Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere #3)

LAYNE HAD been beside herself with joy when I’d called and said I could work extra hours over break. This guy Travis—who I think might’ve been in some kind of country band?—had quit, so Mug Shots was suddenly short-staffed. I might’ve been able to make up for Travis, but Jill, who’d worked there for three years and was a milk frothing wizard, had the flu, and it was total pandemonium in the café.

It was the day before Christmas, so everyone was either attempting to relax with a comforting latte before having to face the stress of a family holiday, desperately caffeinating to finish work before the days off, or trying to show their out-of-town guests an authentic New York coffee shop experience and getting frustrated to find no empty tables and a line that snaked out the door. Then there were the people loading gift cards and buying Mug Shots mugs and whole beans as last-minute Christmas gifts, dithering over whether their secretaries deserved $25 worth of coffee or $30.

We were closing at six, but looking down the barrel of the final two hours of my shift made me slam back another shot of espresso that a customer hadn’t wanted.

“Hey, hot stuff,” a familiar voice said, and I turned to find Will grinning at me from the other side of the long line.

I waved and grinned back, immediately cheered. Will had the power to render the entire coffee shop happy and homey just with his presence. I passed the drink I’d just made to James so he could ring the customer up, and started in on the next of five empty cups to my left.

I was lost in the rhythm of pulling shots, pouring milk, and measuring syrup when an irate voice said, “Excuse me.” I didn’t think much of it, since part of the joy of being behind the espresso machine is that you’re in the heart of the action but you’re behind a wall, only communicating with customers through the boxes ticked on the side of their cups.

“Excuse me,” the voice came again. I looked up to find a well-dressed man with immaculately parted and gelled hair waving the coffee drink with “Frank” scrawled on it in my face. “This was supposed to be a flat white.” He pushed the coffee toward me across the counter.

“Uh, isn’t it?”

I was pretty sure that’s what I’d made, though I tended to forget one drink the second I passed it along and started on the next.

“No, it’s clearly a latte.”

“Oookay, do you want an extra shot in there?” Usually when people said this, they were just angling for more espresso in the drink even when it was made properly.

“No, I don’t want you to just dump an extra shot in. I want the drink I ordered and paid for.”

“Well, it’s just that the difference between a flat white and a latte—”

“I don’t need a lecture, thank you. Just my drink. It’s really not that difficult, you only have one job, and it’s to add milk to coffee in the proportions people order.”

I was pulling the cup toward me and getting ready to remake the drink when Will stepped up.

“Actually,” Will said, “he has many jobs every time a new customer comes up in line. Over and over. For hours. For very little money.” Will’s voice was the lazy drawl he used when he was taking advantage of every bit of force his looks and charisma could exact. He was dressed for work so he looked like he’d stepped out of a GQ ad. “You have one job, which is to pay someone else to make your coffee for you. So why don’t you do that? And then go away.”

The man gaped at Will, who never broke eye contact. There was silence in the café for a moment, except for the irritating swing of Christmas music and the steady hum of the milk steamer. Then from the depths of the line someone called, “Preach!” Someone else said, “You’re holding up the line,” and a third person coughed “douchebag.”

AT FIRST I’d thought that Will would let Christmas pass completely unacknowledged. It seemed possible that Christmas fit into the category of things I’d always thought everyone got swept along with but that Will didn’t acknowledge. Just in case, I’d been dropping subtle hints for the past week about how much I like Christmas: adding holiday movies to Will’s Netflix queue, humming Christmas carols while I was in child’s pose on the rug, commenting on the pretty decorations in the shop windows whenever we walked past.

When I came out into the living room after rinsing the film of steamed milk off me from my morning shift at Mug Shots on Christmas Eve, it was to Christmas lights twinkling around the windows and The Ref queued up on the TV. On the kitchen counter stood a mini tree, also strung with lights—one of those rosemary trees you can get at the fancy grocery stores, the ones that smell like winter.

