by Lina Langley
The moment I see his face, everything clicks into place. I don’t want to go before I talk to him. I don't want to go at all, and that's probably the reason I was so scared. I always knew, I was just too afraid to do anything about it.
“You were right,” I say. “You were right about everything and I’m sorry.”
“Alex…”
I can feel the tears welling up in my eyes and sliding down my cheeks, hot and humiliating. “I shouldn’t have taken you for granted,” I say. “I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did. I’m sorry. You deserve better. And I get it, I get it if you never want to see me again, but I want to stay. If it’s for you, I want to stay.”
He takes a deep breath, his eyes closed. “I’m going to LA,” he says.
“Then I’ll go with you,” I say. “If you want me to. Fuck seminary. I want to stay with you, Cyrus.”
He looks me up and down, a smile on his face. “What about God?”
“God is still going to be there,” I say. “Even if I’m not a priest.”
“Alex, I don’t know—”
I stop him from talking by wrapping my arms around him and kissing him, pressing my lips against him. He kisses me back until we’re both breathless. I let him go and look into his eyes. “Cyrus,” I say. “Seminary is not my destiny. You’re my destiny. I was just too afraid of losing you to see it. I love you and I’ll prove it to you every day, if I have to.”
He stares at me, then slowly, very slowly, he smiles. “You’ll have to,” he says. “And we’re leaving in two days.”
I nod. “Of course,” I say. “Let me just tell Lawrence I need to get my shit out of his car.”
He grabs my hand as I start to walk away, pulling me closer to him. “Wait,” he says.
“What?”
He kisses me on the lips again, his touch sending a shiver down my spine. “Nothing,” he replies. “I’m just glad you’re home now.”
“Yeah,” I say as he wipes the tears from my eyes. “I am too.”
THE END
Author’s Note
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About the author
Lina Langley is a first-generation immigrant. She currently lives in sunny Florida and spends her time slashing hot strangers while getting coffee.
Her past is haunted by spies, thieves, tyrants, and murderers. A resident of the world, she’s lived on three different continents. She first saw a radiator when she was twenty-two years old, and one time she followed a cat instead of going to a house party.
She likes to read, watch TV, and play video games when she’s not developing them. The rest of her free time is spent recreating her own characters in The Sims and hoping that people don’t look at the back end of her games.
You can email her: [email protected]
Chapter SIX
I think I should be excited about this, but after everything that has happened, I can’t bring myself to be excited about my future. I think I’m supposed to be running toward this, not away from what’s happening in my life, but maybe that’s a good enough reason to move away.
I go reach for my phone to call Cyrus, but I can’t call him. I can’t bother him after what I’ve just put him through.
I want to make everything okay between us, but I don’t think I can. I don’t think I’m going to be able to fix any of this, except by leaving. I take my phone out and text Cyrus.
I’m sorry, I text. I didn’t mean to upset you.
It’s okay, he replies. I just want some space, okay?
I want to text him that I love him and I hope he feels better, but I don’t think that’s going to make things better between us. If anything, it’s probably going to make things worse. I take a deep breath and find that I’m getting choked up thinking about what’s going to happen between us. I just want things to be okay.
I look at my phone. My other top contact is Lawrence. Any other time, I wouldn’t even think about calling him for this, especially not on a Sunday. But right now, there’s nobody else I can call. Montgomery… well, fuck, I don’t even know where to start with him.
And Cyrus… I don’t want to think about having lost Cyrus, but it’s very possible that I have. I press the call button, my heart in throat, and wait for it to ring. It rings, once, twice, three times, then it goes to voicemail.
Good. I don’t even know what I would say to him and that was clearly a lapse in judgment. I’m going to have a nap and try to sleep the rest of the day away. Before I can, my phone starts ringing.
It’s Lawrence. Fuck, he probably thinks it’s some sort of emergency. I don’t think “I’ve fucked up my friendships” count as one. I decide to tell him that I called him by accident.
“Hello?”
“Alejandro?”
He sounds far too concerned for me not to tell him the truth. “Hello,” I say. “Sorry to call you on Sunday. I…”
“It’s okay,” he says. “I was only catching up on my reading, which I didn’t want to do anyway. I would much rather talk to you.”
I laugh. “I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “I mean, it’s okay now, until I start complaining.”
He chuckles. “Okay,” he says. “What’s wrong?”
