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There’s that story about Stephen King--when he was 4, he went off to play with a friend of his who lived by the train tracks. An hour later, he returned alone and clearly in shock. The next day, the news broke that a child had been struck by an oncoming train and his mother realized that he must have witnessed his friend’s death.
This is what Clay thinks about as he pinches his nose and, without looking, plunges into the lake’s icy waters. He pushes past the instinctive desire, like an adrenaline shot through his atrophied muscles, to scream or gasp in a breath. Legend has it that’s why King writes as well as he does--something about the ice-cold shock of it, it really must rewire your brain. Maybe that’s where the darkness comes from.
Clay can only speculate. Whatever great darkness in his life is, it’s far off in the distance. And anyway, he’s out here because an hour ago, somebody had stormed into his apartment, dragged him away from where he was huddling over his radiator still half-dressed from work, and cajoled him into jumping into a lake in the dead of winter.
His self-preservation kicks back in and Clay resurfaces, gasping in the cold. His breath crystallizes into smoke in the February air. George is sitting on the pier, laughing at him.
“Wasn’t that fun?” He calls, glee in his voice. His feet dangle off the edge, and he’s since plucked Clay’s scarf from his pile of discarded clothing, half-looped lazily round his neck.
“Not exactly my idea of a good time, I’ll admit,” Clay says through chattering teeth. He submerges up to his neck again like that’ll help with anything. “Why did I do this again? Why did you bring me here?”
George tilts his head and considers Clay from his vantage point. Something about shivering half-naked under the gaze of a heavy-lidded boy, Clay’s own thick woolen scarf looped around his neck--darkness might be unnecessary.
“You said you missed the beach, didn’t you?” This must’ve been ages ago because Clay barely remembers saying so. But George remembers the strangest things about the two of them. “This is the beach, for now. We can make something out of it, can’t we?”
Clay smiles. It is a conscious effort to drag the corners of his cheeks upwards--fighting against his own blood, sluggish with cold, but he fights through it to call, “Only if you get in as well.”
“Why are we stopping?” George demands, outside Clay’s apartment building.
“Just hold on,” he says, stopping in front of the drinks machine by the entrance. He rummages around in his pockets for a five-dollar bill, then feeds that into the slot.
George groans. “You couldn’t have done this later?”
“If I put this off 'til later, then I’ll never want to do it. And I know that you won’t, either. Then we’re no better off.” Clay frowns when the machine spits the bill back out. “Besides, why are you complaining? You know I’m getting one for you as well.”
“Of course I know that,” George says like it’s self-evident. “But I’m freezing .”
“And whose fault is that?” The machine rejects the money again and George rolls his eyes.
“I’m leaving you here.” Clay feels George’s presence press up behind him all of a sudden as George worms his hand into his jacket pocket, feeling around for his keychain. Clay lets it happen, carefully pressing the bill back in--there isn’t much he can do when George wants something.
Two cans of coffee fall heavily into the opening below.
George is still holding the door open. “You coming?”
Later, they sit huddled together by the radiator waiting for the shower water to heat up, tucked under the quilt that George’s mother had sent in a care package, that nonetheless sits folded up in Clay’s living room most of the time.
Sitting there, canned coffee in hand, shivering out of time, Clay says, “Thanks. Maybe I needed that.”
“You should quit your job,” George says. He pulls the blanket tighter over himself and it slips and leaves Clay’s knee exposed to the elements.
“For what? It works, for what it is.” You don’t get it, he doesn’t say. Through his gritted, chattering teeth, George mutters something that might be a curse.
“For what? For yourself, for your writing. The things you enjoy. For me, I dunno.”
“Compelling,” Clay says. In his bathroom, the water drips tepidly.
“I think you’re stupid for staying.”
“You think I’m stupid at least four times a week.
“I didn’t know you were counting,” George retorts. He glances over again and notices, for the first time, Clay’s knee sticking out of their warm little bubble. Clay tries to pretend like he doesn’t notice the way George glances furtively at his face, checking for some sign of discomfort. Then, he drapes the blanket over Clay’s knee again and shuffles closer to make up the lost space, so that his leg rests over Clay’s thigh and their elbows are knocking.