“You wanna order food?” Will asked casually from the couch, but he was twisting the waistband of his sweatpants in tight fingers, looking studiedly at the wall behind me.

I threw myself at him on the couch, hugging him and burying my face in his neck. He made a sound like he was annoyed, but his arms came around me, warm and sure, so I stayed put.

“So,” Will said once we were ensconced on the couch with Indian food, “you didn’t want to go to Michigan for Christmas?”

I shook my head, shoving some naan in my mouth to delay answering. I wasn’t sure how to explain it, exactly. Will never talked about his parents and in that avoidance I read that things were probably pretty bad. But I didn’t have a sob story. My parents hadn’t kicked me out or treated me terribly. They’d never said horrible things, never hit me. But the space between what I wanted a family to be and what mine was gaped like a wound that couldn’t heal. And nothing I put into it—not energy or time, patience or distance—could fill it.

“My mom wanted me to,” I said finally. “So did Janie.” Janie had texted me: Come for Xmas or itll be toooooo boooooring!!!

I’d spoken with everyone that afternoon after I got off work. My mom told me a long story involving one of their neighbors and a Christmas-decoration-related power outage. Janie expressed her annoyance that I hadn’t come home. Eric described some piece of hiking gear he’d gotten for our dad, and when I told him I’d PayPal him for my share, he seemed to have forgotten that we usually all gave our parents something together. My dad just told me to stay warm, the generic Michigan version of “see ya later” in the winter.

“It’s… I dunno, depressing. Last year was….” I shook my head at the memory. “It was just like this pale shadow of what Christmas is supposed to be. There was a tree and presents and carols and some of that eggnog in a carton.” I shuddered. “And my mom cooked this… ham thing that she always makes. With pineapple and like cream of mushroom soup or something. But it was just… all wrong. It didn’t feel right.”

Will had been watching me as he idly mixed saag paneer, chana masala, curried lamb, and chicken tikka masala together in his bowl until it was a brownish slurry. Then he’d dumped in rice and began attacking the whole thing with slabs of naan like I was going to snatch it away from him.

Now he rolled his eyes at me. “You’re such a fucking romantic,” he said with his mouth full.

“Charming.” I handed him a napkin. “It’s not… romantic, really. Just, it didn’t feel the way you think Christmas is supposed to feel. It never has.”

“It didn’t feel the way you thought Christmas was supposed to feel, which you got from fantasies. Books and movies and Thomas fucking Kinkade paintings and shit.”

“My parents have a poster of a Thomas Kinkade painting,” I said, grinning at him. “In the living room.”

“Case in point,” he said, rolling his eyes again and wiping the sides of his bowl with naan. “Growing up under the watchful eye of the Painter of Light, how could you help but turn out to want a Christmas out of a Nicholas Sparks movie? That’s what romanticizing something is, kiddo. Having the notion that it’ll be a certain, perfect way based on something fictional. Something idealized.”

“Maybe,” I allowed. I had kind of liked that Nicholas Sparks movie with the blonde girl from Dancing With the Stars. “But the fact remains that it felt shitty to be there. Depressing.”

“Fair enough,” Will said, reaching over to steal a bite of my chicken. “For you, if something doesn’t achieve this level of Woohoo! Fantasy! Perfect! then it immediately flips over to being depressing. For me… neutrality seems pretty good.”

I thought about that as I finished my food, swatting Will’s fork away when I noticed that his stolen bites were making a substantial dent in the tikka masala, which was my favorite. Will had called me a romantic before. Mostly in reference to actual romance and relationship stuff. I’d never really thought about what it might mean to be a romantic about other stuff.

“But then what’s the difference, really? I mean, I have that idea about what I want Christmas to be. What does it matter where it came from?”

“I’m not saying it’s an invalid thing to want. Just that it’s something you’ve been fed, like an advertisement. So… okay, the goal of any good book cover, right, is to make someone think that what’s inside is going to be awesome. The cover stands in for the content of the book. It has to, because you can’t consume the whole book in an instant.

