“I’m the one who told you that,” I said as I flipped through his key ring looking for his apartment key.
“That’s how come I know it.”
I found the right key and jammed it in the lock. “They also have a bifurcated penis.”
He frowned at me. “What’s bifurcated mean?”
“It means it’s forked.” The lock was sticky and I had to wiggle it a few times before it opened. “It’s got two heads.”
Wyatt shuddered as I draped his arm around me and guided him inside. “How do the lady possums feel about that?”
“Since they’ve got two vaginas, I imagine they find it convenient.”
Wyatt’s shithole apartment was in real shithole top form. Beer bottles and weed paraphernalia littered the coffee table. Discarded clothes lay on the floor and most of the furniture. The kitchen was full of dirty dishes, and I couldn’t even bear to imagine what the bathroom looked like.
Speaking of, Wyatt made it all of three steps inside before he groaned, muttered, “Oh, Jesus,” and launched himself at the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.
I heard retching sounds and went to stand outside the door. “You okay?” I asked him during a pause. “You need help?”
“I’m fine. Don’t come in here.”
The retching started up again and I left him to it. It wouldn’t be the first time one of us had held the other’s hair back while we barfed, but I wasn’t going to push my way in if he didn’t want help.
While he was otherwise occupied, I surveyed his apartment with disgust and concern. Wyatt hadn’t ever been much of a homemaker, but I’d never seen his place this bad before. I wondered again what he’d been doing with himself the last few weeks. Based on the state of his apartment, nothing good.
I loaded his dishwasher and started it running, then picked up the dirty clothes scattered around the living room and dumped them just inside the door of his bedroom. There were more discarded clothes lying all over the room, including a sock hanging from the swing-arm floor lamp, but what caught my eye was an open spiral notebook lying out on the unmade bed next to his guitar.
My curiosity got the better of me, and I ventured into the bedroom, which smelled like dirty laundry but also unmistakably of Wyatt, a scent that grew stronger as I got nearer to the bed where he slept most nights. The open pages of the notebook were covered with scribbled writing that on closer examination looked an awful lot like song lyrics and chord progressions.
Wyatt had always told me he wasn’t interested in writing or playing original music. And yet this notebook contained evidence to the contrary. I riffled the pages with my thumb and saw almost every one was filled with verses. There had to be dozens of songs here.
As I drew my hand back, my eyes skimmed the lyrics on the page facing open.
Laughter in her eyes and a smile bright as the sun
I can’t be sure but I think she was the one
Maybe she could have saved me if I’d let her
She might have made me a better man
But our love story ended before it began
I stopped reading and backed away, a flush of shame burning my cheeks for intruding on Wyatt’s privacy. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it certainly wasn’t anything that romantic and emotional.
It was a song about a girl he’d really cared about, from the sound of it. I didn’t have any idea who it could have been, but it wasn’t any of my business. None of this was my business. He hadn’t offered to share this piece of himself with me. In fact, he’d purposely kept it hidden from me. Lied to keep it a secret, even. That was how much he hadn’t wanted me to know about it.
Still feeling ashamed for snooping, I hurried out of the bedroom and busied myself collecting all the empty cans and bottles from the living room. As I carried them to the recycling bin, I thought about how vehemently Wyatt had always insisted he was happy playing in a cover band and performing other people’s music. How he’d brushed off any suggestion that he should try writing his own songs.
It hurt that he hadn’t trusted me with the truth. I’d always thought I knew Wyatt inside and out, but he’d kept his songwriting aspirations to himself. Just like he’d kept this girl who’d inspired the song a secret. Maybe I didn’t know him so well after all.
By the time Wyatt emerged from the bathroom, I’d nearly finished straightening up. “You didn’t have to clean up my shit,” he mumbled, blinking at the apartment around him.
“Someone does.” It came out more snappish than I intended, and I softened my tone. “You didn’t give yourself another concussion, did you?” I walked over to him and took his chin in my hand, tilting his head down so I could look into his eyes.
He smelled like toothpaste and soap, which meant he’d been lucid enough to clean himself up, at least. His eyes were clear as aquamarines as they reluctantly met mine. Both pupils appeared normal, but he was going to have one hell of a shiner.
“I’m fine.” He pulled out of my grasp and sank down in the middle of the couch. Leaning his head back, he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
I felt bad for him, although only half of his predicament was my fault. The drinking he’d done to himself. I filled a glass of water in the kitchen and got two ibuprofen out of my purse.
“Here.” I nudged his knee with my leg. “Take these.”
He accepted them and popped the pills in his mouth. “Thanks.”
I went back into the kitchen and opened his freezer. It was empty except for a glacier of ice buildup and a few frost-covered pints of King’s ice cream. Wyatt couldn’t stand ice cream, but he’d told me he kept a supply for when he invited girls to his place, because they always expected him to have it because of his name. I supposed free ice cream was a powerful aphrodisiac.
I walked back to the couch with a spoon and a pint of Thar She Blows! bubblegum ice cream. “Here, this is for your face.”
Wyatt had closed his eyes again, but he opened his good one to squint at me, and his lip curled when he saw the ice cream I was holding out. “What the hell?”
“You don’t have any ice cubes or frozen peas, so this is what you get.” I sat next to him and set the ice cream on his knee.
He took it reluctantly and pressed it to his cheekbone with a wince before his head swiveled toward me. “You don’t have to stay or anything. I’ll be okay.”
“I don’t mind staying.” I leaned back on his ugly thrift store couch, thumping the spoon against my leg. “If you did give yourself a concussion and you die of a brain bleed in your sleep, I’ll never forgive myself.”
His lips twitched. “Are you saying you’d actually miss me if I died?”
I knew he was kidding, but it wasn’t funny to me. Not when he gave me so many reasons to worry about him. “You know I’d be devastated, right?”
The smile slid off his face and his hand fumbled for mine, tangling our fingers together. “I’m not going anywhere. You don’t have to worry about me.”
I did worry about him, pretty much constantly. I worried that he drank too much and smoked too much weed. I worried about his penchant for making reckless decisions and getting into fights. I worried that he never seemed to take anything seriously. I worried that his carefree slacker attitude was just an act to hide the fact that he was aimless and miserable. And I hated that he slept around so much, not just because I was jealous—although there was definitely that—but because it felt like he was intentionally denying himself a chance to be loved.