Honesty

by Seth King

  “Because I, um…my mom left some groceries at my house last time she came, and I just wanted to make them. For you.”

  “Aw. Why?”

  He smiled. “Because you’re you, and you’re my favorite You that has ever existed.”

  I breathed him in, wanting to preserve the memory. It was the first time anyone had ever given me anything. Even my parents, really. He didn’t have the tools to love me, but he was trying, and that meant everything. “Thank you, Nicky. Thanks for this.”

  “No problem.”

  “Touch me now,” I said, swept away by something foreign and strange.

  “What?”

  “Hug me,” I said, my voice low. “Touch me…like you do at night.”

  His eyes dropped to the floor. “But I can’t…”

  I closed my eyes and winced, but only for a moment. We settled on my couch and put on this Netflix documentary about murderers, and he spent at least an hour kissing my arms and hands while I lay there, happier than I’d ever been in nineteen years.

  “Have you been thinking about me today?” he asked soon. “We didn’t speak much.”

  I didn’t want him to know just how much I really did think about him, so I looked away. Sometimes he seemed to relish how much I obviously liked him, and then hold it over my head in a weird way whenever he got mad at me.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Well, you should have. I’m pretty alright.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  He leaned in, tapped me on the forehead. “Hey, grumpy. What’s the issue?”

  “It’s just…can we do something that isn’t in a bedroom or living room?” I asked. “Or, like, something in public that doesn’t take place ten minutes before closing time?”

  He looked stumped. It made me really sad. “Like what?”

  The fact that he had to ask me that was troubling. I pushed the subject from my mind, or tried to. Because I wasn’t upset enough to stop seeing him. This whole thing felt like a jig that was about to be up. Every time he texted me, I was terrified that he’d come to his senses and realized how subpar I was, how below him I was. So I leaned into him and let it go. Lately being around him just felt like…being around myself, even despite all our problems. I couldn’t explain it: we just felt like we were flesh and blood sometimes. But at least he kept me on my toes. He was magnificent some nights, wordless others. He’d take me so high, and just when I thought we were about to scrape the clouds, he’d drop me. But I enjoyed it somehow, because I never knew what to expect. Were we perfect? No. I wished I could be strong enough to demand the love I knew I deserved, but I wasn’t. I was too afraid that without him, I’d be nothing at all.

  Soon it got late, and sleep started to get close to us. My mouth twitched once, then twice, and before long I knew I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Finally, I asked the question I’d been obsessing over for weeks.

  “Are you my boyfriend?” I whispered, my voice like a little child’s. He was half-asleep, too, and I felt him kiss the back of my hand one last time.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “But I do know you’re the only person I wanna be alive with.”

  The next morning I brought him on an Honesty mission. I’d been abandoning my life with a shocking casualness since meeting him, and I knew I was going to get a passive-aggressive email from my editor any day now if I didn’t start posting more entries. I found an older man sitting outside a café who said he wrote for a local magazine and gave me some fascinating advice about his job.

  “To write is to access all the parts of yourself that others avoid,” he said, holding his notebook. “A book is like a rose that blooms from the most barren corner of your soul.”

  “That’ll do,” I smiled as I wrote down his quote. “That’ll certainly do.”

  “So what’s with the whole Honesty thing?” Nicky asked as we walked down the sidewalk after I’d taken the man’s photo and bid him adieu.

  “What about it? It’s going well. It seems like the bigger it gets, the faster it grows. I just posted something about a little girl who missed her dead dad, and it was my first picture to reach three thousand likes. There’s even a whole community of fans now that chat in the comments section and share their own stories – it’s getting so big that it’s weird to think about sometimes.”

  “No, like…on a deeper level,” he said. “Do you think you’re so obsessed with getting the truth from other people because you…well, because you run from your own truth, yourself?”

  I frowned. He could sink deeper into me than I could. And not only in the sexual sense. “Um…I’ve never thought about that.”