“But it’s silly to imagine that the cover is the same as what’s inside. It’s a signal telling you what kind of thing you might get. But not necessarily an accurate signal. It’s an advertisement, designed to speak to the audience that might be interested. It’s the same thing as your Christmas. Those picture-perfect images of a snowy cabin in the woods, roaring fire, a glowy Christmas tree with perfectly wrapped presents underneath, smiling happy family in sweaters, et cetera. It’s a fiction. A romanticization.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “A fiction, huh? Sounds just like Rex’s cabin to me. Well, okay, maybe not the perfectly wrapped presents part.”

Will barked out a laugh. “Yeah, okay, well, those fuckers. Sure. But I mean, they’re basically bucking for world’s biggest sappy romance, so.”

“Why are you so pissed off that they’re happy?”

“What? I’m not. I’m glad Rex is happy. Even if it is with the Prince of Poetry.” His nostrils flared at the mention of Daniel.

“No, seriously.”

“I’m being serious. I am seriously happy that Rex got what he wanted. It obviously wasn’t me, so I’m glad he found Mulligan.”

“You just sound pretty bitter is all. Is it because you and Rex don’t talk as much anymore?”

“Jesus, I’m not bitter. I expected that, anyway. It’s pretty much what happens. People get into relationships and all they care about is their partner. Same thing happened with my friend Morgan. We used to hang out all the time, then she met her husband and… that was it. Whatever.”

“You’re not friends anymore?” I’d never even heard him mention a Morgan. “That’s so sad.”

He shrugged. “People give up pieces of themselves to fit into their relationships. Compromise yourself to fit with another person enough, and pretty soon they’re the only person you fit with anymore.”

“That’s the most awful description of relationships I’ve ever heard!”

“Hey, kiddo, there’s only so much that can fit on a postcard.”

In the time it took me to come up with a response to that, Will finished the chicken tikka masala in my bowl and began scooping basmati rice out of the container and into his mouth using a piece of naan as a shovel. I gave up the rest of the food for lost and just pushed my bowl toward him so he could sop up the sauce with his rice.

Later, slaphappy and in a food coma from consuming an entire pumpkin pie that Will had pulled out of the freezer with relish and a wink, we put on Home Alone, which I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.

“This was my fantasy when I was a kid,” Will said. “To have the run of a mansion, eat pizza, and play with a shitload of toys.”

“Wouldn’t you have been lonely by yourself on Christmas?”

“Hell no. Bring it on. I’d rather have been alone instead of just—” He shook his head.

“Lonely?” I guessed.

“Whatever,” he murmured. “Move down.” And he positioned me where he wanted me, behind him on the couch so he could lean back against me. I was kind of squashed into the back cushions, but it felt perfect.

And so, so easy to almost believe that this was my real life. That Will and I would celebrate next Christmas together just like this, and the one after that.

“Hey, thanks,” I murmured into Will’s neck a few minutes later, after he’d settled on some old suspense thriller with Sandra Bullock that I’d seen bits and pieces of on TV as a kid. “For Christmas. And for letting me stay.”

At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer. He did that sometimes. Not to be mean, I had realized. But when he didn’t have anything to say. After a minute, though, he turned around to face me, the flicker of the television lighting his face dramatically. The sweep of his eyelashes cast a shadow, and the dip of his upper lip made me long to trace it with my tongue.

Then he kissed me. It wasn’t a kiss about lust or whim or chemistry. It was a kiss about Christmas and comfort and the pure joy of being here right now, on this couch with Will’s skin warm against mine as the snow blew against the window in a spray of icy crystals.

Will broke the kiss too soon, but didn’t turn away.

“So we’re basically, like, kissing now, huh?” I asked.

“Shh. We can kiss if we want to,” Will said, eyes still closed as if he were asserting a rule in some game that we had made up just for us.

