had reversed. Except the metaphor was so much stronger this time. Like Te Fiti to Moana, Rasul had been the one to show Jacob what strength meant. Now it was Jacob’s privilege to hold up a mirror for his hero, his friend, his lover.

  To hand him back his heart. To help him heal himself so he could go back to healing everyone who read his work.

  Would it hurt if Rasul left Copper Point once his tenure was up, if at best Jacob received the occasional email? Yes. It absolutely would. But he wouldn’t say no to this relationship, not anymore, not ever again. Because Rasul wasn’t a god. He was a man who got lost the same as Jacob did.

  It would be his honor, Jacob thought, to show him the way home. Wherever that home might be.

  Chapter Twelve

  BY CHRISTMAS, Rasul lost all sense of time and space.

  His class on break, his office hours suspended, with Jacob and practically the whole town teaming up to stock his fridge and even, to his chagrin and humility, doing his laundry, Rasul practically lived in his manuscript. The fact that he wrote about two people manipulating time and space didn’t help him either. Several times he’d worked so long his wrists and forearms screamed, and he had to go to the Chinese masseuses out in the strip mall to regain functionality, and even while they worked on him, his mind raced ahead to fill in the spaces in the story still needing attention. On the rare occasions he spent time with other humans in a conversational setting, he fell asleep midsentence regularly. Jacob and the others took to not only bringing over food but seeing that he ate it, and despite the bitter December cold, Jacob frequently walked Rasul’s zombified self along the greenbelt to give him a moment’s grounding in reality.

  Christmas was a kind of dream, Jacob taking over the meal despite Rasul’s original promise to do the cooking. They snuggled together in Jacob’s living room after, a holiday movie playing that didn’t remotely register with Rasul because his brain wouldn’t stop writing.

  “I worry about you,” Jacob said, massaging Rasul’s weary fingers and wrist. “I think you might be working too hard.”

  “Probably. But I want to finish.” He let his body go slack against Jacob, shifting to provide his other hand for treatment. “I want you to read it. I want to turn it in. I want to feel like I can still do this.”

  “Is it okay for me to ask how close you are to the end?”

  “Normally, no. Right now, it’s okay.” Rasul shut his eyes as Jacob’s ministrations hit just the right spot. “I’m in the middle of the dark moment. I’d have been all the way to the end by now if I’d let myself revise after, but I’m super invested in handing it to you as fast as possible before I get too invested in big edits. So I keep going over old sections, adding things, moving them, expanding. There are only about eight scenes ahead of me, but it’s going slower because of the way I’m drafting and editing at the same time.”

  “I’ll forever have a new appreciation for how hard authors work after this.”

  Rasul shrugged. “I don’t think it’s always like this. It wasn’t like this the last two times for me. The stakes are just so high.”

  He thought about those stakes all the time. He stayed up late that night once Jacob had gone to bed, stopping work on the scene he’d been on to go back to the midsection, the opening, several big reveals, scraping over every detail as if it might be the one that redeemed him, that took him to a new place.

  If I get this done, he kept telling himself, everything is going to change. He couldn’t articulate what that change would be. He only knew in his soul that his whole life would pivot around this point and take him to a new dimension.

  Maybe it was because this was his first queer main character, a character with his own ethnic identity. A character who yearned the way he did, who got lost the way he did, who screwed up the way he did. Several delirious nights as he got too lost in the dimension-creating storyline, he became convinced writing this novel would heal all the hurts of his youth.

  Because he was putting them all in. Coded, remixed so he had to draw on the distilled nature of them, not the fine details, but he included them all. His confusion and sorrow over his parents’ disinterest in his life. His frustration as a teenager of not understanding what his identity was—was he Syrian? Brazilian? American? All three? Did it matter that to a lot of people, he passed for white? Was it okay that he buried parts of himself to fit in? Was it bad that he partied and lied to everyone, including himself, about who he was, just for a moment’s peace?

  Above all, though, he soaked himself in the central, vibrating question: What would have happened if, when he was smiling and pretending he wasn’t cracking and hollow inside, someone like Jacob had appeared before him and led him to a place of peace? What would have changed if he’d accepted that hand?

  He had an index card taped to the top of his laptop that read, in black Sharpie, WHAT IS HAPPINESS? Whenever he was stuck, he stared at it.

  Whenever it was late at night and he was alone inside the veil of stars, he answered it, usually out loud.

  “Happiness is knowing peace within myself.”

