Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere #3)

THERE WERE only a few days of classes left before Reading Day and finals period, which was also when my Great Books paper and my dreaded physics final project were due.

Gone was the camaraderie of the week before when, in an attempt to distract myself from the knowledge that Will chose to spend Thanksgiving in a sleazy bar with some other man instead of with me, I’d gone impromptu sledding with Milton and some of his theater friends—including the mysterious Jason, on whom Milton’s crush had reached hero-worship levels.

And I kind of understood why. Dude was cool as hell. He was loud and confident and intense, but genuinely nice when you could get him to slow down enough to engage. He liked being the center of attention, but it was natural, not obnoxious. He just had charisma. Everyone, guys and girls alike, seemed to be totally into him. Hell, I couldn’t help but stop whatever I was doing to listen when he monologued.

He wasn’t handsome exactly—in fact, he was kind of funny looking. His nose was too big for his face and his smile was crooked, and his eyes and hair were a dirty-looking medium brown. But he was compelling. Engaging. All reaction and micro-expression and intense gaze.

We’d taken trays from the dining hall and gone to Prospect Park during the first snowfall that stuck. It wasn’t great sledding, but Milton had done it since he was a kid. Besides, I quickly realized that being from Michigan set my expectations of snow much higher than other people’s. One girl, a hilarious premed student from Louisiana called Sasha, had only seen snow once before in her life, and she was a riot, reacting to the modest hill we found like it was a black diamond ski slope.

Still, it was some of the most fun I’d had. We all fell over each other like puppies trying to pile onto the trays. There were a few families when we first arrived, but they left soon after dark and we got rowdier, pushing each other down the hill, holding on to each other’s hands and trying to slide down in tandem, and generally horsing around like idiots.

One of the guys whose name I never learned made some joke about sledding and Ethan Frome, which I didn’t get and I made a mental note to ask Daniel about it.

Finally, freezing cold and shaky from exertion, we left the dining hall trays at the top of the hill for anyone else to use, and trooped back toward the subway, stopping for hot chocolates twice at bodegas along the way. My mouth sticky with cheap chocolate and my fingers still numb, I fell asleep that night smiling, imagining someone walking past our trays poised in the snow and jumping on one with a grin, sliding downhill in the quiet darkness of the park.

Now, that night was like a distant memory. I was completely on edge, cursing every moment of leisure I’d ever enjoyed for being one more moment of work I had to do now. Charles was in some kind of intense caffeine and paranoia-fueled frenzy where he didn’t sleep, just paced around the room alternately muttering to himself and typing loudly on his computer, which drove me bonkers. He had crudely converted his school-issue side table into a standing desk by stacking it precariously on top of his actual desk and propping up the back edge on books.

Even Milton, who was usually cool as a damn cucumber, wasn’t unaffected. His outfits were distinctly uninspired, and he’d canceled the last two movie nights despite Felicity—which we had given up trying to pretend we were not full-on watching from start to finish with true gusto and strong contradictory opinions—being his total happy place.

Only Gretchen seemed mostly calm. She had a system that included detailed study and work schedules combined with long periods of rigorous physical exertion and timed psychic relaxation. In fact, I was pretty convinced that the fact that I’d been going to yoga with her regularly was the only thing that kept me from melting into an actual Leo puddle on the horrible carpet of my dorm room. I’d never worked so hard in my life, and things with my physics TA had reached a point where I practically started to freak out anytime his name showed up in my e-mail inbox.

I CAME to Will’s in hopes that being around him would calm me down.

He was clearly about to make some snarky comment about my disheveled state, but swallowed it when I rushed in and dropped my backpack on my way to burrow into his couch and have a minor nervous breakdown.

“Ooookay,” Will said. “I take it finals are not going well?”

“I’m gonna fail out of college,” I groaned into the couch.

“Tell me what you need to do and how long you have to do it, and we’ll figure it out.”

I held my planner out to him, now a crumpled hank of paper worried into a smeary exclamation-point-riddled mess. He held it between his thumb and forefinger then put it on the coffee table like an undetonated bomb.

“Why don’t you take me through it.” He patted my back. “One sec.”

He came back with a pad of graph paper and a pencil from his drafting table and sat beside me on the couch.