We fell asleep on the couch hours later, and when I woke up in the middle of the night, all I saw was the lights Will had hung twinkling brightly around the windows and the faint answering glow of lights in the windows of the other buildings nearby.

A FEW mornings later, we were eating pancakes and Will was on an epic rant about his coworker Gus.

He’d been really stressed about work the past week, though, and his rant about Gus seemed less like an ad hominem attack and more like him spinning his wheels.

Finally, I couldn’t listen anymore.

“Gus is fine, Will. You’re the crazy one. You’re probably his nemesis because he’s acting normal and you respond like an insane person. He probably goes home and tells his friends or his wife or whoever about the psycho who hates him for no reason.”

Will sulked, shoveling pancakes into his mouth.

“Hey, what’s the deal with work, for real? You’ve been totally stressing about it.”

Will made a can’t-answer-mouth’s-full gesture, and I rolled my eyes at him and waited as he chewed.

He fiddled with his coffee cup and his fork and twisted the hem of his perfect white T-shirt. I leaned into his space and pulled him toward me a little, then I kissed him, licking the syrup from his lips.

Because we were kissing now.

“Well?” I sat back, and Will looked startled. He licked his lips absently.

“Gus asked me to go into business with him. To start our own graphic design company. Be co-owners.”

Will loved his job, but one thing he complained about all the time was having to work on other people’s schedules and play by other people’s rules.

“That sounds great,” I told him. “Especially considering that Gus sounds like a totally cool person.”

“He’s whatever.”

“So are you gonna do it?”

Will shrugged, going from rant-tastic to nonverbal in 4.5 seconds. I hadn’t seen this mood before, and I mentally labeled it “Petulant Child.”

“Oh, I know what you need!” I got up, and Will gestured toward the pancakes on the counter with a totally unnecessary since-you’re-up grunt.

I dumped more pancakes on his plate and brought his graph-paper pad and pencil over to the table.

“A pros and cons list.”

Will loved lists almost as much as he loved graphs and charts. I waggled the paper in front of him. He pushed it away and concentrated back on the pancakes, drenching them in butter and syrup and chowing down as he stared into space.

Well, a kiss had kind of worked before. I stood up and straddled Will’s lap, putting myself between him and the pancakes. I took the dripping fork out of his hand.

“You’re gonna make yourself sick,” I told him, eating the bite myself. When I kissed him, our lips were sticky-sweet.

Finally, after several more syrupy kisses and a lot of grumbling, I got the truth out of Will. That he valued the prestige of being with a Big Five publisher, which he wouldn’t have if he and Gus started over from scratch.

“But you could make the company whatever you wanted,” I told him. “You care about the work so much. What would be better than being able to do it the way you think is best?”

He looked surprised at my words and his expression softened.

“Yeah, maybe.”

It was the first time I felt like I had been useful to Will for more than just hanging out or doing my share of the dishes. For once, I had helped him instead of the other way around.

I WOKE up in the dark to Will talking on the phone in the bedroom.

“Where did you look already? … Yeah, I can call down there…. Once or twice…. It’s okay…. Yeah, let me know….”

Will came out of his room and wandered to the window in the kitchen, staring out at the gyro place, the Mexican restaurant, and the flower shop on the corner.

I slid a hand up his back and felt that every muscle was tensed.

“You okay?”

He kept staring out the window like I wasn’t there, but he didn’t pull away. When I started to rub his shoulders, though, he shrugged me off.

“Nathan and Sarah?”

Will nodded, but it clearly wasn’t an invitation for further discussion. He moved away and I followed him into the kitchen where he started to make coffee automatically, like he did every morning. Halfway through he seemed to notice that it wasn’t even 5:00 a.m. and it was Sunday, but he continued doing it anyway.

AFTER FOURTEEN days of living with Will, three things were quite clear.

First, that we were so different I never had a prayer of predicting how he would feel about or react to things.

