by Roan Parrish
“You don’t have class until three, right?”
I nodded, ridiculously pleased that he’d remembered my schedule.
“Want to come with me to look at this space Gus wants to set up business from? It’s not far from here.”
“Okay, sure. Let me put pants on.”
Will raised an eyebrow and slid a hand beneath the covers, groping me. He pouted when he realized I was wearing pajama pants, but reached inside the waistband and stroked me gently.
“Gah,” I said, hardening for him.
Will “Mmm”ed and leaned in to kiss my neck. There was something ridiculously hot about lying sprawled in my bed in my pajamas with Will looming, fully dressed, having his way with me.
“Oh, oops, sorry” came Milton’s voice from the open door. He didn’t sound sorry, though. Will, being Will, didn’t stand right away, lingering long enough to press one more kiss to my jaw and give me a squeeze beneath the covers that practically made me swallow my tongue.
“This must be Will,” Milton said in a voice calculated to express maximal scorn, leaning in the doorframe to show himself off to his best advantage.
“This must be Milton,” Will said dismissively, straightening up and squaring his shoulders.
Milton narrowed his eyes, looking Will up and down, and Will faced off, not trying to disguise his once-over of Milton either.
“I basically hate you,” Milton said, “for the way you’ve treated Leo.”
“Milton, man, come on,” I started, actually managing to get out of bed this time, wanting to at least be standing in case things got ugly.
“I basically like you,” Will said evenly, “for being a good friend to Leo and for not dressing like a tsunami has decimated every store selling anything besides track pants and school-affiliated sweatshirts.”
“God, right?” Milton rolled his eyes toward the hallway where Will was looking. “This is New York, for fuck’s sake. Have a little respect.”
Will inclined his head approvingly.
“Um, okay, glad you guys’ve met. I have to get dressed now.” I looked at Milton.
“Well, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” Milton said, his implication and its challenge to Will clear.
But Will just smiled and said, “Then I’m sure you understand that once Leo’s naked, I’m not going to be able to resist being all over that ass. So unless you’d like to watch, you might want to excuse yourself.”
Milton’s eyes went wide and I flushed hotly, letting out a nervous laugh as he tried to retreat with dignity. Point: Will.
The place that Gus wanted them to rent was an office in a coworking space near the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. He and Will both thought it was important that they have a physical space to work from so they could invest in supplies, have a place to meet with clients, and have an address where things could be delivered. Even if they’d had the money to rent their own space, they didn’t want to commit to a long-term lease in case things didn’t work out.
It was a converted warehouse space, open on the first floor, with banks of tables full of people typing away on laptops and congregating around screens. In the back were offices for permanent staff, and a shared kitchen, bathroom, and lounge space scattered with smart, modern-looking couches and poured cement tables.
Upstairs were the offices for rent by the month that Will and Gus were interested in. There was a courtyard, and as Will paced out the space, I could see him picturing how he’d set up here. He asked a lot of questions, about Internet speed, tech support, and hourly availability, and took his time looking around.
“What do you think?” he finally asked me.
“Me? Oh, um, yeah, it’s really cool.” I had no clue what possible insight I could have.
“If you came to meet with a potential collaborator at a place like this, what impression would you have of them?”
“Hm, kind of… edgy, I guess. Like, modern and nontraditional. It’s neat, actually. I think I’d be excited to be around so many people working on so many different projects. It’d make me think that the people I was meeting with were on top of, like, trends or popular culture or whatever.”
Will had listened to me seriously, and he nodded once, satisfied. “Me too.”
“Okay, great,” he said to the woman who’d been showing us around. “I think we’ll probably go ahead with it. I just need to confirm it with my business partner. Can I let you know later today?”
The woman looked between us and Will offered no explanation.
“Sure, that’ll work.”
Will shook her hand, and when we walked outside, he was grinning.
“I like that place,” he said giddily. “It’ll be so different than the office. Want to get a coffee? I want a coffee.”
“Yeah, sure.” I loved seeing him so happy. So exuberant and light. It didn’t happen that often. As we walked, though, and the usual barrage of admirers looked Will up and down, their gazes lingering on him, his mood dimmed. By the time he pulled me into a little café on Houston, he was tapping his fingers against his thighs irritably. There were no empty tables, so we stood at a corner of the counter to drink our coffees, Will glancing around as if he could still feel eyes on him.
My phone chimed with a text from Layne asking if I could come in an hour early for my shift the next day. In the minute it took me to respond, a man sidled up to Will and started talking to him. Will’s jaw was tight, teeth gritted.
All the things he’d told me. About being so aware of people’s eyes on him that he sometimes felt stripped bare by it. Of the way it gradually wore down his energy and his mood by the end of the day until sometimes he could hardly wait to get home behind closed doors just so he could exist in a space where he wasn’t being looked at. They coalesced into a surge of protectiveness like nothing I’d ever felt before.
“Oy,” I said to the guy. I slid an arm around Will’s waist in a way I had secretly always wanted to but never dared do in public. “Back off my boyfriend, dude.” I channeled Daniel, who’d once told me that you had to be totally confident in your superiority over the person you were challenging to make them take you seriously.
