Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere #3)

I STARTLED awake to the train whistle blowing and wondered for the millionth time why I’d chosen that as my alarm and yet, like always, was too asleep to do anything about it.

Charles was perched on his desk chair, muttering furiously at his computer as usual. For the first week or so that we’d lived together, I’d never seen Charles sleep. I assumed that he just went to bed after me and got up before me, but I legit had a moment once, waking in the middle of the night to find him pacing his side of the room restlessly, where I’d wondered if he had some kind of never-sleeping vampire shit going on.

His trackpad clicks got increasingly more aggressive, and his bony shoulders hunched closer to the screen.

“Are the interwebs hurting you again?”

He wheeled around like he was shocked to see me there, though my alarm had blasted a train whistle through our room not thirty seconds before. He did that a lot: seemed to forget I existed. But it was kind of nice. Like he was so used to me he could forget I was there and just be. I, on the other hand, never forgot about Charles because he practically vibrated this manic energy, and I could feel it from anywhere in the room.

He’d blustered into the dorm room the day after I’d met Milton, a huge lumpy duffel bag strapped to him and four boxes stacked on the seat of a wheeled desk chair that he was pushing like a dolly. He’d stuck out a hand to me, nearly overbalancing the chair and boxes, and introduced himself, explaining that he was supposed to go to MIT but had changed his mind at the last minute—for some reason I’ve never fully understood—and now he was here, only yikes, he didn’t have a room and so they’d put him with me.

The whole explanation took place while he was holding my hand, like he’d forgotten we were touching or that hands even existed. He made the kind of eye contact that would’ve been creepy if he’d seemed douchey, or intimidating if he’d seemed overconfident, but was just intense in the way that everything about Charles was intense.

He was tall and far too thin for his frame, bony shoulders poking at the seams of his T-shirts and knobby spine perpetually bruised from sitting folded into lecture hall seats. His hands and feet looked disproportionately large and his Adam’s apple tested the boundaries of his skin when he swallowed. When he gestured, his long arms and bony hands looked skeletal and precarious. But in front of the computer, hunched and intent, he looked completely at home, just as he did walking down the streets in expansive, long-legged steps, his clothes billowing around him like some kind of Arthurian cloak.

His curly brown hair was always frizzy and mussed because he pulled on it, and he had these permanent dark smudges under his eyes, but when he talked he was animated, and I had the suspicion that he might be some kind of secret genius. He’d said he wasn’t uncommonly smart, he just went to a good high school, had basic reasoning skills, and didn’t allow his personal beliefs to get in the way of reason, which made him seem smarter than most people. But I didn’t know. All that seemed pretty uncommon to me.

“Someone on Wikipedia has written, ‘the tunnels beneath Paris are almost catacombic,’ which number one, is not a word, but even if it were, what would that ‘b’ be doing exactly—I mean, would it be said like cata-comic? Because that’s strangely the opposite. But mostly, they’re not catacombic. They are catacombs.”

Charles was a near-compulsive Wikipedia editor. His expertise was vast and shallow.

“Would you ever say ‘honeycombic’?”

“I wouldn’t, no.” He sounded disgusted.

“Well, how would you… adjectivize it or whatever? Honeycombish? Honeycombesque?”

“They just are catacombs. No adjectivizing required.”

Sometimes Charles was also super literal.

MILTON PUSHED our door open without knocking, took one look at me, and rolled his eyes, tapping his watch. We had Intro Psych lecture together, and he always came by to collect me because I sometimes fell back asleep after my alarm went off.

Charles ignored Milton in the passive way he mostly ignored everyone—as if they hadn’t quite intruded into his headspace yet—and Milton clapped him on the shoulder like he always did, and then left him alone.

Milton was good like that. He didn’t take shit personally. Lucky for me, because he was basically the best friend I’d ever had even though I’d acted like a total lunatic after we’d hooked up the first night here.

I had been all, Oh my god, Milton, that was amazing, but I can’t be your boyfriend because my heart belongs to another, and he’d been all, Omigod, Leo, I don’t want to be your boyfriend, I was just horny as fuck and wanted to jerk off with you on a roof under the stars and now we can be friends because we barely even have chemistry really, okay?

Well, maybe it hadn’t been in those exact words, but that was basically what had happened.