“Okay. Go class by class and tell me what you have left to do and when the deadline is.”

I shook my head. “My physics TA is trying to ruin my life. I should just go back to Holiday and rot.”

Will snorted. “You gonna work at Mr. Zoo’s for the rest of your life?”

“Yes. Someday maybe I’ll take it over and rename it Mr. Leo’s.”

“Great plan, kiddo. Come on, sit up. Tell me what you have to do.”

“I can’t.” I knew I sounded childish and petulant and I just couldn’t care. I was too tired, too overwhelmed. “Will,” I groaned. “Can’t I just drop out and come live here?”

“Christ on toast, Leo, you’re fucking depressing me. Sit up.” He dragged me up by my sweatshirt hood. “Now tell me what the deal is.”

I laid it all out for him. How Clark, my physics TA, hated me. How I’d done everything he asked us to do in terms of the proposal for the final project, but he kept forcing me to redo it because he said it wasn’t in compliance with one thing or another. And how, even though I’d asked Professor Ekwensi after class, and she’d mentioned that my project sounded great, Clark still made me revise it again, and when I’d mentioned Ekwensi’s approval, Clark had glared at me and gotten all pissy, accusing me of going over his head by talking to her.

“Let me see these e-mails.” Will’s tone was murderous, and even through my stress and agitation, the warmth of his anger on my behalf settled comfortingly in my stomach.

I showed Will the e-mails, in which Clark had sent comments on the drafts of my proposal where he asked questions that I was really sure most students in an introductory class shouldn’t be expected to know the answers to. And I showed him the comments Clark had written where he gave me totally contradictory feedback. I started to get freaked out all over again, and Will squeezed my shoulder as he peered furiously at the screen.

“I’m gonna kill this fucker! This petty, ineffectual little limp-dicked asshole has nothing better to do than lord his power over students like that makes him someone.” He devolved into muttering and then flopped back. I smiled at him and kissed the corner of his mouth where his lips turned down in a scowl. To my surprise, he flushed a little and shrugged like his shirt was suddenly too tight.

“Okay. Okay, tell me the rest, and then we’ll get back to that fucking guy.”

I walked Will through my whole schedule and he wrote it down on the graph paper in that neat all-caps handwriting I associated with architecture schematics. Even rendered in neat rows and tidy handwriting, it was a lot.

“I don’t think I can—”

“No, no commentary yet. Commentary is the seed of doubt. Doubt is the breeding ground for wasting time.”

Will tore off the page and recopied everything on a fresh sheet of paper, every task with a bullet point, every deadline in order of the date it was due, the chaos of my entire finals schedule neatly organized by the calming blue lines of the graph paper as if there weren’t a single thing that couldn’t be contained, ordered, made achievable. He outlined a box to the left of each task to check off when it had been completed. At the top he wrote Leo’s Guide To Kicking First Semester Finals In the Ass, which made me crack up to see in his neat handwriting.

It’s possible that my laughter was somewhat hysterical because the next thing I knew, Will was squeezing my shoulders and rubbing a hand up and down my back calmingly.

“Okay,” he said finally. He pointed to the schedule where he’d put a 1, a 2, and a 3 next to my tasks for the evening. “You start on this stuff.”

He pulled me up from the couch, sat me down at the desk, and tacked the schedule to the wall in front of me. While I was still trying to figure out how I’d ended up with a life coach and also wondering how I could make him do this every finals period, Will put a glass of water and a bowl of cashews on the desk.

“Protein. Good for energy. Stay hydrated.” Then he squeezed the back of my neck and left me to it.

Later, Will showed me the message he’d drafted to Clark from my e-mail account. It clearly laid out the work I’d already done, the changes he’d requested, and asked for clarification about several points, all of which were numbered. It was written so incisively that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could read it and not just agree to everything it said.

“Oh my god, you’re a genius.”

With Will’s eyes on me, I clicked the Send button without changing a word and closed my laptop in relief.

“Thank you.” I twined my arms around his neck, holding on tightly. Will’s arms tightened around me and he sighed deeply into my hair.

“You can’t let people push you around,” he said.

“Except for you, right?”

He huffed a breath out against my neck, but didn’t disagree.

