by Seth King
And I knew I was being stupid. I knew that a boy who wouldn’t acknowledge me, who treated me like just another friend, who was terrified of what I felt for him, was the last thing I needed on this green planet. But still I was powerless. Under a violet July dawn, love grabbed me and ran away with me. Because beauty like Nicky didn’t just stumble into your life – you had to chase it. And something told me I was going to chase him until we faded to black and white.
As I lay there I felt something on my hip, and I reached around to find that Nicky was snuggled up behind me, his arm resting on my side, like how married couples slept. I froze and listened to the wind, simultaneously burning up and melting all at once. This was the first time he’d ever really touched me.
Nicky finally woke up at about seven, and by this time he’d rolled away, ensuring he never had any idea he’d spooned with me. But as he jumped up and ran to his bike, mortified that my neighbors might wake up and see two dudes sleeping together, I smiled for what felt like forever. I knew I was a fool for liking him, but I didn’t care. He was my pair of brand new eyes, and that was the end of it. Something was happening, something I could feel but not name – something that felt like speeding down a country road on a Saturday morning and realizing you were happier than you’d been in a while. Maybe forever. Here are some other things that made me think Nicky and I were becoming more than just friends:
He started paying for everything. Not just meals, but ice cream, drinks, parking fees, everything. I never questioned it or mentioned anything, but each time, it made me feel something I’d never felt before: special.
One rainy night we went to the movies. I sat one seat away from him, keeping my distance, like I assumed he wanted me to. As the lights darkened, though, he looked over and motioned for me to move closer and sit next to him. I did, and he sat back, smiling. I could feel electricity radiating off his legs all night long.
One day at FitTrax, some dude came up to me and told me he liked my technique at a certain lift we were learning. He was pretty “straight,” but I was still super flattered, mostly because no one had ever talked to me there. It seemed that Nicky’s approval had made me, if not accepted, than at least tolerated. But when I looked over after the dude left, Nicky was murdering me with his eyes. We never talked about it, but we didn’t have to. He was furious.
One thing I noticed was that Nicky was a planet, and I was a nervous little ball of energy darting around him, like a moon bouncing around his gravitational field. Every now and then I’d catch him looking at me, maybe stealing a glimpse at my thighs, or even checking out my ass, his eyes large and curious and confused. So I started touching him. I’d graze his elbow or brush past his legs, all the while feeling like my insides had caught on fire. At first he would freeze up or even brush me off, but soon he started giving in. Before long he didn’t even acknowledge me.
None of this was to say that he was an easy person to be around. He was catnip to every girl we ever came across. Seeing how much he was wanted by other people made me want him a hundred times more. Girls would flock to him by the bucketful, and I hated every minute of it. And there was nothing I could do about it, since we were just “friends.” I was never allowed to forget that he was valuable, wanted, desired. And okay, I kind of loved it in a sense, too, because I had a hot dude who wanted to hangout with me, and these bitches didn’t. Nicky would do nothing to discourage all this attention, and most of the time he flirted back while I stood off to the side, silently fuming. It infuriated me and also turned me on, because he was so smooth and charming and goodness, he was just magic. Lightning in a bottle, that boy. From his smirk, which always seemed to tease you, to his eyes, which danced and glittered with all the colors of the rolling green Atlantic – he was art brought to life, the Mona Lisa in motion.
Best of all: on a Saturday afternoon we biked to Publix for some buffalo chicken subs. Some asshole in an SUV cut Nicky off and made him swerve, and he lurched into me and knocked me over. He landed on top of me on a patch of grass, our bikes clattering to the side, and after we stopped laughing he froze and stared into my eyes. I stared back, and I could swear in that moment, we were the only two people on the planet. Other people were alive out there, of course, but not like us. Not like this. His laugh made me want to smile. His sadness made me want to die. I wanted more than anything in the world to cross this bridge and become his boy, the one he called his own, and not just his friend. But I didn’t know how. “Sometimes I explode for you,” I whispered on the grass before I could stop myself, lost in his galaxy eyes, but he didn’t say anything. We stayed in that position until a car drove by and every single member of the family inside watched us with open mouths. He jumped up and muttered that we could never do that again, but still: my body stayed alive for hours.
Of course, I know I was awful at pretending to keep up the whole “friend” act. He was all I wanted to think about, all I wanted to talk about. I was probably getting so annoying, but I didn’t care. Everything reminded me of him, everything circled back to him. He became the beginning and the end of all I knew. Soon I realized we were even starting to dress the same – I subconsciously adopted some of his darker colors, and his clothes got a bit tighter. Once I even noticed he’d bought Birkenstocks, which I wore all the time because of my flat feet. As I got tanner and my hair darkened to a coppery color, we started to look the same, as well. But I couldn’t help any of it – he skittered across my brain all day. One afternoon my neighbor asked me why I kept smiling as I helped her move boxes, and before I could stop myself I said “Nicky.” She smiled and said she was sure Nicky was a beautiful girl. I smiled back, sick to my stomach with giddiness. For the first time I was starting to understand the term “lovesick:” all day long I was full of a helpless kind of longing that made me feel heavy and lethargic and useless and starry-eyed, like I was bogged down by an unbearable joy that made my bones feel like they were breaking inside me and flying out of my body all at once. Nicky was an exquisite pain, a luxurious heartache. I had been smart at one time, but that boy was making me so stupid.
