The Best Man

by Annabelle Costa

  Kirby is kissing me back.

  I think maybe that asshole mugger killed me and I’ve gone to heaven.

  Chapter 35: Kirby

  John is kissing me.

  If someone told me a few hours ago that this is how my night would end up, I wouldn’t have believed it. I mean, yes, I knew I liked John. Maybe even more than “like.” But I’m engaged. And the idea that he’d just lean forward and kiss me like this when I’m engaged to his best friend is nothing short of insane. I’m not like that—I swear it. I’m loyal to a fault. I’ve never cheated on a guy in my entire life.

  Yet somehow it’s happening.

  And oh my, it’s a nice kiss. John acts like he’s a pariah when it comes to women, but you don’t get to be this good at kissing without a little practice. Or maybe it’s us. Maybe we just have the right kissing chemistry. Maybe it’s because both of us have wanted this for so long.

  I move from the couch onto John’s lap and things get a little more hot and heavy. He can’t move his fingers, but he’s using the balls of his hands to press me against him, and my fingers are all up in his thick, dark hair. I can’t get enough of kissing this man. I never want to stop. Ever.

  “Stop,” John gasps, his lips pulling away from mine.

  At first, I think I’m imagining things. Why is he telling me to stop? This is the best kiss I’ve ever had in my life. And I have to believe it’s pretty damn good for him too.

  “Ted…” he manages.

  Ted.

  Oh God, what have I done?

  I look at John for a moment, at the slight slant of his dark brown eyes. Everyone has been telling me for months that I rushed into things with Ted, that he might not be the right guy for me. I brushed everyone off, never believing it could be true. Until now.

  Everyone was right. Ted was never right for me. We rushed into things because we were both ready to settle down, but Ted was never The One. He’s not mine and I’m not his. It’s so obvious now. Now that I’ve found John.

  “I can’t do this to Ted,” he says, more firmly this time.

  And that’s when I realize that he’s absolutely correct. Ted is coming here in a few days to interview for a job so that he can be closer to me. Because he wants me to be his wife. I made a commitment to him, and now I’m somehow getting swept up in… well, I’m not even sure what this is. Yes, it was an amazing kiss. But I’m not a cheater. I’m certainly not the sort of woman who would cheat on a guy with his best friend. What kind of bitch does something like that? I feel my cheeks turning pink, wondering what John must think of me. I scramble off his lap, getting up on my feet.

  “You’re right,” I say.

  “Yeah.” He lowers his eyes. “This was… a mistake.”

  “Right.” I nod, even though it pains me. “It was a mistake.”

  “Glad we’re in agreement.”

  “Total agreement.” I nod again. “Huge mistake.”

  John gives me a wounded look, and then I think maybe I went too far. Especially since I’m still not sure it was a mistake at all. It was the best kiss of my life—how could that be a mistake?

  “You should probably call a taxi now,” John says in a clipped tone that makes me think I probably did go too far. “It’s late.”

  “Right,” I agree.

  I call a taxi using his phone, and we spend the remaining ten minutes together basically avoiding talking to each other or even looking at one another. And for the entire taxi ride home, I think about what John’s lips felt like on mine.

  Chapter 36: John

  Why did I tell Kirby to stop kissing me?

  I spend the better part of an hour beating myself up for that one. She’s the girl of my dreams, and for some reason, at least in that moment, she wanted me. So why the hell would I tell her to stop? Did I suffer brain damage when I fell out of my chair?

  True, I didn’t want to do that to Ted. That was definitely part of it.

  But there was something more. I was worried that Kirby didn’t really want to be kissing me. That she wasn’t actually attracted to me. I mean, Christ, how could she be? She’s gorgeous and I’m… me. She’s undoubtedly missing Ted a lot, and because she’s spending so much time with me, she’s getting mixed up. She thinks she wants me when she really wants him. And I didn’t want to be around when she realized that herself.

  Thinking about Kirby distracts me from the pain of getting ready for bed. And it’s painful—that’s no joke. But I’ve got to go to bed. I don’t even bother trying to get undressed. I manage to get my shoes off, and that’s all I can manage.

