by Roan Parrish
How, over the couple of weeks since then, Will had been acting normal, mostly, but how I’d hated it anyway. The idea that Tariq had looked at me and seen not someone that Will cared about, but someone he fucked. The same way I looked at him. Hated that I’d had to encounter him unexpectedly, that he—and god knew how many others going forward—might have to be a part of my life because they’d been a part of Will’s.
Or, worse, that I meant just as little to him as they seemed to.
I’d been sulky. At work, in the dorms, at Will’s. Sulky the way I’d been sulky as a kid when I asked my parents for a dog over and over despite my dad being allergic. Every birthday, every Christmas, I put it on the list, in between every other thing I wanted, the exclamation points after it cascading down the page and rendering all the other things I wanted afterthoughts to the thing I knew I couldn’t have.
But there was nothing to push against, here, no one to hate. Will’s transparency made it impossible to rage at him, and since my frustration was that I wanted more of him, I was hardly going to alleviate it by avoidance.
When I finally stopped talking, Layne shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “That fucking sucks.”
And then she made like she was going to go back to the beans.
“Wait! What should I do? I mean, do you have any advice? I’d love your opinion.”
She sat back down, apparently only comfortable giving advice when directly asked.
Layne blew out a breath. “Well. A couple things. When you asked him if you were together, what did you mean? Because there are a lot of ways to be in someone’s life. Being in a monogamous partnership is only one way, and it’s not the default mode for everyone. So, if that’s the only kind of relationship you’re interested and it’s not the kind that Will wants, then that’s a pretty basic incompatibility. You need to figure out what you want. And why you want it.”
“Why I want it?”
“Well, yeah. Like, if monogamy is what you want, do you want it because it’s the only thing you’ve considered, or because it’s normal so you assume you want it? Do you want it because monogamy is something you actively desire or value? Do you want it because you’re jealous thinking of Will with someone else? Or because you aren’t confident about his feelings for you? Et cetera. You know?”
I nodded, wishing I had a pen and paper to write this all down.
“Even if you figure out what you want, though, that doesn’t mean that the other person will want the same thing. And it sucks when that happens, but you have to radically recognize the truth before you can hope to either change or accept it.”
“What do you mean, radically recognize it?”
“Well, sometimes recognizing the truth requires stripping away what you want to be true, which is hard for a lot of people. You seem, um….”
“What? Just say it.”
“You seem like a romantic, I guess. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily,” she said quickly. “But being a romantic means choosing to see the world as ordered by a central force, or around a central person. And for someone who’s romantic, it’s maybe harder to acknowledge data that doesn’t fit with the fantasy view you have, even if that fantasy’s just hope.”
I’d never thought of hope as a fantasy before. And, jeez, I couldn’t believe Layne, whose only contact with me was at work, had come to the same conclusion about me as Will.
“It’s the same in political movement building, really,” she went on. This, I knew, was Layne’s passion. “There’s the romance of the work that you’re doing. ‘Making the world a better place.’” She made air quotes around the phrase. “But if you’re too focused on the romance of it, you forget that someone has to file the paperwork, and get a port-a-potty, and make hundreds of hours of phone calls. And march in the cold and the rain. And you forget that those things aren’t supplementary—they’re every bit as important and central as making inspiring speeches or seeing that your bill passed in the Senate.
“If you get too caught up in yourself as being a part of that romance you forget that it’s not actually about you. That the point isn’t for you to feel good about the work you do, but to do the work because it’s right and necessary. But that requires you to radically recognize the truth, even when it erases the romance you have or the romance you think you’re a part of. I have to recognize that when I go to a Black Lives Matter protest, I’m a white person taking up space, and my very presence there might do harm. That my intentions don’t matter, at the most basic material level.
“That’s the radical truth: that I might care a whole hell of a lot, but my level of feeling doesn’t affect the fact that other people might experience me and the world differently than me, and that no romantic grand narrative I bring into the space, learned from years and years of absorbing the world through headlines and sound bites, is going to change the fact that some people will look at me and feel just the same as if I were some ignorant NYU freshman who jumped on the protest thinking it was a parade I could Instagram.”
I gaped at her, never having heard her say more than a casually tossed-off comment here or there about anything but coffee or scheduling or mopping the floors.
She opened her mouth to continue, but paused. I didn’t know what my face was doing, but my surprise must’ve been evident. I gestured that she should continue.
“Practically speaking, thinking about your situation, you need to recognize whatshisname’s truth too. Will’s. Like, who is he, really? What can you expect? How much is it reasonable to expect someone to change? Is that expectation generous? It means stripping away the romance from them, from your vision of them. It’s really hard to see people as they are, sometimes. We have a lot invested in seeing them in relation to ourselves.”
“Okay, sorry, but… are you like a licensed therapist or something? A professional philosopher? Sorry, never mind, go on.”
Layne shook her head seriously.
