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His eyes rest on the final words on the screen, unmoving, not reading, as he consciously draws his breath in and then out again, in and out. He leans one elbow on the desk and presses his bottom lip to the side of a clenched fist. After a minute, he lifts his head from his hand, blinks, and his mind returns to the present.
It’s finished.
He stands abruptly and closes the laptop in one quick motion, his legs pushing the chair backward across the wooden floor with a loud scrape. He crosses the room and digs in the pocket of his denim jacket hanging on the door, eventually finding a lighter and the hard edges of a half-full cigarette pack, and wrestles them free from rolled up dollar bills and old tissues and the uncooperative fabric.
The sunlight coming through the window is taking on evening’s soft warmth, diffused by a layer of city grime clinging to the glass and lighting up the dust motes floating in the air like so many sparkles in his otherwise uninspiring room. The floor was once fine, but the hardwood is now worn and scratched. It was bad when he rented the place but it’s worse now and he feels guilty about that. The ceiling is so high it’s nearly impossible to keep clean of the spiders’ webs that keep appearing in the corners, a single light hanging from the center on a long wire and adorned with a faded red shade that casts bare-bulb light in one circle on the floor and another on the ceiling and shrouds the rest of the room in rust-colored gloominess.
The bed is made but messy, the quilt wrinkled to his shape where he laid down earlier in the afternoon to turn his words over and over in frustration. And his heavy wooden desk and its matching chair, bare of a cushion and irritatingly uncomfortable, face a wall that some previous tenant had decided to paint a dull blue-grey not quite dark enough to be depressing exactly, but not light enough to lend the room any brightness on overcast days.
He shoves his feet into his chucks and walks over to the window, placing the lighter and cigarette pack on the sill and resting his fingertips on the edge where the white paint is peeling. It reveals in layers the colors from years past: a once-sunny yellow, then a muted green and, beneath them both, a dusty pink that makes him think of indigestion.
The alley outside is wider than most in the city, mercifully allowing more light than it ought to find its way into his room. The red brick of the building opposite reveals evidence of a long history that he always finds interesting: bricked up ghosts of old windows and boarded up remnants of former doorways that must have once led to balconies or walkways or something but now would open only onto a three-story drop to the hard pavement below. There’s one closed up shape on the second floor that’s considerably larger than the others, an arched rectangle with a weathered wooden beam sticking out a few feet from the brick above. A loading bay maybe? The building was probably a warehouse at one point. Now it houses a bodega on the ground floor – very convenient when he runs out of food or cigarettes – and the windows of the floors above are always dark at night.
He slides the window lock to one side and lifts the heavy sash as high as it will go. The counterbalances hidden inside the frame no longer do their job, so he has to take the full weight of the century-old wood and glass, straining with both hands to raise it and then bracing it with his left as his right hand feels around for the thick wooden plank that he uses to prop it open. If he loses his grip, the sash will fall with the full speed of its ridiculous weight and the impact would probably smash every pane to shards across his floor.
Once the plank is in place, he gingerly releases his grip and tests the weight of the window on its brace. It holds. He reaches for the matching plank pushed up against the skirting board and sets it in place to support the other side of the sash, giving it a little tug to ensure it's taken its portion of the window’s weight as well. Satisfied, he grabs the cigarettes and the lighter and, placing the heels of both hands flat on the sill, pushes himself up and over to scramble through the window and onto the fire escape outside.
The heat of the day is finally beginning to lift from the city, but it radiates out of the sun-soaked metal to create a stifling bubble in the still air. When he sits on the lowest stair leading to the floor above, the heat seeps painfully through his jeans, but he ignores it. It’s always unbearable like this in late summer, but it’s better out here in the evening light than in there with the vague gloom and dust motes and the manuscript that never feels finished.
Except it is finished.
He pulls a cigarette out and taps it against the pack, then rolls it between his thumb and index finger. He’s been saving these, just to see how long he can last this time. Five months and he’s proud of himself, but… well, this is big, isn’t it? The end of a whole year’s worth of work and it feels like something worth celebrating.
