by Seth King
We were back in our bed by seven PM, staring at each other’s faces from six inches away. He grabbed some mini vodka bottles from the fridge and we went to town on them. I’d never felt so content, so safe, so guarded. I ran my finger from his shoulder up past his ear to his forehead and then down to his nose. His skin was oily, but I still shivered at the contact. I would never get used to him. He made a crazy face and I laughed so loud I got worried the neighbors would hear, which only made me laugh harder. I was always laughing when I was around him – he was an umbilical cord to happiness, my own personal connection to the sun.
“Why do you wear that ring?” he asked, playing with my hand. He touched the old, scratched golden band on my right ring finger that I sometimes wore.
“It’s my grandpa’s,” I smiled. “It was his older brother’s wedding band that he inherited. He said he wanted me to use it when I proposed. He told me to find a ‘nice little gal’ and give it to her…I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth.”
“And you shouldn’t have,” he said. “Sounds like it would’ve just stressed him out.”
“True, probably. But ever since then I’ve just worn it sort of to…punish myself, in a weird way.”
“Huh?”
“Well, I’m obviously never going to get married, like he wanted me to, so it became sort of an inside joke. It just represented…everything I thought I’d never have, I guess. Some dreams were for normal people, accepted people. Which was kinda sick for me to wear, now that I think about it…”
I slid it off and started thinking.
“Why won’t you get married?” he asked.
“…Um, because Republicans exist?”
He stared at the ring, and I swore I saw something like hope in his eyes.
“Is that…is marriage something you want one day?” I asked him. He just shrugged.
“I don’t know. That’s all a million miles away. But I doubt it. What’s the point of starting a family if the world wouldn’t accept it? The Supreme Court allowing gay marriage is great, sure, yeah, whatever. But what about after marriage? If we tried to buy a house and the owners said no because of who we were, we’d have no legal rights to challenge that. And if we tried to adopt? Bingo, you guessed it, still banned in many states.”
“Well…what if we came here?” I asked, not meeting his eyes. I realized I’d never even really considered any of this. “Like, together? What if we moved, and tried to be together that way? You’d be into that, right? It’s so different here.”
He sighed, and I looked at the drapes and started imagining a future, a life, that I’d never let myself imagine before.
“It could be just you and me, you know,” I said soon. “We could do it. We could get a place in that garden district you like. I was looking at a magazine when you went to the bathroom, and the apartments here are so cheap and cool. Brick walls, wooden floors, ten-foot ceilings…I could do my blog and you could transfer to Savannah College of Art and Design. Nobody would care about us. You saw how everyone looked at the gay couples today – or should I say, didn’t look, actually. Nobody even cared.”
He kept his eyes away. I would do all this in a nanosecond. It hurt my heart to imagine being that happy.
“That would be nice,” he finally said. “But it’s not realistic. My family is here.”
“What about – in a perfect world? Would you be interested in all of it then, if none of that other stuff existed?”
“Of course. I’d husband the shit out of you,” he said, and I smiled. “I’ve never been as high as I am with you.”
I didn’t know how to respond, because I felt the same way. But for the first time in my overly-emotional life, I could sense that he was flying even higher than I was. It was then that I sort of realized love could actually feel good. I didn’t have to be the Me of the past, the little boy hiding in the closet listening to his parents rage and holler. Love could be nice.
“Ugh, but you could never like me as much as I like you,” I sighed. “I’m sure of it. I like you so much it makes me cringe. I overflow for you. It’s all too much, really.”
“Then you don’t see what I see. I don’t even know how to explain it.”
“Try, then.”
He bit that beautiful lip. “You just feel like home, and you make my eyes burn. You’re all of the good in me, and none of the bad. I like you so much it makes me feel like someone else.” He swallowed. “And I kind of admire you.”
“What?”
