Someone Else's Love Story (25 page)

I followed Walcott, feeling strangely shy. We were almost never at odds. I didn’t know how to manage it. To fill the silence—I never had awkward silences with Walcott!—I said, “My dad got Natty that Lego Death Star.” It was a four-hundred-dollar toy, one of the unstoppable penance-gifts Dad was showering down on us, courtesy of Bethany being such a butthole right after the robbery.

“Oh, cool! Can I see it?”

Misfire. I flushed as I said, “It’s at William’s.” I could feel Walcott bristling. “Are you thirsty? I have beer and Cokes and I don’t know what all.”

“Sure.”

We passed through into the kitchen, which had a lot of stainless steel and slate gray granite countertops, but still was not as oppressive as the living room. If I were decorating for my dad, I’d do rich creams and deep, warm browns with a fat, welcoming sofa and a leather wingback.

“How’s Natty doing?” Walcott asked. “He already in bed?”

“Yeah. He’s not great,” I said. I got a beer out of the fridge and pushed it into his hand. “Mimmy offered to come spend the weekend, which might do Natty a world of good, but Lord. I can’t even imagine opening that negotiation with Bethany. I don’t own anything worth her allowing The Mimmy to come pee in her territory. Unless maybe Bethany needs a kidney? I have a spare.”

“Bethany’s more Tin Man,” Walcott said. He didn’t open his beer, just held it, and added, strangely rueful, “Too bad you only have the one heart.”

It was the kind of wryly mawkish joke he made when he’d been out overdrinking with the other poets, but he hadn’t even touched his beer. I got one, too, and then boosted myself up onto the countertop. I took a swig and it was so good, cold and really bitey. It was one of Dad’s small-batch local brews that cost the earth.

“I’m glad you’re finally here, Walcott. I hate being out of sorts with you. It makes everything taste like crap. Can you stay over? Maybe take a shift with Natty? I would pay you four cherry Pop-Tarts. It would seriously change my quality of life if I could get three hours of uninterrupted sleep.”

“Oh. Well. Hmm. I don’t think I can do that.” He said it slow, almost regretful.

“Poop. Are you still mad at me?” He shook his head. “Why then? Because of CeeCee?” I asked, rolling my eyes.

I’d introduced CeeCee to Walcott, and she knew we’d been slipping out our windows and sleeping at each other’s houses on the sly since we were nine. Ever since they got serious, though, she’d been making pushy little dabs at me, trying to step me out of territories she wanted only for herself, acting as if I were some kind of rival.

“Forget CeeCee. I broke up with CeeCee that night after the robbery.”

I looked at him then, really looked at him, studying his face in the kitchen’s bright lights. His mop of unruly brown hair was tufted up crazy like it got when he was stressed or his writing wasn’t going well. He had thick eyebrows arched over large, deep-set eyes. His nose was unapologetically big, but it was a noble damn nose, no matter what he said about it, balanced by his wide, full mouth. His face was so familiar that I hadn’t really looked at him, hadn’t noticed how his skin was drawn tight over his angular skull. He had purple circles under his eyes that rivaled mine.

“You didn’t tell me. Are you okay? I’m such an ass! Are you having PTSD, too?”

“I’m not sleeping great,” Walcott said, setting his untasted beer aside. “Listen, I can’t drink this. I can’t sleep over, none of that, because you are about to be furious and want me out of here.”

I blinked, taken aback, and then laughed. “I never want you out of anywhere.”

“You will this time. I came to ask you to put the brakes on all this crap with William Ashe.”

I sparked into an instant anger, just as Walcott had predicted, and that made me even madder. “That ship has sailed.”

Walcott shook his head. “I don’t mean the lab stuff.” He looked away, desperately unhappy. “I mean stop going over to his house all the time. Don’t let him build the Death Star with Natty. I should do the Death Star.”

I puffed air out in a
psh
noise. “William is not going to replace you with Natty, or with me. You have a Walcott-shaped perma-spot with us.”

“Stop being thick,” Walcott said. “I’m trying—with what has to be the least amount of grace of any poet in the history of time—I’m trying to tell you, I’m in love with you.”

