by Roan Parrish
“Are you gonna come in or are you going to stand there gaping? FYI, you might want to lose the whole mouth-hanging-open look before you hit the streets, unless you really do want to get mugged.” His teeth were straight, and white, and as sharp as his words, but he was smiling and his eyes sparkled. He was at least a little bit happy to see me.
“Hi,” I said and went to hug him. He felt amazing in my arms, and I couldn’t help hooking my chin over his shoulder to try and get a whiff of his hair. “Oh, wow, we’re the same height now,” I noted with my nose in his hair. I thought I heard him sigh a little, and I held on to him a beat after he tensed in my arms. “Sorry. I probably stink.” I let him go, missing the feel of him immediately.
“What the hell happened to you?” Will said as he shut the door.
“What? Oh.” The knees of my jeans were abraded where I hit the ground to avoid the car hitting me, and there was grass stuck in the creases where the fabric had rucked up above my high-tops. “This car almost hit me, man. It was ridic. Talk about defensive driving.”
Will’s eyes snapped to my face and then down to my skateboard, and he shook his head. I had almost forgotten how much he could communicate just by the way he looked at things.
“Lesson one,” he said, getting me some water and leading me over to sit on the couch. “Everything in New York is designed to kill or maim you and everyone wants something from you. It is basically the Hunger Games. Trust no one. Be ever vigilant.”
“Mix your Hunger Games and Harry Potter streams much? Nah. I met a totally nice guy in the park who I’m pretty sure wasn’t trying to kill me. He had a puppy.”
Will looked me up and down and winked. “Then he was trying to get in your pants. Puppies are sex bombs. That’s not even an advanced technique.”
“No! Puppies are not sex bombs. God, don’t say that. Puppies!”
“True story, sorry. They’re like babies. Everyone’s already agreed that they know what our reactions to them should be. Have you noticed how pissed parents get if you don’t smile at their baby? For real, they look at you like you’re the devil.”
“Um, I guess I usually smile at them?”
“Of course you do. Try it next time you’re walking. Even the sweetest-looking East Village mom straight from baby-and-me yoga will cut a bitch if you don’t smile at her baby.”
“You just go around glaring at babies?”
“I didn’t say I glared at them. I just don’t smile at them because they don’t amuse me. And, seriously, people act like you’ve broken a basic tenet of human interaction or something.”
“And you enjoy this? Terrorizing babies and antagonizing yoga moms?” I teased.
Will’s grin was mischievous. He slid down deeper into the couch. It was buttery black leather and, like so much about Will, seemed casually nice but was probably posh and expensive.
“So, did the fam give you a tearful send-off?”
I shook my head. “My mom dropped me off at the bus station in Detroit, but the bus left at like seven in the morning so everyone else was asleep. Besides….” I ran my palm absently over the soft leather of the couch. I was so aware of Will next to me, every shift of his body stirring the air between us. “They probably won’t really notice that I’m not there anymore. Not like they cared that much that I was there before.”
At Will’s sober expression, I immediately felt disloyal to my family.
“I mean, it’s not like they’re terrible or anything, just… I don’t have much in common with them. Like, Eric and my dad have their whole outdoorsy thing going on, and Janie and my mom are all into crafts and tutorials and Pinterest hacks.” Will snorted in amusement. “And Eric and Janie are both so… normal, I guess? They just… have friends or whatever. Anyway, they all have stuff they share and I just never did. And especially with the whole college thing….”
“Bad year?” Will asked.
“Oh man. It sucked. It really sucked. The whole thing—” I shook my head.
“What happened?”
I had e-mailed Will when my plans to come to NYU changed. A long and, let’s face it, whiny e-mail about how I couldn’t justify going into debt for, like, the rest of my life to come to NYU, about how sad I was that I wouldn’t get to hang out with him. And his response had been totally nice. That he agreed it wasn’t worth it. That he was sure I’d do great at community college. Et cetera, et cetera. But I hadn’t wanted him to be nice. I’d wanted him to be as devastated as I was, and he just… wasn’t.
