by Rachel Kane
What would it feel like, to have Val looking at him? Even something mild, something innocent, like if Charlie took off his shirt, how would Val react to that? Would he study every inch of Charlie, thoughtfully, slowly?
Oh no, he thinks.
“You are probably right,” Val says finally, setting his fork down, and looking out the window, careful not to glance Charlie’s way. “If I gave you a bike, I might have, somewhere in my thoughts, the idea that it would be a chance to get to know you better. And that might—might—lead to more. But I don’t know. I’ve never… Well, I’ve never done anything. I don’t really know how it all works. I mean, I know how it works, the physics of it—”
“But the emotions of it. The…personality of it,” offers Charlie. “That’s different.”
He looks through the window too…and realizes Val’s reflection is staring at him. Val wasn’t looking away at all, he wasn’t staring at the parking lot or the snowflakes painted on the window, he was just looking at mirror-Charlie, because it was easier for him that way.
“Yes. I don’t know how that part works. It’s a terrible admission, isn’t it? Sometimes I’ve thought I should just hire someone, get it over with that way. I could hire a tutor to teach me a language, or a therapist to give me someone to talk to, so why not pay someone to…to sleep with me? But that seems wrong somehow. Insufficient. It’s not the sex itself that’s the problem. You can’t hire a…a friend.”
“That’s what I think, too,” Charlie says with relief. “People try. I can’t tell you how many guys have tried to…well, to hire me.”
The way Val stiffens when Charlie says this, it’s interesting. Is that jealousy? Is Val territorial? It doesn’t even seem possible.
“I’m not trying to do that,” Val says. “At least…I don’t think I am. I don’t know, Charlie. What can I say? Objectively speaking, you are very attractive. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to pay you a compliment. It’s just a fact. You’re energetic, you have strong cheekbones, your eyelashes are very long. You have a keen mind and an honest outlook. If I were going to try to hire someone for all this, it would definitely be someone like you. But I’m not. At least…I think I’m not. God, I’m confused. I don’t like this topic, it’s too full of uncertainty. If someone at work came to me with this problem, I’d tell them to form a work group to do further study, before dropping the problem in my lap.”
Charlie laughs, “That’s perfect. I wish I had people like that. Let’s assign a team to the question of this bike deal.”
It’s one thing to get used to guys complimenting you. Charlie’s not vain at all, but he knows he has a certain look that people like; it’s nothing that he has done himself, other than to keep in shape, so he can’t exactly take credit for his eyes, his cheeks, his lashes.
But knowing that Val noticed the way he looked?
That feels different. Because Val’s not going to say anything unless he’s spent some time thinking about it. Which means that Charlie has been on his mind.
And that sends a strange warmth through Charlie. A warmth he doesn’t know what to do with. And when Val’s face softens at Charlie’s joke, he feels a stab of sympathy: What must it be like to be Val, to feel totally lost in this world?
“Eat your hashbrowns,” he says to Val. “They’re no good cold.”
They’re halfway home when Charlie remembers he doesn’t want Val to see the bus.
He could kick himself for not thinking about this earlier, for getting distracted by the conversation.
It’s one thing for Tag to know he lives in the bus. Wendy knows, plenty of his friends do.
Val is different. Val just offered him a fucking bike because his was stolen; what’s he going to offer when he sees that Charlie lives without any electricity?
I’m proud of the bus. I’m proud to be off the grid. The whole point of this was to be free, to be in control of my own life. So why does it matter if Val sees it?
“You can drop me off here,” he says to the driver. “It’s fine, it’s just a short walk.”
Val looks out the window. “Here? There’s nothing here but woods.”
“It’s just a block or so down.”
“But it’s cold outside. We can drop you at your door.”
What’s he supposed to do? Fight Val about it?
If there’s one thing Charlie isn’t used to, it’s turmoil. He doesn’t want drama in his life. He doesn’t want to have to worry over things. The whole point of the bus, the whole point of his entire lifestyle, is to avoid this kind of thing, and yet here he is in the backseat of a cab, late at night, trying to argue that he should walk in the rain.
“Which is it?” asks the driver.
“Keep going,” he says. “I’ll show you where to turn.”
Val is giving him a strange look but Charlie can’t meet his eyes.
10
Val
“You live there?” I asked.
“Um…”
“In a schoolbus.”
“I…”
“Is it heated?”
I was aware that my voice was more strained than it should have been. I understood that Charlie was independent, free, and not under my supervision. Not only did I have no responsibility for his wellbeing, it would be intrusive and inappropriate for me to say a word about it.
“Look, Val. Thanks for bringing me out here. Everything’s fine, okay? Don’t worry about the bus. Don’t worry about me. I’m safe, I’m warm, it’s all good.”
In other words, don’t stick your nose into his business.
Charlie got out of the cab and stood there for just a second. I think neither of us was sure how to say goodbye. Shake hands? No. Hug? Certainly not. But I believed something had passed between us this evening. We were closer, although not in any way I could ever explain, not to Theo, hardly even to myself.