OVER THE next five days, I only went back to the dorms once, to grab a bag of clothes and the rest of my books. I told Charles I was staying at Will’s, and he barely spared me a glance, just muttered something about the role of local politics in the Salem witch trials and nodded at himself as he typed furiously.

When Will went to work, he left me a pot of coffee on the counter and a Post-it note reminder to FOLLOW THE SCHEDULE AND DO NOT PANIC. Even on a Post-it, his handwriting was perfect.

He brought Thai food with him when he came home from work and we ate on the couch. The spicy smells of curry, peanut sauce, and ginger combined with the musky smell of Will’s body wash and the clean, bright smell of his shampoo and I wanted to stay here forever.

He was wearing a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants, but they weren’t normal—they were some kind of perfectly fitted versions of these staples, just like all his clothes, even the most casual ones, looked like they’d been tailored to fit him. When I asked him about it, he looked at me strangely and said they were just white T-shirts, but it seemed impossible.

Will was inhaling his food at a speed that seemed potentially hazardous for a wild dog, much less an average-sized human, when my phone dinged with an incoming e-mail. I grabbed for it, and when I saw it was from Clark, I almost dropped the phone in my Tom Kha.

“Omigod, he actually answered all the things!” Relief washed through me as I stared at my phone, and the weight that had been hanging around my neck like that damn albatross we read about in Great Books disappeared. I tossed the phone on the couch, and Will put his plate down just before I threw myself into his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck, and hugged him tight.

“Thanks,” I said in his ear.

His arms came around me and squeezed me tight, one hand moving up to stroke my hair.

“Sure, babe,” he said, and my heart practically stopped from joy.

LATER, I was taking a break, running through some easy yoga sequences. As often happened, after a few minutes of me doing something else, Will started to talk to me.

Initially, I’d thought this tendency was just Will being perverse. Like he was only interested in me when I wasn’t interested in him. After it happened a few times, though, I realized it wasn’t true. It was that Will felt most comfortable talking about some things when all my attention wasn’t on him. So, though my instinct was to pay attention when someone was talking to me, I’d learned it was best to just keep doing whatever I was doing and listen.

So I kept moving, keeping my breaths deep, in through the nose, out through the nose. Move and breathe. He watched me, perching on the arm of the couch so he could look out the window behind me at the same time. Will looked out the window a lot. The view was the main reason he’d taken this apartment, he’d told me once.

“You can’t get caught up in that kind of shit like what happened with Clark again,” Will was saying, staring past me into the dark city outside. “You’re too smart. You shouldn’t let people have that kind of power over you.”

This was pretty laughable coming from the guy who had such incredible power over me. But I didn’t say that. It was best to just let Will say his piece before responding.

“I know he’s your TA, so he does technically have actual power over you. But you have to remember: NYU is providing a service, and you’re the customer. They’re there to educate you. To make sure you learn the material. Not to make you feel like shit, or like you’re not good enough. Not to try and control what you do with your life.”

That gave me pause since Clark had never tried to control anything about my life.

“Did that happen to you?” I asked carefully, pitching my voice softly so it sounded offhand. I moved into downward-facing dog like I was barely listening to the answer.

Will said nothing.

I pressed my thumbs firmly into the carpet, turned my elbows out to protect my shoulder joints, and moved my shoulder blades together on my back, bending into my knees and then pressing my thighs up to straighten my legs. I could practically hear Tonya’s voice in my head whispering adjustments.

“What happened?” I asked, and then I just breathed—in through my nose, out through my nose—and waited, not sure if Will would answer or not.

“There was this TA for my Intro to Graphic Design class, second semester freshman year.” Will ran a hand through his hair, still looking out the window. “Or, I guess he wasn’t technically a TA, since he wasn’t a grad student; he was a senior graphic design major, but whatever. He was really talented and really harsh. You could tell he kind of hated doing teaching stuff and thought he was too good for it. But he liked me. Said I had potential. He helped me out a lot—helped me with my designs and with adjusting to school. To the city.”

It was strange to be reminded that once Will was just a kid from small-town Michigan who’d never been to the city either. That however far away from me he sometimes seemed now, we’d come from the same place.