“I do. It’s almost like you’re the person I’d be if I was a little…braver. You just are who you are, and you don’t really try to hide it – well, not nearly as hard as I do, at least. You wear what you want to wear, you do what you want to do, you act just as nerdy and…well, soft, as you want to act. I never had that courage. And still don’t.” He swallowed. “Which brings me to another question – why do you deal with me? We both know I treat you like garbage sometimes. Why are you still here?”
Suddenly my brain filled in what my lips couldn’t say. Because I see galaxies in your eyes, and I want to get old and wrinkly with you, and my life wasn’t a life before I met you, and the thought of ever losing you and having to go back to that makes me wanna die, and you’re my whole world and I just wanna be alive with you.
“Because I don’t want you to become a what if,” I said instead.
“Huh?”
“I just don’t want to look back and regret you. This could be so much better than it is now, only if…if you could be open about certain…” I sighed. “If the world wasn’t such a shitty place that was so against kids like us.”
“Your legs,” he said.
“What?”
“You are lying as far from me as you can, with your legs pointing away, because you’re embarrassed deep inside. Don’t preach to me when you’re two miles deep in the closet, yourself. You keep acting like everything’s changing, but it’s not. You’re still just as afraid as you were in the beginning. I see it on and off, every day.”
I set my jaw. “No, you don’t preach to me. I hid a raging dick addiction for nineteen years and counting, in the South, no less. Don’t talk to me about hiding shit. My whole life has been carried out in hiding. Just like yours has.”
He sighed again, and I reached over and pulled him closer as my temper receded. “Thank God we just had some alcohol,” I laughed, and then I stared at him and thought about forever. The human brain wasn’t even built to understand the concept of forever, in my opinion. Things like eternity and infinity boggled our minds and let us know how small we really were. But in this moment, I understood forever, or a glimpse of it at least. Because I knew with certainty that I would have happily spent my forever with him, the version of him he was right then. Even with everything that came along with it.
He drank another vodka bottle, and I did too. We rolled closer, so close I could smell his every breath.
“Do you…do you love me, Coley?” he asked out of nowhere. Suddenly the Atlantic Ocean sloshed around in my brain, mixing in with all of the stars in the Georgia sky. I was full and confused and dizzy and I was in love. But I couldn’t say it. Society had conditioned me not to. And besides, I wasn’t even really sure if I knew what “love” even meant. All I knew for sure was that I didn’t feel like me anymore – I felt like us – and that seemed like a good enough definition for now.
“I think you know what I love,” I said, giddiness making my voice all weird and shaky, like it could escape from me if I didn’t hold it tightly enough. “It’s obvious enough already.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Hmm. I could say yes, but that wouldn’t do. This thing feels like…more than yes.”
“Well tell me what this thing is, then,” Nicky said, sounding almost nervous. “And I don’t want the Hallmark answers, either. Hallmark was never us. Don’t give me the clichés. Don’t tell me I mean the world to you.”
“Okay,” I said, a smile exploding onto my face. “You
mean the moon to me, then.”
For a few seconds there was just silence. “Okay,” Nicky finally said. “I’ll take the moon.”
I clutched his chest, listening to – and feeling – his chest rise, fall. Fall, rise. Soon his fingers were exploring places they’d still never explored before. I sighed, moaned, and let the moonlight take me somewhere else…
When we were done, he grabbed a pillow, locked the door, and got in bed again. “This is so weird,” he said as he wrapped his body around mine, even through the bed was tiny. “I’ve never even liked being touched, much less being in the same bed as someone. But now I never wanna sleep alone again.”
“Agreed,” I smiled. “I’ve never felt so… easy. With anyone.”
He looked at me then, unleashed everything within those galaxy eyes, and I wanted to curse him for the power he held on me. I liked him so much, and it made me feel like I was nothing. For some reason he smiled. His eyes fully locked with mine, and I drowned in them. That was odd. I always thought you could only drown in water, never humans.
With some effort, I finally tore my eyes away from his stupefying perfection.
