The audacity.
“Oh well,” I say, withdrawing my hands. I grab my milkshake and take a few swigs. That kind of dismissive reply—minus the hand squeeze—was not exactly what I was going for, and it didn’t do anything to alleviate my anger or my sadness, but this is probably as good as it’s going to get, so I decide to call it a day. I have a lot of stuff to think about, and I like to think that so has he. “Listen, I have to go. I got plenty of homework and whatnot.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Yeah.” I slide out of our booth.
“You want me to walk you home?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head and picking up my backpack. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”
“All right then.”
I make my way to the door. As I pass Milo behind the counter I nod at him and say, in a final act of passive aggressiveness loud enough for Chris to hear, “He’s paying.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Can I ask you something?”
I’m lying on my bed, reading the tattered copy of Romeo and Juliet that Phil checked out from the library. From the corner of my eye I’ve seen how he’s been looking at me for a minute or two, sitting over at my desk, agonizing over whether he should say something or not.
“If it’s about Romeo and Juliet,” I say, “then I probably don’t know the answer.”
“No, it’s …” His voice trails off.
I lower my book and look at him. “What?”
“Have I done anything wrong?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
He puts his pen down and starts looking for words on my desk, on the floor, in the curtains, and in his hands.
“Well?” I push him.
“You haven’t updated your Wattpad in a while,” he finally says.
He’s right about that. I’ve last updated it on Friday afternoon when I was excited to go to Jack’s party. I haven’t been following up on that, because after everything that’s happened I’m grateful for every second I don’t have to remind myself of the sights and sounds of that night.
“Oh, that,” I say. “That’s not about you, don’t worry.”
“Oh, okay.” He turns back to his notes.
“It’s just … well, let’s just say the party didn’t go the way I expected it, and I’ve had a couple of really miserable days and I didn’t feel like writing it down.”
He nods staring at his notes. “Okay.”
“I think this is the moment where you’re supposed to ask me what happened.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“Ask me already!” I say and throw the book at him. He catches it before it hits him in the face. There’s a brief glimpse of a silly grin before he puts the book aside and looks at me.
“So how was your party?”
“Urgh! Don’t ask!”
“Sorry,” he says, averting his gaze.
The guy’s got no sense of humor whatsoever.
I let out a deep, long sigh, sit up straight, and then I tell him. I tell him every dirty, embarrassing little detail about Jack’s party, my weekend at Alfonso’s, and the chat I’ve had with Chris at the Korova on Monday. Phil listens to my narrative intently and without interruptions. When I’m finished he keeps looking at me as if he’s expecting more.
“That’s it,” I say.
He nods. “Okay.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think you’ve had quite a weekend.”
“No kidding.” He keeps looking at me, and I have to push him for more. “Anything else?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What do you make of Chris’s behavior?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Nothing good. But I never liked him in the first place, so I’m not surprised.”
“Wait,” I say, frowning. “What do you mean you never liked him?”
“I don’t know. There’s something about him. Something disingenuous. Something fake. I don’t trust him.”
I look at him. “I don’t get it. Right from the very beginning you’ve been encouraging me. Even on Friday, just before the party, you told me to go for it if that’s what I want.”
“Yes?”
“Why? I mean … why would you encourage me to pursue my love interest with someone you have such a low opinion of?”
“Chris seemed to make you happy. Or rather, the thought of being with him seemed to make you happy. I wanted you to be happy.”
I frown. “Why would you want me to be happy?”
Phil picks up his pen again and leans over his notepad, almost theatrical, like Jimmy Fallon writing thank you notes. He pretends to write something, but even from my vantage point it’s obvious he’s just doodling. After a long while he finally says in a low voice, “Because I like you?”
I have to let that sink in. It’s not that the substance of his revelation comes as a surprise. From the moment he started following me on Wattpad and reading my stories, he’s been kind and supportive, almost like a friend. He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t like me. I don’t know him very well, simply because does such a good job at not being known, but I know him well enough by now to know he doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.
“Are you finished?”
Startled, I say, “What?”
“We have work to do. Have you finished reading the play?”
I snort. “Very funny. I’ve finished reading the first act.”
“And I thought I was a slow reader. So what do you make of it?”
“It’s all right.” I get up, walk over to the desk and sit in my chair. “I love the archaic language. It’s so poetic, so full of colorful, lush imagery that grabs your soul and lifts it up and makes it soar through the sky, you know what I mean?”
He shrugs. “I wouldn’t know anything about that kind of thing.”
“Okay, wait,” I say. I grab the book and leaf through the pages until I’ve found the passage I’m looking for. “Here, listen to this: ‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.’ That’s beautiful, don’t you think? I wish I could write like that.”
“I like your writing much better than Shakespeare’s.”
I laugh. “Thanks, but … no.”
“At least when I’m reading you, I understand what you’re saying. Shakespeare’s language is so convoluted and not straightforward at all. I mean, why not just say it like it is?”
