I’d signed up for seven classes this semester and had to get special permission from the Dean of Students to do it. I didn’t breathe a word about my brother dying to anyone. I’d bombarded myself, and the schoolwork was intense. The magnitude of my assignments was insane, and they left me with no time or energy to do anything other than school and workouts in between extreme late-night study sessions. The library closed at midnight, and I was usually the last one out, waving good night to the librarians. During that time, I’d had maybe five conversations with West, and half of them revolved around whether or not we needed more milk in the fridge.
But now the semester was done, and the ache in my chest that had disappeared, or maybe just shuffled into the background while I focused on work, was awake and cutting at me again. I sat on the back porch of our small house and stared at the neighbor’s yard across the way. We kept our lawn okay, but they had a chain-link fence around theirs, and they hadn’t mowed the backyard in maybe a decade. There were rambling rose bushes, and tiger lily stalks poked out of the mess, though they weren’t blooming yet.
The misty cold soaked into my bones as I sat there on the cement stoop, but I didn’t care. I had my sweater sleeves shoved up to my elbows, and the ass of my jeans got damp. A cup of coffee steamed beside me. My fingers twitched and tingled, and I had three books piled up next to my coffee mug, all old psych books of Carter’s I’d picked off the shelf in the living room.
My brother’s book was in there, the crowning achievement that might have launched his career into the stratosphere, if he hadn’t gotten sick. He’d had to pass up lecture tours and a promotion. That book was supposed to be his big break, and I didn’t find out about it until he was in the hospital. He’d had to give up a lot of things during that time when he fought for his life and lost.
Carter was into connections, which I thought was a strange topic. He wanted to know all about how humans formed attachments with the important people in their life. I hadn’t read the book, just the blurb on the back, but it made sense he’d want to know that. I never felt like people were as attached to me as I was to them, except maybe Carter and West. I loved Mom and Dad with all my heart, but they were able to set me aside when Dad got… weird with me. I thought for a little while I loved Teddy, but when I stopped hanging out with him, he replaced me with someone else, even though he would never commit to being my boyfriend. I’d seen them canoodling around campus, Teddy’s tongue jammed down some other guy’s throat, all while he kept texting me on the sly.
I ignored him.
I wasn’t mad, exactly, when I saw Teddy and his new guy together in a cutesy photo he’d plastered across every single one of his social media accounts. It was just strange to think about someone else being boyfriend material, and what that said about me. Was it me Teddy couldn’t connect to? Did I not connect to him properly?
“Or maybe I’m just going batshit crazy,” I grumbled, and finally picked up my coffee mug. I drank deeply and contemplated and stared at my books and couldn’t make myself do anything at all. I felt totally drained. So I finished my coffee, picked up my books, saluted the slate-gray sky with one middle finger, and then went back to bed.
I did that for almost a week. I would get up, eat breakfast, shower, think real fucking hard about doing something, and go back to bed instead. Sometimes I would get up and eat dinner with West in a strained silence neither one of us knew how to break, and sometimes I wouldn’t.
Occasionally I would wake up and stare at the wall and think I should probably get a job for the summer, or wonder if I should maybe go see someone because obviously this wasn’t normal. I was too tired to do any of those things, and the sun didn’t come out and shine into my room, so the bed just seemed like the right place to be. I slept through Saturday.
Completely.
West knocked on my door once, but I ignored him. I’d emailed him my grades all semester, he’d demanded it before school geared up for real. He’d told me that I would report to him, in that same gravelly, stern, sexy voice he’d used on me when he told me not to see Teddy anymore.
My stomach had trembled, and I’d said, “yes, of course, West,” and he’d smiled and said “good boy,” and I’d thought about throwing myself on the floor at his feet and begging him to try with me. Maybe doing stuff with me would get less bizarre for him with time. But I wasn’t stupid, so I didn’t do obnoxious things to get myself tossed out on my ass, something I was sure could happen, no matter what West told me.
I thought about West a lot during the week I lay in bed. The way he’d looked right at me like no one else ever had while he told me I wouldn’t see Teddy anymore. I suppose we’d connected then—we’d certainly connected in the kitchen when we came together, one of the best orgasms I’d ever had, except for the very first one where I humped my way to coming on my pillow by accident when I was twelve. That one was still the all-star in my mind because it was the first one, but with West it was like the first time breathing. There was nothing he could have done to make that moment better. There were a lot of those little connecting strings between West and I, but he wanted to cut them all and tie them off rather than have us keep going together. I thought about that too, how we were purposefully making knots in our connection.
I could just leave.
I was an adult, and he didn’t owe me anything. Not really. And I was obviously making it harder for him to move on. Without me here keeping his memory alive for West, Carter could fade, like a dream. Without West in my face every day, maybe the same thing would happen for me. I could move somewhere completely alone, where no one knew me, and no one would wince and ask how I was doing.
I could forget.
Sunday dawned, and my eyes burned as I lay there with them closed for some time. I blinked them open, and real sunlight streamed into the room. Honest-to-goodness rays burned across the floorboards and highlighted the dust motes lazily swirling on the air, making the room warmer. Spring had arrived, I guess—about three months late, but that was normal for New Gothenburg. I stirred and kicked my feet under the cool sheets. The blankets were heavy on me, but rather than being friendly, like a hug, like arms I wanted around myself, they felt confining, so I shoved everything off to the side and rolled onto my back. I stared at the ceiling for a long while, and the sun crept to the bed and caressed my skin. I tickled my hand down my stomach, and for the first time after the brutal brain drain of finals week, my cock plumped up and let me know it still existed. I rubbed my hand over the front of my briefs and closed my eyes, sighing at the slow heat that filtered into my stomach, my body coming awake by degrees. First my belly got warm and loose and then my chest got light.
I licked my lips.
A knock on my door startled me into scrambling for my blankets and yanking them back over my waist. “Yeah?” I called, my voice creaky. I hadn’t talked to anyone since… I wasn’t sure when.
“May I come in?” West’s voice was music after nearly a week of silence. My breath caught.
“Yes,” I answered, sitting up as the door swung inward. West stood there, and I had to admit I’d forgotten how good he looked. His medium-length hair was freshly trimmed, and the short beard he wore had a clean edge to it and looked like it would feel good to run my fingers through. There was a little bit of honey color on the top of his head where his hair went slightly longer than the rest. He had it combed to the side and looked very much lawyer at rest in jeans that were too clean and barely worn, and a button-down white shirt untucked and rolled to the elbows. My eyes tried to glue themselves to his mouthwatering forearms, muscled and sprinkled with just the right amount of dark hair to be manly and fucking sexy. I had a surreal moment where I wondered what the cord of his arm muscles would feel like under my tongue.