by Phil Stamper
But right now that idea lies beyond the constrains of my comprehension.
Before I know it, he’s asleep.
Before I know it, I’m falling asleep too.
Some minutes, or hours or days, later, he sits up and jolts me out of my nap.
“Now I see why you demanded the middle seat,” Ajay says, chiding him.
“Oh, sod off. I know how to pick who’s most comfortable.”
We all chuckle at the line, but my laugh is hollow. I know I’m the most comfortable. I’m the only guy here with extra padding on his chest, and everywhere else for that matter.
I pull my arm around my gut again, and suck it in. My mind flashes back to Pierce’s spontaneous chatter about tuna melts and mayo and fat content and the disgust that was on his face when he said he could never eat the whole sandwich. The same whole sandwich that was residing in my own stomach.
I remind myself that he didn’t mean anything by that, just like he doesn’t mean anything by this. This is just another overreaction by yours truly. Self-sabotage. My body tenses, and I curse each shallow breath for making my stomach stick out more than the last. Megan would call it shutting down, but I don’t care.
I lean against the window again and pretend to fall back asleep.
FIFTEEN
While I rest my head against the window, I plan my next move.
There are two ways he could have meant it. In one, cuddling, in general, is comfortable. He made the “most comfortable” remark flippantly, and it meant nothing. In the other, he meant I was the most comfortable, which means he meant I was overweight, which means he meant I was nothing more than a pillow to him.
I open my eyes.
Option two is ridiculous.
But why can’t I let go of the fear that it’s true? Or that he misspoke. Freudian slip. Which is also probably not what happened. So I take a deep breath and shake off my angst. But it won’t let go. I feel like a wounded bird trying to conceal myself from prey, but the predator isn’t in the car. It’s in me.
When will I ever be free from my own brain?
Somewhere in the middle of my spiral, I realize the car’s slowing to a crawl. Sophie’s peering out the window, and I look around the car for any clue about what’s going on.
Ajay groans. “Why must you insist on taking this road? It’s so far out of the way.”
“Because it’s nice for the Stonehenge virgins,” Dani says, “and it only adds twenty minutes to the drive.”
Pierce palms my knee. I turn to him, slightly confused.
“If you have a camera, you might want to whip it out now.” Pierce points out my window. “Stonehenge is coming up, in all its underwhelming glory.”
“Like, right here?” I ask. “On the side of the road, a couple hours outside of London?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, marks of the oldest civilization ever, treated as normal as seeing, I don’t know, one of your red barns in America.”
“I appreciate the American analogy,” I deadpan.
The car inches over the hill, and rising up in the distance is Stonehenge. It’s literally a bunch of rocks sitting on the side of the road. I know how old they are—over five thousand years—and it’s massively impressive and confusing.
“Here it is,” Pierce says with a laugh. “A very old pile of rocks.”
But when he looks at me, a genuine smile is there. He even leans back to give me a better view. The car inches forward through near-standstill traffic as I survey the megalith, and again, it hits me just how far away I am from my hometown.
“Ah, fine. It’s not all rubbish,” he says, looking back to the site.
His resigned awe brings a smirk to my face. If nothing else, it’s taken me out of my earlier spiral enough for me to enjoy the moment. I shake off some of my worry and grip Pierce’s hand. We stare at the pile of rocks like it is the most wondrous thing in the world.
We get to the cottage just after nine, but the skies have already faded into a stunning Welsh night. I pause a moment to take it in—the smell of grass and trees is the same in Kentucky. The forest spirals around us, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say I was home. It brings me back—the cool night air under a starry sky. Sure, the constellations are different here (I looked it up), but the feeling’s still the same. It’s been a week, but I’m starting to get restless. Eleven weeks left to find something. It’s not nearly enough time.
I’m invited in by the smell of tea. Pierce has already fired up the electric kettle and has made himself a cup. A platter of chocolate-covered biscuits sits on an ornate, antique dining table.