  He smirked. “Yeah. Not trying to pry, but…it’s just funny that you’re so open and honest about everything else in your life, except this. And it’s ironic that the operator of the famous blog about people being honest is…well, closeted.”

  My breath left me. I’d never looked at it like that. “I mean, I don’t know. It’s not…me. It’s not about me. It’s about the subjects. I have nothing to do with it.”

  “Sorry,” he laughed, “but no. That’s like the head of PETA being an African big-game hunter. Doesn’t mesh. Or the head of the Lung Cancer Council of America being a pack-a-day smoker…”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point,” I said, my cheeks warming. “Drop the shovel, I’m already dead.”

  “Sorry! Just saying – you can’t broadcast truth when you’re living in a lie.”

  I’d been thinking about this lately, too, but Nicky was a huge hypocrite to be preaching bravery when he was…well, Nicky. “Hold on, Mr. Honest, let’s look at your-”

  “Okay, okay, let’s drop it. I’m not the famous one, here.”

  I waited for my temper to recede.

  “I just do what I do,” I said soon, “because I want to. I grew up with a camera in my hand. I guess that when I’m looking at the world through a lens, I don’t really have to deal with reality. Trust me, there were a lot of things in my childhood that I didn’t want to see, so I saw them through a camera instead.”

  “What do you see when you look at me?” he asked, and I closed my eyes and swallowed some air and thought about how when I was with him, one plus one equaled three.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Okay then.”

  “And what about you?” I asked him, glancing his way. “What do you see in me? You’re so hard to read.”

  “Freedom,” he said. My eyes gleamed, and his eyes ran away with my fears.

  “Let’s come out together, then,” I whispered through a cringe. “Let’s just do it. Let’s be…well, free. Like how you see when you close your eyes. Like you just said – I should be more open about this. It’s a new century – who cares?”

  He laughed, and it was an insane sort of cackle that made my stomach jump a little. “Oh, sure!” he said, smiling this wild smile. “Great idea! I’ll just march right into my parents’ house and tell them I’m a homo. I don’t need tuition money, or money for my apartment, or my car payment, or my phone bill, or, you know, the love and support of a family, even if it’s fake, and comes with quid pro quos. You’re right!” he shouted, looking around at the empty lot next to us. “Come on out, queers! There’s nothing to worry about! The world will love you! Yay!”

  “Okay, gotcha,” I said. “Coming out doesn’t make sense for you. I understand.”

  Finally, he calmed. “Ugh. You don’t, though. And if you’re waiting for some dramatic ‘coming-out’ moment from me, anyway, some party where I thank all my friends for their support and start crying and kiss a guy on the lips, it’s never gonna happen. That whole concept in general is a lie the world needs to stop believing. The world forces people to go into hiding, and then gawks at them when they come out of that hiding. But it’s all a false concept. We don’t owe the world anything because of who we are.”

  “Huh?”

  “Think about it,” he said, and he got this passionate look on his face I’d never really s
een outside our bedrooms. I almost wanted to photograph the moment and use him on the blog: this was what people looked like when they drudged up their deepest passions, when they touched on what they really cared about. “When’s the last time a straight person was asked to ‘come out?’ When’s the last time a straight person had to make a rambling Facebook status to announce they were heterosexual, or have a melodramatic sit-down meeting with their parents and confess that they liked the opposite sex? Never. The world has claimed gay peoples’ personal lives, co-opted their private lives and told them they’ve gotta offer everything up to be accepted, with every gory detail included. But forget that. My life is mine.” He sighed. “And even if I did come out, which would never happen, I still don’t want to play that game, and deal with that aftermath. These days, coming out is more about straight people flaunting their acceptance than about the people coming out themselves. ‘Oh, you’re gay? Come here and let me show you how tolerant I am!’ I don’t want someone to come up and be amazing at me and pat me on the back and treat me like I’m a wounded kindergartner for being gay. Nobody has ever been asked to ‘accept’ a straight person for being straight, and that shouldn’t be any different for me. I don’t even want the world’s acceptance, really. I just want them to leave me alone and treat me like they would anyone else.”