All this glory at the hands of Nicky Flores was accompanied by another emotion: panic. He was the best person I had ever met, even counting his pretty serious flaws. He knew all kinds of facts about the weather, he made me feel like I mattered, and he could sit and talk about useless shit all day. He was a nerd like me, except he wasn’t ashamed – he was proud. He was kind and good and smart and fun and he made everyone and everything else look like vanilla pudding. But before him, everyone and everything good in my life had left, disappeared. What would happen if we tumbled off this razor-thin wire we were balancing on, and it all went to hell? What would happen if I lost him? Where would I be without Nicky?
He wasn’t just the desire of the deepest parts of myself – he was my best friend. All my time with him was spent trying to cling onto that time and remember it while it was happening, catalog it and store it away, like reaching up and trying to grab the whistling wind. All my time away from him was spent inside those memories, treasuring them, turning over every little detail in my mind, wondering why he’d laughed a certain way during a movie, or asking myself why he’d looked at a certain person with such disdain in his eyes, or trying not to acknowledge the time the waitress had asked if we were together and he’d shaken his head no, unaware that I was watching. Because he didn’t speak much – usually he was as silent as a phone on vibrate. So I had to look for language in other forms. One look, one gesture, one sigh, could leave me reeling and deciphering for hours. And regardless of it all, I knew he craved my presence, too. I noticed he was starting to make room for me in his life, ditching hangout sessions with the bros to go to the beach with me, or blowing off his mom’s phone calls to sit and do nothing with me on my living room floor. He never admitted or acknowledged what he was doing, but he didn’t need to. Nothing outside our little bubble mattered when we were within it. He was the still point in my turning world. Alone, we were lost. Together, we w
ere on fire.
In any case, for me the month of July was like when you started reading a book and realized, Oh shit, this is it. This is a special one. The words crackled, the story clicked, the characters bounced off the page, and suddenly, boom – you were intoxicated. As you read, something intangible grabbed you, hooked you, and soon you were both sinking and flying into a kaleidoscopic joy that you somehow knew was going to rearrange your bones forever. Nicky was that book for me. He was just that good.
Most of the time I wasn’t stupid enough to mistake our moments of private closeness with him wanting to be open with me out in the world, though. Once when we were biking, I lost my brain and got up right next to him, and we rode in tandem for a minute, locked in heaven. Then we rode up to a bar where some of his friends were supposed to be.
“Don’t,” he whispered apologetically but tersely, unable to meet my eyes. It made me feel like the smallest person in the world. Forget about Honey, We Shrunk the Kids – this was Honey, We Shrunk Coley Furman. I was nothing.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, finding a safer distance. He was just a few feet away, but in that moment he felt further away than New York.
The next day, the distance between us widened even more.
“Cole?” Nicky asked on the way to lunch. He was the most careless and absent-minded driver in the world, so I was already alert when I responded.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been having a lot of fun with you and everything, but…I had a dream.”
Ugh, I thought again. Here it was: the flight. I was still in awe of how he could just fly away and leave, even when he was sitting right there in front of me.
“Okay? And?”
“…And my dad walked in us when we were hanging out. In the dream, I mean.”
“…Why is that bad?”
“It wasn’t that, necessarily. It’s what we were doing.”
I waited for him to finish. He didn’t.
“And?”
“Well, you were on your knees.”
My chest exploded. Inside I was all supernovas, waterfalls, booming canons. But I tried not to let any of that rise to my face. “You…you had a sex dream about me?”
He scooted away a little. “Dudes have sex dreams about each other, okay? It’s totally normal. Happens all the time.”
Sure, I thought, trying to force my smile back down my throat. “Okay, well, it was still just a dream. What’s the big deal?”
He cut his eyes away. “It’s not only that. Remember Dylan? The dude who can pump two forty in a high muscle snatch, easy?”
I blinked. “You must’ve forgotten who you’re talking to. I don’t speak ‘straight guy.’”
“Okay, whatever. Anyway…Dylan asked me why I was at Target with you the other night. Remember when we rented that war movie and watched it at my place?”
Of course I remembered. Nicky had tried to keep me in the car, but I came inside anyway. That night I’d fallen asleep on his floor after fifteen minutes. Stupid war movie – I couldn’t even pretend to like it. Why did people pretend, anyway? I was growing less and less patient with the concept every day.
“What about it?” I asked.
“Well, my friend saw me there. At Target. The next day he asked why I was being so ‘chummy’ with another guy.”