George runs cold and silvery. ( And you run hot, George says, an unprovoked challenge in his eyes.) The jutting fine bone of his shoulder reminds Clay all over again of the bracing piercing cold of the lake. He’s shaken to pieces over it. The situation is this--their bodies are touching at multiple points, and each one of them feels like his brain is being rewired anew. Clay itches for a pen. For relief.
Clay says, “You can take the first shower. It should be fine now, I think.”
George leaves, shoving his own coffee into Clay’s free hand. Clay allows himself only seconds more by the radiator. Then, he stands, quilt still draped around his shoulders, and digs the dog-eared, cheap little convenience-store notebook from his briefcase.
“Come over tonight,” George says, as soon as he picks up. “It’s urgent.”
Clay looks around, but it’s so cold today that the only other people outside are the smokers, and they’re standing far enough away that he’s pretty sure they won’t be listening. “How urgent? Like, are you dying? Or can I go home first?”
George sighs. The background din of his call makes it sound like he’s in a nightclub, but it’s a sunny afternoon and George only lives about 15 minutes away. “I guess you can head home first.”
“Thanks,” Clay says drily.
“It’s not urgent at all, to be honest.”
“I’m still gonna come over.”
“How’s work?”
“Eh. It’s work. I’m pretending that I have a smoking habit just so I have an excuse to go outside on my breaks.”
“That’s so sad,” George says sympathetically. “You’re like a little zoo animal. The cubicle is your enclosure.”
“It’s all very inhumane,” Clay agrees. On the other end of the call is a loud bang, then the sound of George yelling something indistinct to somebody else.
“Ugh, sorry,” George says, put upon. The call quiets. “I can’t keep letting randoms up in my home.”
Clay laughs. “Randoms? Your other, cooler friends?” It still hurts a little to say so, but, well, Clay is the paper pusher standing in the parking lot of one of the thousands of office buildings in town, in a shirt and slacks that haven’t been washed in about three days.
The truth is that uniqueness is relative--everybody thinks they’re one in a million. Which scares Clay.
“You’re infinitely more preferable. You know this, right?”
“I bet you say this to all the girls,” Clay teases.
“Shut up,” George mutters. “So you’ll come over then? You promise.”
“Of course.”
Clay never really knows what to expect when he steps into George’s apartment, and this time is no exception. He walks in to find George with his shirt off, making a detailed sketch of what looks to be a still-life on the back of an old takeout menu. It’s been months since they’d met, and Clay still isn’t quite sure what George does for a living. But anyway--his hair is mussed and tousled and slightly damp, and in the dimming evening light, the bare expanse of his back is pale enough that he glows in the vestiges of the day.
“I’m here,” Clay announces, barely audible over the music George is blasting. George turns and waves at him, marker between his teeth. Clay’s eyes zero in on the bandages wrapped around his arm.
“Make yourself comfortable,” George says, gesturing vaguely at the couch. Clay picks his way through George’s cramped doorway. There’s a reason they’re usually at Clay’s apartment, and not George’s.
“What are you doing?” Clay asks. He cranes his neck tentatively to catch a glimpse over George’s (bare) shoulder. Part of him wonders just why the hell George isn’t wearing a shirt in the first place, another part of him thinks maybe he wouldn’t like the answer.
“Just figuring something out for a sketch. The geometry of it--I want it to make sense in my head.”
“Take your time,” Clay says. He leans back on the couch, half-listening to the trance music playing in the background as George finishes up and walks into the kitchen.
He hands Clay a glass of water and flops down next to him. “Sorry,” he says. “My landlord’s afraid of being sued, or something, so the entire building is so fucking hot.”
“It’s kinda nice,” Clay says.
“I knew you’d say that.”
Clay shrugs and brings the cup to his mouth. “Only kind of.” Again, he notices the bandages wrapped around the skin around George’s forearm. “What happened there?”
George’s smile shifts into something more conspiratorial. He has this way of looking at people that makes Clay feel like just maybe, he isn’t just an iteration. “You wanna see?” But he already has the edge of the gauze pulled up like he’s known all along that Clay would say yes.
Clay nods and drags his eyes away from the palm-leaf pattern of George’s ribs to watch him unwind the bandage. Underneath, his skin still raised and raw, is a little crescent moon, tattooed on in thick dark lines.
“Don’t touch,” George says, and Clay retracts the hand that’s been reaching out of its own accord. He folds the bandage back over carefully. “You like? I did it like, this morning. Wilbur helped me clean it up.”