Or mourning. He doesn’t know why, but there's a strange sense of melancholy as well and, honestly, he wasn’t expecting that. He leans forward heavily, his elbows on his knees, and drops his chin to his chest. Between his feet he can see through the fire escape to the level below and then a half-filled dumpster on the ground beneath that. If the rusty bolts holding the metal framework into the brick gave way, he’d land on three black sacks of god knows what. At least it’d break the fall.
He draws a long breath through his nose and lifts his head again. The cigarette is poised between his index and middle fingers, maiden in white, with that still-sweet scent of unlit tobacco. He rolls his fingers, making the cigarette dance a little, and looks down at the lighter in his other hand. Is he doing this? Five months. But he deserves a celebration. He deserves a celebration and he doesn’t have any beer. So, ok, he’s doing this.
The lighter sputters an argument on the first try but gives in on the second and flickers to life. He holds the filter to his lips and brings the flame to the paper, drawing it in, and feels the heat roll across his tongue and then to the back of his throat. The smell is vile, it's acrid, but before the smoke can even reach his lungs, relief comes like a reflex, warm across his belly. And though he’s suddenly wracked with one almighty bone-shaking cough, the five months melt away as if they’d never happened. He closes his eyes and leans back against the hot metal of the stairs behind him, and a satisfied, lopsided grin spreads across his face.
He stays like that while he smokes the rest of the cigarette, consciously thinking of nothing except the way his body relaxes into every slow drag and how it feels to draw life back into himself. When he finally senses the heat of the flame begin to warm the backs of his fingers, he sits up and stubs the cigarette out on the wall of the building. With the filter held between his thumb and index finger he closes one eye and attempts to drop it straight through the grated metal of the fire escape to the dumpster below. The stub makes it cleanly through the open metalwork between his feet, but gets caught on the next level, rolling along the grating for a moment before falling through an opening and landing on the ground just to the right of the dumpster.
His fingers have pulled out another cigarette before he’s even realized what he’s doing. Damn muscle memory. He lights it but, this time, the first draw is tinged with guilt along with the pleasure. How many does he plan to smoke? How big a celebration should he allow himself?
It is a year’s worth of work. That’s worth a few cigarettes. And it's not just the writing, but the remembering too. Not that it’s a memoir, but he did have to rake over years of painful memories to craft the story. The memories unlocked brought sleepless nights and, when they were particularly bad, angry outbursts at work, at his landlady. His fingers move instinctively to a small scar just above his lip. It wasn’t fair to any of them but some things are hard to process, even years later. And he knows he’s lucky he’s still got his job, still got this room, this little oasis of a fire escape in a slightly wider-than-normal alley.
But it’s ok, because now it’s finished. The writing, the memories… all of it. His debut novel, done. He can send it off to his editor at Truncheon Press and then let it go and retreat back to normal life, to the safety of nothing special. He takes a long draw on his cigarette, closes his eyes and holds his breath in for a beat, and then drops his head back, face to the sky, and exhales. It's all finished except for the dedication.
Shit. His eyes open wide, head up in an instant, his free hand running through his hair. The dedication.
He’s suddenly aware of the heat still radiating off the metal of the stairs. It’s making him sticky where it seeps through his jeans, through his shirt. He stands abruptly and crosses to the other side of the fire escape, as if the change in location might lower the temperature in this stifling bubble. Leaning over the railing, he takes a last drag and drops the still-lit butt over the edge. It lands squarely in the dumpster. He turns and leans back, his elbows on the railing, and when he lets his breath out, the smoke curls around his head and hangs in the air. There’s no breeze to take it away.
It should be Luke. He should dedicate the book to Luke. That's easy. It’s what everyone will expect. The guy took him in when he barely knew him, barely knew what he was doing or what he was getting himself in for. Everyone had said it and they were right: Luke is a downright saint for what he did for him.
His fingers twitch restlessly but the pack of cigarettes is still on the stairs at the other side of the fire escape. There’s a brittleness to his mouth, like his tongue is a page in a book that’s gotten wet and been left out to dry again. Maybe he should give it a minute’s rest before he lights another. He turns his back to the stairs and leans over the railing again, hot under his forearms, eyes closed.