We’d tried an experiment of kissing once more a few weeks later in the library, and both started laughing. I didn’t really get it, because that night on the roof, I had been legit into him, and it was super hot, but now… I just didn’t think of him that way, I guess. He said that was normal, and I believed him because if I’d learned anything about Milton over the past month, it was that he was like a Sex + Love Genius. He just completely got it.

I dragged on yesterday’s jeans and a not-too-dirty T-shirt and jammed my feet into my Vans in about fifteen seconds, as Milton looked on, half amused and half silently judging me. He didn’t say anything, though, because my total lack of fashion meant we were on time for Psych and even had time to stop in at his preferred coffee shop.

I texted Daniel, like I did almost every time I was in a coffee shop, and told him I was ordering The Daniel, which is what the coffee shop in Holiday christened the drink he always ordered: three shots of espresso in a large coffee. He texted back a string of random letters that culminated in an emoji of a grimacing head making a thumbs-up sign. I suppose that meant he’d finally gotten a smartphone.

I saw the green ellipsis that meant he was trying to write something else, but after it stuttered a few times, it finally went away. I could practically see him, messing with the new phone to try and explain what he meant to type, making more nonsense, and finally giving up in frustration, most likely throwing the phone down on whatever surface was nearest.

He’d probably forget where he tossed it and wander around later looking for it and pulling his hair out. Rex would ask him when he’d used it last, and he’d remember that it was texting with me and that he’d gotten pissed. Rex would go to wherever he was and pull it out of the couch cushions or the stack of books or wherever he’d thrown it and hand it back to him with that soft look he gets only for Daniel. That look that says I love all these small things about you that are just you but mean something to me. Maybe he’d slide the phone into Daniel’s pocket and kiss him.

Fuck, I missed them.

WE ROLLED into Psych just as Marin, the TA, was setting the professor’s notes on the lectern and adjusting the PowerPoint presentation. I was a little bit obsessed with her because she never smiled. Professor Ginsberg was pretty amusing and joked around, and Marin was just stone. I mean, maybe she’d heard all the jokes before, but still. Not even a polite, indulgent yes-I-acknowledge-humor quirk of the lips. She was totally nice in discussion section—even cracked jokes herself, so it wasn’t like she didn’t have a sense of humor. But still, no smiles, even when we laughed. It was like she was playing some kind of secret game and if she smiled it meant she lost.

Thomas waved us over excitedly, having saved us seats. Thomas was always early and liked to sit directly in the middle of the classroom, like it was a movie theater and he wanted the best view. I wasn’t sure why he bothered since he drew little comics in his notebook throughout the entire lecture.

“Hey, guys!” Thomas shuffled his stuff aside so we could sit down. “Did you see Marin’s shoes?” Everything Thomas said sounded like there was an exclamation point after it.

I squinted to see that stone-faced Marin was rocking some Vans with kitties on them or something.

“Are they cats?” asked Milton, also squinting.

“They’re amaze!” said Thomas, turning to his notebook where he spent the next fifty minutes drawing a comic about a cat that had wings like Pegasus as Professor Ginsberg talked about Emotions. She said “capital-E emotions” to designate it as a topic. Which cracked me up, because of course I knew emotion was psychology, but the idea that we were studying emotions—going to school to learn about feelings like some alien species studying how to be human—just tickled me.

Not that it’d go amiss for some people.

I’d spent a solid week sulking over Will’s rejection. Then I randomly woke up super early one day, as I sometimes had in Holiday, and walked out into the morning. I found myself in Washington Square Park, strolling along the sidewalks as the city woke. I sat on the edge of the fountain, watching as, in the middle of this sprawling city, the water spewed upward, caught the sunlight, and fell down again, recollecting itself only to do it all over again.

I watched, and I started laughing. At myself. Because I was here. Here. In New York City. Taking classes at NYU. Sitting smack-dab in the middle of Washington Square Fucking Park. And I was missing it. I was missing the whole damn thing because I was hung up on Will. It was, I told myself, basically the stupidest thing ever.

It felt so good to laugh. I hadn’t done much laughing over the last year, what with missing Daniel, feeling abandoned by Will, and any enthusiasm for my classes at Grayling being crushed within a week of the semester starting. And as I sat there, grinning like an idiot, people who walked past me smiled back. I thought about what Will had said about not smiling at babies and their parents getting so offended, and I smiled even bigger.