It had been Daniel’s idea that I could take classes at Grayling rather than have to sit out a whole year, since NYU was the only place I applied to. It’s what he had done, transferring to Temple with enough credits under his belt that he only had to pay for a year’s tuition. And it was good advice. He’d had a great experience with his classes and his professors. But he’d also been in a city he loved, with friends, and a goal he was working toward.
“It just felt like high school all over again. Half of the people were people from high school, actually. And just… it was depressing,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to seem like a snob. I tried to be friendly and keep an open mind and everything. But there was an air of, like… despair. Seriously. It was grim. And my parents—ugh. My mom would be all, ‘How was school, honey?’ just like she did when I was little.”
“God, the unmitigated gall of the woman,” Will drawled.
“No, I know, it’s nice, just—ugh, I’m not explaining it well.”
I wasn’t sure how to explain it, exactly. What I’d felt was something close to humiliation. I’d never told my family about NYU, so I didn’t think they were disappointed in me or anything. Neither of my parents had been to college, so it certainly wasn’t something they expected. Eric hadn’t gone, and I didn’t think Janie was interested. No, it was more like a humiliation born of the distance between what I wanted and the life I was living.
As if I’d somehow tempted fate by thinking I was special enough to get out of Holiday and fate had smacked me down.
“I get it,” Will said. “You had an idea of what you wanted from college and that didn’t fit it. It’s almost worse to have some wack approximation of the thing you want than not to have it at all.”
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
Will shrugged and grinned at me.
“Well, now you get your chance.”
I nodded but felt the sudden terror that somehow the fantasy of NYU would blow up in my face all over again. That fate would, once again, punish me for dreaming above my station. But Will had successfully gotten out of Holiday and made a go of it here, proof it was possible.
I told Will about my roommate bailing and how big New York seemed. How unfathomable I found the scale of a city where the subway made it so you couldn’t see how things were connected. How far it seemed you could go without meeting anyone who knew you.
“At least I have you,” I said, testing the waters.
Will’s eyes were on me, but he didn’t say anything, and I started to feel awkward.
“I mean, um, well, and I’ll get a new roommate.”
“My freshman roommate was a nightmare,” Will said. “He’d been homeschooled and he was a total cliché. Awkward as all hell, showered about once a week, and did these relaxation exercises before he went to bed. He’d sit cross-legged and kind of flap his arms and legs around while breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. Total freak show.
“But, oh man, that was nothing compared to this other girl on my hall. She had night terrors, and she’d wake up sometimes convinced that she was part of some kind of army invasion—I think her dad was in the military or something—and bust out her door to forearm crawl down the hallway. Jesus, it was hilarious. And she went to bed early, so she’d wake up this way at like one in the morning and, of course, half the hall was still awake so everyone would see. Ahhh,” he sighed, laughing. “Poor Louise. I wonder if her military crawl skills ever came in handy later in life.”
I laughed with him, but now he’d gotten me even more nervous about who my roommate was going to be.
“Well, if mine’s that bad then I’ll just have to come over and crash on your couch,” I said, sliding a little closer to him.
“You’ll be fine,” he said with a careless smile. “You’ll probably forget I’m even here in a week or two. With this grin?” He chucked me under the chin. “You’ll make a ton of friends. Besides, you’ll have all your classes.”
The concept of forgetting about Will was an absurdity of the magnitude of the IC 1101 galaxy. But I was now veering into dangerous territory. Resolution 4 territory.
Resolution 4 was serious. Resolution 4 was essential. Resolution 4 was basically Daniel’s voice in my head and it went something like: Do not stalk Will like a total psycho when you get to New York in order to confess your love for him because you barely know him and haven’t seen him in almost two years and also he’s a bag of dicks. The bag of dicks part was definitely Daniel’s voice, though the rest of it wasn’t exactly untrue.