She’s holding a book, flipping through the pages from thumb to thumb like she’s shuffling a deck of cards. She looks up, bright-eyed and sparkling and questioning. He shrugs, hands shoved deep in his pockets. “Well, what is much?” And when she grins at him, something warm and golden drips like honey down the inside of his ribcage.
He pushes off the railing, crosses the fire escape in two steps and fishes out the next cigarette. It’s lit, it’s between his lips, he draws and it’s burning his throat, his lungs, his mind, the memory. He spits the smoke back out, rubbing the back of his neck hard with his free hand just for something to do with the jitteriness. Fuck it.
The light has begun to change: more golden along the roofs of the buildings in front and probably growing deeper blue higher up behind him. The alley is more shadowed, his room will be too. There are probably stars, but he knows he won’t be able to see them. You can never much see them in the city. If you lived someplace where you could see the stars every night, you’d probably name the place for them, wouldn’t you? And he snorts involuntarily, drops his hand from his neck, lifts the cigarette to his smirk.
He sits again, this time trying to relax into the warmth instead of fighting it, and pushes the cigarette between his lips, gripping the filter with his teeth. He rests one hand on each thigh, fingers curved as if to play a piano, closes his eyes and then begins to tap out an alternating rhythm. Right hand, left hand, right hand, left. He’s in a library, tucked into a corner on the floor between the stacks, books on shelves as far as the eye can see. He’s leaning against his backpack, his fingers disrespectfully curling the page of the book open against his thighs. Right hand, left hand, right, left. Deep draw on the cigarette, heat against his throat. No one knows about this corner, tucked away. No one comes here except him. The book is heavy in his hands, definitely not written for someone so young. He turns the page, slightly yellowed and rough along the edge, made rougher by the newly curled corner, and pushes deeper against his backpack.
For one careless moment, he’s in the book store in Stars Hollow, startled, scrambling to his feet. A reflexive too-fast pull on the cigarette and he suddenly wants to cough but his hands are busy with the tapping and so he pushes the cough out forcefully through his nose, his cheeks puffing involuntarily as his teeth grip the filter hard to hold onto the cigarette. Right, left, right, left… too fast, too angry. Back to the library, back to safety. There’s the shelves… there’s his backpack… the book… the pages… right, left… Slow it down. A gentle controlled draw on the cigarette, the warmth, hold it, and out through his nose.
Ok. Ok. He turns another yellowed page, feels his shoulders relax. No one comes here. No one knows this place.
His concentration is broken by a high pitched buzzing near his ear. Fuck. The mosquitos always find him. He stills his hands, opens his eyes.
Liz never got bitten like he does. When he was little, they’d sit side by side on the stoop on a summer’s evening and, when they came back inside, she’d have three bites to his thirty. It’s his pheromones, she’d laugh. Mosquitos don’t like her Nordic blood, but they apparently love his Italian pheromones. Like a curse.
He can just barely make out the mosquito dancing around his head, as it darts back and forth to find a place to land. When it moves to his left, he loses it to the backdrop of the darkening brick wall but when it returns to the right, it's visible again against the glowing sky. He takes the cigarette from his mouth and shakes the ridiculously long line of ash on the grating of the fire escape by his feet, and then goes back to watching for where the mosquito will try to land. When he loses sight of it again, he lets his gaze move to the sky. It’s glowing orange-red, looking as hot as the day had felt, and fading into pink and then periwinkle and then something like a purple as his eyes move upward.
He turns to take another puff and spots the mosquito resting on the metal upright next to his head. Without thinking, he presses the glowing end of the cigarette right over the insect, and hears it sizzle as the ember stubs out. When he pulls it away, there’s a blob of burnt blood squeezed out of the charred remains. His blood? Probably, and his lip lifts into a grimace. We’re all just part of the food chain. But dammit, now he’ll itch somewhere tonight as well as swelter.
He sighs and flicks the butt across the fire escape, aiming for it to arc elegantly over the far railing and fall like an Olympic diver into the dumpster below. But the deepening sky has brought a slight breeze that, though welcome, catches the butt just enough for it to land several yards further along in the alley. Great. Now he’s just adding to the endless debris of the city. He should really get an ashtray and stop being one of those assholes who leaves their old butts everywhere.