“Dani and Ajay claimed one of the rooms upstairs,” Sophie says. “Pierce took the other. We can share the pullout down here, or …”
She glances in the direction of Pierce.
“Anyone want a cuppa?” he asks. “Earl Grey, chamomile—Twinings brand. It’s the good stuff.”
Sophie looks at me. Pierce looks at me.
“No. Yes.” My gaze darts between the two. “I mean. No tea, thanks. Yes, Sophie, the pullout.”
I set down my bag and run up the stairs to the bathroom to re-collect. That, and to relieve myself after a four-hour drive. Before I step downstairs, I take a peek into the two rooms up here. Ajay sits on his bed, and looks up at me.
“It’s kind of weird to stay in someone’s place, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Not usually. Flat sharing is great, and cheap, and you’re not stuck in hostels.” Ajay points up. “But occasionally you’ll have a two-meter-long picture of the host’s grandchild hanging above your bed.”
I laugh and continue walking through the hallway. Pictures of a family line the wall, and it makes me feel a little weird. The second bedroom up here is much smaller—just a double-size bed fits with a small dresser and not much else. Pierce has been in this room for less than a minute, and the whole place smells like him. It’s impressive. I turn to see a travel-size bottle of cologne on the dresser. When I bring it to my nose, it starts to make sense—he must’ve given himself a spritz before he came back downstairs.
And then his hand is on my shoulder.
He pulls back, gently, and I turn to him. He has a mug of tea in his hand, and he raises it to me.
“Have you actually had tea before? I mean, real, properly steeped tea with milk and sugar?”
“My mom usually microwaves her water and dunks the tea bag in.” I smile. “Is that not how you do it?”
He throws his head back, sloshing some of the tea on the floor. “Your mum is evil. Americans are the worst.”
“I’m joking. My mom may be a coffee convert, but she is Irish after all.” I roll my eyes. “I did a ton of research on how to fit in here, and I came across this three-thousand-word rant by some Brit about how Americans ruin tea. I thought I’d test the waters. Turns out all British people are just as intense.”
He brings the tea to my lips. The tan liquid rises toward me, and I think this is an intimate moment where I should be sensual and turned on, but I’m really just worried about him burning my face with this hot water.
But he’s careful about it. He presses the rim of the mug to my lips, and he tips it toward me, slightly, until the liquid meets my mouth. I take in a sip. He pulls away.
It’s warm, comforting. A hint of that bitter, earthy tea flavor cuts through, but it’s softened with a brush of sweetness. It’s something I could get used to.
He sets the mug down on the dresser and puts his arms around my neck. He looks up at me, and we stand there like we’re about to get taken out of a high school dance for pressing our bodies too closely together. And I kind of want to sway back and forth, to dance with him. To redo my one prom night and take him. He’d look damn good in a tux.
My breaths get heavy, and he puts his head on my chest.
“I know how to pick who’s most comfortable.”
It echoes through my mind, and I can’t get it out. I can’t let this moment pass, but I can’t put my guard down. I can’t let him
hurt me when I’m hurting myself enough as it is.
I gently push him off me, and he looks into my eyes. And I get lost in his, which is a supremely cliché thing to say, but have you ever actually looked at someone’s eyes? I refuse to believe anyone else has eyes like his, shades of brown and green and a million new colors in between.
I’m falling deep, and he’s not stopping me. I don’t have anyone to tell me what to do. Do I kiss him? Do I stay with him? How do I stop myself from getting hurt? Why is there not a guidebook, an easy resource I can google to tell me how to rationalize what I’m feeling? Help me help me he’s too cute and too nice and his lips are too soft and I can’t I can’t but maybe I can.
I bring my lips to his, and I fall.
He closes the door. He presses into me with such force that I step backward. I take small steps back, knowing what lies behind me. But I don’t want to stop. I pull his face closer, and he wraps his arms around my waist. Then I fall, this time literally, onto the bed.