He’d been right. I’d tried it a few days after he had mentioned it in a twisted attempt to feel closer to him, though I’d broken at the last minute and smiled at the baby anyway. The baby’s mom had expected me to smile at her kid, and when I hadn’t, it was as if I’d broken some social law.

But, though Will was right, his point wasn’t mine. It felt amazing to smile at someone and have them smile back. And I could tell from the way people smiled back at me that morning that they thought so too. After all, things were shitty so much of the time. If you could connect with someone over something as small and easy as a smile, why wouldn’t you want to?

In that spirit, I’d texted Will.

It’s soooo beautiful here today, I wrote, with three grinning face emojis and a picture of the fountain.

His reply had been almost immediate, though it was barely 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning: Here too, and a picture of the view from out his living room window, sunlight falling gently on brick and, in the bottom corner, a man buying flowers at the corner bodega.

Since then, Will and I had fallen into the habit of texting each other random silliness. Well. I texted him random stuff that I hoped he’d think was funny, and he texted me back, basically making fun of me. But in a friendly way. A flirty way, I hoped. That was how I chose to take it, anyway.

Last night, for instance, I’d texted him a pic of mud splattered all over my skateboard and my shoes that said Another driver just tried to kill me. Should I be taking this personally???

He’d responded: He probably took your shoes personally and wanted to put them out of their misery. Srsly, they’re dead.

What I hear you saying is that you want to take me shopping! I’d written, though I totally did not have the cash for new anything right now.

He hadn’t responded for a while, then wrote, Well, I’d be doing the entire city a service, I suppose. Saturday afternoon.

I’d practically run my battery down looking at the text every ten minutes since it came. Every time I did, this warm, kind of squeeish happiness burbled up in me. It’d be the first time I’d seen Will since our awkward meeting at his apartment when I first got to town.

Milton bumped me with his shoulder and I nearly dropped my phone.

“What are you all slappy about?”

I hesitated to tell him because Milton has made it really clear that he thinks what he refers to as my obsession with Will is pathetic. Well, misguided, anyway.

“Oh,” he said, looking at my phone. “Will?”

“He’s taking me shopping on Saturday.”

I could see Milton physically stop himself from making whatever comment occurred to him, so to thank him for not harshing my vibe, I told him that he could pick the movies for tonight, even though I knew he’d pick this nine-million-hour-long documentary series about a staircase or something that he’d gotten from the library and had been trying to get me to watch for the last two weeks.

“AND THIS filmmaker was there practically from the very beginning, so you see the direct aftermath of the wife’s death, and then it takes you through his whole trial and everything, and each episode is about a different bit of evidence. Oh man, it’s so intense—like, in the middle, there’s this one—well, okay, no, I won’t give it away. But it’s so good. Don’t look him up online, though, or you’ll get totally spoilered.”

Milton’s movie night pick turned out to be amazing—though at nearly eight hours long we’d stayed up almost all night finishing it—and I’d started telling Will about it right away. Partly because it had been fascinating, and partly in order to keep myself from saying all the things I really wanted to say to him.

Like that the second I’d seen him loping toward me, I’d felt the same way I had when he would walk into a room in Holiday: as if the background receded and he was this pulsing star at the center of things. And how just like then, my face heated up and my stomach went all wobbly.

Nope, definitely didn’t need to be saying anything like that. So. Describing an epic documentary about murder it was!

Will said the neighborhood we were in was Chelsea. Brick buildings towered above us, and here and there you could see the ghost of where another building must have rested. The shops all had window displays that looked like art, or like they were trying to look abandoned. He kept pointing things out in displays and asking if I liked them. At first I thought he meant for me, but it quickly became clear he was just curious about what I thought was aesthetically pleasing, because I could never afford any of the stuff he was looking at.

When I told him so, Will ran a finger along the worn neck of my T-shirt and shook his head, making a tsking sound.

“You know,” I told him, “Einstein said ‘Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.’”