  I dream about Kirby all night. I can’t remember most of it, but in my dreams, I don’t push her away. I let her kiss me.

  In my dreams, I’m not always in a wheelchair. These days, it’s fifty-fifty. Whenever I have a dream where I’m not disabled, it’s good in some ways because it’s a break—even though I always wake up feeling frustrated. During my dream in which I’m kissing Kirby, I’m not disabled. I’m able to touch her everywhere, unbutton her shirt, and fuck her with a completely functional dick.

  Waking up is the biggest punch in the gut it’s ever been.

  The first thing I do every morning when I wake up is pull myself into a sitting position in bed so that I can transfer into my wheelchair. It’s not the easiest thing in the world, but I’ve got the rail of my bed to help me so I can manage. Usually. But this morning, the second I put weight on my left shoulder, the pain is so bad, my eyes start to water. It feels like there’s a knife jammed in my shoulder. It’s dizzying, almost nauseating pain. I fall back against the bed, trying to breathe through the pain.

  Fuck. It’s even worse than yesterday.

  I lie in bed for a minute, contemplating my situation. Then I try again, to see if my shoulder has magically healed itself in sixty seconds. It hasn’t.

  So this is the situation: I can’t fucking sit up. I can’t get into my goddamn chair. I can’t get dressed. I am completely and totally fucked.

  My options are limited at this point. I’ve got the number of a home health service in my phone and I know that I’ve got to call them. I need help, if only temporarily. I’ve got to give my shoulder a rest.

  The woman who picks up the phone is far too cheerful. “How may I help you?” she chirps.

  I put the phone on speaker and rest it next to my head. “I need to request a home health aide,” I explain. “I need someone at night and in the morning. For maybe… a week.”

  “Is this for you, sir?” she asks.

  “Uh, yes,” I say.

  “And what services do you require?”

  “I’ll need help getting in and out of my wheelchair,” I say. “And I guess with getting dressed, and… and bathing.” I also might need some help with my bowel program, but I can’t bring myself to say that.

  “Are you disabled, sir?”

  “I just said I was in a wheelchair, didn’t I?” I snap. What the hell is wrong with this woman? I don’t have the patience for this. My goddamn shoulder is throbbing.

  “I’ll need to collect some more information,” the woman explains.

  Even though I’ve used this service before, it seems like they’re starting from scratch based on the sheer number of questions they ask me. Thank God they at least retained my health insurance information because I don’t know how I’d manage to get my wallet.

  Then once all my information has been collected, I wait. The woman puts me on endless hold. Christmas music is blasting on the other line, for some reason. It’s nowhere near Christmas, for fuck’s sake.

  “All right, Mr. Yang,” the woman’s voice says, interrupting a rock and roll version of Jingle Bells. “We’ve got you set up for services starting tonight.”

  “And what about this morning?” I ask.

  “I’m afraid we don’t have anyone available right now,” she explains. “The soonest we could have someone at your house would be about one o’clock.”

  I glance at my clock. It’s barely eight in th
e morning. “Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do—lie here in my goddamn bed for the next five hours?”

  The woman doesn’t respond right away. I shouldn’t have yelled at her. But I’m mad as hell and I’ve got to take it out on someone. And what am I supposed to do?

  I make another attempt to sit up in my bed and the pain is too much to power through. No matter how badly I want to get up on my own, I can’t do it. I can’t. I’m literally trapped in this bed.

  “Sir,” she finally says, “this is the best we could do on such short notice. If you’re in a situation where you’re going to need help, you have to give us advance notice.”

  “Right,” I mutter.

  “Now do you want someone to come at one?”

  “No,” I say. “I’ll figure it out.”

  I have to figure this out. Staying in bed is not an option, and not just because it would suck to be stuck in bed for the next twelve hours. For starters, I’ve got my urine bag hanging off the bed and it’s got to be close to full by now. If that starts backing up, it will kick off my autonomic dysreflexia, which means my blood pressure will shoot up and I’ll probably have stroked out by the time the nighttime caregiver gets here.

