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I came back late last night—so late I tried to sneak in through the bedroom window instead of going through the front door like a normal person. Your mom was out, working a late late late shift and I slipped out of my leather jacket, shucked it off onto the floor, left it in a heap with my jeans and sweater and my socks that might be yours. And I would’ve could’ve should’ve gone to bed without wasting still more precious minutes—in some other timeline, maybe I just went to bed like anybody else would do in my position, tucked myself into your guest room’s comforter and then left well enough alone—but I tried and see, my throat burned and tingled for want of something cool and wet and my mouth tasted like the tangled inside of her kisses and my tongue stuck to everything it touched with tack like the backs of postage stamps and I wandered down the hallway, past your room and the first time, I ignored it—your door was cracked, your lights were off, your breathing sounded pretty even so why would I pay attention—but on my way back from the kitchen, on my way toward the sleep I should have gotten and the place I should’ve been to start with, I stopped because my ribs were twisting into me like knives and something wormed along my muscles and scraped along my tendons and scoured at my nerves with bleach. Guilt dug in deep and scratched all up and down my insides because I kissed her last night and so many other times before that and I really couldn’t let it go—maybe I should have, maybe I should have let you be, but I had to check in on you. I had to crack the door a little further, stick my face into the sliver. I couldn’t just leave well enough alone. Not now and not with you. There’s too much of that going around these days with regard to you, I think.
So I slipped into your doorway without any invitation and I’m not the praying type or anything like that but still I prayed you wouldn’t notice and more than that, I hoped to something like a god that maybe you would be okay. Just sleeping as though nothing’s wrong because nothing’s wrong because you’re fine because you have to be and anyway you’d tell us if you weren’t. Me or her or him, your mom or someone—you’d tell someone, I know you would. I sought you out among the shadows, waiting for you to move, even the gentle up and down motions of your breathing chest would have been enough for me, enough to say that you were fine and that I didn’t need to worry, that the tender beating of your heart wasn’t hindered by anything at all or held back or weighted down with burdens that were never yours. You were still awake when I looked in and my breath caught behind my Adam’s apple as I sought cover from the door with its claws latched in deeper than they had any right to go, buried and rooted and submerged in me. The floorboards creaked as I shifted and it rang out like arrowheads clanging off a redbrick wall but you didn’t even notice me or if you did then you said nothing and you didn’t look up or anything. You just sat there all grave-still and museum kinds of quiet, back turned to the door and on the far edge of the mattress with your head tilted up and your eyes fixed on the waxing moon, glued to it even. Pearlescent, it hung there, gleaming and silver and I felt the draw to it that you must feel drawing us in past the wisps of clouds that wrapped it up in obscuration like flies to a zapper, like iron shavings to a magnet they’ll never get pried off of. But more than that, more than your totally unerring silence, I noticed the stark smell of blood.
It stank like copper and reeked a few days’ stale and it drowned out the memory of her murky muggy melancholic apricot perfume (the way your own particular bouquet of pomegranate soap would do on most nights). And I couldn’t shake it then and I couldn’t shake it when I tried to sleep and I still couldn’t shake it down at breakfast and I haven’t managed to sake it now. I’m sitting here in English class with our too nice substitute who might yet become permanent some three weeks on from the eclipse and she looks back at me like she’s my Orpheus and she smiles at me like nothing’s wrong and all I can think about is you. The only thing I wonder is how you must be feeling and why your bedroom smelled the way it did.
None of the explanations work for me and I don’t think they ever will. Either they’re things that I don’t want to think about or they make no sense because you are you and I know you and there are certain possibilities we really can’t waste time considering—even with the darkness etched around your heart, they’re ridiculous, they’re just ridiculous, they make no sense and they’re not you, they never would be you. It’s not as though you’ve killed someone and it’s not as though you ever would, not even if you had a reason. But it’s also not as though weird smells are really new with you or like this is the first time they’ve gone without an explanation. There was the dog and then your abysmal cooking. There was the way your scent started changing when your eyes started flashing red (not that I knew this at the time but the timing all works out in retrospect). Those ones, you put words to for me. But you still haven’t told me why you stank like gasoline when we came back from that motel. You promised that you’d tell me and you haven’t yet much less why there’s a bloody smell that sometimes lingers in the shower or why he got so fidgety (why he started twisting up his fingers in his hems and toying with his zipper like it made a difference, paler than usual and chafing his chapped lips against each other) about the idea of letting you go through with the doc’s ideas, letting you take a dip inside the ice bath when we had no more time and no more options and a reasonable chance that you could die and stay that way. It’s not that I don’t understand his concern because I do—but put into the context, everything just falls apart.
But I guess it’s fair enough that you haven’t yet explained yourself to me. It’s not a case where I can go around and point my fingers or anything like that. I have so many things to tell you and no idea where to start. When I’ve fucked her or when I’ve let her fuck me, when we’ve laid in her bed and blinked into each other’s eyes with nothing much to say except for the purpose of filling up the silence before it rubs us raw like sandpaper, when we’ve kissed each other dry and when we’ve gotten ourselves tangled up until the boundaries dissolve and when I’ve brushed my fingers through her hair (wrapped the thick soft strands around my knuckles and breathed in deep her smell of blood red raspberries), we really don’t talk all that much. I guess we don’t have that much to say. Places where we could connect, I guess, but any time it happens, any time we use our words, we mostly talk about you instead of us. I guess that’s the basis of the appeal. Sometimes I think that I might love you but sometimes I think I might love her but most of the time I don’t love anyone because honestly I don’t see the point. You make me believe that it could happen and she challenges me to think it might be real but love leads to attachment and to lowering your guard and to letting people hurt you and I can’t say that I’m interested in that. But if you dug your claws into my chest, I don’t think that I’d mind it much. And I’d let her pick up my pieces. And I’m sorry but I think I want you both—but more than that, I need to know that you’re okay. So tell me. Can you tell me that much? It’s not like… please… just tell me that much. Please.