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“So she let them record the sounds while she meditated, and she says that she was thinking about being in love with Carl Sagan, so that really it’s like the soundtrack to her feelings of love for him. And, okay, I mean, in meditation you’re supposed to not really think, but still. Isn’t that the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard? She sent her love into space to echo throughout the fucking cosmos!”
I hooked my elbow through Will’s and squeezed his arm against me, caught up in the story. If only I could transmit to him the feelings that I knew he wouldn’t want to hear me say out loud.
Will let me take his arm, but he shook his head.
“I guess, but wasn’t Carl Sagan married to someone else, and didn’t they have some super dramatic divorce with kids and stuff because he fell in love with Ann Druyan?”
“Oh my god, why do you always focus on the part that spoils everything?” I groaned.
“The truth of something doesn’t spoil it, kiddo. It’s the truth. I’m not saying they weren’t in love, I’m just saying—”
“No, but come on. I know you think I’m an über-romantic or whatever, but admit it. You, like, fundamentally refuse to believe that something might be romantic.”
He swung around and looked at me, eyes narrowed. “No. Things aren’t romantic or not romantic. It’s not a definitional category. It’s individual. And I think it’s more accurate to say that a lie is what spoils something. I hate lies.”
This I knew. Even the tiny little white lies that most people would consider a part of basic manners weren’t safe from Will’s scorn.
He started to say something more but stopped when a handsome man in his late-twenties jogged up to us, cheeks flushed and the muscles of his chest defined by sweat.
“Will,” the man said, inclining his head.
Will dropped my arm without looking at me, but the man’s eyes tracked the movement.
“Hey, Tariq. How’s it going?”
Tariq’s smile was flirtatious. Filthy. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind it was a smile that broadcast We have had sex.
“It’s going great.” His eyes tracked up and down Will’s body appreciatively. “You never called,” he said flirtatiously.
Will didn’t say anything, and Tariq set his jaw and cut his eyes to me.
“I guess your tastes run a little more to the… barely legal? To each his own. You take care.”
He gave me a dismissive look, then jogged off, his powerful arms pumping at his sides.
“Asshole. Ignore him,” Will muttered before I’d even had time to process what the guy had said.
A part of me had been wondering if an element of Will’s reluctance to really give a relationship with me a try was our age difference, but when I took Tariq’s comment as an excuse to ask him flat-out, Will dismissed it. “I don’t give a shit how old you are,” he said.
Still, though we went to dinner and back to his apartment after, he was as distant and unreachable as a star.
LAYNE WAS holding the portafilter in one hand and a bag of beans in the other, and she looked panicked. Probably because she’d finally responded to my laborious sighs and asked if I wanted to talk about it, clearly assuming—and hoping—that I would say no like any polite person. But I was desperate. So I said yes.
“Oh, okay,” she said, rallying and putting down the beans.
I gave her a thumbnail sketch of what happened over January break, culminating in me asking Will if we could still be together. I told her about what Tariq said and how Will insisted that he didn’t give a shit about my age or about what anyone thought about who he fucked.
How, over the couple of weeks since then, Will had been acting normal, mostly, but how I’d hated it anyway. The idea that Tariq had looked at me and seen not someone that Will cared about, but someone he fucked. The same way I looked at him. Hated that I’d had to encounter him unexpectedly, that he—and god knew how many others going forward—might have to be a part of my life because they’d been a part of Will’s.
Or, worse, that I meant just as little to him as they seemed to.
I’d been sulky. At work, in the dorms, at Will’s. Sulky the way I’d been sulky as a kid when I asked my parents for a dog over and over despite my dad being allergic. Every birthday, every Christmas, I put it on the list, in between every other thing I wanted, the exclamation points after it cascading down the page and rendering all the other things I wanted afterthoughts to the thing I knew I couldn’t have.
But there was nothing to push against, here, no one to hate. Will’s transparency made it impossible to rage at him, and since my frustration was that I wanted more of him, I was hardly going to alleviate it by avoidance.
