by Roan Parrish
I lay my head on his shoulder and stroke his stomach lightly. He squeezes me a little, lets out a sigh and seems to relax. I listen to his slow breathing, my mind drifting.
When I wake up, it’s dark and, for a second, I have no idea where I am. I tense, but my hand feels the warmth of Rex’s body next to me and I relax. I tilt my chin up and kiss the underside of Rex’s chin.
“Hi,” he says.
“You’re awake.”
“Just for a minute.”
“How do you feel?”
“A bit better. It’s the tail end of it now, I think. It started on Friday night, and they don’t usually last more than two days.” He yawns. “I have to piss like you wouldn’t believe.”
Rex pushes himself up, his muscles trembling, and swings his legs over the side of the bed to heave himself upright. As Rex shakily makes his way to the bathroom, it gets me right in the gut: I want to take care of him. Not because I think he’s weak, but because I care about him. It’s so obvious. Ginger’s been saying it to me for years, but I’ve never—not once—actually believed her because I’ve never felt it before.
Every time I asked my brothers for help they gave me shit about it. Anytime I asked for help from someone at school, they made me feel stupid or like I wasn’t trying hard enough. And the few times people offered help, it was obvious they expected something in return. Even my father’s gruff attempts at taking care of my car just made me feel awkward, because he so clearly resented them.
And Ginger… well, Ginger always just felt like an exception. I wanted to take care of her, of course, but, deep down, it felt a lot like paying a debt. She saved me the day I wandered into her shop. Somehow, she saw me differently than my brothers or my teachers and the other kids at school did. Not as a fuckup or a loser or a pansy. She really saw me, and so of course I felt indebted to her. I felt like each small thing I could do for her might go a little way toward paying her back for giving me a chance to be something other than a fuckup and a loser.
It’s not that way anymore. At least, I don’t think it is. But it segued from that to true, deep friendship so slowly that I can’t pinpoint when it happened exactly. And I’ve never felt it with anyone else. Definitely not with Richard, who would have viewed the idea of me taking care of him as absurd since, as he saw it, I didn’t have anything I could offer him except a hard fuck, which, clearly, was a service others could provide. And other friends? I don’t know. They never seemed to need taking care of—at least not from me.
But now, seeing Rex curled up in that big bed, struggling to get to the bathroom, all I feel is an itchiness in my palms to reach out and help him; a manic desire to somehow take his pain into my own body because I’d rather feel it than have to watch him suffer.
“You sticking around for a bit?”
Rex’s voice startles me. I look up at him. He looks better. The tension is mostly gone from his face, though he still looks a little out of it.
“Yeah,” I say, “if you want me to.”
Rex smiles, but he looks a little sad. Was that the wrong answer?
“I mean, unless you just want some quiet, for your head,” I amend. He pulls me gently toward him, hugging me to his broad chest.
“No, I want you here,” he says, and I relax at the rumble of it through his chest. “The pills really helped. How’d you know what to do?”
“Ginger gets them—migraines. She always throws up and the only way she can keep a pill down is with the applesauce. She says it’s like the migraine wants to take over, so it makes her brain reject the pill, but if she can’t see the pill in the applesauce, it tricks the migraine and lets her swallow it. I think that’s what her mom told her when she was younger, I mean. And the pressure points really help her. She’s a die-hard acupuncture believer. Her hands get really cramped from holding the tattoo machine all day, and her back hurts from sitting bent over, so she goes to this guy in Chinatown who’s done acupuncture for, like, sixty years. I swear to god, you look at this guy and you’d think he was forty, but he’s seventy-five. Anyway, she says it really helps.”
“Maybe I should try it,” Rex says.
“Maybe. I read that for a while in the seventies, it got a lot of press because in China doctors were doing open-heart surgery using acupuncture instead of anesthesia. I asked the guy in Chinatown about it and he said that that was a hoax they did for attention when Nixon visited China, and that the patient was getting morphine, but that it’s actually completely possible to render a part of the body pain-free using acupuncture if the person doing it is skilled enough.”