Will snorted. “Yeah? Well, when you’re inventing theories of relativity I won’t say a word about how you dress like you passed out in a skate park in 1997 and just woke up. Until then, I’m happy both accepting that the universe is matter expanding into nothing and also that the combination of too many design elements in that universe looks like shit.”

I elbowed him playfully.

“So, was the guy found guilty?” Will asked.

I gaped at him. “Dude, that’s the entire point of the documentary. I’m not going to ruin it. You’re supposed to watch and, like, form your own opinion based on the evidence.”

“I don’t care about spoilers, man—a story’s either interesting or it isn’t. Besides, I assure you, I don’t have any problem forming my own opinion, even in a sea of conflicting ones.” He winked at me.

I certainly believed that.

“I can’t tell you. No way. If you wanna know, you can google it, but I’m not going to tell you the end. I am firmly in the no spoilers camp. It’s a lifestyle.”

The look Will gave me was one I liked to think he saved just for me. Like I didn’t say what he expected, but he was glad that I didn’t, and also irritated with himself for being glad. Will was really not the surprised type. He was more the absolutely-nothing-shocks-me type. In fact, it seemed vital to him that he’d thought of every possible eventuality. So the moments when I did something that bypassed whatever formulas he’d cooked up about how people acted or how the world worked were total wins. Granted, I still couldn’t predict what was going to strike him that way. At all. But it was a start.

The thing about walking with Will, I was realizing, was that everybody stared at him. Some people straight up checked him out, but others just… looked at him, like they had every right to. Like he was art, publicly displayed to be publicly appreciated.

At first I thought he was getting a kick out of it. But Will wore his beauty with a kind of scorn that made it even more potent, the way some people in New York seemed to wear expensive clothes with the air that they couldn’t care less if they ruined them. Like, yeah, splatter duck fat on this gazillion-dollar silk shirt, sure. Or, what’s that? Sit on the dirt in this designer dress and drink champagne? Let’s do it.

After the eight billionth person’s head turned to look at him, though, he started to tighten up. It probably just read as good posture to the casual observer, but to me it looked like he was trying to pull into himself. As if by making himself stiller he could escape notice, a gazelle on the plains freezing to elude the chase.

When he shoved his fisted hands into his pockets, though, I pulled him into a little café, seated him facing the wall, and bought him a coffee. And I watched him slowly relax.

He looked tired and still wasn’t very talkative, but he seemed happy to listen, so to distract him, I told him about Milton and Charles, and about Gretchen, this awesome girl on my hall, who was the calmest person I’d ever known. Seriously, just being around her made me relax. I’d met Gretchen because we were in a tour group for people who hadn’t already visited campus the previous spring. Our tour guide was a sophomore who seemed so jaded that he could hardly raise his voice loud enough to be heard, but clearly took a great deal of pleasure in making us nervous.

When we’d gotten to the lobby in the library, he pointed a languid thumb behind his shoulder and told us that from the fifth or sixth floor looking down, the mosaic tile was laid out to look like spikes rising out of the ground in an attempt to deter students from throwing themselves over. Because before the administration added the cage around the opening, they did that, he told us. A lot. He made eye contact with each of us in turn, as if he were making a toast. I let out a nervous laugh.

The girl next to me, tall, with curly hair so blonde it was nearly white and strangely colorless eyes, cocked her head at the mosaic and said, “That’s so odd. If people wanted to commit suicide, the promise of spikes would hardly be a deterrent would it?”

“Oh gosh,” I said. “You’re totally right.”

And that, I had quickly learned, was really all it took to make new friends the first week of college.

I told him about classes. How my favorite was this physics class that was blowing my mind. Especially the parts about astrophysics. Physics was like a cheat sheet to the universe. Things that once just were suddenly had explanations, a logic all their own—except not all their own because they resonated with other things and forces throughout the universe. I might have gotten pretty excited talking about Newton’s second law.

And as long as I was talking and Will was paying attention to me I felt like I could do anything. Like he was a magnifying glass refracting the light of the whole universe onto me in a beam so intense and so warm that every molecule of my being was illuminated and seen. The threat of being burned alive was always in play, but the risk felt totally worth it.

Two girls at the counter lingered over doctoring their coffees, sneaking glances at Will and giggling. Will let out an exasperated breath.

“They stare at you because you’re so beautiful,” I told him, nudging his coffee with mine.