“But he was manipulative as hell too. Talked me out of using this one idea I had for a design and then used it himself. And when I called him on it, he told me that I hadn’t known what to do with it so it couldn’t’ve worked; that knowing how to use a design is just as important as the design itself.”

My arms started to shake, and I moved through a few vinyasas, my attention always on Will.

“Hell, he even manipulated me into thinking that I seduced him.”

I dropped to my hands and knees, breathing deliberately, like his words hadn’t knocked the wind out of me. As I moved into plank pose, out of the corner of my eye I saw him twisting the hem of his shirt between his fingers.

“Anyway, what did I know? I was a baby. If he told me I was good, then I was good, period. I didn’t know myself, really. I cared too much what he thought of me so I ran everything through this filter of what he’d think of it before I decided what I thought of it. It became automatic. That’s the worst part—way worse than him stealing my design, or the rest of it.”

Will’s voice had gone bitter, cold. Like he was still chastising the version of himself who’d acted that way. And the description was so far from the person he was now that I could almost imagine it as someone else entirely. I wanted to go to him, touch him, but I knew he wouldn’t want me to. Not in a mood like this. He shook his head and turned away from the window, hands in his pockets.

“Anyway, whatever. He was a shithead who made me care about him and then fucked my head up and dumped me at the end of the year. I heard he did the same damn thing to someone the next semester. Sociopath creep.”

My legs were shaking, my arms were burning, and my stomach was trembling. Tonya said that you should be able to sink into each pose. Hold it and relax and breathe, and that was the challenge: to push your body only so far as it could go without causing agitation for your mind. But now it wasn’t the pose that was agitating me.

Will took a deep breath and turned to me.

“Look, college is great and everything, just don’t make the mistake of thinking those fuckers are magical founts of wisdom or anything, okay? Take everything you can get from it and don’t put up with any of the shit that isn’t useful.”

Okay, that was officially a subject change if I’d ever heard one.

“That sounds like your personal philosophy in a nutshell,” I said, collapsing out of plank in a totally un-flowy way. Tonya would not approve.

“I don’t have a damn philosophy.”

I rocked forward into child’s pose to wait him out. Will might be feeling snarky with himself, but he was still the most honest person I’d ever met.

“But okay, fine, if I did, then, yes. People have a terrible habit of not separating things out into their component parts, you know? They think if they accept one part of something, then they’re under some obligation to accept it all, as if there’s no in-between. As if it’s more important to agree than to be accurate.”

And there it was again. A reminder of one of the reasons I loved spending time with Will. No one had ever made me feel so comfortable just saying whatever I thought before. I didn’t have to worry that disagreeing with Will would hurt his feelings or piss him off. I mean, he might be pissed because of my opinion, but not because it was different than his.

I had grown up constantly trying to blend in with people at school so they wouldn’t notice I was gay. Constantly trying to find common ground with my family so I could feel like one of them. Always sure that it was because I was weird that I didn’t really have many friends in Holiday. To be able to simply speak my mind and know that Will was speaking his… it was a sweet relief.

That didn’t mean I didn’t still enjoy messing with him a little, though. I flopped onto the couch next to Will.

“You never agree with anything, asshole.”

“It doesn’t make me an asshole that I actually listen to what people say and address the points where my thoughts diverge instead of ignoring the parts I don’t agree with.”

“Oh yeah?” I nudged him with my shoulder. “Then what makes you an asshole?”

Will grinned. “A lot of other things.”

“Well, why focus on the things you disagree with rather than the ones you agree with?”

“I don’t focus on them. But if someone says, ‘I like peanut butter, cheese, pickles, caramel, and taking it up the ass, don’t you?’ and I just say yes, then they’d assume that I agree on all counts, which is inaccurate. So if I want them to know what is accurate, I’d have to clarify the place where we diverge.”

“Um, you don’t like….”

He raised his eyebrows at me and smirked.

“Taking it up the ass?” I asked at the same moment he said, “Peanut butter.”

“You don’t like peanut butter? That’s outrageous! Peanut butter’s—” Then my brain caught up to the actual content of what he said. “Oh,” I said.

AGAINST WHAT felt like all odds, I’d finished everything, Will’s blocky letters in their perfectly ordered blue boxes guiding my way through finals.