  He gave that peace to Adam as best he could. He empowered Adam and Milo both, but to Adam in particular, he paved a way to understanding and accepting himself and his path. Showing him how to find the way through to the light, which came from his own heart.

  I’m okay. I’ve always been okay. I can be okay whenever I want, no matter what happens.

  He
wrote a love scene for the boys. He knew his editors wouldn’t like it, that they’d say young adult novels shouldn’t have sex, people underage, etc. Thinking of Judy Blume and Forever, he didn’t just ignore his editor’s anticipated objections, he wrote the sex in a way that would make it absolutely impossible to remove. In some kind of strange move by the universe, his thermostat broke the night he wrote that scene, sending his apartment above eighty degrees. He wrote the scene naked with ethereal Middle Eastern vocals blasting in his headphones, a towel draped over the wrist pad of his laptop to catch the sweat. He made the characters sweat too, giving them the intense, passionate union he knew they deserved. He made Adam say to Milo everything he longed to say to Jacob.

  Everything he fully intended to say.

  He wept several times while he wrote, sometimes at points that made sense, sometimes in some kind of release-valve catharsis that didn’t come from the scene but from the act of finishing the story itself. Well before he wrote the final chapter, he understood fully that he was completing this. That no matter what his editors, his agent, the literary world thought about it, this was the book he’d needed to write. That for him, it was already exactly what it needed to be.

  He knew, in his bones, that it was exactly what Jacob needed it to be too.

  It was two in the afternoon on December 31 that he wrote the last words of the final scene. It felt so… random, so off script, but that’s when it came. Had it been the middle of the night, he’d have gone out into the snowy street and shouted, but it was midday and people were bustling about, getting ready for New Year’s Eve parties. He thought about doing it anyway. He thought about renting one of those trucks with a megaphone and announcing it to the town.

  He thought about calling Jacob, and he almost did. But then he stopped.

  No. I’m going to see him in person. I’m going to do this right.

  He made a frantic call to Evan Clare, who enthusiastically met him at the college and approved his three-hundred-and-fifty-page double-spaced, single-sided printout. He went to the florist, the chocolatier, and even the thrift shop. He packed up the things he needed at home, made a call to Gina, and when she arrived, loaded himself and a bulging suitcase into her car.

  He sweated a little as he sat in the parking lot behind the bookstore long after she went inside, shutting his eyes and giving himself one last pep talk. Then he grabbed everything and went in through the front door.

  He looked past the customers to the man behind the counter. The man in the soft blue cardigan patiently going over his sales figures. The man who looked up at him, surprised, then smiled with warmth behind those brown eyes.

  Heart galloping, Rasul strode up the counter, plunked down the box.

  Waited.

  As he watched Jacob open the lid, face lighting up with surprise and joy at what he saw inside—a printed manuscript surrounded by a chain of flowers and battery-operated lights and weighed down by a box of gourmet chocolate—Rasul felt the universe opening up for him the way it had for Adam. Ever-changing, always racing, but anchored in every way around the central point of this man.

  He let out a breath as his heart sighed and settled, finally, into place.

  JACOB’S ENTIRE nervous system began to hum as he realized what was in the box in front of him. Heart beating in what felt like triplicate, the world narrowing, he met Rasul’s wild gaze. “This is…?”

  Rasul nodded. “Finished. A bit rough still, but… yeah. Finished.”

  Jacob ran his hand over the title page. VEIL OF STARS by Rasul Youssef. In the upper right corner it said 80,000 words.

  The flowers that surrounded it were white, and they glowed slightly. He realized there were tiny battery-powered lights embedded within them.

  Rasul rubbed the back of his head. “The lights and… everything is a little cheesy, but… well.”

  Jacob ran his hand over the box of chocolates—all his favorites—the flowers, the manuscript heading. “Backlit flowers, chocolates, and the first look at my favorite author’s manuscript. Are you flirting with me, Rasul Youssef?”

  “God yes.”

  There were customers in the shop, but Jacob didn’t care about them, not now. His whole world was the box in front of him. “I wish I could start reading right away.”

  “You can.” Rasul jerked his head toward the door where Gina stood waiting. “I called Gina, and she’s going to come help me close up. I’ll work the register. You go upstairs and start reading. I’ll get things to make dinner.”

  “Are you sure?” Jacob couldn’t look away from the manuscript.

  “Completely and utterly. I’m barely going to be able to breathe until you finish. Please start reading right now.”

  Jacob would, gladly. But first….

  He went around the counter, kissed Rasul softly on the cheek, and drew him into his arms. “I’m so proud of you.”