“Ugh, who fucking cares,” he said, flopping backward in his seat and closing his eyes, like if he wasn’t able to see people, then they couldn’t see him.

I snorted. “Easy to say when you are. I bet everyone wishes they were. Or, most people, anyway,” I corrected myself. It drove Daniel batshit when people made generalizations and whenever I did it in front of him I’d get an earful.

“You shouldn’t wish for that. You’re fine as you are.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said, but secretly I was a little thrilled even at the faint praise. Will hardly ever gave compliments.

“Whatever, you’re fucking adorable. Don’t fish.”

“I don’t get it, though. You like it sometimes, I know. The power it gives you over people. I mean, you use it to, like… meet people, right, so you can’t tell me you don’t like being so hot—”

“Yeah, at a bar or a club—when I’m trying to pick someone up. Not at work or buying a fucking newspaper, or”—he nodded to our surroundings—“drinking a damn coffee. Not when I can’t control it. You think it’s great to look like this? To walk down the street and have everyone stare at you so you can’t even trip on the damn sidewalk without an audience. To constantly have people talking to you and smiling and acting all nervous or insecure or like you’re better than them?”

He cut himself off with a quick look around, suddenly realizing he’d started ranting.

“Whoa. I guess… I didn’t think about that part of it.”

“Yeah, nobody ever does.”

He took another sip of his coffee and made a face. “Ugh. Overextracted.” He was quiet for a while, pushing a finger through the light spill of sugar to leave a trail. “I just…,” he said quietly, then shook his head.

“What?”

When Will had things to say, he said them. When he had nothing to say, he didn’t make an effort to fill the silence. At first this had made me uncomfortable. It was weird to hang out with someone who might be silent for an hour and then, when something occurred to him, monologue about it. But now it was one of my favorite things about hanging out with Will. Realizing that when he said things they mattered to him.

“I don’t want to be responsible for other people’s feelings, you know? I don’t want to know that someone is nervous because they’re hot for me and feel like it’s my responsibility to be nicer to them to put them at ease or some shit. It’s nothing to do with me even. They don’t like me, they don’t care about me. Hell, they just want to stare at me and have me shut up and smile at them. Like I’m a fucking prop in some fantasy.”

His expression was grim, bitter.

“And then, if I don’t play along—if I don’t smile the way they want, or flirt back, or say thank you to their compliments—it’s like I’ve somehow committed a social foul. I’ve offended them so they have to get revenge somehow. Like by asserting that I’m an actual fucking person I’ve invited retribution.”

I started to respond, but Will’s jaw was tight and he clearly wasn’t done.

“And if they aren’t turning me into a prop or a fuck toy in their heads, then they just let me do whatever I want because beauty is basically an all-access pass to the world.”

“People don’t really think that, do they?” But even as I said it, I thought of my own initial reactions to Will’s beauty.

Will hit me with a heavy, pitying look.

“Leo, you would not believe the shit I can get away with by looking like this. Seriously. It’s sick.”

“Like what?”

He sighed, like there were too many to even list.

“The things that I can say to someone and not get called on it…. Like, I was on a date over the summer with this guy and we had nothing in common. He started talking some stupid shit about how stop-and-frisk is the best thing to ever happen to the city. He kept flirting with me and I kept telling him off. Like, he’d say ‘Tell me about yourself,’ and I’d just dead-eye him and say, ‘If you think stop-and-frisk is a good policy, you are a racist.’ And he just let me talk all this shit and kind of laughed like I was kidding and never called me on it.”

“Well, maybe he was just being polite because you guys were on a date and he was trying to make the best of it since you didn’t have anything in common.”

“Dude, I called him a racist to his face and he just looked embarrassed and said nothing. Whatever—he’s just one example of shit that’s happened hundreds of times. I’ve tried it the other way around too. I’ve said ignorant, bigoted shit just to see if people will call me on it and they don’t. People don’t call me on being rude or selfish or ignorant even when the person next to me will get called out for doing the exact same thing. It’s like a social experiment at this point. A… screening process for assholes.”

The idea of Will wandering through the city feeling like everyone he interacted with was failing him, instead of actually connecting with them, made me incredibly sad.

“They give me credit for something that has nothing to do with me. It’s… it’s bullshit,” Will continued.

