I love you for making this all about you, for giving yourself a name. You are so flagrantly you. I tell you what you want to hear: “Beck, you’re not Death Girl. It just sounds like you know some troubled people.”
You cut me off. “That’s two of my friends dead in a matter of months. And you know what I think, Joe? I think this is the universe punishing me for being a fucking liar. I lie and say my dad is dead and now my friends are dying. I mean obviously that’s what’s happening.”
“Let it out,” I say because I know when you’re drunk there’s no point in arguing the benefits of life without Peach and Benji. “But it’s not your fault.”
You huff. “Like hell it isn’t.”
“So talk to me,” I say. “I’m here.”
It’s fun to watch you try and decide whether to tell me about the massage session with Peach and you decide against it. “Peach left to go running, which she did every morning. But apparently, this time she filled her pockets with rocks. And it is my fault, Joe. I was the last one to see her alive. I should have known.”
I was the last one to see her alive, but never mind that. “Beck,” I say. “You can’t blame yourself for what she did. She was depressed. You knew that. You were a damn good friend and this has nothing to do with you.”
You motion for me to stop talking and I pour vodka into the dirty glasses and you dig around for your phone, which has fallen into the sofa with a lot of other junk and you scroll and find the e-mail that Peach wrote to you, the one that I wrote. I know I’m not a suspect anymore and I can’t help but think that it’s kind of hot, hearing my words come out of your mouth. You finish reading and look at me. “Virginia Woolf. I should have known. And I did nothing.”
“You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”
“But she did want to be saved,” you say and you pull your hair up into a high bun. “I just couldn’t do it.”
“Couldn’t do what?”
You gulp and I remember you naked and I want my turn and take a hefty sip. “This has to stay right here for obvious reasons, but you have to know. She tried to fuck me, Joe.”
“Oh man.” Yes, you’re opening up, petal by petal, it’s happening.
“I pushed her off, of course. Right away,” you say and again you can’t resist lying, from stealing a little cash from the Monopoly board when the other players are out of the room. You are a cheater, to the bone, a renovator and I admire you, Beck. You never stop making improvements on life. You have charisma. You have vision. Someday, maybe we’ll have some beat-up farmhouse and you’ll paint the walls until you find the right shade of yellow and I’ll tease you but I’ll love the way you look with paint on your face. This is where you do your real art and this is where your magic happens. You need an audience, alive—me—not a shrink, not a computer.
“How’d she take it?”
“Not well.”
“Fuck,” I say.
“And the saddest thing is, it’s not the first time this happened.”
“Fuck.”
You take a sip and you’re too embarrassed to look at me. Or maybe you’re just too drunk. “Are you horrified?”
“Beck,” I say and I rest my hand on your knee. “I’m not horrified that your best friend was in love with you. I don’t blame her.”
You come at me hard and whole, sloppy and groping. You tear your top off and your hot hands are underneath my shirt—my shirt marked by your tears—and your kiss is wet and hungry and you bite my lip and there is blood, a sweetness, a saltiness, a touch. You have my belt off in no time, a professional under the influence. This time when I fuck you I am the mouse in your house and you can’t get rid of me and you want to get rid of me because you hate how much you want me, how I own you when I’m inside of you, how you’ll never want anything but me—Nicky who?—and at some point your emotions all turn into one, your tears for Peach, your cunt throbbing for me, your tits humming because of me, all of you exists solely because of me and I fuck the Peach out of you, I fuck the Benji out of you, and the Nicky out of you, and I am the only man in the world and this time, I wake up first. I go into your bathroom, into your tub and I piss all over the floor of the shower and mark my place, my home, you. I take the IKEA pillow out from under the table and rip off the tag and bring it back to bed. You’re half asleep when I slip the pillow under your chin and you purr. “Mmm. Joe.”
When we get out of bed, we know that we’re together now. It’s not about whether we’ll go out to breakfast; it’s just a matter of deciding where to go. We sit across from each other at a diner and we’re there six hours because we can’t get enough of each other. I finally manage to pull myself away and take a leak and when I’m gone, you e-mail Lynn and Chana: Holy fuck. Joe. JOE.
When I get back to the table, we start all over again.
42
OUR first eight days together are the best days of my life. You have these plush giant robes from the Ritz-Carlton. You tell me this elaborate story about stealing them while on spring break with Lynn and Chana. I love that you love to tell stories. You couldn’t possibly know that I know that you stole them from Peach’s place and I don’t tell! We live in these robes and you like to entertain me and you do.
Day Two of us, we’re lounging around in our robes and you declare the Rule of the Robes: “When you are in my apartment, you are allowed to be naked or in a robe.”
“And what if I don’t comply with the Rule of the Robes?”
You saunter up to me and growl. “You don’t wanna know, buster.”
I promise to abide by the rule and I like you all charged up, adult. Your therapy worked because your daddy issues are gone and with me, you’re a woman, not a little girl. You’re not sending e-mails to yourself anymore, and why would you? You have me to talk to and oh, do we talk. Van Morrison doesn’t know shit about love because you and I are inventing love in our Ritz-Carlton robes, with our all night conversations, with our moments of silence that are, as you say, “the opposite of awkward.”
We’re living on each other and we don’t need sleep and by Day Five we have more private jokes than Ethan and Blythe do. We watch Pitch Perfect on Netflix—you call it your favorite movie but you don’t own the DVD; you are fascinating—and you press PAUSE. You curl up into me and tell me I’m the best and I tease you about loving this movie and you giggle and snort and we wrestle and by the time they go to their championship or whatever, we’re in bed, fucking. You love me more than anything and you tell me I’m smarter than the guys in your grad program and the guys you knew in college and we read one of Blythe’s stories together and I call it solipsistic and you agree.
The next morning, I wake up first—who can sleep with you in the world?—and I notice that you were up earlier. You’re like a child in the best way and you leave a trail of bread crumbs wherever you go and your trail leads me into the kitchen, where the dictionary is open and the word solipsistic is smeared with chocolate icing from the half-eaten chocolate cake on the counter. I love you for listening, unabashedly.
You don’t want me to leave but I have to go to work.
“But I want you to stay,” you argue and even your aggression is sweet. “Can’t Ethan cover?”
“I hate to break it to you, Beck, but you should have thought of this when you were fixing him up with Blythe.”
You groan and you block the door and you let your robe fall open. “You’re breaking the Rule of the Robe, Joe.”
“Fuck,” I say and you maul me and eventually I do leave and the day goes by so slowly and we text so much my thumbs are falling off. I want to bring you all the books in the world, but I settle on one of my favorites that you’ve never read, In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien.
You let me into your place and you take it with tender hands and you kiss me with your sweet, soft Guiniverean lips. “I knew I was waiting to read this book for a reason,” you say. “It’s like I knew someday there’d be someone who gave it to me or something.”