He said it so mild and calm and simple that I couldn’t process the words for a second or two. Then I said, “No, you aren’t.”

“I am, though,” he said, holding one hand out toward me like he was offering an apology. “Apparently I’ve been in love with you for years now.”

“No, you have not,” I said, a fringe of anger tickling across my skin, because this declaration felt like a betrayal. “What are you saying? That you’ve been all secretly pining, the whole time, like a trick?” It was too dishonest, and I couldn’t bear it if every disdainful thing I thought about Paula was true for Walcott, too. The idea that Walcott—my Walcott—had kept a secret of such magnitude! If he’d always had some nasty, sexed, romantical agenda, it negated everything we’d ever been. But he was shaking his head, vehement.

“I didn’t know,” Walcott said. “Or I did. But only in the back of my heart. Maybe I felt a kind of waiting? I never thought about it, same way I don’t think about breathing. It was a quiet fact, that we would be an us, eventually. When we were old enough to not eff it up. I’m pretty sure you knew it, too, before all that shit went down at the Kappa house.” I was shaking my head no, but he kept talking. “Then you were in that Circle K, and it occurred to me that you could die. There I was, waiting for us to grow up enough to make our real life happen, and all at once I was looking at a tomorrow with the world still spinning, except you wouldn’t be on it. Natty wouldn’t be on it. So I—”

“Walcott!” I interrupted. “This is a reaction to the stress. This isn’t real.”

He shook his head. “Remember when the cops brought you out? That’s when I understood. I’ve been trying hard to tamp it back, but I can’t. It happened, and it won’t unhappen.”

I remembered. They drove William away in the ambulance, and the cop who looked like Samuel L. Jackson took charge of me. He was escorting us toward his car, when I spotted Walcott talking to another cop near the perimeter. I changed our course, beelining toward him. Walcott’s face looked like it was made out of wallpaper paste. He had drying brownish blood all over his favorite Pixies T-shirt. I still had brown streaks of William’s blood on my hands, and I thought to myself,
Oh, look, we match.

Natty spotted Walcott then and came alive in my arms, hollering, “Walcott! Walcott!”

Walcott turned and saw us coming. His face broke into a wide, weird smile, an unreadable look spreading over his face as he watched us coming. It was familiar. I had seen him make this face before, but I couldn’t place it. I sped up, almost running toward him with the cop pacing me.

Just as we reached him, before I could lay hands on him, Walcott turned and doubled up and puked into the grass. He heaved and heaved, with his outsize hands dangling down, his arms braced on his bent knees.

I thought,
Oh, man!
I’m the only one who got to keep Mimmy’s fantastic rage lunch.

Between heaves, he reared up to look at me and say, “Hi. Oh, hi,” with that weird look still on his face.

The cop went and got him a bottle of water, and then I had to give my statement, so I’d forgotten about trying to place his strange expression.

Standing in the overelegant kitchen, I finally realized where I had seen Walcott make that face before. It was his bad hangover face, from the few times when he had truly overdone it. It was a face he made when he felt poisoned near to death.

The taste of the beer soured in my mouth. It was true, then. He fucking loved me.

He was still talking, and with such calm finality it was absolutely terrifying. “Shandi, I think you were in love with me. Before. Maybe you still are, but you haven’t noticed, because I’ve politely chosen not to be in a hostage situation.” I didn’t say anything, but I guess not saying anything was answer enough. He shrugged and looked away from me, blinking rapidly. “Did I miss the window? Every time I text you, these days, you’re at his house. Are you with him?”

“No. It’s more like—” I stopped talking, finally clueing in, and feeling like an idiot. Walcott hadn’t been objecting to my hunt for the Golem. Walcott had never been dim or missed the point. He was jealous of William.

He said, “Whatever. I don’t care. I’m asking if there’s room for us to try this out.” He waved his hand forward and back, drawing an invisible connecting line in the air between us.

I was shaking my head, not like no, but more because I couldn’t process. “Walcott, come on. We already did that.”

“Did what?” Walcott said.