  So I do what any guy in his thirties would do when he’s got nobody else to help him. I call my mom.

  My parents live about twenty minutes away, and that’s entirely intentional. They’ve got a key to my apartment, and it’s comforting to know that they can come help me in a pinch if I need it. Or should I say, my mom will come help me. My dad’s a grumpy bastard.

  I grab my phone off the nightstand. For one scary moment, it nearly slips through my fingers and I think about how awful it would be if I dropped it on the floor. Then I’d really and truly be fucked. But I manage not to drop the damn thing. I select my parents’ number from my list of favorite numbers, and after a few rings, I hear my father’s voice, “Hello?”

  “Hi,” I say. “It’s me.”

  “Me?” Dad barks. “Who is ‘me’?”

  He hates it when I answer that way, but I always forget. “It’s John.”

  Dad grunts. “What do you need?”

  I’m not sure why he always assumes that I need something when I call. Although I guess he’s right. I do need something. “Is Mom around?”

  He grunts again and drops the phone without another word. I wait for a minute, growing anxious that maybe she’s out. My father won’t come help me. Only my mother would. I feel a flood of relief when my mother’s voice comes on the other line, “Johnny? What’s wrong?”

  “I hurt my shoulder.” I’m not going to tell her what happened—it would only make her panic. “I got a health aide to come for the rest of the week, but I’m sort of… I’m stuck in bed. Do you think that you could come…?”

  It’s hard to say the words. After all six years, you’d think it would be easier. Hey, Mom, I need you to help me get out of bed. I need you to help me get dressed. I need you to empty out my bag of piss.

  But of course, my mother can and has done all these things, no problem. When I first got injured, I lived at home for close to a year while I got stronger in the muscles I could use and got more comfortable with my new body. But when I came home from rehab, my mom did a lot for me. Not only did she help me with transfers and dressing my lower body, but she’d help me with my bowel program and get me in and out of the shower.

  Having my mother help me with that kind of intimate stuff was a situation I desperately wanted to escape. The last thing you want when you’re a twenty-five-year-old man is to have your mommy undress you and get you into the shower. And talk about confidence-killers when it came to the opposite sex. I couldn’t imagine admitting to a woman that my mother had to help me with such basic things. Hey, baby, you like this shirt my mom dressed me in?

  “Of course, honey,” Mom says. “We’ll be right over.”

  The word “we” irks me. I don’t want her to bring my father with her. If he comes, he’s just going to give me the same look he always does, like he’s disappointed in me for being crippled. He’s had two knee replacements and got back on his feet after both of those, so why can’t I do it? He strongly believes it’s one of those mind over matter deals. I’m only in the wheelchair because I’m lazy.

  I lie in bed to wait for my mother to come. While I’m waiting, my phone buzzes and I see that it’s a text from Kirby: Can we talk?

  No, we can’t. The last thing I need right now, when I’m stuck in bed and feeling at my worst, is her fumbling explanation of how she made a horrible mistake last night and let’s forget it ever happened. Yes, I get it. It’s forgotten.

  Of course, it’s not really forgotten. I wish more than anything in the world that she could be here right now with me in bed, kissing me, her warm body close to mine. And it’s not just my loneliness. I don’t want any girl. I want her.

  But I’ll never have her. And she wouldn’t really want me anyway.

  I mean, fuck. Look at me. I can’t even get out of my fucking bed.

  I still haven’t replied to Kirby when I hear the lock turning on my apartment door and my parents coming inside. They’re definitely both there, because I can hear my father complaining. He’s nearly eighty now and the crankiest old man you’ll ever meet. He was born in Beijing and came to this country with his wife when they were in their early twenties. They had three children, and then when his wife was about forty years old, she died of breast cancer. He met my mother, who was fifteen years younger and liked him for reasons I still can’t fathom, and they had me.

