by Seth King
“Don’t you say that,” I said. “Stop. When are you going to let me into your life? When is this going to stop? The breakups, the hiding…I can’t take it. Your family doesn’t own you!” I stopped and swallowed, my voice falling into my throat. “How can you hold back the one thing you know I want? How are you so…cruel?”
He stopped, staring at nothing. “The world made me like this, Coley. It messed me up real good.”
“No it didn’t, it made you a coward.”
He turned around. “I’m the coward?”
“We both are, okay? Go out and be a bro and deny me in public again. You’re living inside a pile of lies and you don’t even realize it.” I looked at the boy I wanted to grow into a man with. “You’re never gonna love me like I love you, are you? I just wanna be close to you. But I can’t. You won’t let me.”
He stared blankly at me, and that’s when I knew he was lying about something. “Nicky,” I said, “tell me the story, the whole story, right now.”
He sighed. “Ugh. I guess it’s time.” He tossed his wallet down on the bed. “If I date you, this wallet will be useless.”
“Excuse me?”
“When my dad caught me watching gay porn when I was younger, he gave me an ultimatum, in a way. Get over this ‘problem,’ as he called it, train yourself to change your thinking so you can be accepted at church and in society, and you can keep your trust fund. But if I ended up ‘becoming’ gay, as he put it, he’d keep every last cent of my inheritance from me.”
I didn’t even know what to say. “What the hell kind of ultimatum is that?”
He shrugged. “So I had no choice. I never did. I can’t plunge myself into student loan debt for the rest of my life just because of this.”
He turned, considered me. Opened his mouth. Closed it again. And I knew what it meant. Nicky was gone. He had flown away.
But I still didn’t want to accept it. We were two boys who liked each other with our whole lives opening out in front of us. There was no reason to shut that down.
The seal broke inside me, and I punched the dresser. “You know what? Screw you, then. Screw this. I’m the addict and you’re the pipe and I can’t put you down. But I hate you. I’m done living in your nightmare. I need you like I need water in my lungs.”
I knew we were childish. I knew we were melodramatic. But I couldn’t turn this off. Falling in love with him was the stupidest thing I’d ever done, and I never wanted to go back.
I went to the bathroom, splashed water on my face. When I walked back in, his eyes were glassy. I just sighed.
“I’m sorry,” I said soon. “I am. I like you too much, Nicky. If you were a book, I would read every chapter twice and then tuck you into bed next to me. And the thing is...I’m afraid you wouldn’t even pick me up if you passed me in a bookstore. If you ever knew how much I really needed you, you’d delete me like a typo. And now it’s too late.”
“Don’t think like that,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “And I feel the same way. You’re so hard to read – half the time I don’t even know how you feel.”
“What?”
“You disappear all the time. Into your eyes. Like your dad used to.”
I stared at him, unable to comprehend how he thought things like this. “Nicky, why don’t you get it? Every time I go dark, every time my eyes glaze over, I’m not mad at you – I’m mad at me. I’m looking at you and thinking, shit, this boy is perfect, and my face is asymmetrical and my teeth aren’t totally straight and I do this weird thing with my arm when I laugh and, oh God, I will never measure up to this boy in any way, shape or form. But that’s on me. It’s my past’s fault that I hate myself, not yours.” And that was the funny thing, wasn’t it? The more I worried about him losing interest, the more I pushed him away.
“Stop,” he said. “Don’t be stupid. I need you, too. No matter what happens.”
“Not like this.”
We listened to nothing. It was starting to dawn on me that this would never change – he would always be too afraid. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you to be alive?” I asked him.
“We can’t go on like this,” he responded, and the worst thing was that I knew it, too. He was still that scared little boy, rattled senseless from the vision of his gay neighbor’s body. Whenever he looked at me, that dead body was probably all he saw. “It’s not working. I’m just no good. I’m gonna break one day, just collapse like a building, and you don’t deserve to get injured by the shards. And it’s not just me. Savannah has been great,” he said, in a formal, faraway voice that sounded nothing like the Nicky I knew from ColeyAndNickyVille, “but it’s not reality. Tomorrow we’re going back home, to the real world, the same one we started out in, and what then? We thought Victoria was bad, we thought my friend seeing us at the gas station was bad – it’s just going to get worse. Next week it’ll be something, and then next month it’ll be something else, something worse. We can’t run and hide forever. I would do anything in the world to change all this, but I can’t. I’m just one person.”
I looked out of the window at a world that already seemed darker. “Oh, stop blaming it on all that. I’m perfectly happy with you exactly how you are. Stop blaming it on anything other than your fear. Look at what we’re up against. Walk outside with me.”
He fidgeted, his eyes darting around like balls on a pool table. “Well, it’s kinda bright outside, and my friend’s grandma lives close by, and-”
“Exactly. We can’t walk down the street, Nicky. We literally can’t walk down the street. You’ll only ever love me with the lights off.”