I sighed, stared out the window. I wanted to rage, to punch the glass and ask Nicky if he was as sick of this shit as I was, but I just sighed instead. “Well that’s just great, then. Awesome! I don’t even want to know what you told him.”
He winced a little – he didn’t want me to know, either.
“We’re moving too fast, Cole,” he said after we stopped at a light. “Our…friendship is, I mean. The vultures are everywhere. If the guys start talking…I might as well move back home to Savannah. If they ditch me, if I lose that, I don’t know what I’d have.”
You’d have me, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. If you ever have nobody, I’ll be everything to you. “So what? They’re all ignorant garbage receptacles,” I said instead, “and you know it.”
He shrugged. “We’ve been over this. The situation is what it is.”
“Oh, okay. Why not just ditch me, then? Just get it over with a little early?”
He looked over at me with such genuine emotion in his eyes, I wanted to hug something, anything. “Why would you say that? Is that what you want?”
“Geez,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d mind. It was just a joke.”
He sighed with that masculine cool I didn’t have, had spent my life coveting. “Okay. Thank God.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“I don’t know. I like having you around. You’re cool, Cole. You’re different. You’re a pretty weird kid, actually, but I like it.”
I looked away, my mind spinning like a dradle. That was the first time he’d ever said he liked me. “Weird?” I asked, egging this on.
“Can’t put it into words, really. All the others – you’re not like them. You fell from somewhere else, with your big blue eyes and crazy blonde hair and everything. You’re just an alien.”
And I fell deep, but it didn’t last long. Soon I looked over and noticed he was shaking with nerves. “Nicky…are you okay?”
“I mean…yeah. The thing is, I wanted to go to my favorite little café, but…I don’t know. My mom is coming in town, and I don’t want her to see…us. Together. After the dream, and Target, and all. I don’t know…”
I looked out the window at a town that suddenly seemed to shimmer less. “Oh. Okay.” I was so ashamed, and more than that, I was borderline disgusted with myself for putting up with this again and again. He was always going to hide me, lie about me. I was always going to be the tagalong.
He shook his head. “I still want to hangout, though. Let’s go to a library.”
Instantly I knew why he was asking me to go to a library: nobody went to libraries anymore. Nobody he knew, at least. We would be isolated, hidden. And so I said yes. Because at this point I still halfway wanted to hide, too. I didn’t know anything else.
At the library I took Nicky to my usual area in the corner, hidden by great love stories of the past. I found myself being pulled into him, and as I stood about an inch away from him in the magazine section, a librarian’s eyes landed on us for a second longer than was necessary. Something like disapproval shaded her eyes before she looked away again. Or was I imagining it? In any case, being in my happy place with him felt like a rare triumph, like a shooting star in the corner of the sky that you’d just barely noticed at the last possible second.
I took a deep, nervous breath. “Do you read?” I asked him.
“I do. Not as much as I’d like, but I definitely do. Books give me tickets to worlds that are so much better than this shitty one we have to live in. And you?”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s like dancing with the world without ever leaving your own mind.”
It was like I’d dreamed him into reality. I wanted to play it cool, but I couldn’t. I was a book nerd: playing it cool just wasn’t in my wheelhouse.
“You can’t be real,” I said.
“I certainly was last time I checked.”
My face smiled without my permission. I couldn’t believe how quickly my world had turned on its side.
“I know what you mean, though,” he said. “This is so crazy, and nice, having someone to talk about this stuff with. Books, I mean.”
“What, Ryan and the guys aren’t in any book clubs? I’m shocked.”
“Touché. I kind of dug my own grave with that one.”
I laughed. I was beginning to realize I laughed at every single thing he said, actually, and I probably sounded like a maniac.
“What’s funny?”
I just shrugged, as I couldn’t really put it into words. Describing him with words was like taking a picture of the moon: no matter how good your angle may have seemed at the time, in the end it’d still turn out looking stupid and faded and terrible a
nd just like every other picture of the moon ever taken. You just couldn’t capture him – he was a specific kind of magic that refused to be bottled.
“It’s just weird,” I said, and I brushed my arm against his before I could stop myself. “You-”
I felt eyes on me again, and I snapped my head over and met someone’s gaze. It was my father’s best friend, Robert. He glanced from the way I way standing totally oriented to Nicky’s body, then to Nicky’s face, and finally to me. I wanted to get up and scream at him, tell him to mind his business, but I just stared back. Then he turned away, his nose high in the air, with a look on his face like someone had just served him a plate of dirty diapers. And I had no doubt in my mind that he was going to call my father about this.
“What is it?” Nicky asked.
“Nothing! Just don’t feel that well. Let’s walk somewhere else.”
We passed some photography books. “Your job is really cool,” he said.
“Thanks, but it’s not, just, like, ‘a job’ for me. I’d be taking photos even if I never got a dime off it.” I took out my phone. “See here – I take pictures of people all the time, even when I’m not doing the Honesty thing. I’m a professional creeper, basically.”