  I stared at him. “I’ve never looked at it all like that. You are so…insightful.”

  He sighed. “So, yeah, there they are – my thoughts on all this.” Then his eyes flashed. “You’ve got me all hot and bothered now. I can’t come out, but I can do other things, though…maybe with my tongue…”

  I shivered a little. That look – he set me on fire with his eyes. I wanted to feel like that for the rest of my life, even when it burned.

  I knew he wanted to go home and hook up, so I hit the brakes. “Wait. Let’s do this more often. Maybe along with tongue stuff sometime. But this, too.”

  “What?”

  “Hangout. In public. During the day. Just me and you. We’ve been getting better, but I want to do it…more.”

  “…Just us?”

  I nodded. “No alcohol, no late nights, no hiding. Just this.”

  He nodded back, fear bright like a torch in his eyes. “Okay. I’ll try.”

  This only led to more problems, though. Being around Nicky was almost like being with a child – his lack of experience showed everywhere. Or was it just a lack of experience? Sometimes it seemed like he picked fights for the hell of it. A little argument here or there turned into more regular bickering, and then the drama started roaring at full throttle. We’d start going at it over the timing of a text message, an unanswered phone call. Soon we were volcanic together, two kids on a Coney Island rollercoaster. I’d catch him checking out a girl and delete his number. He’d catch a male friend texting me and tell me he hated me and say he was never going to speak to me again. But every time I said goodbye, it would tear me apart, and I’d want to run back the second I could. I needed him so badly, but sometimes I hated him just as much. When he was mad at me, I could not function – I was restless and distracted and felt like one of my organs had been removed.

  As August opened up we fell into this dysfunctional little routine: we’d grow closer than two people had ever been, then fight about something stupid and bump away like magnets meeting on the wrong sides, then meet again. I didn’t want to live without him, but I couldn’t live with him, either. School was starting soon, time was running out, and we both felt the stress. We’d share a beautiful set of days together, then get into some dumb blowout and stop talking for an afternoon. He made me feel emotion on a scale I’d never experienced before. Every heartbreak was a hurricane, every ignored text message felt like a breakdown. He knew exactly which buttons to push, which things to say to make me explode. His temper was an absolute livewire, too, and in his rages he’d block me from every single social media platform possible. But then I’d find a way back in and message him that I missed him. After that, we’d slowly start talking again, and then have an explosive hookup on my bedroom floor.

  One night he caught me checking out a basketball player while waiting in line for a late-night movie, and he hit the roof. I couldn’t help it – I guess I was getting more open about those things now that I knew how beautiful the touch of a guy felt. Nicky saw, though, and as the theater girl handed us our tickets, he whispered to me that he hated me and never wanted to see me again. I stood at the ticket stand, stunned, as he disappeared into the lobby. He sat alone in the theater, glaring at me on and off the whole movie. We didn’t talk for a day after that, and it was miserable – not only was I without the boy I loved, I was out of a best friend. That afternoon I went on my balcony and watched a lady fall flat on her face into the sand as she attempted to take a selfie while jogging, and as I laughed I realized I had nobody to tell – I would’ve texted Nicky about it immediately, but I couldn’t. That was the worst part, the little gaps in my life that were already showing in his absence. He’d already sifted in and rearranged things, and I felt incomplete without him. And in that moment I knew I never wanted to feel that lonely again – I wanted him around me, always.

  He relented and unblocked me and invited me over the next night, of course, and the fight was never even mentioned, but something told me the drama was only going to get worse. And it did. Over the span of one week, we broke up four times. Four! Sometimes I felt like I was standing in a dark room, screaming at the top of my lungs, with nobody around to hear me. But why did I keep running back into the flames?