So, yeeeaaahhh. Did I mention yet that my feelings for Will were pretty… intense?
I knew that I didn’t super know him, but I also knew I wasn’t wrong about the connection we had. One half of my brain repeated Resolution 4, Resolution 4, while the other half pictured Will and me tucked up together on his couch just like this every night, talking about everything. Getting to know each other the way no one else had ever known me. Going out together so Will could show me the city. We’d hold hands and—
Will was looking at me strangely and my heart started to hammer, an awkward, sick feeling stealing into my stomach. I didn’t remember what I’d been saying and became convinced maybe I’d said things about us going out aloud.
Pretend it’s casual! I shouted at myself. Everything’s super casual! You’re a casual guy! “Uh, hang out! We can hang out. Right?”
Will’s narrowed eyes suggested that I hadn’t sounded quite as casual as I’d intended.
“Sure,” he said, “we can hang out.” But the way he said it—like maybe he was just humoring me—scraped at the last nerve I had. And, okay, maybe I slightly overreacted. But I had ridden on buses for what felt like forever, lugged around my hallmates’ worldly possessions, been abandoned by my roommate, almost been hit by a car, gotten on the subway going the wrong way twice trying to get here, and now Will was wrenching away the one scrap of comfort I had.
I was trying to keep calm, but my voice had gone all tight with the promise of a subway ride back downtown by myself, each stop putting more and more distance between me and the only person I knew here.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “We got along so well in Holiday. And now I’m here, and I thought… I mean, I came here so that….” Abort! That was definitely not casual. “I just mean that now that I’m here, I thought maybe we might have a chance. Just to try, you know, being together.”
I swallowed and I imagined the sound of it echoing through the open window and out into the streets beyond, announcing to the inhabitants of East Harlem that Leo Ware was completely and officially pathetic.
Will was looking at me like he was puzzled by something essential about me. I felt taken apart by his gaze, like he could see things about me I hadn’t even figured out yet.
“Leo.” He almost never said my name and it cut right through me. “You didn’t come here for me. You came here for college. I live here, yeah, but this is a big city. It’s a whole world. You’ll see.”
I opened my mouth to say something, and he pressed a thumb to the swell of my bottom lip, fingers curling around my chin.
“Look, I want to be clear, okay? I’m not looking for a relationship,” he said. There was an almost savage cruelty to the gentleness of his tone as his words tore through me. It was a quelling blow from an honored enemy, a poison kiss, an end before things had even started.
“You’re… not interested in general, or… with me?” I forced myself to clarify, pressing farther onto the sword.
“In general.”
The silence between us stretched. Usually I’d feel compelled to fill such a silence, but I couldn’t even find the words.
“So, then, you just….”
Will’s eyes went hard with the warning of irritation.
“I sleep with people when I want to, yeah, if that’s what you were going to say.” His tone dared me to find fault with what he’d said.
I looked at him, but it was as if I were watching myself from outside my own body as the one thing that I had promised myself I wouldn’t say fell out of my mouth and landed between us on Will’s posh couch like an unwelcome splotch of oatmeal.
“But… you kissed me.”
It sounded so inconsequential, so childish; like I was dangling something unsavory and clumsy in front of him and insisting that he take it as proof.
Will’s brows drew together, but then he just smiled casually. “Yeah, well, I’m sure I’m not the first to do that. That fucking smirk you throw.” He winked and tapped my lip again.
I gaped at him. In fact, he had been the first. Well, not counting Christina Marciano at the eighth-grade social that Carter had dragged me to back when we were still best friends. Before he decided that sports were cooler than movie marathons and being popular was more important than me. And she didn’t really count because that was spin the bottle, so she kind of had to kiss me. But that wasn’t even the point.
Will’s smile faded in the silence.
“Okaaay. Um, I shouldn’t have done that. I was in a weird place. Being back in Michigan, and stuff with my sister and—”
I couldn’t listen. He regretted kissing me—not even regretted: discounted. Basically the best moment of my entire life, and it had been nothing to him. A mistake.
