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Victor
For the first time, there’s someone with me in the dark. He fills the space with his body heat and the smell of dollar store hand soap and Italian sun.
You always come back for me. Even when I beg you to stop.
“Let’s get room service,” he says. Then he catches himself. “If I go get it for us, if I watch them make it, is that ok?” His nose tickles my ear.
I nod. I never imagined I could trust someone like that again, but I do.
“I’ll be back.” He opens the closet door and offers me a hand, pulls me up against his chest, like I’m some kind of damsel in distress, but I don’t really mind. “Think about what we’re going to pretend tonight.”
The last night. The last-last night, for real this time, no more take-backs. What do you even do with that?
I turn on the TV because it’s too quiet, but I’m careful not to touch the news channels. Just a nature show with some shiny, green-headed ducks and a narrator that keeps saying things likemagnificentandrarein Italian. I should save Ethan’s sweatshirt for when he leaves, so I don’t start overwriting his scent, but I can’t stop myself from lying on the bed with my nose buried in it. I’ll ask him to wear it again tonight.
Eventually, he comes back with two plates of fettuccine alfredo. “I realized I still haven’t had a real Italian pasta dish.”
I hesitate when he hands me the food. This might be the most trust I’ve ever given anyone in my life. When I take the first bite, I can see the happiness in his eyes and it makes it easier to ignore the panic in my chest and keep eating. It tastes so good I’m scared I’ll make myself sick, so much rich food after so long.
“Did you figure out what we’re doing?” he asks, wiping up the last few bites on his plate with a piece of garlic bread.
I chew on the inside of my cheek, staring at my lap. “Not really.”Nothing seems right.
“Maybe—” he hesitates, and I’m scared he’s going to start talking about love again and ruin whatever we have left. “Maybe we shouldn’t play around tonight, pretend to be something. Maybe we should justbe.”
“Ok.” For some reason, that makes my heart thump against my ribs.
We put the tray of dirty plates in the hall and lock the door.
I grab Ethan’s sweatshirt and a thick blanket and head to the balcony. Leaning on the railing, I look across at the harbor lights, the skeleton shadows of boat masts, and the decorative lamps on the sea wall stretching miles in either direction. Then I tilt my head back and study the stars. They’re faint here, pale freckles across the face of the sky, but there are so many of them.
Ethan nudges up behind me, his lips brushing the back of my neck. “I’ve never been anywhere so peaceful,” he breathes. “I don’t have to lie awake and play ‘is that a backfire or a gunshot’.”
Draping my blanket over himself, he lies down in the biggest lounge chair. He lifts up the corner and gestures for me to crawl in next to him. Our bodies fit together perfectly, every hill and valley contoured to each other like we were one person who got broken in half before we were born.
His hand slides down the back of my jeans and his fingers curl around the waistband of my thong, his thumb brushing slowly back and forth across my bare flank, and we just let go of everything, melting into the kind of silence that comes when every word in the universe has already been said.
Ethan
“I always wished I was a star,” he murmurs into my chest, half asleep. His breathing rises and falls slow against mine and his soft hair tickles my neck.
“A ball of fire careening through the void that’s probably dead by the time we see it?”
He shakes his head. “No one can reach them; no one can touch them. They’re alone. But they’re not lonely.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I wouldn’t be lonely, if it were me.” He slides his hand under my shirt and spreads his chilly fingers against my stomach. “And because you’d be the star next to me.”
“What if I don’t want to be a star?”
Abruptly, he sits up and crosses his legs, his thigh pressed against mine, the blanket falling off his shoulders. “Maybe that’s it. Everyone else is down here fighting and fucking, all the things we have names for, and we’re just…out there, where it’s quiet and still. And even if we never touched again, we wouldn’t be alone.”
Something elemental and painful swells in my chest as I reach out and touch his neck, run my fingers along his jaw.
“I don’t hate you,” I say.
He climbs into my lap. “And I don’t love you.”