  Rasul clutched at his back. “You haven’t read it yet. It might suck. You might be completely disappointed in me.”

  “Impossible. But even if I were, that doesn’t matter. You finished it. You worked so hard. You did a good job.”

  “Thank you.” Rasul shivered as Jacob kissed, then licked his neck. “Go read.”

  Jacob all but ran to the door leading to the apartment, pressing the box to his chest as he fumbled with the key. He took the stairs two at a time, or as best he could manage, sailing over the waiting Moriarty. He trembled as he put water on for tea, as he arranged a reading nest for himself on the couch. Once his tea was ready, he tucked himself in, drew a breath, and pulled aside the cover page.

  The sheet of paper beneath it had two lines.

  For Jacob

  who showed me what lay beyond the veil

  Beneath that was Rasul’s scrawled signature, complete with a rough and endearing heart.

  Jacob put a hand over his mouth and stared at the paper for several seconds, his eyes filling with tears. Then, with a sigh, he wiped them away with a tissue, the box of which he’d strategically placed on the tea tray beside him.

  “Making me cry even before page one,” he murmured and flipped the page again.

  He started reading.

  When he’d first picked up Rasul’s book in the hospital gift shop, Jacob had been taken aback by the power of Rasul’s narrative style, the way it pulled the reader hard and fast into the fictional world, the way it made everything around the reader bloom in a rich, breathless fashion. Critics praised him for this skill too, and it was considered his signature. In those first two books, he’d written in an engaging but omnipotent third-person past.

  Veil of Stars was written in stark, immediate first-person present.

  He still drew Jacob in like he’d been sucked through a black hole into another world, but the point of view he’d chosen made Jacob feel as if these were his hands, as if these nervous gulps for air came from his own lungs.

  I walk through the gauntlet of a thousand friends, smiling as I receive their greetings and praise, knowing I’m utterly alone.

  The surrealist bent Rasul was known for began right away, as the hero, Adam Hasan, described what had first been a metaphorical but had become a physical veil between him and the world around him. The more Adam pushed himself to pretend it wasn’t there, the thicker it became. Adam spoke of the invisible barrier between him and the world cavalierly, but at the same time, it was clear the veil bothered him. His panic and despair bled through his dismissals.

  But then Milo Bloom appeared.

  Jacob knew instantly Adam had a crush on Milo, but for the entire first few chapters, Adam made a point of denying it, taking intense pains to insist he focused on him only because he stood out among the crowd, that somehow he seemed to pierce the veil. A shame, Adam lamented, because Milo wasn’t his friend, just someone he knew. Yet of course he knew so much more about this boy than anyone else at his school.

  As he turned page after page, stacking the read pieces of paper beside him on the tray, Jacob descended further and
further into the imaginary world. As Adam’s reality shifted and swirled around him, Jacob quickly lost his sense of time and place, real and imagined, along with the protagonist. The only constant was that no matter how the universe shifted around him, Milo was always there somewhere, was always a focal point, and Adam couldn’t shake the feeling that if he only made contact with Milo, the universe would right again. The two traveled back in time, into alternate dimensions, into the future. Sometimes their schoolmates and families came along and sometimes didn’t, but always, Milo was there.

  When Jacob got to the part where Adam began to suspect Milo was aware he was traveling through space and time, a touch on his shoulder made him surface from the story. Blinking, struggling to focus, he looked up to see Rasul standing beside him with a tray of food.

  “It’s past seven. Time to eat.” Rasul set the tray on the ottoman, shifted the pile of read manuscript pages to the floor, and moved the tray closer to Jacob.

  Jacob glanced worriedly at the papers that had been set aside. “Don’t step on them.”

  Rasul looked amused. “I can print you three hundred more just like them.”

  “No, you can’t. This is the one you printed for me and surrounded with lights and flowers and weighed down with chocolate.”

  Rasul nudged the box, the ribbon still around it. “You haven’t even eaten the chocolate.”

  Jacob lifted his chin. “I didn’t want to get the pages dirty.”

  Rasul put his hands on his hips. “You’re not even halfway through. You’re going to have to stop and eat.”

  Though Jacob would have protested more, he smelled the fragrant stew and fresh bread from the tray beside him. “Fine. I’ll eat while I read.”

  Rasul bit his lip. “Is it okay?”

  Jacob gave him a long look. “I’m unwilling to put it down long enough to put food in my body, and you dare ask that question?”

  Rasul sighed and turned away. “Read faster, then.”

  “You can’t bully me into rushing this. I’ve waited forever for this book.”