He stayed silent, and in that moment I realized I knew he would never turn the lights on. So I closed my eyes and started to imagine a world without him. I had to accept it and get it into my head: he was too weak for this. Maybe we weren’t meant to collide: maybe we were meant to explode. Maybe we were fundamentally incompatible, and by staying together we were just delaying heartbreak. I couldn’t deal with this, but I was going to have to pretend to, and then save all the falling apart for later. Because if I was going to have to give him up, I wanted to do it now. I had to. Heaven contained him, and if I couldn’t have this forever, I didn’t want it at all. I was at a high water mark, and I would not be strong enough to do this in the future, not after I’d rolled even deeper into him. I just needed five more beautiful minutes of this.
The most terrifying thing about love was that it ended. My parents’ pathetic marriage had proved that. Maybe everything beautiful fell to pieces. My parents had been consumed by each other in the beginning – you could see their love in the pictures, so young and rosy-cheeked – and all it did was burn them up. Maybe we’d been kidding ourselves all this time. Death was in the stars for us. He wouldn’t accept me, so no point in running from it now. We would never be out of the woods, and there would always be monsters around every corner. There would forever be bigoted Southerners and frowning parents and a society that told us we were dirty and sinful and doomed to hell, even while it dangled its flimsy “acceptance” in front of us like carrots to a horse. This “relationship” was falling apart, dead on arrival, and maybe I just needed to escape this burning house before the roof caved in.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “But we’re getting older…the deeper I get with you, the more I see the other route fading away. The normal route, or whatever. It’s starting to become an either/or thing. And I know Victoria knew that.”
For some reason I laughed. “Wait…what? Are you saying you’re actually listening to them, and you think you’ll become…straight?”
He shrugged again. “I see two roads. One is you. But the other is…normality. Acceptance. My parents were right – no girl wants a guy who’s been with guys, and if we get any more serious, if any more people find out, I’d be done. And there’s more, too. I see two roles for gay guys in this country – one is the tank-top-wearing fairy, the glitter-covered queen hopping around on a Pride float and throwing rainbow-colored condoms at
passing children or something. You know, the kind that takes out their anger on the world by forcing everyone to accept them at gunpoint. ‘Whoever doesn’t stand and applaud for my tutu is a bigot who deserves jail!’ Yeah, that’s not me. The ‘other gay guy’ they want you to be is the one who doesn’t even acknowledge his gayness – the strapping dude in the business suit who’s forced to keep his personal life private to gain acceptance. That’s not me, either. I’m just…me, a dude with a touch of gay. But the world hasn’t made space for that person yet. White American society says to either be the freak on the fringes and flaunt it, or if you want to come sit at our table and have a piece of our pie, act like us and dress like us and become like us. You have to choose, and I don’t want to choose.”
“Nicky,” I said, in shock, “you’re so wrong. How can you be so wrong? You can be whoever you want to be. Fuck the world’s perception.”
“Well what if I end up wanting to marry a woman and not a man?”
“Um, I don’t see that happening. You’ve never once showed a sign of wanting that.”
“Well, what if I wake up one day and that changes?”
Anger spiked in me again. “Okay, and how do you think you’re going to make this change? Jesus camp?”
“A lot of people pray about a lot of things,” he said as his eyes got faraway again. “My grandma has stomach cancer, and she started praying every night about it. Pretty soon the tumors shrank and she was as healthy as a-”
“This isn’t your grandma, Nicky,” I scoffed. “I mean, have you lost your mind? You really believe you’re going to…pray away your gay, or something?”
He sort of nodded, true belief shining in his eyes, and that’s when my anger sifted out of me and became replaced by something else: pity. This boy was so desperate, he was chasing any lie he could find.
“You’re scared,” I said, quieter. “Of this. Of love. Of happiness. Of what could happen if you let go of the fear. But it’s understandable. Just stop listening to them. They don’t matter. We matter. So much…”
He shrugged and cried and pretended to be interested in putting shirts into his suitcase. “I’m gonna try the other road, Coley. I hate the way my life is, and I just want things to be easy.”
“Oh, Nicky.”
Now the erratic past few weeks made total sense – he’d been pulling himself away, in every way, slowly but surely. In his eyes, I’d brought him over to the dark side, and he resented me for it. Suddenly I felt like such a pathetic fool – how could I have missed the signs? Even I couldn’t deny that things hadn’t been working out for us – the only thing we had in common in the world was love – but still, I’d had no idea he’d been creating an exit strategy all along. All this Jesus stuff was insane, though. How could he pray to these bad relics? How could he willingly drink this poison? “Can I hug you?” I asked him. He looked away, tears falling from his cheek.
“Why? And prolong the inevitable? This isn’t easy for me either. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, actually. I love you too much and it scares me.”
I turned and took the deepest breath of my life. “Okay,” I said. “It’s over. Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. But I don’t want anyone after this, ever. If I can’t have this, I don’t want anyone.”
“Coley?” he asked as the silence closed in.
“Yeah?”
“Will you just lay with me? In our little world? Until we have to go back to the real one?”
I closed my eyes as the tears came. “You don’t even have to ask.”