But nah, if he got an ashtray, he’d have to bring it in and empty it in the room, and then he’d never manage to quit again. Tonight is special, it’s a celebration. This isn’t him starting up again.
Ok: Luke. What’s he going to say? He leans forward, elbows on knees, and twists his hands together.
“To the man who saved me”...? His forehead instantly drops into his hand. God no! Luke had saved him, in a way. It was bad before he left for Stars Hollow, really bad. Liz was… Liz wasn’t coping and so he had to go and Luke took him in and, yeah, maybe that saved him from whatever it would have become if he’d stayed but he can’t say that in the dedication. It’s way too sappy for either of them.
“To the man who gave me a home”...? His hand moves to scratch the back of his neck, head bent forward, really grimacing now. Oh jeez, why is this so hard? Guess there was a reason he’d avoided thinking about the dedication.
Ok, how about “to the man who opened his home to me”...?
But Luke had also kicked him out of his home. His jaw tightens and pulls his mouth into a thin line. Goddammit, Luke had fucking kicked him out! Twice. His dad bailed on him. His mom fucking flaked on him. And then Luke had unceremoniously put him on a bus and sent him away for… for what? He pushes his hand through his hair, then scrubs it down over his mouth to his jaw.
For a mistake, for an accident!
No. For Lorelai.
Jesus. Even though he’d done everything he could to make things right. He’d made sure she was ok. And Luke fucking knew it.
He folds his arms across his knees and drops his head onto his forearms, squeezing his eyes tight, and turns a little to press them hard into the crook of his elbow.
She’s laughing and he can barely keep his eyes on the road. He’s just offered to run her down with her own car and somehow she’s laughing at that and he feels like he’s floating. She said he could do more and he doesn’t believe it but he knows she does. And he’s light, he’s expansive… He could say anything, he could do anything, and it’ll be ok.
He lets out a ragged breath into the space between his elbow and his knees, then lifts his head and presses the fingers of one hand into the bridge of his nose. His eyes are hot, they’re stinging, and his lips are pulled in between his teeth. Dammit!
His clenched hand drops to his mouth as he inhales sharply a wet sniff, and now he can smell the tobacco on his fingers. Where’s that damn pack? He opens his eyes, wet and a little too blurry, and feels around until he finds it on the stair next to him. Rattles it in his hand… not many left. The bodega is open late but… shit, he doesn’t want to get another pack. He doesn’t want to need another pack.
He pulls out a cigarette and lights up, sucks in a slow breath, then pushes the smoke out with a huff. Dries his eyes with the back of his other hand. Fucking stupid. He’s past this. Getting past this is what the whole fucking book was for. That’s what writing is, right? Cheap therapy for the broke and the broken.
Besides, the dedication is just one line. One stupid line. He could make it to anyone, to the fucking bodega cat, and who would care?
He stands up and walks halfway across the fire escape, then stops abruptly. Crouches down right where he is, his ass on his heels, his elbows on his knees, and his hands clasped tightly behind his neck. The cigarette drops a line of soft grey ash down the back of his shirt that he doesn’t even notice before the breeze has blown it away.
He would care.
Does it have to be Luke? Maybe it doesn’t have to be Luke. Everyone will be disappointed but… when hasn’t he disappointed them all? Why the fuck even do this thing, this great thing that took a whole year of his life, and then not turn around and make sure it disappoints them all? He barks out a laugh, still crouched under his clenched hands.
But damn it, he did do a great thing. He wrote a book. Even if no one ever likes it or reads it or understands, he wrote a book.
He stands – too quickly, feels a little woozy, his vision black around the edges. He reaches for the wall to get his bearings and waits for his eyes to focus and the black to fade away. Guess that's a lot of nicotine for a system that was getting used to going without. Yeah, well. He takes another puff anyway.
The writing… it was more like excavating. Like he reached down into his guts, into the soft places he never lets anyone see, and scooped it all out and laid it flat to dry in the sun. The more he dug, the more there was. And he’d only needed enough to form the story and his characters but there he was with it all spread out around him, everything he needed and everything he didn’t, and it was all raw and moist and exposed to the light.