The man smirked at me disbelievingly and looked at Will. His look clearly said, Yeah right. No way did a skinny kid like you manage to land yourself a hottie like that. I flushed, but stood my ground, fingers curling around Will’s hip. I was expecting him to pull away at any minute or tell us both to go fuck ourselves. But he didn’t. He narrowed his eyes at the guy and put his arm around me in turn, tugging me closer. Then he kissed me on the cheek, lips lingering long enough for me to smell the vanilla from his latte.
“Oookay,” the guy said like he’d just been faced with something too confusing to attempt to puzzle out. “Have a good one.” And he walked away.
I felt as triumphant as if I’d been telling the truth about Will and me, the warmth of being able to defend Will suffusing me. I went to drop my arm from his waist before he could call me on the fiction, but he let his arm linger for a minute, so I did too.
“Um, sorry I said you were my boyfriend. I just… I thought you might want a rescue, and that guy seemed like kind of a douchebag.”
Will gave me a long assessing look and then smiled. And I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he didn’t totally hate what I’d done after all.
17
Chapter 17
April
Spring had sprung with a vengeance and the energy on campus was electric. No matter what time of day I walked through the park, there were groups of students camped out, shirts rolled up to the sun, heads on each other’s shoulders, and textbooks lying abandoned in front of them in the new grass.
Those who were staying on campus for the summer were angling for the best rooms, those who were from the city making plans to see each other after the semester ended, and everyone else was grumbling about going home or scheming about how to stay. I didn’t know a single person who hadn’t fallen in love with New York in some way
.
Midway through April, I found out I’d gotten the job working as an assistant in the physics lab and could count myself among the excited ones who would be staying in the city for the summer.
The only problem was that the job was only part-time and wasn’t for credit, so I didn’t qualify for campus housing.
The next night, we all went to see Milton in his drama class’ production of Pippin. I’d never heard of it, but Milton assured me it was a classic.
“What… what is this?” Charles whispered to me, horrified, about ten minutes in. I had no answer at all. Milton was great, though. He sang, he danced, he had a few lines, and he looked thrilled the whole time. After we’d gathered our bags and the tatters of our sanity, we went backstage and found him in close conversation with a wildly gesticulating, intensely staring Jason, so we just waved and gestured that we’d see him later.
The real surprise of the night came when we got back to the dorm to find Thomas waiting for us. Only it wasn’t Thomas because Thomas had been with us.
“Oh wow, they really look alike,” I said stupidly.
“Identical twins,” Charles said, nodding once.
Thomas and his brother hugged like one of them was returning from war. They were all over each other like puppies, with no bubble of personal space. They really did look startlingly alike, but unlike Thomas, Andy was quiet, often looking over at his twin when someone addressed a question to him. I wondered if they had always been this way and, if so, how hard it must’ve been for Andy, away at school without Thomas there to speak for him.
Andy’s school was on a different schedule so he’d taken the train down as soon as the semester ended. I got the sense that he wouldn’t mind just hanging out in Thomas’ room and playing video games while Thomas studied. I told him he could come by Mug Shots the next day if he wanted a free coffee and a place to hang out, but though he nodded politely, Andy didn’t seem to like me. I guessed I couldn’t blame him if Thomas had mentioned anything about me not returning his feelings. I wouldn’t like me either.
I sat bolt upright in the dark, confused for a second at when I had finally remembered to change my alarm sound and why of all things I’d chosen something that sounded like screaming, until I realized it was the fire alarm. Charles had clearly already been awake, though from the looks of him he’d been about to go to bed, and he was sitting at his desk shaking his head.
“Someone pulled it,” he said. “I heard them run away, giggling. But we all have to leave anyway. It’s illogical.”
“I’ll add it to the list of dorm laws: someone always pulls the fire alarm on the one fucking night I was gonna get the doctor’s recommended eight hours,” I grumbled.
“Or on the night before a big test,” Charles said. “Might have to be two different laws.”
We trooped into the hall and down the seven flights of stairs, joining the stream of people from our hall. Some were manic, clearly having been awake and studying, some were irate and ranting at being woken up when there was clearly no fire, but the majority were, like me, shambling zombie-like down the hall in an attempt to preserve something of the sleep that had been interrupted.
It was about four in the morning, but outside the city was ticking along like always. In Holiday, one of the things I’d loved was the way there were times of the night and early morning when there was actually no one else around. When I couldn’t sleep, sometimes I’d slide out of bed and dress in silence, in the dark, and walk down the streets that would, in a few hours, be full of people, each of them with their own plans and their own desires.
I’d watched them my whole life, like they were a drama playing out before me on the television screen of Holiday, but I’d rarely seen myself as part of it. In the late night and early morning emptiness, the town seemed like a movie set for that drama. And in those moments I would feel a bit sad for it, emptied out and waiting for the people who would make it less lonely.