He stopped packing for good. We lay down together, holding hands, passing a bottle of pink wine back and forth one last time. He’d made his decision and I had to live with it, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy him for these last few minutes. I looked at him, even though he made me want to close my eyes and sigh. If he ever fell out of love with me, it would prove my father right, bring up all my oldest and most feared monsters, and I would not recover. So this was a pre-breakup. If he wasn’t going to love me forever, I didn’t want to love him at all. We were a ship in a bottle, and I was going to put us up on a shelf before we broke, freeze the memories in place for the long haul. Now we would be beautiful and young and in love in my memory forever. There was no other option for us. Just ask Nicky.
“So it’s over,” I said into his shoulder. “Wow.” I didn’t even want to breathe, I was so scared of ruining the last lingering magic. And that’s what Nicky was – that’s what this world we’d created was. Our beautiful magical little secret. Again, he reminded me of my books. When I loved a book, I wanted to tell the whole world about it. But when I LOVED a book, when a book got into my bones and rearranged them, I wanted to hide it and keep it my own little secret forever. And he was my new favorite book. My secret.
“Will you remember me?” he asked, sounding so heartbroken it broke mine too. How could I be mad at this? He was delusional.
“Ugh, Nicky. Of course I will.” I swallowed. “I was living in literature before you. It’s like you…stepped off a page and showed me love didn’t just exist in books. Shit, you yanked the dreams right out of my skull and made them real – I’m grateful, even if you’ve ruined books forever.” I smiled. I may have let go of tomorrow, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t hold onto today with everything in me. “Things’ll change, obviously. They’ve got to. That’s how this place works, I think. But I won’t forget you. Even when we’re vintage.”
This stupid perfect boy. We loved each other too much, so much that the love had been interconnected with the need irreparably. Now that we couldn’t tell what was what, I guessed it had to end. I knew there were so many more things I could do to try to keep him – throw myself at his feet, cry and beg and plead, but part of me knew it’d be worthless. His mind had been pushed along to a destination by his family and friends and culture. I just hoped he would survive the cold nights that were probably about to come.
Someone walked by with their dog outside, and even though they could not see us, could not even hear us over the rustle of the wind in the oaks outside, he pulled away a little. So did I. Some battles were unbeatable.
“Just for the record,” he asked soon, “how did you really feel, all along?”
I stared at the generic TV stand, so ashamed I could die. “I think you might be the love of my life,” I said. “You grew me up.”
“Same,” he nodded. “If my world caught on fire, you’re probably the only thing I would reach for.”
“I think I love you beyond reason,” I said, and he just nodded again.
“And that’s the problem,” he said. “This is the truth. When I picture the rest of my life and think about you not being in it, I wanna die. But…I don’t know how to fit you into that life, even though I want to build it around you.”
I nodded, then swallowed. “I was born to meet you,” I said simply, as I rested my hand around the inside of his thigh.
“Why are you crying like that?” he asked, brushing my face with his stubble. People talked about the big bang, but he was so much bigger than the bang. “All smiley and stuff? It’s weird.”
“Because I just saw the kid I was when I met you,” I said, my voice cracking around the edges like a boulder left in the wind and the sun, sacrificed to the elements and the stupid world. “I can see him now. Remember? He was so scared, but he looked at you and he saw…safety, I guess. He saw his only shot. He saw something worth waking up for, you know?” I wiped my eyes, but it didn’t help. “What if I could go back in time and tell him everything that would happen with that boy with the galaxy eyes? That I’d go to Savannah with that boy and I’d meet that boy’s sister and fall in love with that boy? I’d be so proud of everything, but mostly I’d just be proud that I tried. That I was brave enough to put myself on the line and get my heart broken. That I let you become the best part of my life.”
He didn’t say anything, just focused all the beauty of those galaxy eyes on me.
&
nbsp; “Oh, and Nicky?” I asked quietly. “Before I forget, take these. I want you to keep them.”
I rolled over, reached into my bag, and then gave him the first picture I’d ever taken of him at the gym, along with a Polaroid I’d taken the previous morning of a chandelier in a hipsterrific furniture store. On the bottom of the second one, I’d written what he’d told me in our hidden library that day. There’s nothing wrong with chandeliers, it said in black Sharpie, even though there apparently was.
He started to reach out, then stopped. “But someone might see your name,” he said, and then left them on the bed without further comment.
15
We drove home holding hands. The way we’d left Savannah was so sloppy and haphazard, I ended up losing or forgetting half the clothes I’d brought, along with my cologne and my grandpa’s ring. I didn’t even want to think about any of that yet, though. He dropped me off and cried openly when I got out, and then he just stared at me. When you loved someone they became better looking – their molecules aligned perfectly, their pores closed up, their crooked noses straightened. So he was beautiful even when he cried, and that’s how I remembered him. And then he drove away and it was over. Just like that.
The next day, I woke up and checked his Facebook. His account didn’t come up. He’d blocked me. So I tried to Snapchat him. He’d deleted me. Then I brought up his Instagram, or tried to. He’d unfollowed me and turned his profile private. Just as we’d met – digitally – so he removed me from his world. He’d ghosted me. It was almost like he’d never existed at all. And so I did the same thing to him – I scrubbed him from digital existence. I deleted his email address, every photo of him, every photo of us. And soon he was gone from my life, too. He vanished.