“Will I see you…later?” I hardly dared ask. What if the answer was no thank you? What if my offer of a bike had been a step too far?
“Of course you will,” he said, his hand on the door. “Goodbye, Val…and thank you.”
All I could manage was half a wave, as he shut the door. The raindrops on the window jittered and began to roll down. I could barely see him, tugging his overshirt tight around himself as he walked to the bus.
He doesn’t even have a coat, I thought.
The driver pulled us away. I sat with my hands in my lap and stared at the cold night outside, as we passed trees and small houses. The lights of the city were just in view when I told the driver to turn around.
“It’s your money, bub.”
I tapped on the glass door of the bus. I couldn’t see inside, because there were curtains; in the dark I couldn’t tell what color they were, other than they were pale.
Maybe I had expected the curtain to twitch aside so that he could check to see who was at the door. Instead the door just creaked and folded itself open.
Charlie sighed and looked at me the way you look at a child who has just broken your favorite vase, a sort of sympathetic disappointment.
“Val.”
He watched me as I stepped up into the bus. He watched me look around. I knew he was waiting for something, waiting for the words he knew I would speak, when I saw his sleeping bag, his boxes of belongings. The clothes on hangers, hooked into a seam of the bus roof. The steam on the windows, and the places where the steam was missing because of cold drafts coming in. The electric lantern next to stacks of paper.
“This…” I said, my voice trailing to silence.
“I did ask you not to drop me off,” he said. “I didn’t want you to see this.”
“This is…”
“Look, go ahead and get your cab back, head for your nice apartment, Val. It’s okay. I know it changes things. But for tonight, just don’t…don’t…”
“This is wonderful,” I said.
Charlie stared at me agape. He looked down the aisle of the bus, as though checking to make sure we were both seeing the
same thing.
“Wonderful?”
“I love it,” I said. “Think about it, there’s no wasted space. If you want to sit down, there’s all this seating. If you need somewhere to put a box, the seats can serve as shelves.”
I’m not sure whether he believed me. I’m not sure whether he understood.
“My apartments are always so big,” I said. “I have four bedrooms. Four. Why? It’s pointless, there’s just one of me. My living room is vast. People act like, if you have money, what you want most is floor space. It’s so inefficient. Why should it take an extra forty-five seconds to walk from your bed to your bathroom? But this…it’s all about efficiency. Your time is never being wasted. Charlie, why doesn’t everyone live in a bus?”
I had already walked past him, my shoulder brushing his, as I went more deeply into the bus, marveling over its possibilities.
“You’re not fucking with me, are you?” he asked. “I mean, don’t lie—”
“I never lie,” I said archly. “Or at least, I never did before I met you. Now apparently I lie all the time. But not about this.”
In a smaller voice he said, “I really like it here, but no one understands it.”
I turned to him and wagged my finger. “You’ll forgive me if I take a little bit of a tone with you, though. Where’s your plumbing? Where is your lighting? It’s a good start, but you’re not making the best use of this space.”
Now his face was alight as he lifted the lantern to the ceiling. “I have so many plans! God, Val, if you had an hour, I couldn’t finish telling you. I want to put solar panels on the roof, and a battery system, and I think I could pull out some of the seats to replace them with cabinets—”
I touched the cold ceiling. “Insulation first, of course. Rust-proofing, to protect your investment. Yes to batteries, but you have to have sufficient wiring. And, I bring up again the plumbing, since that would require—”
“Money,” said Charlie with a shrug. “It all takes money. So I guess for a while, I’m just living here in my sleeping bag.”
“Oh, if it’s a matter of money—”
“No, Val. Don’t. Don’t finish that sentence.”
I stopped. I had gotten caught up in the moment, imagining all the things you could do with a space like this. The organizing it would take. The planning.
A project.
But no. This wasn’t my project. It wasn’t my house. “I’m sorry, I got carried away. Of course I won’t give you any money. And I’m sorry my offer of the bike earlier caused some tension between us. I can retract that offer too. I can retract altogether, if that’s what you want, Charlie. You’ll see I’m very good at it. I disappear from people’s lives, and they forget all about me.”
He stared at me a long time, his face half-lit by the steady white glow of the lantern. The shadows brought out the sharpness of his features, as he thought his secret thoughts, as he made his secret decisions, as he brought considerations and rationales to bear on the problem of me.
I wanted to touch his face. His soft skin seemed to glow with its own inner light, like it was translucent.
The fear in my throat was impossible to swallow. I don’t feel like this about people. I never do.
I never want to touch them. But I wanted to now.
It’s wrong. You can’t. It’s impossible. My mind would not even make a coherent argument, just a frightened refusal to admit what I was feeling.
“I don’t think I want you to disappear,” he said.
“I’m clumsy, Charlie. I don’t know how to do anything but run a company. I could make you a million dollars easier than I could have a normal conversation with you.”