“I—I don’t know,” I say. “Drama?”
He doesn’t say anything. He’s waiting for me to keep talking, but the longer we talk about this, the more stupid I feel.
“It’s… I decided to go,” I say. “To seminary.”
There’s a long pause before he speaks. “Good,” he says. “I’m glad.”
I close my eyes. I know m
y voice is breaking when I speak again. “I don’t know if this is what I’m supposed to do.”
“Do you want to meet up?”
I swallow. “Would you mind?”
“No,” he replies. “My plans are all—you seem upset. Would you like to go get coffee in, I don’t know, twenty minutes?”
I smile despite myself. “Yes,” I say, then realize that it’s very likely I’m going to break down in front of a bunch of random people. I don’t want to break down in front of a bunch of random people. I don’t want to break down in front of Lawrence, either, but I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to happen. “Wait. Can I—can I go over to your, uh, office? I would rather go somewhere private.”
“Sure,” he says. “But I’m not at the office. Come to my house, if you’re comfortable with that?”
I swallow. “I don’t want to impose.”
“No, you wouldn’t be imposing,” he says. “You would be making my day.”
“Okay,” I reply. “That would… I would like that, I think.”
“Good,” he says. “I’ll see you soon, Alejandro.”
CONTINUE
He lives over the bridge. I’ve never asked him where he lives before because it seemed completely irrelevant, but most people who work on the island live on the island, so it surprises me. By the time I get there, I’m soaked in sweat, because I’ve biked all the way here. I had a lot of anxious energy to burn, so I’m not surprised that I look like shit when I get there. I pull into a little road off the side of the main street.
This is beautiful, very green. I look at my phone, which says I’m in the right place.
I shield my eyes from the sun and look at Lawrence’s house. It’s large and beautiful, all dark green outside.
I walk toward the door and knock softly. He answers immediately. He’s wearing jeans and a dark blue shirt, his hair wet with no product in it. He looks younger than he ever has. I smiled as he gestures for me to come inside. The outside of the house might have looked like something from a movie, but the inside looks like something from a fairytale. Half the walls aren’t even walls, they’re windows. Even the ceiling looks like it’s made of glass.
Next to the wall, everything is wood-paneled, and there are bookshelves full of books. They’re everywhere. I have no idea how Lawrence has managed to read so many books in his life.
“Hi,” he says. “You can sit anywhere. Would you like a drink?”
I never even thought about siting. “I… wow,” I say.
Lawrence smiles. “You like it?”
“Yes,” I say, looking around. “This is very you.”
That makes him laugh, but there’s something quiet about the way he’s laughing, subdued. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose it is. Considering I live alone, that’s hardly a surprise. Sit down. So, a drink?”
“Water,” I say. “I’m gross.”
He smiles. “Agree to disagree,” he says. He walks off to the kitchen and leaves me there for a bit.
I definitely don’t want to sit down when there is so much to discover here. I think I practically run toward one of the bookshelves. All the books are pristine and very old. After wiping my hands on my jeans to make sure they aren’t too disgusting, I take one out, trace my fingers over the golden spine, and then open it. It smells like it’s old. The print edition page says that it’s from 1913, and I’m too scared to flip the flimsy pages. I put it back and do the same with a different book, which is even older. I wouldn’t read these—because I would be too scared of hurting them—but I think I could spend all night here, smelling their pages, tracing my fingers on the covers.
I hear Lawrence laughs when he comes back. “Are you having a good time?”
I put the book I’m looking at back, my face red. “Shit, sorry.”
“No, don’t be,” he says. “Books are there to be admired, not left behind. It would upset me if you didn’t have any interest in them.”
I smile at him. He hands me a bottle of water and baby wipes. I look at them.
“Baby wipes,” he says. “It seemed like you needed to be cooled down and you seemed to need to speak to someone urgently.”
I shake my head. “No,” I say, wiping my face with the wipe. “I mean, not urgently. Your house is lovely.”
His smile widens. There’s something about his expression that I can’t quite place, but I don’t have time to ask. “Thank you,” he says. “Let’s sit.”
I follow him and sit next to him.
“So what is going on?” he asks, tilting his head slightly.
“I, uh, I said yes,” I reply. “I said yes I would go to seminary.”
“How do you feel about it?” he asks softly.
“I—I don’t know,” I say. “The circumstances to, uh, accept it, were a little complicated.”
