I’m propped on my bed drawing Brian, who’s a few feet away at my desk watching a meteor shower on some astronomy site he’s addicted to. In the drawing, the stars and planets are storming out of the computer screen and into the room. This is the first time we’ve seen each other since the woods except for the kabillion times I’ve seen him in my mind over the last few days, which included Christmas. What happened between us has colonized every last brain cell. I can barely tie my shoelaces. I forgot how to chew this morning.
I thought maybe he’d hide from me for the rest of our lives, but a few minutes after I heard his mom’s car pull into the garage today, signaling their return from some Buddhist center up north, he was at my window. I’ve listened to an endless state of the intergalactic union and now we’re fighting about whose Christmas was worse. He’s acting like what happened between us didn’t happen, so I am too. Well, trying to. My heart’s bigger than a blue whale’s, which needs its own parking spot. Not to mention my eight feet of concrete, which has kept me perpetually in the shower. I am so clean. If there’s a drought, blame me.
In fact, I just happen to be thinking about the shower, him and me in it, thinking about hot water sliding down our naked bodies, thinking about pressing him against the wall, about gliding my hands all over him, thinking about the sounds he’d make, how he’d throw his head back and say yeah like he did in the woods, thinking all this, as I tell him in an even, controlled voice how Jude and I spent Christmas in Dad’s hotel room eating takeout Chinese food and breathing gray air. It’s amazing how many things you can do at once. It’s amazing how what goes on in the head stays in the head.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Do Not Disturb)
“Give it up,” he says. “No way you can beat this. I had to go to an all-day sit with my mom and then sleep on the floor on a mat and eat gross gruel for Christmas dinner. I got a prayer from the monks as my only present. A prayer for peace! I repeat: an all-day sit, me! I couldn’t say anything. Or do anything. For eight hours. And then gruel and a prayer!” He starts laughing and I catch it immediately. “And I had to wear a robe. A fricken dress.” He turns around, lit up like a lantern. “And what’s worse is the whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about . . .”
I see him tremble. Oh God.
“It was so painful, dude. Luckily we had these weird pillow things on our laps so no one knew. Sucked.” He’s staring at my mouth. “And didn’t suck too.” He turns back to the stars.
I see him shudder again.
My hand goes limp and I drop my pencil. He can’t stop thinking about it either.
He swivels around. “So, who were the ‘them’ you mentioned, anyway?”
It takes me a second but then I understand. “I saw these guys making out at that party.”
His brow furrows. “The party where you hooked up with Heather?”
For months, I’ve been so pissed at him and Jude about something that didn’t happen, it never occurred to me that he could be mad at me about what actually did. Is he still? Is that why he never called or emailed? I want to tell him what really happened. I want to say sorry. Because I am. Instead, I just say, “Yeah, that party. They were . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know, amazing or something . . .”
“Why?” His talking is turning into breathing. There’s no answer. Really, they were amazing only because they were guys kissing.
I tell him, “I decided I’d give up all my fingers, if . . .”
“If what?” he presses.
I realize I can’t possibly say it aloud but don’t have to because he does. “If it could’ve been us, right? I saw them too.”
It’s a thousand degrees in me.
“It’d be hard to draw with no fingers,” he says.
“I’d manage.”
I close my eyes, unable to contain the feeling inside me and when I open them a second later, it’s like he’s gotten hitched on a hook and I’m the hook. I follow his gaze to my bare stomach—my shirt’s ridden up—then lower to where there’s no hiding how I’m feeling. I think he’s Tasering me or something, because I can’t move.
He swallows, swivels back around to face the computer, and puts a hand on the mouse but doesn’t click the screensaver away. I watch his other hand travel down.
Still looking at the screen, he asks, “Want to?” and I’m a flood in a paper cup.
“Totally,” I say, knowing without a doubt what he means, and then our hands are on our belts, unbuckling. From across the room, I watch his back, unable to see much, but then his neck arches, and I can see his face, his eyes all swimming and wild, locking with mine, and it’s like we’re kissing again, but from across the room this time, kissing even more intensely than in the woods, where our pants stayed on. I didn’t know you could kiss with your eyes. I didn’t know anything. And then the colors are forcing down the walls of the room, the walls of me—
Then, the impossible.
My mother as in my mother bursts in, waving a magazine. I thought I’d locked the door. I could’ve sworn I locked it!
“This is the best essay I’ve ever read on Picasso, you’re going—” Her confused gaze darts from me to Brian. His hands, my hands, fumbling, shoving, zipping.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh. Oh.”
Then the door’s closed and she’s gone, like she was never there, like she hadn’t seen a thing.