I lean back, elbows propping me up on the bed. He stares at me in consideration. Is he trying to read me? The messages my face might send could range from “I very much like you as a friend” to “Take me now.” Though I don’t exactly know what the latter would mean in this context.
“What’s going on in that head of yours?”
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“Tell me. You look freaked, but excited.”
“Pierce, I—I don’t know. I can’t explain a feeling I’ve never felt.” One I never thought I’d feel. “Aren’t the others waiting for us?”
He shakes his head and sits down next to me. “Don’t think about them. Think about you. Me and you. What do you want?”
It doesn’t take a Google search to figure out what he means. He’s talking about how far I want to go. How many bases. How far we’ll take this tonight. If we’ll ever leave this bedroom. He wants to share this with me, and that’s the most mind-blowing thing I’ve ever experienced, but it feels wrong.
I need to decipher whether it feels wrong because it is wrong, or because it’s how I’ve been raised. Or if I’ve seen one too many movies where person A gets screwed over by person B because B was fucking around but A loved B and B didn’t really care about anyone but B.
“Honestly, I don’t know.”
“Yes, you’ve said that.”
I smile. “Can we make out for a couple more minutes? Then go downstairs before people start talking?”
“They’re already talking.”
He leans into me, kisses the side of my nose, which causes chills to explode down my back. Apparently that’s where all my nerve endings have been hiding.
I bring him into me. His lips meet mine. His tongue pushes in, and I let it happen. I taste him, and the taste is so uniquely … Pierce. Tea and sugar. Spearmint lip balm. I breathe him in when he exhales. I can’t remember ever feeling this close to another human before.
We lie back on the bed, lips still locked on to each other, but now I pull him as close to me as possible. A million firsts already, but I want him to be my first everything. I want to be with him, from grabbing lunch between classes to flying to America to meet my parents.
And that’s what stops me.
I want something real. And he might want something real too. But we’re not going to figure that out by mashing faces.
I’m panting. He is too.
My face still stings from his rough beard.
“Let’s go downstairs, now.” I give him a last kiss. “Or I’ll never leave this bed.”
His lips perk up into a smile, and it makes me want to start the whole make-out session all over again, but I can’t. My chest aches to have him close to me. But I can’t I can’t I can’t I won’t. I am stronger than this.
SIXTEEN
There is nothing, in all of life’s existence, more putrid than instant coffee.
But it’s all I can find here. So I choke down a sip, because it’s early. Wales seems brighter than England, but I could be making that up. Sophie’s still on the pullout—that girl can snore—and everyone else is asleep upstairs.
So I’m stuck in the kitchen with my toxic sludge.
My ears perk up as I hear someone come down the stairs, and my heart aches, since I have a one-in-three chance that it’s Pierce.
But it’s not. It’s Dani. Her hair’s a massive, stringy mess, and she’s thrown on the same clothes from last night.
“Morning, love. You all right?”
I nod to the living room, where Sophie’s snoring echoes throughout the house.
“Not great,” I whisper.
As I take another sip and fight the urge to gag, she reaches into the purse she discarded on the kitchen table the previous night. She pulls out a set of keys.
“Can’t believe you’re drinking that. I’m going to the café we saw on the way in—you want to come?”
I smack my tongue against my mouth, begging the taste to get better. Then I slam down my cup.
“Yes. God, yes.”
We leave the cottage and jump in the car. The passenger seat is a whole new world. We’re wildly close to the left curb, and everything feels off. But it also feels exciting, somehow. Different.
“Ready for the most fire opinion of film composers you’ve ever heard?” Dani asks.
I laugh. “Go for it.”
“Ennio Morricone’s a hack.”
“Excuse me?” I fake a gasp. “You saying you didn’t like my piece?”
“Look, I think your performance with Sang was beyond epic. But I’m a film score aficionado, and his are not the best.”
“Right.” I roll my eyes. “Let me guess, you’re a Hans Zimmer fan.”