“I really love that,” Rex says.
“Yeah, it’s pretty amazing,” I say. “Especially since so many people end up dying after surgery from the anesthesia even when the surgery goes fine.”
“No, I mean, I love how you tell me all this information about stuff. I love how you always have some fact about something.”
“I don’t mean to be a know-it-all,” I say. My brothers hated when I’d bring up things I’d read, so after a while, I just shut up about it. But sometimes, I’d think it would be something they’d definitely be interested in, so I’d tell them. It never worked out how I thought it would, inevitably leading to them calling me a know-it-all or a smartass.
“Did I say that?” Rex asks, gently, tilting my chin up.
“No,” I say softly. “Listen, Rex. I’m sorry about the other night. How I yelled at you. I should have thought to ask you fix the table. I’m just… not used to having anyone to…. I’m just used to looking out for myself, you know?”
He nods.
“I know. I think I get it. You’ve never had someone help you who didn’t make you pay for it somehow. I shouldn’t have walked out like that. I just felt stupid. I’d already made such an ass of myself acting like a jealous caveman about your colleague. I’m sorry about that.”
He kisses me on the cheek, his lips a little shaky against my skin.
“So, you watched the Food Network, huh?” he says, taking my hand and walking into the living room.
“You heard that?”
He nods, grabbing the remote and flopping down on the couch, pulling me down next to him. He turns to the Food Network and I settle against his shoulder.
After two episodes of a cooking competition show, I’m a total Food Network convert and my stomach is growling so loudly that I can hear it over the television.
“Can I make something?” I ask Rex, gesturing toward the kitchen.
“Sure.” He stands up with me.
“You can just stay here and rest,” I tell him. “I got it.”
“No, I’ll come.”
“Man, you really do think I’m going to poison you, huh?”
“No. But I’ll keep you company.”
I don’t believe him, but I shrug and walk into the kitchen, thinking I’ll just throw a frozen pizza in the oven or open some soup. But when I look in the freezer and open Rex’s cupboards, I don’t find anything.
“You don’t have any food,” I say.
“I have a ton of food,” Rex says, chuckling. “I just don’t have anything encased in a block of ice or preserved to the point that it could be space food.”
I glare at him.
“Here, let me do it,” he says.
“No, no, I got this,” I say, pushing him back down onto the stool by the shoulders. I totally do not got this.
Rex smiles and puts his arms around my waist, spreading his legs to draw me in to him. He kisses me and then leans his forehead against my chest. Then he stands up and opens the refrigerator, pulling things out.
“I’m going to show you how to make spaghetti,” he says. “Okay?”
“Great.”
Rex puts me to work cutting up a green pepper and some tomatoes.
“I’ll teach you how to make the pasta yourself another time—fresh pasta is the best. But for now let’s just use premade before you starve to death.”
Rex bustles around the kitchen making a sal
ad and putting water on to boil. I consider the pepper, trying to figure out how to explain why I got so mad before I left for Detroit.
“Listen, about what you said Thursday night,” I say, concentrating on cutting up the pepper and not slicing my fingers off in the process. Rex looks up. “About how I won’t accept your help?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Well, a couple years after I met her, Ginger bought this motorcycle from a guy on Craigslist. She’d gone down to the guy’s house and looked at it and everything and she said it seemed to run fine, so she bought it. Then, like, a week later, the thing totally died. Ginger asked me to look at it for her and I did—I’m not as good as my dad or my brothers, but I know enough to tell that the engine was total garbage and the gas tank was leaking. I mean, it’s a miracle the thing didn’t throw a spark and ignite the whole gas tank. Anyway, Ginger tried to message the guy through Craigslist, but, of course, he’d taken his profile down once the bike sold.
