by Kent, Julia
Darla shot Trevor a look.
Trevor marched over and took over the microphone. “Anyhow, thanks honey,” he said to Darla, giving her a pat on the ass as she jumped down offstage and back to her seat. “I wrote this song for Darla.”
“What about Joe?”
“Joe will be back—no worries,” Trevor assured them. “Now, who wants to hear a new song?”
Instant explosion of frenzied cheers from the crowd.
The guys had never done anything like this when we were in high school, and as the first chords of the new song started up, I watched Sam and wondered what it would be like to find a guy so in love with you that he would write you a song.
Sam
Your Mama told you to watch out for me
Your God told you to walk away
Your Daddy said nothing, for he was gone
And you weren’t sure what to say
The night you found me, wandering and lost
Naked by the side of the road
My guitar shattered, my body bereft
You fought everything you were told
And the chorus:
When a naked soul finds you
You don’t have a choice
You have to stop and pause
You can turn away and never look back
But it will yank you back, because
Random acts of crazy draw you in
Random acts of kindness draw you in
Random acts of love draw you in
I went into the zone, which wasn’t hard, all you had to do was stick me on a seat in front of a drum set and leave me alone. I wondered how Trevor let those words out on stage. I was good with words in a debate and on paper for a class. But when I had something real to say—when someone looked me in the eye and expected the truth from me about how I felt? I might as well be translating to Aramaic, or Quechua after a single weekend with a Rosetta Stone DVD.
We’d practiced the new song plenty of times, enough for me to drift on autopilot through the zone; my mind stayed with Amy. Amy’s skin had burned a brand into mine and I could feel the heat, the want, and I could feel her ‘yes.’ Maybe that ‘yes’ was what it took to find the words, to write a song about someone. Maybe the lyrics and the music together formed something powerful enough to express all these feelings that bottled up and created a pressure inside.
Had Darla been Trevor’s revelation? Was there a moment when he touched her, when he looked at her, the first time they made love? I didn’t know. No one had ever made me feel like that. At least, not until this moment.
Four and a half years of stupidity flowed over me. I couldn’t look at Amy. I’d squandered so much. Was there any chance I could get it back? Give it back to her?
Normally, when I was in the zone, the song took over and all linear thought disappeared; I became part of everything in the room. Hell, in the world. With Amy on my mind, though, I couldn’t. My hands were the same, the sticks were the same, all the music, the beats, the measures, the same.
I was changed. She had changed me.
Amy’s acceptance of my kiss, my touch, my desire, made it so that the zone wasn’t enough anymore. As the song wound down without my ever becoming truly consumed by the music, I realized that I never would again. The only place where I would find that peace and that part of me was in Amy.
Amy
As the words came out:
When a naked soul finds you
You don’t have a choice
You have to stop and pause
You can turn away and never look back
But it will yank you back, because
Random acts of crazy draw you in
Random acts of kindness draw you in
Random acts of love draw you in
...I wondered about the story here and now I wanted to go and grab Darla—and not by the hair like I’d wanted to earlier—and ask her what had happened. She was with Trevor and Joe? How-? What-? Who-? Something about Trevor being naked by the side of the road, and she found him, in the middle of Ohio? This was getting a little too surreal.
Sam seemed different onstage. Distracted. As he played the song his body was like a powerful drug—I could watch him all night. His knees bounced up, thick thighs pressed against faded denim, and he rotated at the waist to hit all the notes in prefect syncopation. Sweat formed at the edges of his hair and his eyes were half-lidded as he moved, a kinetic force of heat, light, and domination. He owned those drums. The way he touched the sticks, the way he moved so fluidly, knowing exactly what to do next, was the most arousing and sensual thing I had ever seen.
I wondered what it was like to go to a place inside yourself, where your mind and your body knew exactly what to do, and how to do it. Isn’t that what I’d always read that making love is supposed to be? A sensuality between two people where everything else melts away, there is no past or future, and all that exists in that moment is the two of you. No wall between you. What was it like to reach that point? What would it be like to touch someone, to let him in, to let all of that warmth and power seep into my pores?
What would it be like to have Sam look at me, our bodies entwined as he thrust into me, and know that I was part of him and he was part of me, and there was nothing else in the world? That certainty, that moment of knowingness, when I was everything to him and he was everything to me, and we just were and it was ageless, and timeless? Would I ever really have that? And if I did, would I ever want it to stop?
Sam
We finished the set and I looked out into the crowd—no Amy.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I’d done the wrong thing, hadn’t I? She said she’d stay, and then she left. I couldn’t blame her—I told her I’d go to prom, and then I never talked to her again. A creeping dread poured into my legs and arms, and my throat went dry.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I’d really screwed this one up, hadn’t I?
I got offstage and went back to grab some water, trying not to go into the tailspin that I so richly deserved. I stood there, chugging, trying to just do anything with my body that would get my mind off of the fact that she’d left. I finished the bottle of water, pitched it in the trash, and turned around to find Amy standing there.