“Ouch. That physically hurt me.” She gives me a light punch from the driver’s seat. “Love, I know everyone’s here to perform, go on to orchestras and symphonies and tour the world, but I want to be a film composer. Like Carter Burwell—emotional and simple.”
Her hands fly as she talks, her passion bringing a brightness to her face.
“Sure. I really wanted the Twilight score to be better, though,” I admit.
“Those are fighting words. But come on! Carol?”
“I actually don’t know that one. I guess I’m not much of a buff—my mom used to listen to them a lot, so I know a lot of the older ones.”
“Well, you’ll know mine. Guarantee it.”
“I support that,” I say with a smile. “But you have to give oboes the best parts. And hire me to play them, because otherwise I’ll be broke forever.”
We pull into the parking lot of the café. Once we get inside, I take in the sharp, rich smell of coffee. It’s all from an espresso machine, which isn’t my scene, but it’ll have to do.
“Do you have any recordings of your stuff?” I ask.
“I’m working on a piece for piano and flute at the moment. It’s utter crap.”
I grab our drinks and lead us out the door.
“You should play one for your weekly performance. Baverstock would go nuts over that, wouldn’t he?”
“I may’ve hyped my skills a bit too much—pretend I never told you. I want to play in the London Symphony Orchestra! And other totally cliché things!”
I shake my head, and smile all the way back to the cottage.
“So what’s our plan?” I ask as Dani parks in a garage in the middle of the city.
We step out of the car, and I see Pierce and Ajay smile at each other.
“Plan?” Pierce asks. “We’ll walk around, maybe get lunch, definitely find a place to drink.”
“Oh.” I like having a plan. I feel anxious energy flood my body, and I feel flustered. It’s not that I care what we do, but I hate not knowing, and not having a goal. We could go back to the cottage in an hour or fifteen for all I know.
I don’t play things by ear.
“Could we do some touristy stuff?” Sophie asks. “We can drink shit beer anywhere. Cardiff Castle is only in Cardiff.”
Ajay laugh
s. “Fine. Tourism, then we drink.”
As we step out from the garage, it’s clear this is a different place than London. Gone are the flags of England, the red cross on a white rectangle, and up are the official flags of Wales:
A fucking dragon.
This place reeks of coolness. People our age litter the streets, half speaking English, a quarter speaking straight-up gibberish (okay, Welsh), and the last quarter speaking languages from all over the world.
“There’s no shortage of pubs here,” Dani says. “Pubs and fourteenth-century churches. There’s something odd about that.”
“In my hometown, there are seventeen churches and nine bars.” I shrug. “Only a couple thousand people live in this town.”
“Huh,” Sophie says. “I guess this is a universal thing.”
We walk down the street together, a few paces behind the rest. What she said that first night about Pierce’s ex burns deep in my core, warning me of the heartbreak that might come if I keep doing … whatever it is I’m doing with him.
He’s directly in front of me, and I take a second to survey a different view. How can someone’s jeans fit that well? Were they sewn on him?
And yes, technically, this mental conversation makes me a perv, but that is something I can deal with.
Dani’s leading our group, but it’s clear she has no idea what she’s doing. We end up on a pedestrian path in the town square. We meander through stores, until we come across a pasty shop. It’s a lovely concept—any ingredients you’d ever want, stuffed into crisp puff pastry.
I see Pierce’s hesitation from here.
I’m hungry, but I’m not. The thought of eating anything like this (all fat, all butter) makes me feel gross. Well, it sounds great, actually. But Pierce’s insistence on reading the nutrition information on everything he eats is really starting to rub off on me. The sugar content of the chocolate-covered biscuits we all shared last night, for example.
I realize I’ve started glancing at that info myself this week, and it’s kind of hard to get it out of my head. The sodium content in those Kraft Mac & Cheese boxes Aunt Leah got us, the calories in a single bag of crisps.