It had been exhausting. It was so hard. He never wants to do it again.
He leans back against the brick, one arm held tightly across his stomach, and brings the cigarette back to his lips. There’s a red-hot tightness spreading along the underside of his jaw and it makes his breath judder as he takes the drag.
She’s in front of him, so changed with her shorter hair, her face expressionless but her eyes filled with such hurt and wariness that it makes him want to weep. It’s taking all his energy just to breathe and… he can’t say it. He can’t say it. Then in a rush and on a shaking breath: “I love you.” And his head swims – it’s too much – and he’s running before he’s even realized his feet are moving.
He drops his head, drops his arm, drops the cigarette and it falls through the metalwork. Down, down until it lands on the ground below, still glowing and only half finished. Fuck.
She had believed in him. More than any of his teachers, more than Liz, more than Luke. Probably more than he’d ever deserved, she had believed in him. And though he’d ruined it – ruined it utterly – he knows he’s been carrying her belief with him ever since. There it was, when he began digging. He hadn’t realized but there it was, spread out in the sun to dry alongside all the shit that had ruined his life. Exposed for anyone to see, for him to see. And he hated looking at it – he hated it, hated that it had been with him the whole time – but he couldn’t look away.
Is love the way you feel about another person? Or is love the way you feel about yourself when you're with that person? He scrubs one hand hard over his face and presses back into the wall, looking for stability.
The air has gone thin. And suddenly so cold. He’s leaning forward, seeing his shoes. Leaning forward, his elbows in his belly, his hands in his hair. He’s leaning forward, until his head is at his waist, until he’s almost at his knees. He’s spinning, he can’t breathe. He presses one arm across his abdomen, the other hand braced on his knee.
He’s so hot. His stomach churns and he spreads his feet. Sweat beads on his brow, sweat soaks his back, saliva drips in long strings from his open mouth. When it comes, it’s going to spill all over the fire escape and stink in the summer heat. It’s going to drip through to his neighbors’ level, and then down to the alley. They’ll smell it all night when they’re trying to sleep.
He heaves, but nothing comes. He moves his hand from his abdomen onto his knee and stays braced over his feet spread wide, his backside pressed into the still warm brick. His back rises with every gulped breath. He heaves again and it releases a belch with a loud pop that burns his chest.
He waits for it… and waits…
And nothing comes. He stays hunched forward and still for a long time, not daring to move, until his stomach calms and the saliva has dried on his lips. At last, he lifts up gingerly, pressing his back into the brick to find his bearings, and then lets his legs collapse and slides down the wall until his backside is on the metal grating and his knees are bent under his elbows.
He drags the back of his hand across wet eyes, then turns it over and runs his fingers over his mouth. Swallows hard and can’t tell if it’s snot or bile that goes down, but at least it’s down.
He needs water. It was stupid to sit out here in this heat and smoke all those cigarettes without anything to drink for hours. Maybe he should eat too but… no… no, he doesn’t want to think about food. His head drops back against the brick. He’ll get a bottle of water in a minute. Just… yeah, in a minute. The sun has sunk behind the buildings and the shadows are deepening in the alleyway. It feels good to sit in the shade after all the relentless heat. His lids droop and he lets his eyes close.
When at last he rouses himself and stands, he feels shaky but better than he expected. With one hand trailing the brick wall for balance, he walks back to the window and slides through awkwardly. There’s bottled water stacked in the corner of his room – warm, but that’s ok – and he grabs one and gives the cap a half-twist to break the seal.
At his desk, he reaches for his laptop, still closed and humming gently as its fan fights the stale warmth of the dark room, but stops with his hand poised in midair. No, if he uses the laptop, it will open to the manuscript and… maybe it's best to let those sleeping dogs lie.