And suddenly, I was kissing her. It happened again. If you pressed me to describe the handful of seconds between not kissing her and kissing her, I couldn’t. You could waterboard me and I couldn’t remember it—it was that visceral, that swift, that all-consuming. She was definitely more insistent, more turned on, and more game, and all that did was fuel me. My hands slid under her shirt, finding hot flesh that felt like the most beautiful object in the world; soft, and pliant, and in my hands now...like coming home.
Her hands snaked under my sweaty t-shirt, and the cold air combined with her soft touch made me lose it. I couldn’t get enough of her. My mouth took hers, my hands were all over her, her breasts, her waist, her hips, her ass. She was filling me and I wanted to fill her.
Trevor’s voice cut through the little world of Amy, and I pulled back, swallowing, a dry click in my throat as if I hadn’t had the water, as if I were parched. “Sam, come on. Gotta get back on stage. Next set.” I could hear the grin in his voice.
She pulled back, her lips pink, almost bruised from the intensity of our kisses. “Don’t leave,” I begged.
“I won’t,” she promised.
“Come backstage when the last song is almost done.”
She nodded and swallowed. Her eyes bored into mine, and I felt an unfamiliar feeling inside: hope. It batted its wings like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. Wings the exact color of Amy’s eyes.
The rest of the performance went by like a blur, frenzied hands, fevered brain. It was one of the better sets I’d ever done, and yet, it felt rushed because all I wanted to do was get back to Amy. She found me—thank God, she found me—at the end of the set. All I could do was stare at her. I was a sweaty mess, a live wire with buzzing arms and legs, and a heart that felt five sizes too big for my chest.
“You waited,” I said, and smiled.
“You asked me to.” Her face was a little closed off and I knew we had a lot of talking to do. I reached for her elbow, and then the small of her back, as if we had been together for years and this was a casual touch that a long-term boyfriend would give to his partner. She moved in concert with my motion, and it all flowed. Something clicked, and there I was.
In the zone.
She stopped, and turned toward me, her hands reaching out, stroking my arms as if she were trying to verify that I was really here. It pleased me at the same time that it pained me, because I knew why. “What next?” she asked.
I looked at my phone, waiting to answer her. 1:15 AM. “It’s late,” I said. “Do you have a place?”
She pulled back a bit. I’d over-played my hand, hadn’t I? “I do,” she said, slowly, with caution.
My words came out in a jumbled mess. “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that,” I assured her, but even as it came out I was a little disappointed. And I think that I saw disappointment in her eyes, too. “I just meant,” I said, softly, bending down to whisper in her ear, “I don’t want to stop being with you.”
“I don’t want to stop being with you either, Sam,” she said. “How about we walk back to my apartment and we’ll just take things from there?”
Once again, the world changed because Amy was Amy.
Amy
The cold blast of late summer air felt like walking into another dimension. Sam’s arm was around my shoulders, and even though it was still summer, in New England it already felt like October. We both shivered. Sam was half covered in sweat and it was a bit of a shock. No more a shock, though, than what was happening, second by second, between us. When he’d suggested going back to my apartment I’d had an involuntary reaction of no—not because I didn’t wanna take him back to my apartment and make love with him for...well, eternity—but because it caught me off guard. It seemed too abrupt.
His assurances made a difference, and I got it; I didn’t want to stop being with him either. I didn’t want the night to end. The thirty minute walk back to my apartment yawned before us, the giant elephant of the years between our then and our now balanced between us, on our shoulders. I decided to acknowledge it.
“Why did you shut me out?” I asked, my voice quiet.
He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, clearly struggling. The world suspended itself around us. Cars rushed by us, yet their headlights seemed to hold us still as a held breath. My whole life was in this timeless minute, because I was about to hear the explanation for the unexplainable four and a half years later.
“I’ve thought about that a lot, Amy. I don’t have an easy answer,” he said.
I wanted to interrupt him but I kept my mouth shut. He needed to tell me this, and it needed to be one-hundred percent on him. I had tortured myself over the years, trying to guess how I was somehow responsible for what Sam had done. No matter how hard my insecure, unworthy self tried to turn this around into a blame that I could place on me, though, I couldn’t. It was all him.
“When you won,” he said, slowly, “you won.” He tipped my head up to look me in the eye—he was a head taller. “You won decisively.” He shook his head. “I never had any question, and you were fine up there, on your game.”
“So were you,” I interrupted, breaking my own vow.
“But you were better,” he said, simply. “I had a lot riding on that debate.”
“We all did,” I said.
A pained expression covered his face. “There’s so much more to this than I think I can explain right now, but please let me say what I can say,” he stressed.
I nodded. Our legs began to walk in concert, left and left, right and right. “OK,” that was all I could think to say.
“My dad,” he said, the words coming out bitterly, “told me that at all costs, I needed to make it into the top three. And if I didn’t, I was a worthless piece of shit.”