“These are all things that I think a lot about,” she said. “In my community, among my friends and lovers, nonmonogamy is the norm, so we talk about it a lot, and I have a lot of experience with different ways it can play out. I know some of the questions you need to ask, that’s all. And stripping away the narratives—whether of romance or of fear or whatever—that culture has manufactured and perpetuated is at the heart of my political work. You can’t have any hope of working toward social justice until you cultivate the ability to see the realities of what you’re working with.”
Just as Charles’ philosophy project had taken over his life, he had taken over our room and turned it into something that looked like that dude’s office in A Beautiful Mind. He restructured his schedule so that each day lasted for thirty-six hours instead of twenty-four. He was still abiding by the whole wake up, eat breakfast, then lunch, then dinner thing. But it was difficult when some of his classes now occurred in the middle of his night. His working with the lights on at all hours of the night—excuse me, of my night—hadn’t been too bad, but in an attempt to make sure he didn’t accidentally sleep at the wrong time, Charles had taken to putting a file cabinet that he found in the basement on top of his bed so that he couldn’t go to sleep without wrestling it off his bed—and into the middle of the room, where I inevitably tripped over it or stubbed my toe on it.
But tonight it was our turn to host movie night—which we should just start calling Felicity night—so we really needed to move the damn filing cabinet.
Gretchen showed up early with snacks, and I related some of what Layne had told me, because it seemed like stuff Gretchen would be interested in.
I had thought about Layne’s words a lot in the last few days. When Will called me a romantic I’d thought of it in contrast to him and his total resistance to romance of all kinds, but to hear it in the context of what Layne said put it in perspective.
She was right that I saw the world as having a kind of meant-to-be. Without many friends or much to see, I started to make a game of se
eing things through the lens of the books I read or the movies I watched, imagining drama where there was none, or turning the drama to a different plot.
My parents’ dull relationship seemed depressing as a model—certainly nothing to aspire to. Even my sister, who was pretty and popular, mostly seemed dissatisfied with the boys she went out with.
So when Will showed up, looking so much the part of the hero, interesting and cultured and living in New York City… well, I guess I’d cast him as exactly that.
But everything was different now. Now I knew him. Knew him, I got the sense, in a way that other people really didn’t.
And Layne was right: the truth was that Will didn’t want the kind of relationship I was used to seeing. And that wasn’t bad, it was just true for him.
“Layne’s basically a philosopher,” I told Gretchen, Charles’ head popping up at the word “philosopher,” tuning in for the first time in hours, then immediately turning away again when he realized we were just talking about our actual lives.
“Yeah, she’s pretty great,” Gretchen said.
Since Gretchen had been hanging out at Mug Shots doing work, she and Layne had spent some time together, I knew, and there was something in Gretchen’s voice that sounded strangely….
“Uh, Gretch,” I said carefully. “Are you like… into my boss?”
She shot me a way-to-make-it-all-about-you look. But then she bit her thumbnail and nodded.
“Kinda. I’ve seen her a few times. We hit it off, so.”
“Whoa. I didn’t know you were….” I was going to say I didn’t know she was into girls, which was true, but mostly it was that I’d never thought of Gretchen as being into anyone. She never talked about having crushes on anyone or finding people attractive. She never talked about sex or mentioned people she’d dated in the past. I’d kind of assumed she just wasn’t particularly interested.
Gretchen shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like her.” And that was Gretchen, as straightforward about her feelings as she was about everything else.
I smiled at her and she smiled back, seeming to shed any uncertainty. “We’ll see how things go. She thinks I’m too young, I think.”
“God, what’s up with that?” I said, thinking back to Tariq’s comment in the park.
“I get where she’s coming from, though, I guess,” Gretchen said, calm logic firmly back in place. “It’s not a personal indictment. But we are at different places in our lives. We’ve had different experiences. We know ourselves differently.”
“Ugh, stop being so annoyingly mature and logical. This is feelings stuff! Feelings stuff isn’t logical.”
“‘Annoyingly mature and logical’—can I quote you on that to Layne?”
“I’m sure she already knows. She’s annoyingly logical too. Clearly you’re meant for each other.”
It was a divisive episode, with Milton and Gretchen taking Noel’s side and Thomas and me in the Felicity camp. Charles, as usual, was only partly paying attention to the content of the show. Today he was stuck on the conviction that they hadn’t shot a scene where it was set because the traffic was going in the wrong direction for that street.
“But don’t you admire how she tells him how she really feels? See—” I turned to Gretchen. “—the radical truth, like Layne says.”
“I… don’t think that’s what she means by that,” Gretchen said.
“Well, okay, but this is still about telling the truth.”
“Mmm, I think there’s a big difference between forcing yourself to look at things honestly and blabbing out your personal truth because it makes you feel good,” Gretchen said.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I think it’s brave to just put it all out there like that. I could never do that; I’d be too scared of rejection.”
“But Felicity doesn’t tell the truth because she’s brave,” said Gretchen. “She tells the truth as a compulsion. She tells the truth because she doesn’t want to have to handle her emotions on her own. She makes people complicit in them.”