He leans back. “Okay,” he says. “Tell me about that.”
I blink. “I, uh, it’s complicated, but basically, I got my friend, I don’t know if he’s my friend, my roommate, out of the drunk tank,” I say. “And then he told me that he had feelings for me, so I called my best friend, and…”
He looks me up and down. “Yes?”
I put my head in my hands and groan. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t even know why… fuck, I should go.”
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay,” he says. “Whatever you’re going through, you shouldn’t have to go through it alone.”
I look at him and smile, my heart flipping in my chest. “The problem is, I feel like… well, one of the problems is that now that I’ve done this, I don’t know if I should have,” I say. “Like I made this decision and it felt like the right decision, but… what if I’m wrong?”
“You could be wrong,” he says. “What would happen if you were?”
I look him up and down. He doesn’t understand, he doesn’t get that I would be giving up everything. I shake my head. “I care about him,” I say, with a humorless chuckle. “I care about them, unfortunately, about them both. And I… I think this is the best thing I could do, pulling away from them.”
He’s watching me, saying nothing.
I can feel the tears streaming down my face. I wipe them with the back of my hand, feeling like an absolute idiot. “I just don’t want to hurt them.”
“Is that why you’re leaving?”
I open my mouth to tell him that it isn’t, that of course that’s not why I’m leaving, but no words are coming out of my mouth. I shake my head and sniffle. “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t—”
“No, don’t apologize,” he says. “It’s okay. You stay here. I’m going to go get something.”
I watch him walk away, my eyes wide. When he comes back, he has a big red binder in one of his hand. He sits down next to me and flashes me a smile.
“I’m going to show you something,” he says.
I try to smile at him. “What is this?”
“A photo album,” he says. He opens the album. The first photo is a picture of a young man who looks slightly familiar, with dark curls that go all the way to his shoulders. His eyes are wide and he’s smiling. There’s a headband pushing his hair back and little beads of sweat covering his skin. He’s not wearing a shirt. It takes me forever to recognize him. “That’s… you?”
“Yes,” he says. “I think I was… two years younger than you here?”
I look at him.
“After the girl I decided not to go to seminary for dumped me, I was certain I’d made a mistake by not going,” he says. “I thought I had wasted a year of my life doing something pointless. I was brokenhearted, of course, but too young and proud to admit it even to myself.”
I continue to watch him as he starts flipping through the pages. It’s hard to reconcile the man that’s sitting in front of me with the one in the pictures, but he does still have the same glint in his eyes.
“So I thought I would go abroad and do missionary work there,” he says. “Except I wasn’t actually qualified
to do any of that and I wanted to go as soon as humanly possible. I didn’t want to wait. Truthfully, I wanted to run away from my feelings.”
“From your ex-girlfriend?”
He shrugs. “I suppose so, but it wasn’t just about her,” he says. “It was about me being certain that I’d made the wrong choice. I didn’t want to be around all the reminders of my poor choices. I scraped some money together and left.”
“You left?”
“Yes,” he says as he starts flipping through the album. “See this? That’s me in China.”
“Wow,” I reply.
He keeps flipping through the album. “And that’s Japan,” he says. “And that’s Korea, and that’s Thailand, and that’s France.”
“France?”
“Long story,” he says. “Beautiful country.”
“Right,” I reply as I continue to look at his pictures. He looks so happy in all of them, so carefree. I don’t think it looks like he’s trying to outrun anything. There is one person that’s in most of them with them, a guy about his age. I can’t tell where he’s from, but he seemed to have appeared in Japan. He’s pale, with black hair and high cheekbones, and sort of looks like he could be a fashion model. “Who is that?”
“Oh, my boyfriend at the time,” he says, flipping the page again. “His name was Asahi. He was great. Here we are in India…”
He keeps talking, but I don’t hear him anymore. I feel like the ground has just been taken from under me and like everything I know about Lawrence was wrong. I knew he was married, I knew he loved his wife, and I always knew I had no chance with him.
I know I shouldn’t act like him dating a guy is a big deal. It’s clearly not a big deal to him, considering how he just told me that. It feels like it’s completely changed my perception of him, however. He stops flipping through pages and looks at me. “Alejandro,” he says softly. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows. His perfectly arched eyebrows, fuck, do people just become sexier when you find out they’re bisexual or something? “Are you sure?”