When you’re in a weird place you, like, impulse buy dumb trinkets at the gas station or decide that you probably should watch Fifty Shades of Grey just to see what everyone is talking about. But Will had kissed me. I mean, really kissed me.
Even all these months later I could slide back into the moment like a jacket worn perfectly to fit my shoulders….
Laughing at a snarky joke Will made and looking up to find his eyes locked on my mouth, those honey gold lashes vulnerable where his eyes always flayed me. The sudden heat I felt, like every atom between our bodies was agitated to a singing vibration. The drag of those lashes as his eyes met mine and he inhaled sharply through his nose like he was startled by whatever he saw in me. How slowly he moved—almost imperceptibly—until my eyes crossed trying to track his mouth’s approach.
His breath caught moments before we touched, a tiny automatic sound that I thought might be nerves, though Will had never indicated he had any. I closed my eyes at the hint of vulnerability and waited for contact, the whole world—my whole stupid, pathetic life—reduced to our mouths, microns apart, taking each other’s breath into our bodies like maybe we could share something.
But when contact came it wasn’t Will’s lips. It was his hands, one on either side of my face, holding me fiercely still. His eyes were knives again, any hint of uncertainty gone, and he crushed his mouth to mine before I could even register that he’d moved. It startled a sound out of me, a kind of whine in the back of my throat that I try not to think about, and then it was just the taste of him, like warm ocean water on my tongue.
I pushed up on tiptoes to kiss him back, fisting the fabric of his shirt until he yanked me against him and his tongue stroked mine. It was a shock that electrified my whole body. The fucking intimacy of it. Of someone touching my mouth with his. That something of Will was inside me, a part of me—spit and breath and taste and touch. In that instant he owned me.
When I slid my fingers into his hair it even felt blond, the strands smooth and heavy, and Will let out a breath into my mouth. We broke apart for a moment and his eyes were narrowed. Had I done something wrong? Made a misstep I didn’t even recognize?
Before I could apologize or ask or do anything, really, other th
an try not to plaster myself back against his body, he covered my mouth with his palm and closed his eyes, shaking his head slightly. I tried to say something, but he pressed his palm tighter against my lips, his fingers a blunt disappointment after the poetry of his mouth. His hand stayed there for a moment before sliding away in a silent benediction as he took a step back, leaving me breathless and shaky and tremblingly hard.
Leaving me totally destroyed for anything but another taste of him.
Since the moment I had gotten my acceptance letter to NYU—no, from the moment it had occurred to me that I could come to New York—I’d had a fantasy of this moment. The one where I saw Will for the first time since our leave-taking in Holiday. I’d played it in my head so often, scripted different versions of it so many times, that it almost felt like it’d already happened. As if this meeting were something I’d already read in a book, years before, its details gone flat and hazy with the familiarity of a scene read a thousand times.
I’d pulled that story around myself like a blanket for so long, and needed it so badly, that I hadn’t ever let myself imagine what would happen if Will went off script. After all, I’d written him so many.
There were the ones I’d thought of as realistic, where he smiled and was amused at me and I was awkward and self-deprecating, and we kind of laughed and he said, “Yeah, we’ll see,” but in a way that left me buoyant with hope. There were the ones that were more porn than romance, where we didn’t speak at all, he just stripped me bare and claimed me, as if I had finally come home.
Then there were the swoony ones. The embarrassingly detailed ones that never ended. There was no climax to them because they were just us, always together. Sharing all the small, daily things that people share. They were punctuated by things like Will bringing me my favorite flowers (not that I knew enough about flowers to have one), or buying me a Valentine’s Day stuffed animal (not that I could imagine real-life Will ever doing such a thing), or planning an elaborate surprise for our one-year anniversary (this was always hazy, since my only exposure to anniversaries was my parents, who exchanged cards from the grocery store over breakfast on their anniversary like clockwork).