“Um, well, I guess it means you get what you want, though?” I was trying to put a positive spin on it, but as someone who had never really felt like I had the license to be rude or selfish or inconsiderate, it didn’t seem like the absolute worst thing.

“Yeah, great.” Will slumped. Clearly that was the wrong thing to say. “Never knowing if you get something because you deserve it or because someone just likes the way you look is awesome.”

“Shit, sorry, I didn’t think about it like that.”

He threw back the rest of his coffee like a shot and stood abruptly.

“Let’s get out of here.”

The second we were outside again, Will straightened his spine and set his shoulders. Even his gait changed. The mask slid back into place, like he could filter what went out and what got in. Will was pretty good at that whole making a bubble around yourself thing.

After a few blocks, he pulled me into a store where every single article of clothing was white. Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of rule about white after… some day? I was going to ask Will, but he was distracted, pinching the pressed pleat of a pant leg here, running a fingertip over the crisp collar of shirt there, and caressing the cable of a sweater with the back of his hand as he walked through the store.

“Here, try this on.”

Will held up a pair of pants that tied at the waist with a strip of fabric and had built-in suspenders, like in those old Charlie Chaplin films. He handed them to me along with a sleeveless shirt that looked like an undershirt but probably wasn’t. It was baby blue and cut low enough that the few chest hairs I had would be on full display.

“Um, why?”

Will’s eyes narrowed, like he was seeing me in the outfit he’d chosen, and gestured me toward the dressing rooms.

“Because I want to see. Okay?”

And of course the idea that Will would want to see me in anything was so flattering that I immediately stumbled to the dressing room. Will hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and gave the dressing room attendant a look that said he had this and we didn’t need any assistance. She just gave him a bored once-over and raised one painted-on eyebrow, tapping at her phone where it rested on her slender thigh.

I hung the clothes on the back of the door, kicked off my ratty sneakers, and pulled off my jeans and T-shirt, letting them fall in a pile on the floor.

The mirror certainly didn’t do me any favors. In the direct lighting, reflected to myself from three angles, there was no avoiding it. I was… not much to look at. Skinny as shit, kind of tan, but it maybe looked more like I was just scruffy. Freckles across my nose and cheeks. Hair on my arms and legs but, for some reason, only a sprinkling of hair on my chest and a few under my belly button.

My shoulders and knees were bony—I mean, I wasn’t in Charles’ league, but he was about nine feet tall—and my shoulder blades poked out. Once, when he’d had a few drinks, Daniel told me that he thought I would be handsome in a few years. Something about growing into my face. But it had been over a year since he’d said that, and if it was going to happen, it certainly hadn’t yet.

My nose still looked like a little kid’s, and I had these deep dimples that my grandma used to touch whenever she’d see me and say, “God just took a little stitch.” Which was actually terrifying when I thought about it. My mouth was too big for my face. My eyes were… I dunno, they were mine so it was hard to tell. Okay, I guess? Mostly I just thought I looked startled all the time. And my eyebrows kind of didn’t go with my face or something. I looked nice, mostly, but my eyebrows were all über serious, like I was concentrating really hard or someone had just hurt my feelings.

Turning my back to concentrate on the pants wasn’t much better because even though they were, you know, pants, there was something weird about them, and I couldn’t figure out which way around they went. As I was pulling them up, the door opened, nearly pushing me into the mirror, and Will slid in.

“What the hell are you doing in here?” he asked.

He took in my state of half undress with a total lack of concern or interest, and I felt this particular kind of shame that usually comes when you give someone something that really matters to you and they don’t even notice.

“These stupid pants are like a puzzle,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out which—”

Will tossed me the shirt, which I pulled on—couldn’t mess up a tank top at least—and the second the fabric touched me he tucked it into the pants, and did something where he tied the fabric and engaged the suspenders in one easy gesture.

“Who could wear white pants anyway?” I muttered. “I’d sit down on a bench or something and be filthy in point five seconds.”

He didn’t respond, regarding me, leaning against the dressing room door, a hand on his chin like he was considering what he thought of me. And when he smiled it felt emptier than I’d expected, because it was like he was smiling at the clothes and not at me at all. Was this what he was attracted to? People who dressed like this?