“I don’t want a normal conversation,” he said. “Normal conversations are all about people trying to get you to do things, trying to work their way around your defenses, trying to control you—”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to control you. I don’t think I could, even if I wanted to. Charlie, I don’t understand what I’m feeling. I don’t know what this is. I’ve never— I could never—”
Was his expression one of worry or sympathy? I could not tell, just that his eyebrows tilted up and he moved toward me, closer and closer, until a collision was inevitable. But in the last moment, he put out his hand, as though a braking maneuver, letting it rest against me.
“Do you…” These pauses, these long long pauses. “Do you want me to show you how?” His voice a whisper.
“I would never ask.”
“It’s because you never ask.”
“I don’t want to be one of those…one of those—”
“You’re not one of those,” he whispered, before I could even get my thoughts together on who those are, the ones I am not one of, the people who tried to control him, the people who treated him badly.
He lifted himself onto his toes. Now we were eye to eye. And not only eye to eye, but lip to lip. Because he was moving forward, crossing that vast final distance between us, and his lips were softer than his hair, softer than his eyelashes, so warm in this cold air.
It was like being touched with a feather. Except the feather was on fire, because everywhere he touched left me burning. His fingers were on my neck, on my jaw, and I could feel each touch, his lips, his fingers, the way they melded into one sensation, and I made a discovery: It’s hard to be afraid when someone is kissing you. It’s hard to be afraid when they’re pulling you close, standing on their toes to get closer to you, when they press their chest against your chest, when you can feel their heart beating strong between the miles and miles of clothes between you. Hard to be afraid when all you want to do is remove those layers, lessen that distance, get closer, and you never ever in your entire life wanted to get closer before, but now you do, now it’s all you want, now it’s the thing that occupies your mind and your planning and your organization, you’re thinking about how to lift your own hand, how to work his buttons, how to get closer, at the same time he keeps sweeping you away—sweeping me away—and I have never felt so swept away.
His lips parted from mine, and it was like being let go, I took a step back, trying to regain my balance, my breath, my ability to think, as he came down from his toes and looked at me carefully.
“That’s a kiss,” he whispered. “You could call that lesson one.”
“Teach me lesson two,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the only thing I’ve ever been sure of,” I said. “You make me feel… You make me feel—”
There was no word at the end of it because there didn’t need to be. He made me feel. I had never known what it meant. People say it and you think you know what it means but until you feel it you don’t know.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It really is okay.”
I didn’t realize I was shivering until he reached for me again. I didn’t realize how this emotion was playing out in my body. “Hold me?”
“I will.”
And he did. He put his arms around me. He pulled me close again, with no kiss this time, just the closeness, as I felt something shaking me, like a great fever was leaving my body.
“Look,” he said, “listen,” and they were meaningless words, there wasn’t anything to say, he just wanted to draw my attention, bring me back to this world we were sharing, to the feeling of his arms around me, the safety they represented, a safety where I could feel and experience and not have to think, not have to worry. “Can I just…” His voice going silent when he kissed me again.
11
Charlie
Charlie knows a thing or two about this. He’s been here before, but always on the other side. Always someone else putting their arms around him, telling him it’s okay, don’t be afraid, even though he knows, he knows, that fear is the most rational instinct of all, it’s that basic worry when someone is bigger than you, when they could take you down.
But when Val starts shivering, it’s like the bigger man is speaking a language he knows. A language of uncertai
nty, of fearful anticipation, and all Charlie wants to do is comfort him, to tell him it’s okay, but right now all of Charlie’s words are gone, because he’s too full, there are too many feelings inside him for there to be any room for words, sentences, dialogues, and he says Look and he says Listen but he isn’t sure what he means by any of it.
Look at me. Listen to my heart.
Val is a nervous deer at the edge of the woods. If you move too quickly, he’ll spring away. You’ll never see him again. Charlie doesn’t want to scare him off. He’s going to have to move slowly, carefully, with confidence.
With control.
There it is. That’s the difference. That’s why he wants to kiss Val again and again. That’s why he wants to strip him down right here, kiss every inch of him.
Val trusts him with the power. He put his faith in Charlie, and no one ever puts their faith in Charlie, it’s always the other way around, men demanding his trust, angry when he can’t give it, why won’t you trust me goddamn it don’t you know you need me—
It’s funny how there’s no room for that in his head. It’s funny how, with Val’s tentative hands rising to touch him, to entangle their fingers, Charlie’s past can’t seem to get a foothold, can’t haunt him the way it usually does. Val takes up too much space for that, Charlie’s need to understand him, to touch him, to guide him.
It’s mental, it’s emotional, but it’s also completely physical. Charlie’s hard as a rock right now. Part of him just wants to throw the big man down onto the sleeping bag and move straight from lesson one to lesson twelve, to feel himself coming inside Val, to get that close.
When they’re face to face they’re not face to face. Val is taller, and Charlie’s lips touch the collar of his shirt. It’s buttoned all the way up, and it’s time to do something about that, it’s time to show Val there’s more to life than kissing. The thick smooth fabric of the shirt, the cold buttons, he can feel everything through the tips of his fingers.