One morning he came in and made coffee, and I pointed to the bananas I’d gotten at the bodega, saying “There are bananas if you want any.”

Will said, “I live here. If I wanted a banana in my own apartment then obviously I would get one.”

“I was just telling you they were there,” I said.

“I can see they’re there. They are a huge bunch of yellow bananas in the middle of my counter, forty microns from where my hand is currently resting. If I couldn’t see the bananas there, I would have a major problem, given that I work in a field of visual arts.”

“Jesus, sorry, I was just being polite!”

“It’s not polite,” Will said, rounding on me. “It’s not polite to make people respond to inane comments in their own houses at seven in the morning. It’s intrusive. I need all my energy to deal with existing in a world filled with idiots and psychopaths. I can’t waste any on fucking bananas before I’ve even had coffee. Next thing I know you’ll say good morning or ask me how I am and I’ll have to kill myself.”

“How are you and good morning are not intrusive, asshole!”

“How are you is the root canal of small talk and good morning should be shot,” he said, and turned on his heel to go get dressed, taking his coffee with him.

Second, and not unrelated, was that Will mostly said whatever he wanted and considered honesty to be far more important than protecting people’s feelings.

When I suggested that sometimes a little white lie was more valuable than telling a truth for no reason other than to pat yourself on the back for being truthful, he said that he categorically refused to take other people’s feelings on as his responsibility. That if he’d let himself choose his words or his actions based on what might or might not hurt or uplift other people he’d never have made it past high school much less in New York.

It sucked when I was the one on the other end of one of his hard truths, but it was also incredibly reassuring to know where I stood. I knew that if Will paid me a compliment, then he meant it. I knew that if I asked his opinion, I’d get it. Will was aggressively, uncompromisingly himself, and it kind of made me feel like I could be that way with him too.

Third, if I wanted things to progress from the we-kiss-now phase into actual, like, sex stuff—which, uh, I really did—then I was definitely going to have to be the one to make it happen.

Despite the kissing, and the way that more and more often our television watching time turned into a cuddle-fest, Will had remained firm about me sleeping on the couch. He said he liked his privacy.

I was totally respectful of that, of course, but it was honestly torture, lying there and knowing that only about twenty feet and a thin door separated us.

So, since I couldn’t hope that maybe one night we’d just… I dunno, like, come together naturally in the middle of the night, I was taking matters into my own hands. I’d decided that tonight would be the night I made my move.

Apparently the universe had other plans, though, because things at Mug Shots went completely batshit. Gretchen, who was in town because she was doing a January term class, had come in to get a coffee and say hi, so I was distracted for a minute while it happened, but some lady drove her scooter into the window of the Starbucks across the street from us, and they had to shut down for the day to clean up the glass. This meant that all the people whose business Starbucks usually drew popped over to us when they found their usual route to caffeine cut off. It was the busiest day I’d ever worked, all of us running around at double-time just to barely keep up with the line. I fell asleep on the subway going back to Will’s and missed my stop.

Turned out Will’d had a day from hell too and was already in sweats when I got home, a sure sign he was wrung out.

“You want me to order food?” he asked. “I was thinking of sushi.”

I’d never tried sushi, but it seemed like a very New York thing to eat. Besides, if Will wanted it then I wanted to want it, so I nodded.

“Do you mind if I take a shower?”

He waved me into the bathroom absently, like he was totally used to having me here. The bone-deep contentment of being a thing that made sense in Will’s well-ordered world filled me, and I practically floated to the shower, my exhaustion evaporating in the steam.

“Oh my god,” Will said half an hour later as we sat with the sushi spread between us and I chewed. And chewed. And chewed. “You’ve never had sushi before have you?”

And, oh shit, I had to spit it out. I just had to. The texture. Oh man. I just couldn’t with the texture.

“Gah! Jesus. Sorry.”