  “Knock knock!” My mother calls out as she comes into my bedroom without actually knocking. She wasn’t great at respecting my privacy when I was an able-bodied teenager, and she’s really shit at it now that I’m a quadriplegic. It’s like it doesn’t occur to her that I might want any privacy. Then again, I called her to come here and help me get out of bed, so I can’t blame her.

  My mother stands in front of my bed, assessing the situation. She’s in her early sixties, but she’s still what you’d call a MILF. She’s kept her hair blond instead of letting it go gray, and she’s slim with tits that my friends have been ogling for years. Yeah, I’m the guy with the hot mom. I’m over it by now.

  “Johnny, where’s your lift?” she asks.

  Back at home, I used to have a Hoyer lift. That’s one of those lifts that cradles my body in the air so that I can be lifted from my chair to the bed and vice versa without much physical exertion from the person helping me. I fucking hate those lifts. I know it’s not realistic to think that as a quad that I’d be able to avoid them entirely forever, but still, I hate them. I got rid of mine years ago.

  “I don’t have it anymore,” I tell her.

  Mom lets out an annoyed huff. Well, sorry. She knows she can transfer me without the lift.

  After my mother has helped me get my pants on, I’ve got to get into my wheelchair. Mom helps me to sit up, then I wrap my arms around her neck. I brace myself against her, she grabs onto my pants, and then moves me into the seat of my chair in one quick movement. Then she goes behind me and grabs me under my armpits to help me straighten my butt out in the chair. I arrange my own feet on the footplate. At least I can do that much.

  Goddamn shoulder. Goddamn mugger.

  It even hurts when I try to wheel my chair. It feels like a knife is jabbing me in the ball of my shoulder. Mom looks down at me and shakes her head.

  “Johnny,” she says, “I thought you were going to get yourself a power wheelchair.”

  I want to tell her to mind her own damn business, but she just helped me to get dressed and out of bed, and also, I’m not the kind of dick who says that to my own mother.

  “I’m okay,” I say instead. “Really.”

  Except I don’t protest when she wheels my chair into the living room for me. And then I hate myself.

  My father is sitting on the couch when my mother brings me into the living room, but he immediately stands up when he sees me, probably so that
he can lord his height over me. Prior to my accident, I was five full inches taller than my father. I was six foot one to his five foot eight. Now in my chair, I always have to look up at him.

  I look at my father’s soldier-perfect posture and instinctively try to sit up straighter in my wheelchair. My shoulder reminds me that’s not a great idea. I’m going to have to slouch.

  “What’s the problem this time, John?” my father demands to know. He still has a heavy accent. “What do you need us to rush over here so early in the morning?”

  “I hurt my shoulder,” I mumble.

  “He needs a power wheelchair,” Mom volunteers.

  “Another wheelchair?” My father looks aghast. “He shouldn’t even be in the one he’s got!”

  Here we fucking go again…

  “Your brother Nelson, he ran a marathon last week!” Dad informs me. “And he’s over ten years older than you are! A man in his forties and he ran a marathon. You don’t even walk.”

  Calling Nelson my “brother” is a stretch. He’s my half-brother. My three half-siblings have joined in solidarity to never speak to me or my mother. Nelson doesn’t spit on me when he sees me, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call him my brother. And it doesn’t make me like him any better to have his accomplishments thrown in my face.

  That’s my father for you though.

  I don’t want to start fighting with him, so I just shrug.

  “Are you still doing the physical therapy?” Dad presses me.

  “No,” I say.

  “How come?”

  “Because I don’t need it,” I say. Although I might need it after this shoulder injury.

  “Don’t need it!” my father roars. “You’re in a wheelchair. You should be doing the physical therapy until you walk again! You are lazy! You know how hard I worked in the physical therapy after I had my knees replaced?”

  I don’t know what part of me not even being able to get out of bed on my own this morning my father didn’t get. He genuinely thinks I’m in a wheelchair because of laziness on my part. Back when I first got injured, I’d have screaming fights with him over it. Why aren’t you trying to walk, John? Are you doing any walking today, John? Now I just tune him out. As long as I don’t have to live with the guy, I can deal with his shitty attitude.