“You know,” I said. He shook his head, mystified. He really didn’t. “You
know
,” I said, but I didn’t have a word for it. What Walcott and I did together, while not exactly pleasant, was too funny and too friendly for that ugly f-word. Had sex? Cold and clinical. Did it? That sounded so giggly-fifties-poodle-skirt, and way too shy. Made love? Puke. “Two years ago? You know!” I yelled, thoroughly frustrated, and I saw understanding finally dawn.

“You’re kidding me, right?” he said.

“No?” I said. “You were there. We did what we did, and neither one of us saw unicorns or rainbows.”

Now he was laughing, but I could see that under that, he was getting angry. “I’m kind of insulted. You’re going to count that?”

I swallowed and looked away. “It was enough to know there isn’t any
there
there.”

He shoved his hands through his hair, nostrils flaring. “We didn’t even kiss! And have you ever had a
there
there? With Doug or whatever that other old dude’s name was?”

“Richard,” I said, feeling pretty sure he’d just changed my attraction-meaning
there there
to a much dirtier euphemism. “That question is cheating. You know I didn’t.”

My former boyfriend, Doug, was the only reason Walcott and I did what we did in the first place. Doug wasn’t some punk college boy. He was an actual man, divorced, with a couple of kids. He had the kind of job that came with health insurance, and he took me to dinner in real restaurants. He didn’t go skateboarding or drink dollar beer and he wasn’t interested in making out in any kind of vehicle. He wanted a grown-up, actual relationship, one that included sex.

I wanted those things, too, but I was too freaked out to give Doug the green light.

My sticking point was, Doug believed I was experienced. He hadn’t met Natty, but he knew Natty existed. In reality, I’d had exactly one boyfriend in high school before Natty happened. His name was Ajay. He had liquid black eyes and a gorgeous smile, but looking back, I mostly picked him because he wasn’t Jewish or any kind of Christian. He was a cute boy I could date without picking a team. We’d eventually broken up because I could only see him every other weekend, but while we lasted, we’d had several epic make-out sessions. I’d let him put his hand under my shirt, over the bra, where he kneaded with delighted disbelief at my booby. It had been super exciting, not really because it felt that great to have my booby treated like a yeast roll, but because we had both been so thrilled that I had let him touch it.

Doug was an adult, dating a mother. He would not expect some fumbling innocent in bed. I panicked over the ugliest logistics. What if it hurt, and I cried? What if I bled? How the hell would I explain that?

So I went to the one person who had always had my back, every living second. I’d let myself into the Cabbagetown rent-a-house Walcott shared with three other English majors. He had a bedroom the size of a walk-in closet, but all his own.

He was sitting on his futon, feverishly tapping at his laptop when I came in and closed the door behind me.

He said, “I’m onto something. Can you give me half an hour?”

“Sure,” I said, “but then I need you to make sex with me.”

The typing stopped. “You need me to who the what what?”

“Sex,” I said. “I need you to help me have it.”

Walcott nodded, suddenly thoughtful. “Brilliant! Let’s get to it. This sounds like the ideal way for us to never speak again. Can I finish my poem now?”

I said, “I keep thinking I’ll go home with Doug, and then I freak out and don’t.”

He winced at the name. Doug, he always said, sounded like someone’s gray-chest-haired old father. Which Doug was. Well, he was a father. I didn’t know about the chest hair, yet. He did have a little gray in his hair, which I liked. But I couldn’t get from where I was all the way to Doug. Not without Walcott. I begged him, and then I yelled at him. No dice. I whined that I was a dreadful virgin mother-monster who would never have sex or get to be in love for my whole life.

None of that fazed him. What fazed him was when I cried. When I sat there with tears rolling down my face and my hands in my lap and said simply, as sincere as I had ever been, “You always help me, Walcott. Why won’t you help me now?”

He banged his laptop shut and set it aside on the dresser. “Gah, okay. Stop crying.” I dried up, and he said, in his thinking voice. “We’ll make the sex, as you say in your oh-so-charming native country, The Land of Super-Crazy, but there have to be some rules. So it doesn’t get all weird and ruin us.”