Will silently pulled my plate toward him and moved most of the sushi onto his own, replacing it with a few things from his and a few from a container to his right, then pushed it back to me where I eyed it suspiciously.

“It’s tempura. It’s fried. You’ll be fine.”

I took a cautious bite, but it mostly tasted like sesame-y onion rings, so I munched happily as Will watched me with a mildly amused expression.

After dinner, we flopped onto the couch, and Will put on Orphan Black. I fell asleep in about ten minutes, the exhaustion of the day catching up with me, and woke up halfway on top of Will where I must’ve snuggled him in my sleep. He was asleep too, head thrown back against the couch. The naked curve of his throat in the moonlight was irresistible. I kissed his neck softly.

“Will?”

His nose scrunched at the sound. “Mmphm.”

“Do you wanna go to bed?”

He nodded sleepily, but his hand was in my hair, and he was kind of… cuddling me.

My heart started racing. Fully aware that I might be pushing my luck—that I might be gambling for a hundred with a twenty and lose both, I said, “Can I stay with you tonight?”

His eyes tracked from mine down to my mouth, then up again. Then, in a movement so slow I almost thought I was imagining it, he nodded.

I stood up and held out a hand to him, pulling him up. Will moved into my arms like it was natural and we went to his room. I brushed my teeth thoroughly, nervous that I had sushi breath, then made my way to the bed. In the dark, all I could really make out was the light sweep of Will’s blond hair.

I’d been so sleepy a minute before, but now I was wide-awake.

And intensely nervous.

I stood there for a minute, trying to figure out how this was going to go. Should I kiss Will? Would he—

“Leo, get in the bed and go to sleep.”

“Oh, but I—um, are we—”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I was gonna say,” I grumbled.

He snorted. “We’re not having sex, just come the hell to bed. I’m so tired.”

“What time did you leave this morning, anyway?” I slid into bed next to him.

“Like six.”

“Is everything okay at work? Why’d you go in so early? You don’t usually go that early, do you? No, you don’t. I—”

The pillow hit my face and Will pulled the covers up over it, encasing me in a cocoon of Will-smelling warmth. He held the pillow there for a minute. I mean, I could still breathe and everything, he was just making a point. When I relaxed into the bed, he took his pillow back and shoved it under his head, turning onto his stomach.

“What kind of sheets are these?” I asked. “They’re so comfy.”

Will groaned. “Leo!”

“But I’m suddenly not tired anymore,” I said.

“Yes, you are. You just forgot about it momentarily because penises don’t run on the same clock as the rest of us.”

“You mean like a dessert stomach? A cock clock?” I started giggling. Then I laughed some more. Then I turned over to tell Will something terribly important, but I couldn’t possibly because I was so very, very asleep.

I FINALLY decided on the direct approach.

“I want us to have sex,” I said as we did the dishes the next night. “Okay?”

Honestly, I’d kind of expected surprise at my boldness or… something. But Will just snorted dismissively and said, “You’re nineteen. You want to have sex with everything.”

“That’s not true!” I insisted. “Besides, I’m more mature than you. You’re a child basically, only with, like, dicks instead of toys.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that. I take mine, and I go home as soon as I’m sick of playing.” He waggled an eyebrow at me as he dried the final dish, then walked to his desk and starting preparing things for work the next day.

“Will, I’m serious.”

He sighed and his shoulders slumped. “Yeah, I know.”

Well that was… not encouraging.

“So then… what? Am I really that bad?”

“No, of course not,” Will said.

“Then I don’t get it. You’ll sleep with all those strangers—with guys you don’t even like—with guys you kinda hate, but not with me?”

Will cut his eyes to me sharply, though his voice was only a mild warning. “Careful, Leo.”

“Sorry, sorry, just….” My stomach turned over. “You must really not want me at all, I guess?”

Will opened his mouth and an expression I’d never seen before crossed his face. It was heavy and complicated. I got irritation and curiosity and… maybe fear? I’d never seen Will look afraid before so I couldn’t be sure.