I was ready to collapse on my bed and sleep for the foreseeable future, but when I got to our room I found Charles packing and ranting because apparently there had been some kind of electrical problem in the dorm designated for the people enrolled in January term classes, and res life had temporarily reassigned them to the rooms on our floor. So now Charles and I, and anyone else on our hall not signed up for January term classes, had to clear our stuff out and store it in basement storage until spring term started.

As Charles explained, gesturing vaguely toward his computer monitor at an e-mail I’d clearly missed in the hustle of finals, total panic set in. Because I realized that I hadn’t even thought about what I was doing for January term. Or, I’d thought about it in the vague way that happened when my mom mentioned something about Christmas or people in the dining hall talked about plans for winter break. But I had failed to actually do anything about it.

Which is why instead of being facedown on my bed, I found myself knocking on Will’s door with my fingers crossed, my heart in my throat, and my duffel bag over my shoulder.

“Did you finish?” he asked, not seeming surprised to see me as he waved me inside.

“Yeah. Um. Haha, about that. Funny story.”

I told Will the situation, my panic mounting as I got to the part about how I’d totally fucked up and forgotten to make plans.

Will looked at me skeptically.

“I was just so stressed about all the finals stuff, and stuff with physics. I didn’t even notice the e-mail, I swear!”

Suddenly it was less important that I find somewhere to stay for January term. I mean, really, I could go back to Michigan if I needed to. I could take the bus again, or my mom would probably be able to scrape up plane fare for me. It was more that, standing here in Will’s apartment after spending the last week so close to him, the idea of leaving him for a month—of not getting to hear him make pronouncements or bitch about things, of not smelling him fresh out of the shower, of not feeling his eyes on me—was unbearable.

“Jesus! Fine, just stay here,” he said. “Holy puppy dog eyes, Batman.” He shook his head at me and took my duffel bag, putting it next to the couch.

“Wait, really! Oh my god, Will, thank you! You won’t regret it, I swear! I’ll do the dishes, I’ll do… um, you know, other chores. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

I flung myself into his arms, intensely relieved, and now thrilled to have my life unavoidably intertwined with Will’s for the next month.

Will fell backward onto the couch, and I landed half on his lap and half on the floor with an “Oof.”

“Ouch, Jesus!”

“Sorry, sorry.”

Will dragged me up and kind of wiggled over at the same time, and I ended up lying on top of him. God, he smelled amazing.

“Thanks for letting me stay,” I said softly, our mouths an inch apart. His lips were parted, and he was half smiling at me. I wanted him so badly. Wanted to absorb him into my skin and get under his. To feel every inch of him welcome me. I slid my hand to his jaw, leaned in slowly, and kissed him.

His eyelids fluttered shut as his mouth opened to mine. There was the slick heat of his tongue and the rasp of his stubbled chin, and my brain short-circuited in like point five seconds. I could feel his pulse speed up against my fingertips and I pressed against it, the line of his jaw sharp beneath soft skin. Everything about Will was sharp wrapped in soft or vice versa.

He groaned and grabbed me by the biceps. “Saying you could stay was not the same as saying we were going to—”

“No, I know that. I know.” But I ran my knuckles over his cheekbone and kissed him again, and he didn’t stop me.

WE FELL into a rhythm, orbiting around each other like twin satellites. Whether we were cooking, eating, showering, watching TV, or just coexisting, I was always aware of Will. Always attuned.

I learned things about Will by living with him that I’d only seen hints of before. Will could be easygoing and fun, but hated to be scrutinized, so the second I drew too much attention to him, his defenses would snap into place. Sometimes it was sharpness, sometimes silence or irritation. Sometimes it was bravado or flirtation. Sometimes teasing. Whatever the patina, though, it was a cover for the Will that I was getting to know in the times when he wasn’t self-conscious. It was like his apartment was his haven, and when I paid too much overt attention, he acted like he did when people stared at him on the streets.

I learned that he was an amazing problem solver, able to look at a complex system and sort it out easily. He was extremely visual, so he solved those problems by writing things down or drawing them out, unraveling things and putting them in an order that was most logical (not to mention aesthetically pleasing) as he’d done with my finals schedule. Every endeavor, no matter how insignificant, was driven by that same logic of optimization. From the way he did laundry to the order of how he gathered the trash, it was a ballet of economy and grace, never a wasted gesture, always the shortest distance between two points.