Was this what he wanted me to be?

I looked ridiculous. Like I was trying really hard to be someone I wasn’t.

“You like this?” I asked Will.

He nodded.

“But, like, for me?”

“Well, you wouldn’t wear it, would you?”

His hands went to my shoulders to adjust the suspenders, and I shook my head.

“I don’t look like me.”

He shrugged like that was nothing.

“You get to decide what you look like. You get to decide who you are.”

“You don’t get to decide who you are,” I said. That was ridiculous. “You just… are who you are.”

Will’s hands, still hovering at my shoulders, tightened. I took a step toward him so we were almost chest to chest.

“Why did you really want me to try this stuff on? You know I wouldn’t wear it.”

“Just for fun,” he said, but his voice sounded like he was having the opposite of fun.

“I don’t believe you.” I stepped forward again, putting Will’s back against the door. “Seriously. Why?”

I could feel it again. That heat. That pull between us like it was taking more energy to keep our bodies apart than it would to allow their collision. How did that fit with your first law, Newton? We might’ve been at rest, but everything in us was straining together, like only this skin was keeping us from getting all messed up in each other.

Will’s breath came a little short as I stared at him. Somehow, looking at him this close up, his perfect beauty fell apart and reformed into something different. No longer was it about proportion and line and angle. Up close, Will was texture and shadow and something far more human. I could smell him. The familiar, slightly milky smell of the coffee shop. Beneath that, some subtle cologne that smelled like expensive suits and garden parties and maybe just a hint of leather. The slight sour bite of fresh sweat. And then his skin, like dust warmed in a beam of sunlight.

His eyes locked on my mouth and his hands came up like he wanted to put them on my hips but was stopping himself, so they just hovered there.

“See,” I said, and it came out as a whisper.

Will shook his head but his eyes didn’t leave my mouth. I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and watched his Adam’s apple slide and catch in an audible swallow.

I wanted to press him against the dressing room door and kiss him until he actually talked to me, the way he’d started to do in Holiday. But it was like he’d gotten enough time apart from me for whatever spell Holiday wove to have fallen away. Or maybe it was as simple as he had needed someone to talk to in Holiday and Rex was occupied so it became me by default, and now that he was back in New York I was just… I don’t know.

But I could feel this—whatever it was—between us.

“Will.”

He was almost glaring at me, like a super turned-up version of The Look. And for some reason it made me ridiculously happy, because with Will, any response other than haughty neutrality was a step in the right direction.

“Hey, kiss me,” I said, nudging him, and watched his battle with himself play out over his face.

He stared at me, breathing through his nose, having come, apparently, to no decision whatsoever.

“Okay, I’m going to kiss you now if you don’t stop me,” I said, which actually sounded a little creepy of me.

But he didn’t stop me. And he didn’t seem creeped. He just closed his eyes and sighed a little and I didn’t know what he was thinking. Now that we were the same height, I just stepped into him and pressed our mouths together.

The second I kissed him he came alive, a sparkler touched by a match. He made a sound in the back of his throat and pulled me against him with a palm at the small of my back, just above those damn pants. His mouth was hot, and I could taste his coffee from earlier, a bitter note that gave way almost immediately to the sweetness of his taste.

I remembered it, even all these months later, and it tasted like home.

Will had his arms around me now, wrapping me up so tight I almost couldn’t move. He pushed one hand through my hair to hold my face to his while he—holy shit—while he kissed the hell out of me. One second I was kissing him, and the next he’d flipped me, slammed me against the dressing room door, and was basically eating my face. Only, you know, in a good way. An awesome way.

It felt nothing like my make-out session with Milton. Even when Milton had touched my cock I hadn’t felt as electrified as I did from Will’s kiss. I scrabbled at his back, trying to… something—to touch skin or trace muscle, but it was really all I could do to keep my feet under me with Will’s mouth on mine. Finally, he tickled the roof of my mouth with his tongue, just gently stroked it, and I found myself so close to coming that it shocked me. I let out a groan and tried to grab for his hips, desperate to get some friction.

Then I realized that I was wearing these stupid white pants that I’d probably have to pay like five hundred dollars for if I came in them, and I pulled my hips away, groaning at the loss of his heat.