“For the record, I like you, Coley,” he said. “Very much. I like the way your eyes explode when you look at me and I like the way you bite your pinkie when you’re scared and I like the way your hair is the color of honey set on fire. More than anything I like this little world that happens around us whenever we’re alone. Sometimes I think I could live in that world forever.” I fell to pieces. “But I still don’t know how to do this, either…I keep looking down, wondering what would happen if we fell, if-”
“Don’t look down, then,” I said. “Nothing down there matters.” I inched closer. He backed up. “Nicky, come on. Don’t go into your faraway mood again. Stay here, with me. I’ve been by myself for way too long, and…”
He turned his head, but he was still so beautiful in the winterglow. “Why do you always say my name when you talk to me? Nobody does that.”
“I do, Nicky. Nicky, Nicky, Nicky.” I laughed a little, lovedrunk. “Sorry, Nicky, for happening to love your name, Nicky. I’ll have to thank your mother for choosing it. Nicky.”
And that wasn’t all I loved. But that was crazy, I reminded myself as my shoulders slipped a little. He’d already said it: we would never work out, even if he made me feel all colorful and dreamy. And we both knew I’d probably never get to sit and talk to his mom, or go around with him in public, and be with him in a real, genuine way. He’d never let me into his life, his family, that world he kept inside his eyes. That just wasn’t in the cards for me. For us…
I felt his eyes on me as the truth hit. I knew he wanted to take me in his arms, but he couldn’t. I stared at his hair, kissed by the sun, and suddenly I didn’t care about the fact that his body was totally pointed away from me again. There were worse things in the world. I’d dealt with so many shitty things before, and now none of them mattered. Because now I came to Nicky, a boy remade. I didn’t have to hide here in this hidden room at the end of the world. Now that my newly-lightened life contained him, music sounded better. The breeze smelled fresher. Food tasted better. My skull felt lighter. Babies in strollers were things I noticed instead of glancing past. Everything had changed, and it was that simple, that groundbreaking.
I heard a sniffle. “Why are you crying?” I asked him, and he hid his face.
“Because I don’t…I don’t know how to love,” he said. “My father has never told me he loved me, not once. Ever. I don’t even know why that’s coming to mind, but it is, and…”
“Oh, God, come here.”
I hugged my boy, and I knew I couldn’t deny it then: I loved this person. More than anything, really. I loved him because he’d opened up a new world for me and because his face looked like a song and his hands moved like the movies and his eyes were sad like violins and victorious like saxophones. I loved him because he saw all the brightest part of me and noticed things in me I couldn’t admit to myself and actually believed I might be somebody in this life. But I couldn’t say it. Up to this point, this thing had been all about sneaking around the truth, hiding the facts and tiptoeing around everything so we could carry on with our whole sad charade of being “straight.” The weird thing about words was that once released, you could never get them back. This was the point of no return, and if I spoke now, pivoted now, there would be no coming back. But I had never known anything in his neighborhood, and a love like this deserved words.
“You were totally right earlier – it shouldn’t be like this. I just don’t want to put you through this,” he said, “and maybe we should just-”
“I love you, Nicky.”
He looked at me, eyes wide, as my body spun in his warm love. “Coley?”
Sometimes you couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment you realized you were in love with someone. Your feelings gradually deepened and changed and transformed and took root until one day you turned around and realized your life has bent itself around someone, and you’d never even noticed it. But this was different. This was no slow burn. Right there, right then, in Savannah, Georgia, I knew. No eureka moment needed: I was in love with Nicky Flores. Maybe I always had been, ever since the moment my mortal eyes had first made contact with his galaxy ones.
“I love you,” I said, as something in me seemed to speed up, “and I know the world is stacked against us and everything, and I knew we’d probably get written off by a lot of society if we walked down the street hand-in-hand right now, and I know this is gonna be the hardest thing either of us have ever done, and I love you, and I just…”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Then he stood up. So did I. He smiled. He was glowing, shimmering, incandescent. And he was mine. This boy was mine.