Crouching, he yanks on the bottom drawer of the desk. The wood has swelled in the heat and it resists stubbornly but, when it finally jerks open, there’s a welcome smell of pencil shavings and wood oil. Fishing around in the dark, he finds the metal coils of a spiral-bound notebook and tugs it out. He grabs a pen and then carries everything – the water, the notebook, and the pen – back to the window and scrambles over the sill, reaching back through to pull the heavy maroon curtains shut. That will at least discourage the mosquitoes from flying in and maybe he’ll get a slightly better night.
He sinks onto the bottom stair next to the cigarettes and his lighter, and opens the notebook to the first blank page he comes across, folding the cover completely around to the back. It’s a little hard to see in the growing dark, but the white pages glow slightly bluish and, yeah, he can make them out well enough. He shoves the pen into the spiral coil to stop it from rolling away, sets the notebook down beside him on the stair, and twists the cap off the water.
He drinks with his head tilted right back and drains half the bottle in three gulps. God, he hadn’t realized how much he’d needed that. He leans back on his elbows just to absorb the sensation of feeling quenched, cool again from the inside out. When he finally sits back up, he takes another quick swig, then sets the water bottle down and picks up the notebook.
The cap flies off the pen when he yanks it out from where he’d jammed it into the notebook's coil and it disappears down through the metal grating. Fine. Whatever. The pen is poised over the first line on the page, but his hand remains still.
His eyes close for a moment as he swallows hard, and then open again. Maybe this isn’t going to be any easier.
But it should be easier. It feels like it should be. All the tightness is gone. This feels right. He looks down again at the paper and in his neat, slanted scrawl, slowly and deliberately presses each letter into the page: “To the woman who-”
He stops, the pen suspended over the paper. His brow is furrowed, his eyes fixed on the words.
The woman?
He looks out over the railing of the fire escape, where the streetlights cast angled shadows across the alley. As he breathes, he’s conscious of his ribs making way for the air. Almost all the color is gone from the sky. He hasn’t seen her in so long.
Does he know the woman? The person he knows – no, knew – was a girl. Do people really change that much?
He scrapes his hand through his hair and exhales slowly. Nah. He knows they never do. They always say they’ll try and they always fucking slide back to who they always were. Liz made a million promises that she broke. Every time. Every fucking time. Luke said family was family and look how that turned out. Jimmy said he had nothing to give him… well, shit, yeah, the guy did come true on that.
And he’s written a book – hell, he’s written a book that’s being published – and he pays his rent on time and he’s kept this job, but he knows he's still the same fuck-up he always was. People don’t change, not in their fundamentals.
And she-
He lifts his gaze and there’s the moon, low in the west, waxing gibbous and pale orange. Setting. Which means it’s been in the sky the whole time and he didn’t realize, never saw it against the bright heat of the sun. It’s beautiful, mesmerizing. He leans forward, rests his chin on his fist, and doesn’t look away.
Well, the moon never changes. Crescent, gibbous, waxing, waning, new, full… it’s always the same cold rock behind the shadow and light. Every human on earth gazes on the same unchanging moon. Bowie, Hemingway, the goddamn President… Chris fucking Martin… And him.
And she-
She cut her hair. And she’s busy at college and a whole new group of friends and becoming who she was always destined to be. And she maybe loved him once but she’s moved on.
His breath catches and he shakes his head as if to free it, drops his eyes to the pen that hovers over the paper. She was just a girl when she made him believe.
Scratching out the line he wrote before, the pen moves fast, little jagged lines marked deeper into the paper than they need to be. He swallows around a hard lump in his throat and looks back up at the moon, dancing a little in his watery vision. The same cold rock for everyone.
When he looks back down at the paper, he has to squint to bring it into focus. He starts again, the handwriting just as neat, just as deliberate.
“To the girl-”
He pauses to work through his words a few times in his head. Ok, he’s got it now. This feels right. And the corner of his mouth lifts just a fraction as he writes.
“-who taught me I could dodge my destiny.”
And then he sits up again and closes the cover of the notebook. He shoves the pen back in the metal spiral and sets the notebook down, covering the cigarette packet and the lighter.
There. Now it’s finished. Leaning back on his elbows, he rests his head on the stair behind him, his face tilted to the inky sky overhead, and takes a deep breath of the clean night air.
To his surprise, he can make out a few faint stars.