“Because that would be boring,” I say. “It would be like … if I described one of your drawings as, I don’t know, ‘Two naked dudes in front of a tree.’ It would be an accurate description, but it wouldn’t do it justice, would it?”
“I suppose?”
“Because a picture is worth a thousand words. So by using that amount of imagery in his language, Shakespeare can convey the meaning of thousands of words in just a few lines, and I think that’s awesome.”
Keeping his eyes on the notepad in front of him, he looks the way I feel when a teacher asks me something I don’t know and I’m waiting for the moment when they grow tired of waiting for an answer that will never come and they finally put me out of my misery by moving on and asking someone else so I can look out of the window again and continue watching that squirrel in the tree.
“Anyway,” he finally says. “We should get on with it. We still have a lot of work to do.”
I watch him closely as he continues scribbling words on his notepad, and I wonder if anything I’ve just said means anything to him at all. My glance falls back on the book in my hand, on the passage I’ve quoted to him, and suddenly it dawns on me.
“Is it about the lips?”
He looks up but still avoids my gaze. “I don’t know what you mean,” he says, blushing.
“The thing Romeo says. My lips, two blushing pilgrims. That’s why you don’t like the bit I’ve read to you.”
“I give no care,” he says, shaking his head.
I don’t call him out on his obvious, blatant lie. Instead, I stare at him until he gets so annoyed that he finally looks at me and says, “What?”
“Have you ever tried covering it up?”
“Covering what up?”
“The …” I awkwardly point at my mouth. “… thing.”
He nods. “I once put a potato sack over my head. That worked pretty well.”
I look at his deadpan face for a few moments until we both crack up and laugh.
“Hang on,” I say, getting up. I leave the room and make my way down the corridor to Zoey’s bedroom. I know she’s not home—no one is—so I don’t bother to knock. I head straight for her dresser where she keeps all her beauty stuff. Directly below the wall mirror, her lipsticks are lined up against the wall like soldiers of an ethnically diverse army, their colors ranging from very pale to very bright. I pick one from the middle. There’s a compact mirror lying on the dresser, so I grab that as well before I head back to my room.
“All right,” I say as I slump into my chair, “let’s make those pilgrims blush, shall we?”
Looking at the lipstick in my hand, Phil shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Sure you do.” I lean in to him and remove the lipstick’s cap.
“No,” he says, leaning back.
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Come on,” I say, nudging his leg with my knee. “Don’t you want to know what it looks like?”
He hesitates. I know he’s tempted, but he’s also embarrassed and he probably doesn’t trust me.
“I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
“Only if you do it too.”
“Fair enough,” I say. My own curiosity to see if Phil’s cleft lip can be covered up is stronger than the potential embarrassment of him seeing me wearing lipstick.
He exhales through his nose, his shoulders slumping. I lean in and lift the lipstick to his mouth. The moment it touches his upper lip, he twitches.
“Hold still!” I warn him and grab his chin with my other hand. His skin feels smooth and silky, his peach fuzz having never seen a razor. As I carefully apply the lipstick to his lips, Phil looks at me suspiciously with his warm, brown almond eyes. When I’m done, I lean back and look at the result.
“Wow,” I say. His cleft is still there, obviously, but it’s nowhere near as plain and in-your-face as before, and from twenty feet away he might even pass for an almost normal looking person.
“What?” he asks, apprehensively shuffling in his chair.
I hand him the mirror. “Have a look.”
He takes the mirror and looks at himself for a long time. He squints, he frowns, he moves the mirror so he can look at himself from one side and the other.
“So what do you think?” I ask.
“I think your mirror is broken,” he says. “That looks nothing like me. It’s weird.”
I raise an eyebrow at him. “Weirder than before?”
“No,” he says, still examining himself in the mirror.
“It only looks weird to you because you’re not used to it. You should do this more often. It looks good on you.”
He takes one last look at himself, then he puts down the mirror and picks up the lipstick. “Okay, now you,” he says and leans in to me.
Phil is very concentrated as he paints my lips, his look focused and wrapped up in his task. His grip on my chin is soft and gentle although his fingers remind me of Alfonso’s. Their skin feels coarse and dry, as if he’s doing hard manual labor all day, yet his hand is an artist’s hand, deft and nimble, moving the lipstick across my lips like a paintbrush across the canvas.
“Done,” he finally announces, putting the cap back on the lipstick.
I pick up the mirror and have a good look at myself. The contrast between the color of my lips and rest of my face is not as sharp as with Phil and his olive skin, but it’s still obvious. Phil was right, this is weird, even when there’s no cleft to cover up. I put the mirror away and look at Phil. We stare at each other for a long time. After a while, I can’t help but start smiling.
“What?” he asks.
“We look so silly,” I say.
He shakes his head. “You look pretty.”
I feel compelled to return the compliment, but I’m not going to lie to him. “You look good.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I think you do, actually.”