I’d already known he was passionate about his work, but I hadn’t fully grasped how many of his coworkers depended on him to be their second set of eyes. How often they e-mailed him looking for help or a reality check. And, for all that he was brusque and honest with them, they respected him for it. One night he’d gotten an e-mail from his coworker Joanne with a cover design attached that she wanted notes on.

“Christ,” he’d muttered, squinting disgustedly at the screen, “that’s horrible.”

“Oh no, what are you going to tell her?” I asked. That was my worst nightmare, basically—being put in the position of having to lie to someone. No one ever believed me, so it always got awkward.

“Uh, I’m going to tell her it’s horrible.”

“What? Oh my god, you can’t say that; it’s so mean!”

Will snorted. “What are you, six? It’s not mean. This is our job, and Joanne’s asking for notes. What good would it do her to tell her it’s good when it’s not?” He said this like it was just that simple and dialed before I could respond.

“Joanne, hey.” He peered at the screen as he talked. “Yeah, I got it. It’s… well, it’s not working at all, huh?” I gaped at him, but his expression and his voice were totally neutral. “Well, yeah, that’s why you sent it to me instead of that ass-kisser, Adamson. So, let’s fix it.”

And he sat at the computer helping her redesign it for two hours. Before they hung up, he said, “I think it looks great, how about you?” And though I couldn’t hear Joanne’s response, Will smiled broadly—a sincere, tired, thoroughly satisfied smile—and simply said, “Good. Night,” before wandering away to shower. He looked more than just proud; he looked… intoxicated. High on being able to have solved a problem, fixed an error, turned something from bad to good.

I was getting pretty good at reading Will’s moods, too, even though I still couldn’t predict them. Sometimes he was grouchy and short for no reason that I could tell. Other times he was upbeat, chatting about his coworkers or telling stories about what he’d seen walking home that day. Sometimes he had bouts of being furious with the world, ranting about everything from health care reform to e-mail etiquette. Other times he was quiet, almost meditative, moving through his own apartment like a ghost.

Sometimes he watched me. I’d look up from doing yoga or pouring coffee, feeling his eyes on me. Half the time he’d keep staring until I flushed with self-consciousness or arousal, because when he looked at me like that, it felt like I belonged to him somehow. The rest of the time he’d look away, scowling, irritated at me for catching him, or irritated at himself for looking in the first place, I couldn’t tell. At other times it was like he forgot I was even there. He’d come around the corner and look genuinely startled to find me there.

And all the time, between us, the air grew thinner.

I could feel it when we stood close, him pouring coffee and me stirring eggs. The way the hairs on my arms stood up when his sleeve brushed mine. The way the back of my neck tingled when he stretched a casual arm behind me on the couch. Sometimes, it was as if he did everything he could to make sure we didn’t make contact. Other times, he’d throw a leg over my knee while we talked like it was nothing, or run his fingers through my hair absently. His touch was electrifying and capricious, and every time it came, the intensity of my reaction startled me.

When I initiated touch with him, I eased into it slowly. I’d pass him his coffee and continue the movement of my hand up to rest on the back of his neck. I’d flip his collar down and keep contact, slowly moving to rest my chin on his shoulder.

One night, when he was standing looking out the window, I tucked my chin into the crook of his neck and he sighed and relaxed into me. I could feel the heat of his body through the fabric of his shirt, smell the scent of his skin and his hair. He reached a hand back and threaded it through my hair, keeping me there. We stood like that for what felt like ages, and just when I was about to blurt the question that felt like it was bursting to get out of me—that I knew he said he didn’t want a relationship, but why the hell weren’t we together when we so clearly worked?—I caught a glimpse of him in the window.

He looked vulnerable, his light hair a halo against the night sky. His eyes were closed and he was leaning into me like I was the only thing keeping him upright. When I opened my mouth to ask, I felt rather than saw his reaction. His shoulders tightened, and he shifted the balance of his weight away from me, as if preparing to support himself any second. And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t shatter the spun-sugar moment, especially as I noticed how tired Will looked.

He had been up late the night before talking on the phone and pacing. So I just nuzzled the side of his neck and snaked my arms around his waist, taking his weight onto myself again.