“Cute,” Clay says.
George sniffs. “That’s it?”
It makes Clay laugh, even as George settles back as well, curling his legs up and tucking his bare feet underneath him. “I mean, it’s nice. It feels like you, somehow.”
Saying so makes him feel stupid--the ad infinitum boy making the same trite comparison that everybody else does. But George cocks his head and looks at him like that's exactly what he wanted to hear.
It’s not in Clay’s nature to dwell on darkness. As a child, it had frightened him, but only until the next sunrise.
“Hold still,” George says. He traps Clay’s twitching hand under his elbow and dips the needle once more into the shot glass of india ink he has by his left hand.
“And you promise it’ll be safe?” Clay asks, nervous like he really thinks George can guarantee anything. He’s getting a stick and poke tattoo in the tiny kitchenette of an apartment that is scorching hot in the middle of February from his best friend. It’s the sort of thing he’d never have seen himself doing, back in Florida.
“Of course it will,” George says. “Have a little more faith in me.” But his hand hovers, hesitating rather concerningly right over Clay’s epidermis.
The problem is that I have too much faith, Clay thinks, just as George starts. It hurts, but not as much as he’d built it up to in his head. Not nearly as much as the point of George’s elbow pressing into his palm, or the vice-grip that George has on his heart and his life.
Sometime later, George looks up. He asks, “Do you hate me?”
Clay blinks, taken aback. “Why would I hate you?”
George says, “No reason.”
He goes back to tracing one triangular point. George pierces through him, over and over again.
They’d been sitting across from one another, at first, but it was George who had tugged him over and made them sit side-by-side. Clay pulls one of his legs up and rests his chin on his knee, watching George’s slow, methodical process. I fucked up the lines here , he’d said, showing Clay the tiniest little wayward blotch of darkness in his tattoo. If I do the same to yours, I’ll never forgive myself.
George sets the needle down then--duct-taped to the end of one of his watercolor pencils--and leans back. Clay inspects his arm, stares as close as he possibly dares at the sun on the inside of his forearm.
“That’s the first layer done,” George says. He cleans the needle.
Everything hits Clay then, like an oncoming train or the mind-numbing chill of a lake in the dead of winter. The permanency of it all. Indelible as the words scrawled in his notebook at home.
“We match now,” Clay says. Even to his own ears, he sounds like he’s having a revelation.
George laughs and pulls him in by the back of his neck to kiss him. The change is sudden and lightning-quick but Clay’s been watching close enough to have kind of known this was coming.
Somebody somewhere said once that we tell stories to live. But for this one moment, George stamping his smile into Clay’s idling mouth and the sun into his skin, Clay tells stories because he is alive.
“You say that like you’re surprised,” George says.
“You surprise me,” Clay gasps.
“What an honor.” And again, George pulls him in like the tide.
“Do you miss home?” George asks like he doesn’t already know the answer. Clay closes his eyes, feels the pull of drowsiness like ocean waves.
“I miss it very much,” Clay says. When he opens his eyes again, George is staring at the sun on his arm. The dark curve of his eyelashes flickers back and forth, and for a moment Clay is too afraid to even move. But he’s only afraid until the next sunrise--
It’s been drizzling all day. Clay says, “I miss it all the time.”
“I’ve never been to Florida,” George says. He reaches out then and pulls Clay’s arm into his lap. He strokes carefully over the lines--still sensitive, but healing over in a way that Clay isn’t used to. He’s never had a tattoo before. In the mornings, after he wakes up, his instinct is to expect it to have disappeared. “Tell me what it's like.”
“It’s bright. And warm,” Clay thinks. “So warm, all year round.” He peeks up at where George is sitting on the other end of the couch, where he’d settled after coming by to bother Clay in the middle of his nap. “It’s strange, too, in a way that I think you’d enjoy.”
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Enjoy it.” George flicks him on the ankle.
“Not really. Otherwise, I would’ve stayed.”
“I’m glad you don’t--where would I be then?”
Clay laughs. He must be going red. “You--I’m pretty sure you’d be fine, whether I was there or not.”
“You know that isn’t true,” George says, uncharacteristically serious. He wraps his hand around Clay’s wrist and says nothing. Outside, the drizzle shifts into heavy rainfall.