  I know it was all crazyballs, but at the same time I was starting to learn that love was a pacific insanity. I was inching closer to the edge than ever before, but strangely I loved every minute of it. He was becoming the other half of my world, and that world was blown off its own axis all the time. Without him I felt blue desolation. With him I often felt red fury. On top of him I felt white heat. When he left, it was all black. That’s what that boy brought me: for the first time ever, I was living in color. Those deep, previously unexplored feelings and instincts I’d spent my life hiding and burying and denying – he pulled them all to the surface in one dizzying, intoxicating whoosh of Technicolor madness. Sometimes I found myself enjoying the pain, too – he opened up a sublime rage in me that I didn’t even know existed. Hurting him felt like heaven, and I hated myself for how much I wanted to hate him sometimes. He was like a book, one of the really good ones where you had to slip away and press your face close to the page and disappear into the world that was slowly blooming between the two of you. I’d see him, he’d see me, and poof – we’d be gone. Our love existed in an empire that no one knew about but us.

  “Beautiful,” he whispered one night in the midst of the craziness, as the empire crumbled. He was in an unusually happy mood for a moment, and I remember wanting to savor it, wrap my hands around it like it was a warm mug of coffee on a cold morning and never let it go.

  “What’s beautiful?” I asked, as he bled at the edges like a November sunset. We’d just watched a gorgeous documentary called Living Earth, and I guess he had some things on his mind.

  “So many things. You right now, mostly.”

  “Okayyy, what else?” I asked, stretching the moment, since he gave me so few of them. I felt an eyebrow twitch. He smiled and breathed, half-asleep. But this wasn’t one of our jokes – this was real. This was ours.

  “What else is beautiful? God, so much – right now, at least. I think it’s beautiful that we’re alive on this blue planet. I think it’s beautiful that airplanes are taking off and landing all over that planet right now, so many of them, and that children are looking out of the windows of those planes and falling in love with their lives. I think it’s beautiful that my grandpa nursed my grandma through Alzheimer’s and held her hand while she was a vegetable and told her how lucky he was to have had her. But mostly I just think you’re beautiful.”

  A tear fell out of my eye, and I hated it.

  “I like yo
u so much, Richard Cole Furman IV, I can barely take it. You’re making my world go mad.”

  The next morning he was as cold and distant as ever, though, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to blow. The great baking sun was doing something to us, making us lose our minds. His eyes were getting more paranoid than ever, and it could only be so long before his fear broke out for good. He was struggling – with exactly what, I wasn’t sure – but I knew things were starting to spin out of control.

  A few days later he took me to the library – our library. He’d been reluctant to so much as walk down the sidewalk with me lately, and so he was already in a black mood when the librarian appeared.

  “Would you guys like the computers next?” she asked. “I’m taking reservations.”

  “Oh, I’m good,” Nicky said. She kept her eyes on him, but pointed at me.

  “Okay, and what about your…?”

  She let the question hang. She didn’t know what he was, and she didn’t want to say the wrong thing and offend us. For a moment I wanted to say it – I wanted to blurt it all out. What am I? I’m his secret boyfriend. He’s all I care about and I want to spend forever with him and God, even sitting here right now, I want to rub his face and kiss his forehead because he’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

  “Brother. He’s my brother,” Nicky said. “And no, he’s fine, too.” The librarian nodded and left.

  Ashamed, I looked over at Nicky, the boy I was falling in love with who couldn’t even acknowledge me to a stranger. He stared back. And then the sadness of the South rolled over us, filling the room, saying everything we couldn’t. I looked around at the books on the shelves, antiquated artifacts in a world that had moved past them. Just like us.

  I got up.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “The hell you didn’t,” I scream-whispered.

  “Oh really, Mr. Perfect? What about when you sat so far away from me at that fro-yo place the other night, you fell off your chair? Do you think I don’t notice these things, too?”