“Nothing’s wrong.”
“You’re acting strange.”
“I’m not.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“No, I want to. I’m sorry, I’ll do better.”
“You’re not doing anything wrong. Just . . . promise you’d tell me if you were bothered about something?”
“I promise.”
I lean up to kiss him, waiting for the calm that always comes from touching Percy. But it has left the building. Instead I’m stiff and tense and so aware of how awkward it is to have someone’s lips smashed against yours. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to kiss him. How to kiss anyone. I can’t make my mouth open, even as his tongue prods my teeth. I have no idea what to do with my hands. What do people do with their hands when they kiss? Surely they don’t simply let them hang like limp vines at their sides, which is what I’m doing now.
I take hold of . . . his elbow. Which is somehow less romantic than not touching him at all.
He seems to agree, for, with our mouths still together, he does a very careful extrication of said elbow from my grip, which leaves me pawing at the air again like I’m treading water. He reaches 26
up and cups my face in his hands, so gentle and so sweet, and why does someone as gentle and sweet as Percy Newton want to be with someone as raw and coarse and rough as me?
We stay like that for a while, soft and tame and completely within the same boundaries we’ve skirted for the past weeks, and it’s going to be fine, I tell myself. Everything is going to be fine and my heart is not about to punch its way through my rib cage and it’s Percy and it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s so goddamn fine and could not be finer.
Percy is either oblivious to the fact that this is not usually the sort of fond touching that preludes sodomy, or he’s pretending he hasn’t noticed I’m losing my goddamn mind, for he wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me up against him. Which is mortifying because, for perhaps the first time I’ve been in Percy’s presence, since I was fifteen years old, my arms are not the only things hanging limp. He either can feel me go tense or feels just how not tense an essential area is when pressed against him, because he stops and looks down at me with his brow creased.
“Am I doing something wrong?” he asks.
“No,” I say, and somehow it comes out both hoarse and shrill at the same time, like a songbird that smoked too many cigars.
“You’re shaking. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” In an attempt to stall for time, I drag out the word fine for so long that I run out of air. Percy blinks at me, for I am clearly not fine but still clinging to the slim chance that I might have him fooled. “Let’s sit.”
“Sit.”
“On the bed.” Like somehow that will help anything, but he follows my lead and we sit. On the bed. Side by side. Not touching.
27
I scrub at my hair. Percy looks up at the ceiling. Loud, slow seconds tick by, each one a stone dropped onto my chest. I’m going to be pressed to death like a witch, except instead of boulders it will be the weight of my own goddamn issues that kills me.
I lean over and kiss him again, fast and graceless, before I have time to think too much. It feels like a stage kiss, two passionless actors, and poor, darling Percy who expected me to take him by the hand and lead him into this garden of earthly delights is instead left stumbling blind and alone in the dark, knocking over furniture and smashing into walls.
And then he pulls away from me, puts his hands in his lap, and asks bluntly, “Do you not want me?”
It’s the worst thing anyone has ever said to me. First because it is so fantastically untrue but I have no physical evidence to back up my denial, and second because I can see in the hurt on his face that he’s thinking of every time he walked in on me with my hands up some girl’s skirt in the side room off a party, and now here we are, alone at last after me making declaration after declaration that I kept company with unwavering love for him during all those hands-up-skirts years and yet I’m acting as though I’m getting warmed up to do it with an upturned mop wearing a wig.
He’s hurt. And mortified. I’m similarly mortified and trying to work out how it is that I’ve been burning off absurd amounts of energy waiting for exactly this moment with exactly him and now that the appointed hour has arrived—all this planning and overture and dear God, there were figs—we’re three feet apart, staring at each other like we’re strangers.
And then I say, “I’m sorry,” before I realize that I didn’t answer his question about whether I wanted him, so it sounds like I’m apologizing for not wanting and dear Lord I have never felt more like a pile of soggy porridge molded into human form. “Wait, no, that’s not . . .”
28
He looks down at his hands, those fine, long fingers that I want to snatch back and press against my heart, but I can’t move. “It’s fine.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“But something’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
He turns, one leg pulled up under him on the bed so he’s properly facing me. “Monty.”
“I really, really want to.”
“All right, so . . .” He tips his head like he’s going to kiss me, and I lean back without thinking and dear God I almost let myself fall off the bed in hopes I will strike my head and in the resulting blackout, lose all memory that any of this ever happened. Perhaps I should drag Percy down after me, just to make certain we both forget.
“This is important to you,” I say.
“Yes. Isn’t it important to you?”
“Well, I mean . . .” He raises an eyebrow, an unmistakable tread carefully, and so of course I put on my heaviest boots and start clomping through the flower gardens. “Yes, but . . . it’s not like it’s anything . . . remarkable . . . sex is actually . . . it’s a part of nature, so it’s really not . . .
worms do it, you know.”
Percy squints at me, and I look around for something sharp I can impale myself upon. Better to fall on my sword now than continue to drown slowly and sickeningly in shame.
“Worms?” Percy repeats.
“I just don’t think it should be some kind of grand affair,” I say, too fast and too loud. “And if you’re going to make it one, I think we should wait.”
“I’m not making it—”
29
“Or maybe just not.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’ve been doing fine without it— I’m doing fine—and if this will change everything, then maybe we just would do better if we didn’t do it. Now. Or ever. Maybe ever. Maybe things should just stay the same.”
I can tell he’s trying to follow that unmappable logic, made all the more inscrutable by how dedicated I am to both my nonsense and how violently I have just vomited it onto him. Then he says slowly, “So you don’t want to do this anymore?”
“Not until you figure out—”
“Me?” he interrupts, frustration crackling in his tone for the first time. “How is this my fault?”