“It’s the Greek tragedy coming out again,” I said feebly. “Retribution, you know? I thought about sacrificing him to Zeus, but it would’ve been messy.”
He didn’t smile. “Hilarious,” he said. Then two of his fingers were hovering over the swollen curve of my cheekbone. I might have imagined the ghost of their warmth. “But this isn’t actually funny, Julian. I mean, Jordan.”
My heart took an unsteady swerve. I kept my voice level. “Taste of your own medicine, Mr. Walk-on-Thin-Ice.”
“That’s not the same. I, unlike some people here, don’t get hurt for real.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, quiet and hoarse. “I kind of make it a habit.”
His fingers landed against my cheek, two points of light contact. Second by second, my focus gathered around his touch. Ignore it, I told myself. Glancing down, I studied the dots of snow that salted the flagstone floor, the tight knots of Isaac’s black sneakers, the white corners worn into his jeans pocket where he tucked his phone, and the cable knit of his sweater. But then my gaze slid up too far, brushed his, and stuck. My composure slipped out of my strangling grip. His eyes were the warm black of velvet.
His touch on my cheek became a conduit for everything I couldn’t say: the admissions I couldn’t make; the wants I couldn’t let myself want; and the fears that came from trusting someone more than he’d deserved. I kept quiet. Isaac would take his hand away, step back, and leave this weird silence where it hung in the air, to extinguish safely. And I would look down at the bloodstains on my dad’s old coat, and it would still be December 12th, two days before I left this place for good. Silence was the right answer here.
But he didn’t back up. He slid his hand forward, his callused fingers brushing over my ear into my hair. The stiff heel of his hand rested against my jaw.
I pressed the tiniest bit against his touch, a breath slipping between my lips. His expression was written in uncertainty and signed in curiosity.
I slipped forward on the armchair and rose back to my unsteady feet, nearly his height. His hand stayed in place, palm fitting warm against my cheek, and his eyes stayed searching mine, as if I were hiding answers inside instead of a rippling well of confusion. The wind mumbled past the window. The space heater emitted its determined hum. A whisper of breath from him drowned it all out. He was so close.
Isaac swallowed. My gaze darted down to his neck, the bobbing movement of the sharp curve in his throat. My thoughts fragmented as I thought of the voice in him, always going, never tired. The whisper that had brushed my forehead in November in the cinema. The scraping words in Jon Cox’s attic as the dawn snuck up. The raw edges of his solos that tore at me every time he sang, and tore at the crowd during concerts, leaving us all dumbstruck afterward. This boy put so much of himself into his voice and spent all his time giving it away.
His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth, and then his other hand found my hip, and I realized I wanted him. With the strength of a thousand gravities, I wanted this. What would he feel like against me? Would he be uncertain, or reckless, or something else entirely, showing some facet I hadn’t seen? I wanted his quick, string-callused hands on me.
Where was his impulse now? Where had that gone?
I placed a hand uncertainly on his chest. One of the questions in his eyes resolved. He tilted his head, and we moved together. Then my eyes were shut, and my mouth was landing softly against his. The aching, for a second, melted away.
The moment froze. A moment of feeling, just for a second, what it was like—him and me, lip to lip, tense and hesitant.
He pressed forward. His lips were rough and bitten, scraping mine like salt. The tip of his nose dug into my cheek, and as I drew a breath, the smell and taste of him rushed in, bittersweet and biting.
I reached up and slipped my fingers into his dark hair. It felt how I’d imagined, thick and rough, tangled as if he’d walked out of a hurricane. I hadn’t known I’d been imagining it at all.
He pressed too hard and too far, mouth clumsy and immobile, all movements of the head and neck. My nose bumped his, and pain darted up between my eyes. I drew back too fast, remembering myself: my bruises, my swellings, the penciled shading in my eyebrows, and my shapelessness under layers of disguises. I was a collage of cover-ups and bad decisions.
But Isaac didn’t seem to have remembered any of that. He was looking at me as if he couldn’t breathe from self-doubt. I read it right out of his eyes: Did I fuck it up? Is this okay? Am I okay? And I knew, somehow, that if I didn’t reassure him, he’d cut and run. I’d lose him, this time, across the river.
I knew Isaac longed to be the mask he wore every day: all instinct, no caution. But I looked at him now and saw a boy made out of contingency plans.
He didn’t need one. Not with me.
I leaned up and kissed him again. He pulled me in until we were flush together. Heat snarled up beneath my heart. The quick ache in my chest had turned huge and yearning.
My perpetual doubt clamored up. Is this right, Jordan? it nagged. Is this stupid? Is this plummeting feeling something you want to escape, or something you want to let spin down to your core? And if you give yourself over—if you close your eyes and let gravity have its way—what’s it going to feel like when you hit the ground?
What if it hurts?
What if it hurts, all over again?
When he leaves you too, what if it’s as bad as it used to be?
Shut up, I thought. Shut up and let yourself be happy for a second.
For once, my brain obliged, going blissfully silent, but it wasn’t happiness that bloomed up to fill the silent aftermath. It was closer to shock, the instant of shock that follows an accidental glance into the sun, painful and immense and consuming. Closeness felt like that after being untouched for a while.
The world was quiet. Isaac’s hand was rough on the back of my neck, his thumb drawing designs over my skin.
As we kissed, tentative turned to urgent, before fading back to gentle, and finally—when we pulled back—he rested his forehead against mine. I didn’t find any guarantees in his eyes. For a moment, I wished I could see certainty there, the cocky arrogance of absolute surety. For a second, I imagined him saying, This is going to be everything, the words Michael had whispered at the start of our relationship with burning eyes—with authority.
I knew better, though. Isaac was panic over whether to call and the murmured admission that the world was too big and too furious and too much to make sense. He wasn’t about to patch my doubts and make me whole; he wasn’t going to be my cornerstone; he wasn’t the blanket stretched taut to catch me when I fell. He was this nervous kid, playing with matches and dancing around gasoline, and I was this nervous kid, shying back from the firelight, and we were here nervous together, acting like we had it figured out—as if we hadn’t already learned what it looked like to see each other pretending.