From outside the door came a very haughty stage cough followed by some heavy-duty throat clearing.

“Fuck,” Will snapped and dropped his forehead to my collarbone. “Fuck, Leo. Shit.” I could feel the warmth of his skin. He was sweating at his hairline and his back rose and fell with rapid breaths. He stayed like that for a long moment, clutching my hips, each finger palpable even through the pants, before he cleared his throat and told me he’d meet me outside.

And, hell. The idea of Will imprinting himself on the fabric was almost enough to make me want to buy the ridiculous things.

FOR THE next week, I went to sleep with Will’s taste on my tongue and woke up to visions of him. I dreamt about him. By Friday night, though, Milton was sick to death of my play-by-play analysis of our dressing room encounter and of watching me (apparently) sigh all through meals in the dining hall, so he said that instead of movie night we were going to go dancing. He spent two hours forcing me to try on clothes from his closet because he said I didn’t own anything decent, but I was thinking of Will and our kiss the whole time.

Charles wouldn’t come with us—he said dancing was a ludicrous mating ritual, and when Milton said it wasn’t about mating, he just looked puzzled and said, “Well, if it isn’t at least that, then what possible appeal could it have?”

Thomas came with us, though, as did Gretchen. I hardly recognized Thomas without his Psych notebook, but he seemed bouncy and ready to go. Gretchen shocked me by turning up in a bright green dress and proclaiming her love of dancing. But when we got to the club—some place in Bushwick that Milton said didn’t card—I saw that she danced the way she did everything else: with a quiet joy that was just her own. She wasn’t there for anyone or anything except dancing. And I kind of got the feeling I could learn something from her on that front.

I sat at the bar with Milton, watching as this mess of people attempted to make connections. Everyone was checking out everyone else. Or they were with their friends and oblivious to anyone else. Or they were with their friends or dates and still looking for someone better or more interesting or flashier to come along. It made me incredibly sad. Like this club was a microcosm of the real world. Except, I guess it actually was the real world. And then I was imagining infinitely more bars just like this one, all with people inside them acting the same way.

What blew my mind about physics was how it could account for this whole random set of people. We were all subject to the same forces of the universe. For every action there was an equal and opposite reaction. Like, no matter how illogical an action seemed there was still a sense of predictability in the way the world absorbed it and responded. Maybe that shouldn’t have comforted me, but it did. Because it was partly the predictability of those reactions that kept things running smoothly—I mean, that was socialization, right? Take that away and everything was chaotic and terrifying.

The things that could happen. Not super dramatic things like getting mugged or killed, even. But, the guy over there in khakis and a polo shirt? He could go and pee in the middle of the dance floor while singing Queen if he chose to. Nothing was stopping him except that he could predict what our reaction would be.

I didn’t know why I was thinking about these things when we were there to dance. I think maybe even the two drinks I’d limited myself to had made me pretty tipsy.

Milton delighted me when he drank because he got super loose and brutally honest. And maybe a little bit mean, but in this way that was totally justified because he was such a nice person at base. And because people were idiots. Like, this sleazy guy came up to him and was trying to flirt but kept saying super racist shit in the guise of compliments, and Milton was just like, “Goodness, I am so sorry, but I don’t speak English. No, seriously, I have no idea what you’re saying to me right now—it all just sounds like nonsense.” At which point, Milton slid another drink over to me, and I took it, even though I’d learned at orientation that I was a total lightweight, because I knew he was exasperated and wanted to commiserate.

But then I was definitely tipsy, which meant of course that I fished out my phone and called Will. He didn’t answer, and before I could leave a message, Gretchen pulled me off the bar stool to dance. Which was probably for the best, because I didn’t know what I would have said to him. Something about forces in the universe and the way he makes me see stars and his mouth and, shit, it was a good thing I didn’t leave a message. Well, good for me, not necessarily for the rest of the bar, which had to see me try to dance.

Gretchen’s dress was green fire and her light hair floated out around her. It was like she spun without even moving, the pulse of the music carrying her effortlessly. She seemed strong and centered, and I couldn’t even imagine what it must feel like, so I tried to match my movements to hers. I was a moon caught in the gravitational pull of her planet, and when I looked up and spun and spun the lights sparkling above were the brightest stars I’d seen since leaving Michigan.