Here, there was never total emptiness. There was no waiting, no reset where the city breathed in relief for a few hours after the people were gone. There was only a constant readiness. A kind of low-level hum beneath the bones of the city itself, like the cranking, coiled machinery of a roller coaster being pulled uphill.
A true perpetual-motion machine is an impossibility, we learned in physics, since it violates the laws of thermodynamics. “Even the sun, as a source of energy, will eventually burn out,” Professor Ekwensi had said, matter-of-factly and as if that weren’t basically the most terrifying sentence ever to be uttered in a college classroom. Still, if there was ever something that felt like it came close, this city was it.
I had been tearing my hair out over my final project for physics. The assignment was as irritatingly vague as it was intriguing: measure something. I’d changed my topic three times since midterms and was still searching for the right thing.
Coming home from Will’s the other morning, I’d gotten off at 33rd Street and walked over to the High Line, hoping a coffee and some fresh air would clear my head, that some bolt of inspiration would strike since I was getting down to the wire.
It was a sunny morning, with a chill still in the air, and I was in a well-fucked, under-caffeinated trance, my eye catching on the smallest details. The way tiny ruffs of new plants were pushing their way through the spaces between the metal slats. How at that exact moment the scaffolding on a nearby building cast a shadow at a perfect perpendicular to the pink edge of the mural I was walking past.
A bench where, from my angle of approach it looked like a man sat alone. When I walked five steps closer, though, I saw that the breadth of his body had completely hidden the woman sitting with him. They were looking at each other with a kind of absorption that made me soften my steps because it felt intrusive to even stir the air around them, to cause vibrations from my footfalls that would reach them. As I walked by, though, they both glanced up at me and smiled. Like the joy they shared was large enough to include me, and the plants, and the shadows, and everything around them.
I smiled back and lifted my coffee in a toast, not just to them but to the High Line and the river and the traffic, and the whole goddamned beautiful city around us. I was so giddy with it that for a moment, grin wrinkling my whole face, I made the kind of sound that’s completely embarrassing outside of, like, a movie musical or an episode of Glee.
It was a perfect moment. So perfect that I found myself almost frantically trying to catalog it. To break it down to its component parts so I could re-create it. But as I tried to measure it—to make it reducible to some kind of system or law—it slipped away.
And that was my problem. Measure something. All the things that truly mattered were immeasurable. Using any system of quantification currently in existence, anyway. And I wanted to do something meaningful, otherwise, what was the point?
I’d tried to think of ways to measure everything important in my life. And god knew Milton had given me enough shit about it, singing that damn song from Rent about measuring a life until I actually wondered if the professor had ever needed to ban its lyrics from being the titles of final projects.
In an admittedly sappy moment—though I consoled myself that sappiness and science were not necessarily opposed by thinking of Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan—I’d even tried to think through how I would measure love.
I’d been in the physics lab scribbling ideas in my notebook when Max, one of the grad students came in. Max had intimidated me when I first started at the lab. He was tall and muscular, and I heard someone say he was ex-military. He narrowed his eyes when he listened closely, which made it look like he doubted what you were saying, and though he was taller than everyone in the lab, he never inclined his head when he spoke to people, which gave him the impression of being even taller. But he was wicked good at physics and clearly loved it.
So when he asked what I was working on, I posed the question, though I imagined he’d probably laugh in my face.
“Do you think it’s possible to…
measure love?”
He cocked his head, eyes sharp. “Didn’t they do that in that Christopher Nolan movie? Interstellar?”
“Oh, I dunno, I didn’t see it.”
He squinted at me and then leaned over the lab table, tapping my notebook.
“Well, you can’t measure something unless we can agree on what it actually is, which is a problem, since love is abstract… but, okay, let’s see. Maybe we can’t measure it directly, but we could measure its effects, like with entropy. Love… people do some crazy-ass shit for love,” he mused, gaze fixed on the wall above my head.
I knew Max had a wife and a baby daughter—he’d shown me their picture on his phone one day, with soft eyes and a private smile. I wondered if he was thinking about them. I wondered what kind of crazy-ass shit he’d done for love.
“Does the degree of crazy imply a greater degree of love?” he mused. “A higher intensity, or larger… amount. Are there different flavors of love like there are flavors of quarks?—heh, yeah. Up love and down love, charm love and strange love, top love and bottom love. I like that.”
He lapsed into silence, like he’d forgotten I was there. When he remembered me, he stabbed a thick finger at my notebook. “Yeah, I’d try and formulate a hypothesis that measured the effects of love on something.” Then he nodded once, signaling that he’d said all he had to say on the matter, and bent back over his own work.
My mind went immediately to the way Will had writhed beneath me days before as I worshiped his cock with my mouth. It had been love for me—love that made me want to shake him apart with pleasure, to transmit my adoration. I blinked until I cleared the images of Will from my mind, but when I thanked Max for his help, he just raised an eyebrow as he wished me good luck. And I had the sense that he didn’t just mean with my physics project.
So, yeah, I’d tried to explain wanting to do my project on something meaningful to Will the night before. Will, practical as ever, had cut rather to the chase.