“So, Ginger asked me if I would go with her to talk to the guy. When we got there, the dude was like, ‘Wow, I’m so sorry to hear that. It was running fine for me. You probably rode the clutch or something.’ You know, because she’s a woman, he thinks he can make it seem like it’s her fault because she’s not good with a bike or something, which is bullshit because Ginge’s a great rider, she just doesn’t know about mechanics. Anyway, the guy was a douchebag, but I made him give her her money back and everything.”
“What did you do to him?” Rex asks suspiciously.
“Nothing!” I say, still addressing the cutting board. “I didn’t hurt him, I just scared him. Told him what kind of loser I thought he was for ripping someone off like that. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that I was really happy that Ginger asked me to help her, you know, because it meant that she trusted me and that we were really friends because you’d only ask a friend to do that. And, so, my point is that you were like me and I was like Ginger, only I didn’t ask you, so it was like we weren’t friends, and that’s my fault because I didn’t totally realize what was going on. But I do now. You know?”
Rex puts his hand over mine, taking my knife. I’ve cut the green pepper into such tiny pieces that it’s almost pulp.
“That’s wrong, isn’t it?” I say, pointing to the green pepper.
Rex doesn’t even look at the cutting board. He cups my face in his hands, forcing me to look at him.
“You’re saying you understand that I want to help you because I care?”
“Um. Yeah,” I say.
Rex looks at me seriously.
“You helped me today,” he says. “You took care of me. Do you think less of me because I let you?”
“Of course not. I never said—”
“You never said it, but it’s clear. Somewhere along the line you learned that it’s a failure to accept help. That it makes you weak. Right?”
I try to look away, but he’s still holding my face. I don’t think anyone’s ever looked at me so hard.
“Right?” he says again.
“Right,” I say, and my voice cracks. I clear my throat. “But I know it’s not true. That’s what made me think of it: how much I wanted to take care of you today.”
“You know it’s not true here,” Rex says, tapping my forehead. “But it’ll take a while to believe it.”
I shrug, but I keep looking at his beautiful eyes.
“Well, then I guess we’ll just have to keep looking out for each other until we both believe it, huh?” Rex says.
“Okay,” I tell him.
“Okay,” he says, and he kisses me matter-of-factly, like we’ve just sealed a deal.
“Um, did I mess that up?” I ask again, pointing to the pepper.
“Nope,” Rex says. “It’s perfect for the sauce. It’ll just cook faster now.”
He shows me how to sauté the green pepper, onion, garlic, and tomatoes for the base of the sauce and mix oil and vinegar for salad dressing.
Rex nudges me with his shoulder, teasing me about being distractible. Apparently, I missed whatever he just said because I was watching him bend over to take the bread out of the oven. Rex’s teasing is always gentle, which makes it feel like a whole different animal than my brothers’ take-no-prisoners brand of humiliation.
“How are you feeling?” I ask him as we sit down to eat.
“I feel pretty damn good,” he says, looking at me. I meant his head, but I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about. I smile at him, but now that I’m not distracted by cooking, my mind is racing with questions. Should I tell him about Jay asking me out, or will that just give him more of a reason to be jealous? Should I tell him about Richard? Ginger said that’s what you do when you… date someone. Is that what we’re doing?
I shove spaghetti into my mouth until I can decide, but when I look up, Rex is looking at me, but isn’t eating.
“’S good,” I say with my mouth full.
“Something wrong?” Rex asks.
“No, I just. I was thinking, when I was in Detroit, that….” That what? That I should tell him what happened the last time I thought I was dating someone? That I should tell him how pathetic I am? Ugh.
“So, the main character in my favorite book is named Richard,” I say.
“The Secret History?” Rex asks.
“Yeah! How’d you—oh.” Right, the book had fallen out of my pants the night we fucked against the tree. “But how’d you know it was my favorite?”
“It was worn,” he says. “And most of your other books looked like you bought them used, but not like they’d been read that many times. The Secret History had its corners all rounded, like it’d been handled a lot.”