Tomorrow, today would be yesterday. We were all stories in the end, and one day soon we would be in the past to somebody from the future. All of these things would go away and we would merely be memories that people told stories about. But before that happened, I wanted to make us a memory worth sharing, not hiding. So I got closer to him, swept by something I couldn’t quite place, and put a hand on his chest. He looked down, terror in his galaxy eyes, but he didn’t flinch this time. I moved it slowly up past his nipples and then to his neck, and he still didn’t wince. I heard guitars, pianos, orchestras, screaming choirs, angels, all those things that are supposed to accompany love. Every cliché in the world suddenly made sense to me now – clichés were made for this. Even if they ripped me apart.
What’s in a label? I thought as I leaned closer to his mouth. Gay, bi, lesbian, closeted, out: all of it was garbage in the end, all meant to slap names on us and box into corners and limit us. I knew the world would toss many of those labels at us, including many other ones, like fag and queer and cock licker and so many more, but I didn’t want to waste any more time wondering if those people were right. Because this right here, this was right, even if it couldn’t leave the four walls around us. I loved Nicky Flores and I wanted to build my life around him, and a love like that was never wrong. It was just magnificent.
I wrapped him up in me and kissed him. Life could be so beautiful if you let it be. He didn’t fight this time. He relaxed, and soon I was supporting his weight. Together we just stood.The world had always moved past people like us – it had always rushed by, busy and hurried and self-important like so many rude New Yorkers, bumping us out of the way to remind us we did not belong, that we were on the outside. But for the first time, all that didn’t matter. We were islands in the stream of a humanity that had shunned us. Suddenly, beautifully, we were standing still. Together.
“So what now?” he asked as I held him. Shivering, I locked my hands around his back and held him even tighter. I’d never wanted to touch so much of the same person at one time before – all my flesh screamed to be pressed against his, for every second, every minute, maybe always. I had no idea two humans could have so much affection flow through them – my skin was breathing into his, two as
one. I’d been right all along. We were twins.
“Now,” I said, “we-”
Nicky’s phone suddenly lit up, and he reached down and inhaled.
It was sister.
Her friend had seen us.
And she was demanding to know why he’d come to Savannah without telling her.
13
Next day. We slept until noon. Then it was all gross hotel coffee. Semi-awkward silences. Sex after the silence got old. After he fell back asleep, I walked into his bathroom and knew again that I loved him, because his clothes were all over the floor and his body wash was expensive. I knew I loved him not because of these things, but because I wondered about these things, noticed these things. I noticed everything. I was like an overweight kid who’d been dieting for six months and had just stumbled into a donut shop for the first time. And I wanted to know so much more. Everything, really.
Lazily, we walked to a candy store on the river, and I took a picture of him on one of Savannah’s famously-steep stone staircases leading down to the river walk. In the store, he was so cute – he got as excited as any child as he stared at the chocolate machines and candied apples and rows and rows of pralines, Savannah’s specialty, a mouth-watering food made of melted sugar and pecans. Then we visited my heaven, a cool old bookshop with brick walls and a huge fireplace.
“Do you think we were supposed to meet?” he asked out of nowhere on the walk back to the hotel. Then he looked at me like I was a secret and nobody in the world knew the answer but him. It made me smile a smile that felt too big to be contained by one face.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I do think I was meant to love you.”
And then…then the other thing. When I finished showering that evening, I found him on the phone with his sister, watching me. When he stared at me like that I felt naked, stripped, like nobody had ever seen so much of me at one time, not even close. I was always trying to present him with the best version of me, as if he might realize at any second what a dud I was and run for Montana. When he hung up, he came over to me. He took the boy who was glared at, stared at, snickered at, and swallowed him into his arms, made him his own. He was into me, and it was a revolution.
