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“Hey, it’s all right. No worries, Jonah.” He got up and walked over to a small black fridge set in the corner. He opened it and grabbed a bottle of water.
“Here you go.” He leaned on the table, handing me the bottle. It was cool in my hands.
And it lasted approximately four seconds in my hands before it fell, tumbling down and spinning through the air, almost in slow motion.
The bottle landed, miraculously, on its bottom, preventing it from exploding and spilling water everywhere.
“Shit, sorry.” I reached down, steadying my hands with a breath. “Palms are sweaty.”
My hands steadied enough for me to grab the bottle. I lifted it, feeling the muscles in my fingers and palm and wrist all working in a fucked-up unison. Like they were all following the beat to a different song.
I was able to lift the bottle without dropping it again. I put it between my legs and left it there, deciding I could quench the dryness in my mouth later.
“I’ve got a gay brother,” I said, doubling back on the conversation. I didn’t want to leave it the way I had. Up until now, I felt like I had been pretty much acing the interview. But suddenly, it looked like the road up ahead was leading straight toward a mile-long drop off a steep cliff. “It’s part of the reason why I want to work here so bad. He’s my younger brother, by two years, and I’ve always looked out for him. I always had his back. When he came out, which he did in such an awesome way, I made sure everyone in his class was okay with it, and anyone who wasn’t would get a… well, they’d get a pretty rough talking-to from me. I protected him… and then, one night, I couldn’t protect him. He was walking to his apartment with his boyfriend. This was a couple years ago. They were holding hands, when…uh… two piece-of-shit thugs… they run up behind them and start beating my brother and his boyfriend with bats.”
The memory of that night was coming at me with the speed of a Formula One driver. The memory of driving to the hospital and not giving a fuck about speed limits, just wanting to get to my brother’s bedside.
“My brother managed to get up and fight back. So did his boyfriend. And then one of the thugs pulled out a knife. There was another struggle, and then they were stabbed.”
Fox was a stoic man. I could tell he was rarely affected by things as much as someone more sensitive, someone like me. But this story seemed to have cut to his core, because his face cracked and his jaw dropped.
“Fucking hell, Jonah.”
“My brother survived,” I said. “His boyfriend, though… he didn’t make it. Died in my brother’s arms while the ambulance got there. The two men had run off when they heard someone calling the police, and… they were never found after that.”
“I… Jonah. Fuck.”
“Yeah, that about sums it up.”
“Sorry. I normally have more words than that… That just makes me so fucking angry.” I could hear it in his voice, the emotion. His fists were clenched, pale around the knuckles from how tight they were.
“That’s okay, I get it.” Something about Fox’s anger felt familiar. It was the burning sensation I had felt inside me, a different kind of heat than the one I was currently feeling. It was a cold heat. The kind that doesn’t lick at your skin but tears it off, a vicious kind of heat that made it difficult to breathe. Hard to see straight.
“You know, this is weird, but… it’s oddly comforting to see you get upset over my brother the way I did. When I first got the news, I wanted to find the two fuckers and wring them by their necks. It made me ashamed of myself. But I couldn’t stop it. And the night it all happened, Wendy, my girlfriend, well… she deals with things differently. She saw the anger and how deeply upset I was, and she, uhm, she told me to go stay at a hotel that night. The night my brother almost died, and the night his boyfriend did die.”
“For fuck’s sake.”
“And my anger was never directed in any way toward her, at all, just to make that clear.”
“I’d never even think that.”
“But she still didn’t want me around.”
“So you stayed by yourself that night? In some random hotel? While your girlfriend slept in your bed?” Fox’s forehead grew wrinkled from concern. “Sorry, I shoul—
“No, that’s okay. I didn’t sleep in a hotel that night, but I did sleep alone. I went to my parents’ house and slept in my childhood bedroom. Not that there was much sleeping that night, obviously. Or the nights after, which she also told me to stay away for.”