“You’re sure that’s what you want?”

“Well, jeez, don’t sound too excited.”

Now I just felt stupid, like I was talking him into something he really didn’t want. But Will was still looking at me like he expected an answer. Which was ridiculous because I was pretty sure the fact that I wanted Will was up there with “global warming is real” on the list of stuff that is obvious.

“Yeah. Yes, of course I do.”

For just a second I imagined that what I saw in Will’s expression was… disappointment. Which didn’t make any sense, so I must have been wrong. And then whatever it was vanished, the cool mask I recognized from outside the walls of his apartment firmly in place.

“Okay, then,” he said, and grabbed my hand, pulling me toward the bedroom.

“Wait, what? Really? Uh, wait, right now?”

At the bed, Will stripped with economy and gestured at me to do the same.

He was perfect, pale velvet skin over long muscles, gleaming with fine golden hairs like he was a marble statue that the sculptor had dusted with gilt. But he looked like he could have been changing in a gym locker room for all the enthusiasm he was showing.

“Umm. This wasn’t quite the way I… thought this would go.”

“What, you want me to seduce you? You were the one negotiating this like a business transaction not five minutes ago.”

“Yeah, but I just thought….”

“You thought it’d be romantic? That you’d stay here for a month and we’d fall in love and be boyfriends and soul mates and get married and artificially inseminate your lesbian BFF and have a kid called Mint? That’s not me, Leo. And the sooner you realize that you don’t actually want me like that the better.”

“But I do want you. I—”

“Look, I’m not saying this to be cute. I’m not doing some ‘Oh god, I’m awful, you don’t want me, rending my garments in the rain, tortured and riddled with feelings of unworthiness because my little brother drowned while I was supposed to be watching him and I don’t deserve love’ thing. I’m being honest. You wanna fuck? Let’s fuck. But don’t have the expectation that then we’ll be boyfriends because you’ll be disappointed. And if you do it anyway and you get your feelings hurt, I want you to think back to this moment right here, where I’m telling you it’s a bad idea, so that you don’t blame that shit on me.”

I gaped at him, something shaking loose and jangling around inside my chest, my stomach hollow. He had said all this in a tone that was completely sincere. Genuine. Like he could’ve been giving me advice about someone else.

I wasn’t sure how to tell him that, yes, I wanted him. But not the way he thought. Not in the anonymous, impersonal way that he slept with strangers. I didn’t know how to say that and not prove him right about what else I wanted from him, though. About all those things he said he didn’t want to give.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Will said before I could find the words, and started pulling his clothes back on.

Something made me say, “Wait.” Because part of me didn’t believe it could be true. After everything we’d shared, how close we’d gotten, I couldn’t quite believe that sex would mean nothing to him. How could it?

Sure, maybe this was all I could get from Will for now. But… after we’d slept together, how could Will not realize how good we could be? Realize how it could be different with me than it was with those other guys?

“I still want to,” I said. Will froze, pants half on.

“You do?”

I nodded. He looked uncertain. He had pitched a hardball, fully expecting me to walk away, and I’d taken a swing and hit it squarely. He narrowed his eyes at me.

“I heard you,” I said. “And I accept the limitations of your offer. Just sex, we’re not boyfriends. I get it. I swear.” I sounded at least marginally nonchalant, even if my heart was about to pound out of my chest.

Will crossed his arms. “Okaaaay….”

“Okay.”

“Okay. So we’re doing this?”

“Yeah, just… um, just know that I’ve never… exactly… I mean, I have done stuff—but I’ve. Yeah.”

“Duly noted,” Will said, back in control. He walked over to me and started pulling my clothes off, smirking. “I’ve got no problem whatsoever telling you exactly how I want you to fuck me.”

My knees practically buckled, because, shit, that was hot. “Oh Jesus. Okay. You want me to—right, sure, no problem.”