I felt slapped, imagining the pain of his father saying that and taking it on myself. It hurt me to think that someone would hurt him like that. “Oh, Sam,” I whispered.
“Let me finish,” he said, holding out one hand, palm to me, his voice shaky, “because if I don’t finish, I don’t think I can do this.”
“This?”
“Oh, I can do this,” he stressed, stroking my hip and my ribcage with one hand, making me hot and needy, and wanting so much more. “But Amy,” he said, plaintively, stopping and turning toward me, his hands on my shoulders, his eyes serious. “What I need to do first is this; I need to tell you what happened, or at least part of it.” He sighed, his words taking on a gravitas that made time move slower. “My dad told me I had to win, and I had to win in order to get the debate scholarship to one of my top three. If I didn’t, it was Bible school. And that was it. So, you won and I left, knowing what I was about to go home to.”
“And what did you go home to?”
His face hardened and he closed off.
I could hear thousands of words in his silence, all of them thorned and barbed. I didn’t want to put him through reliving that, so I didn’t press. Not yet. Someday, when he was comfortable, he would tell me, and I would hold him, and I would help him, and we would be OK. Now was too soon. It was too much.
I reached up and kissed him gently on the lips, standing on tiptoe. “You don’t have to do this all right now, Sam.”
“I know.” His words hung in the air.
We continued walking, both eager to see what came next. “But I want you to understand that I was...stupid. There’s really no other word for it. I got home, uh...the world ended with my dad—that’s the easiest way to put it—and I just froze. Everything changed, I had to scramble to survive, and I became someone else because I had to.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He ran a hand through his hair, his jaw clenched, his body tight and restrained. “Amy...I just...” he stumbled. “Can we leave it at that? Can we just say that it’s like I disappeared and a different Sam—let’s call him Robot Sam—kicked in and everything was about functioning, and nothing was about emotion. It was easier to shut everything out, because I learned a hard lesson that day at home.”
“What lesson?” I whispered.
“There’s no such thing as unconditional love.”
I closed my eyes. The thorned and barbed words were as I had expected. What I wanted to say, what pushed against my lips so hard to come out, and yet, remained behind my teeth was—
Let me help you unlearn that lesson.
Sam
I was dying, absolutely dying. You would think that having a bunch of emotions inside me, it would be easy to just pick one and explore it. It’s the hardest fucking thing to do in the world. It’s so much easier to shut down, to close off, to protect myself and never look at them at all. I’d done more than ignore my emotional past. I’d put it in a box inside me, and I’d padlocked the box and thrown it and its key in separate oceans. And now, here with Amy, she was asking me to find the key, and the box, and unlock everything
We walked in silence for a long time, the peaceful presence of her enough. Words weren’t needed. Most people fill the space between them and other humans with speech. It clouds everything if words are used like that. Conversations that have meaning, or that teach—that’s different. But chatter for the sake of chatter is like crappy junk food.
It just makes you feel full, and then sick, and then you regret you ever partook.
Amy stopped at a brick building, weirdly angled into not-quite an L shape. She punched a code into the security door and took my hand, fingers entwining as we went in. We walked up a set of stairs, and then another, and were in a
n apartment the size of a healthy walk-in closet.
“Is this your apartment?” I said. “This is the whole thing?”
“Pretty much. There’s a bathroom right there.” She opened the door two or three feet, and then pushed something—I realized it was a futon—aside in order to open the door the whole way.
“This is your entire apartment?” I said, incredulous.
She frowned “Yeah, it’s mine. What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing is wrong with it. It’s...” I looked around. “It’s quirky. I like it.”
Her shoulders lowered and she sighed. “Thanks.”
“This must be dirt cheap,” I said.
She grinned. “Yes, it is. And no roommates.”
A brief image of Joe coming out into the kitchen to grab sex food for Trevor and Darla floated through my mind. “What a luxury.”
“I don’t want to talk about my housing situation, Sam.”
She sat down on the futon, her body so graceful I enjoyed just watching how she moved, the curve of her hip, the stretch of her calf, how her wrist pivoted as she stretched, then folded herself into comfort. Mimicking her, I folded my legs and sat directly across, nervous yet fully present.
She took my hands. “I want to talk about us.”
“Is there an ‘us’?” I asked.
“That’s up to us.”
“Well then, what does us think?”
She pressed her lips together to hold back a smile. “Us thinks that us needs to work this out.”
“Well, us is really, really, really sorry for being such an asshole four and a half years ago.”
“Us is pleased that us realizes that he’s an asshole.”
“Oh, us is now he?” We both laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
The sound of my dad’s scream echoed through my ears, how he had bellowed what a worthless piece of shit I was, and how he had ordered me to go to Bible college, and how, when he punched me with the full force of his rage, for the first time in my life, I had hit back. All of it poured into my mind, into my soul, as I looked Amy in the eye and I had to compartmentalize, and shut that shit down, and push it away, and still look at her and be a human being.