Jesus Christ, he’s observant.
“Well, so, when I was in grad school, I met this guy and—this is so stupid—his name was Richard. And I had this idiotic thought that maybe he’d be like Richard in the book.” I trail off, embarrassed that I admitted this.
“It’s not stupid,” he says, taking my hand. “It’s actually incredibly sweet.”
“It’s nerdy,” I say.
“Yeah, maybe a little. And… he wasn’t?”
“Ah, no.”
Rex nods and starts to eat slowly, as I talk. I tell him about meeting Richard and about how things were between us. Rex keeps eating, but his left hand is clenched into a fist where it rests on his knee, and he keeps squeezing it tighter and tighter every time I say something he doesn’t like. When I get to the part about Ginger overhearing Rex’s friends calling me trash, he makes a sound like a growl in the back of his throat, but stops himself from interrupting me. When I tell him about walking in on Richard kissing another man, Rex’s face falls and he grits his teeth. He looks furious.
“I would never do that to you,” Rex insists, his eyes on fire. He looks like he’s about to say something else, but I just wanted to get it off my chest. I don’t want to rehash my own pathetic history.
I push the serving bowl toward Rex.
“You should finish it. I bet you haven’t eaten much lately.”
He smiles gratefully and puts the last serving of pasta on his plate.
“Yeah, I can never eat when I have them. Poor Marilyn,” he says. “She thought I was dying or something. She kept jumping up on the bed, trying to check on me, but I couldn’t stand the movement, so I shut the door. She was whining all night, trying to get in.”
I know the sound. It was the same sound she made the night I hit her. Remembering the way she lay on the ground, so helpless, makes me shiver.
“Hey,” I say, “you never told me how you knew what to do for Marilyn.”
“What, with her leg?”
He starts to clear the plates, but I wave him off, putting a hand on his shoulder to keep him sitting. I carry the plates to the sink and start to do the dishes.
“Animals used to follow my mom home all the time,” Rex says. “There was always a dog sleeping outside our door, or some cats living under the porch. One day, I got hom
e from school and found a turkey in our yard. Dogs were what she liked best, though, so whenever one followed her home or showed up at our door, she’d let it in and feed it. And then it’d just stay. The first one we had was Buster, like Buster Keaton. Sweet dog. Big hound. He used to sit next to my mom at the table and rest his chin on her lap. But usually, they’d live outside because we weren’t home all day. They’d come home busted up from getting in fights with other dogs, or sometimes hit by cars.”
I wince at that.
“So, my mom’d fix them up. She showed me how. It’s just like people, really, only you have to make sure the dogs don’t lick their cuts.” He smiles absently.
“How many did you have at once, then?” I ask, imagining his mom as the Pied Piper of Hamlin, a trail of dogs trotting behind her.
“Only one or two at once,” Rex said, and he gazes out the window sadly. “We could never take them with us when we moved. And we moved so often. Used to break my fucking heart, but my mom said that things come into your life when you need them. And there would always be another dog the next place we moved. She was right about that, anyway.”
He still looks upset, though.
“Do you think that’s true? That things come into your life when you need them?”
“Nah,” he says, “not really. And, besides, even if it is true, she never said anything about leaving them. I would have dreams for weeks after we moved, where I was in the car with my mom and the dogs were all running behind us, baying, not understanding why we’d leave them behind. I mean, what about them? We came into their lives when they needed it, sure, but then we just left.”
As if on cue, Marilyn comes into the kitchen, sniffing under the table for a snack. Rex bends down and puts his arms around her, squeezing her and then scratching her head. She plops down on the floor next to him and he leaves a hand on her head.
“Such a good girl,” he says fondly.
“But, then,” he says in an unfamiliar voice. It’s deeper than usual, and a bit forced. “Then I think about you—how you came into my life that night. You and Marilyn. And, I don’t know. Maybe there’s some truth to it after all.”