“Get on the bed, Leo.”

I scrambled to the bed, so distracted by what was about to happen that I almost forgot to store away the image of Will, naked and pale as ice, prowling toward me, thighs tightening and releasing, the perfect cut of muscle at his hips almost ridiculous in its definition.

“Do you have a personal trainer or something?” He just smirked and shook his head, crawling over me in the bed.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It won’t hurt too much.” Then he leered and grabbed my dick.

I already felt ridiculously exposed, and that didn’t help.

“Oh my god, can you at least pretend that you’re taking me a little bit seriously?”

“I take this”—he stroked my erection—“very seriously, Leo.”

I groaned, my head falling back. “’Kay, kiss now, please.”

Will kissed me and I forgot that he was basically doing me a favor. That this was just sex to him—maybe even pity sex. I forgot everything except that his mouth felt like heaven and his body against mine was intoxicating. I was immediately at about an eight out of ten on the imaginary arousal scale that I’d just created. What would you measure arousal in, anyway? Well, I was at eight out of ten of them, in any case.

“Okay, okay, okay,” I chanted, pulling away and praying that Will would see how close I was and ease off just a little.

He reached into the bedside table and pulled out a condom.

“You know how to do this?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, starting to rip it open with my teeth like I’d seen people do in the movies.

“Oh dear god, give me that, I’ll do it.” He snatched the condom and rolled it over my erection. I bit my lip, and he smirked at me.

“Can I, um.”

“Spit it out.”

“I want to… can we switch places?”

“Oh, you want to be on top of me?”

I nodded.

“You going to fuck me hard, Leo?” His comment was half flirtatious and half mocking, but somehow I thought he was a little excited at the idea. And my dick definitely was.

“Lie down,” I said, and he did. Spread out beneath me, Will looked different. Accessible in one way, but more remote in another. Like he was giving me a part of himself, but if I took it, another part would recede.

Gone was the man I’d made out with over pancakes, or cuddled with on the couch, binge watching Orphan Black. Gone was the man I’d listened to as he ranted about typography on book spines, and the one who’d eaten chicken tikka masala off my plate and grinned when he got caught, sauce in his teeth.

The one in his place was sexy, experienced, in control. Distant. But I had said I wanted this and I wasn’t sure I’d get another chance to prove to him what we could be.

I thought back on all the porn I’d watched, but couldn’t actually remember what happened before the actual fucking part. Maybe they edited that out? Was I supposed to, like….

“It’s on the condom already.”

“Huh?”

“Lube. If that’s what you’re waiting for.”

“Oh, okay. Um, so should I like… do something?”

“Yeah, you might consider fucking me. That or get me something to read in the meantime.”

“No, I meant, um, like in terms of preparation or—”

“I know what you meant.”

“Okay, then I’ll just, uh….”

But my hands were shaking and my knees were shaking and really this did not feel like I wanted it to. And I know Will made fun of me for having these grand romantic notions—“capital-R romantic,” Professor Ginsberg would probably say—and maybe he was right, but….

I dropped my chin to my chest.

“Hey, can we not do it like this?” I said, my voice small.

“You’re the one who wanted to switch places!”

“No, I mean…. Will, come on. Please. I know it’s maybe a joke to you, but I really haven’t ever done this before, and you’re kind of making me feel like shit.”

I opened my eyes a crack and looked at Will. He looked away.

“Like, I want you you, not sex you.”

“Sex me,” he repeated.

“Yeah, with the whole ‘I’ve slept with a ton of people, and this is just one more notch on my bedpost, I’m beautiful and confident and not terrified I’m about to totally fuck it up’ thing.”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re not gonna fuck it up.”

“I might,” I whispered.

This had been a huge mistake. Will was looking at me like I was a stranger he’d offered a favor to who was now making the favor much more work than he’d anticipated. I’d had warmer, more intimate exchanges checking out library books. This was nothing like what I wanted with him. Nothing at all.