We keep looking at each other, and all of a sudden I’m feeling dazed and confused, and before I even know what’s getting into me I feel myself leaning in to him, slowly, cautiously, closer and closer until our lips finally touch and we engage in an awkward but tender, spine-tingling kiss. His lips feel lush and warm and surprisingly … normal. If I didn’t know about his cleft lip, there would be no way of telling just from kissing him.
Losing myself in the heat of the moment, I gently pry his lips apart with my tongue. As our tongues touch and perform a clumsy mating dance, a dam breaks, and I’m swept off my feet and washed away in a torrent of tender passion. Phil exhales through his nose deeply, slowly, almost coming close to a little moan. It’s possibly the sexiest sound I have ever heard, and in this unexpected upheaval of emotions I’m thinking the outrageous thought that on a scale from one to ten, where one is kissing a pig and ten is kissing Chris, kissing Phil is a a twenty-two.
When after a minute or ten or an hour—who can tell?—our lips part and I open my eyes, we’re both taking long deep breaths through our open mouths. My eyes are seeking his, but he seems to be looking at some imaginary point on my chest, his peachy pink lips glistening with our saliva. His hands are resting on his thighs. I reach out and touch one of them, very carefully because I’m afraid he might pull it back, but he doesn’t. The moment my fingers touch the back of his hand he raises it, and our fingers interlace. It almost feels as if he’s trying to pull me under again, and I’m willing to let myself go, so I lean in to him again for another kiss. Our lips touch again, and this time it’s his tongue that’s impatiently seeking its way into my mouth. Our second kiss, less clumsy and more passionate than the first one, is becoming a force of nature, a force so powerful as to shake, rattle and roll the world around us to the point where it makes the floorboards outside my room creak.
Wait …
What.
No.
No!
* * *
When I release myself from our kiss and turn my head, I look straight at Greg standing in the open door, holding his phone in front of his face, the camera lens pointing straight at Phil and me. Now that he has caught our attention, he no longer has to hold himself back, so he bursts out laughing.
Without even thinking about it, I jump up from my chair and rush towards Greg. He turns on his heel and runs, still laughing as I follow him down the hall.
“Get back here, you little piece of trash!” I shout after him, my voice cracking.
Taking three steps at a time, he tumbles down the stairs. At the bottom I’ve almost caught up with him. When I’m only an arm’s length away from him he makes a sharp turn left into the bathroom. I hit the door just as he slams it shut and turns the lock. I pound the door with my fist while rattling the doorknob with my other hand.
“Open up!”
“No!”
“Gregory Joseph Dunstan, if you don’t open that goddamn door right now, I promise I’ll kick it in and then may God have mercy on your sorry little ass!”
“The joke’s on you, asshole. There is no God!”
“Open the door!”
“The moment you come near me, the video will go out to two hundred Facebook friends and five hundred Twitter followers and then everyone will see what a faggot you are! I got my finger on the button, Matt, so you better back off!”
Irate, I slam both my hands against the door three times. “If you do that, I will destroy you, I swear to God!”
“Back off!”
Behind me, I hear Phil’s footsteps coming down the stairs. When I turn to look, I see him hurrying toward the front door. Before he reaches it, the door opens and Zoey walks in. Phil rushes past her.
“Phil!” I call after him. “Wait! Phil!”
He’s not turning back.
Zoey shuts the door and walks up to me, the look on her face puzzled and alert.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
I pound and kick the bathroom door again. “Open up, Greg!”
“Piss off, Matt!”
I keep pounding the door. “Greg!”
“Matthew,” Zoey says, pulling me away from the door. “Will you calm down a sec and tell me what the hell is going on?”
Panting heavily, I look at her. “The little vermin’s got a video of us kissing, and he’s threatening to post it online.”
“Us?” Zoey says, frowning. “You mean—” She looks at the front door where Phil’s just left, then back at me, “—oh, wow. That’s an unexpected twist.”
“I’ll kill him,” I say. “I swear to God, Zoey, I’ll kill him.”
“No, you won’t. Calm down.” She turns to the bathroom door and knocks. “Greg? It’s me. Open up!”
“No way!”
“You can’t stay in there forever. Mom and Dad will be home soon.”
Greg remains defiant. “Fine,” he says. “Can’t wait to hear Matt explain to them why he’s besieging the bathroom and waiting to pounce on me!”
Zoey turns to me, shrugging. Then her sympathetic look turns into a frown. “Are you wearing lipstick?”
“Long story,” I say with a sigh.
“He snuck into your room and stole your lipstick!” it sounds from behind the door. “And then he painted his lips and made out with his retard boyfriend!”
“He’s not a retard! You’re a retard, you stupid little zitface!”
“At least I’m not a faggot!”
I’m about to kick in the door, but Zoey holds me back. “All right, you really need to calm down now, okay?” She tones her voice down to a whisper. “I get that you’re upset, but this is clearly not working. He’s never gonna come out as long as you’re out here.”
Cupid Painted Blind Page 21