“Hey, who were you talking to last night?” I kept my voice quiet.

“Hmm? Oh, my nephew.” He sighed.

“You talk to him a lot, huh? Something up?”

“Uh, Claire. My sister. Sometimes she… leaves without telling Nathan and Sarah where she’s going.”

His weight against my shoulder grew heavier.

“She leaves?”

“Yeah.” He sighed, and I tightened my arms around him. “She’s bipolar—well, she hates that term, thinks it’s bullshit, but she was diagnosed just after high school.”

“Sorry, I’m not sure I know what that means, exactly.”

“Well, it varies a lot. But for Claire… she always had these periods of being really manic. Not sleeping, planning these grand projects or adventures. Her teachers used to send notes home that said she should be checked for ADHD, but my parents never paid attention. When we were younger, she’d do all her school projects for a month in one week, or clean the house from top to bottom. Once, she borrowed a friend’s car and drove to Kansas without sleeping because she was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz. Then, when she got back, she slept for like forty-eight hours straight and wouldn’t come out of her room for the next week. Stuff like that.”

“Oh man. That does sound like it’d be really hard for kids.” I made sure to keep my voice calm and low so Will wouldn’t move out of my arms.

He nodded and sighed. He sounded so tired, and I wondered how many times this had happened before. I kind of couldn’t believe he’d never mentioned something so huge.

“Sometimes she’ll go to the store and buy hundreds of dollars of groceries and cook for days until she has so much food it won’t even fit in the freezer. And sometimes she takes off and doesn’t tell Nathan and Sarah where she’s going. So, they call me and I call around and try and track her down, but really she just comes back when she’s ready. She leaves them food and money. But, you know. They’re kids. They get scared.”

“Yeah, of course.” Nathan was ten and Sarah was only eight. “Can anyone help out? What about Nathan and Sarah’s dad?”

“Dads. No. There’s no one else.”

“Your parents, maybe—”

“No.” Will’s voice was poisonous and his whole body tensed against me. He’d never even mentioned his parents before. “They couldn’t be fucked to take care of their own kids; they certainly don’t give a shit about their grandkids. Besides, they’re useless. They’re worse than children.”

I started to ask about his parents, but Will pulled away and went to the kitchen, taking a beer out of the refrigerator. He held it up to me on offer, but I shook my head. I still didn’t like the taste.

“Then sometimes… she does other things. Like….” Will bit his lip and sat down on the couch, tucking his knees up. It made him look uncharacteristically young. Uncertain. I sat down, folding my forearms over his knees and resting my chin on them.

“Like she’ll drive to Detroit and meet up with these randoms she knows and get wasted in a hotel room for three days. Or she’ll bring some guy home and tell Nathan and Sarah that she’s in love and she wants them to meet her new boyfriend. I mean, these are guys she’s known for like a week. And of course they never stick around. Sometimes they get scared off by the fact that she has kids, or she comes on too strong. And if not that, then she gets bored of them after a few weeks. Or a few days. Not a single one of them has lasted more than two months. And it’s fine for her. But Nathan and Sarah….”

I wrapped my arms around his legs, curling around him. He sipped his beer, and his other hand came to rest on my hair.

“Well, I think they know the score by now. But when they were younger they used to call me and say, like, ‘we have a new friend,’ or, god, the worst, ‘we have a new dad.’ And when I’d tell Claire to quit introducing these guys to them… depending on her mood, sometimes she’d tell me how this guy was different. He was the one she’d spend her life with. Her soul mate. Or she’d be furious with me. Accuse me of thinking she was a loser who no one would want to stick around for. So there was no point.”

Will shook his head, staring out the window into the dark. I took the empty beer bottle from him and slid it onto the coffee table, then I pulled him up toward me. He came into my arms easily, even if he grumbled a bit as he did it.

“It’s good that they have you. Nathan and Sarah, I mean. I bet it makes a big difference.”

Will nodded. “I guess.”

It was a lot to take in all at once, and I felt like I should say something. Reassure him. But platitudes would irritate him and empty assurances enrage him, so I did the only thing I could in comfort.

I ran my fingers through his hair, rubbing his scalp, and he melted against me like a giant cat, content, for the moment, to be petted.