“Well, I think she doesn’t know what she wants sometimes too,” Milton chimed in, “so she tells the truth hoping that someone will make the decision for her. Take it out of her hands.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she just wants genuine connections with people. And she doesn’t think you can have that if you don’t tell the truth, even when it’s hard or it makes someone uncomfortable. And she does know what she wants, it’s just different from day to day. Like, she pays attention to how her feelings change. They’re still real, even if they’re not consistent.”
“I like Meghan,” asserted Charles from across the room, perched on the filing cabinet to see the schedule he’d tacked high on the wall.
He was taking a one-credit sports medicine class this semester to fulfill some arcane distribution requirement and was developing systems to integrate movement into his daily schedule, which included putting things around the room in configurations that required him to climb over furniture or jump on top of it to access them.
He’d relocated his underwear to the top of my closet and his socks to under his bed so the two things he’d usually reach for at the same time were as geographically distant as you could get in our room—notably smaller than the dorms in Felicity—and begun plugging his laptop into the farthest outlet from his desk with a system of extension cords that I was certain would one day kill either me or his computer.
“No surprise there,” Milton muttered, looking around. “Your senses of décor are about on par.”
I let myself into Will’s apartment with the keys I still had from January, sniffing myself to try and determine just how much like milk I smelled. I’d come right from work, figuring Will was just going to pull my clothes off pretty soon after I got there anyway, the way he had the last few times I’d seen him. I had stopped briefly to get a piece of tiramisu, though. Hopefully even if I reeked of coffee shop, the tiramisu would make up for it. It was Will’s favorite, and I knew work stuff had been stressing him out the last few weeks.
He’d been staying late and bringing more work home than usual. He still hadn’t decided what to do about Gus’ offer to go into business for themselves, and he was having a problem with a client whose agent wanted him to produce a cover that would change the face of publishing even though the book she was representing was the third in a pedestrian series.
When I opened the door, I heard a noise from the direction of the bedroom. A low groan. Unmistakably Will. For a moment I held myself suspended in a bubble of fantasy that I was about to walk in on the super hot scene of Will jerking off. He’d be startled to see me at first, but then I’d sit on the edge of the bed and touch him as he pleasured himself. Run my hands over his thighs and between his legs. Suck on his nipples and dip my tongue in his belly button to feel how it changed the way his hand moved on his cock.
Then the bubble burst.
Another groan. This one decidedly not Will.
I should’ve left. I should have taken the tiramisu and backed out the door like I’d never been here at all.
But I didn’t leave. I closed the door behind me carefully and, holding the tiramisu in front of me like a ward, crept toward the bedroom, all the time I’d spent here bent to the purpose of getting there without making a sound so I could see for myself something that Will had insisted upon a hundred times: that he fucked other people.
I pushed the bedroom door open thinking that I knew how I was going to feel because I already felt that way. Gutted. Shredded. Devoured.
But though he had told me a dozen times over the months I’d been here, Will’s words were no inoculation. It was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.
Because I’d only thought about how it would feel to see Will with someone else. I hadn’t thought about how it would be to see another man with Will. Touching him. Kissing him. Doing all the things to him that I did. Making me totally redundant in Will’s life.
The door swung open on a s
cene so vivid it took me a moment to process the details. Will, on the bed, groaning as a man kissed him, bit his neck, pulled his hair back, hips grinding together, Will in just his underwear, the other man still half dressed. It was both intimate and impersonal, intense physical closeness with purely functional touch.
I must’ve made some horrible, broken sound because Will craned his head around the guy’s shoulder and looked at me. For a moment, I saw something in his eyes that I could read: panic, maybe, or regret. Then his face went blank and shuttered. He struggled underneath the man for a moment before the guy realized he was trying to sit up.
Distantly I heard a wet crunch, and I searched the bed for a detail I’d missed, slowly becoming aware that it was the sound of the tiramisu I’d been holding hitting the ground, its plastic clamshell cracking as it splattered on the floor.
Will shouldered the man to the side and scrambled off the bed, pulling on the same sweatpants that I’d pulled down the other morning when I’d dropped between his knees on the couch and sucked him until he was clutching my hair and cursing at me to let him come, his hands soft afterward, brushing over my cheeks and jaw and settling on my neck as we gazed at each other.
Now when he came over to me, I couldn’t stand to look at him, couldn’t stand the idea that he’d touch me. I wheeled around and made for the front door. He caught up to me before I opened it and I heard the man swear from the bedroom. I hoped he’d cut his foot open on the tiramisu box.
“Leo, wait,” Will said as the man came out of the room, wiping his foot on the rug. He was handsome. Fortyish, with light brown hair and a beard threaded with gray, trim and muscular, and everything I wasn’t. He leaned in the doorway, still shirtless, as if they were going to pick up where they’d left off.
“The kid’s cute. He can join us if you want,” he said, eyes dragging over me. He smiled at me, and I felt a brief flicker of flattery before it was replaced with disgust.
