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Gray
No looking backis easier said than done when you need one last glimpse of that thick, aggressive little cock studded with gleaming hardware before he stuffs it back into his boxers. His intense, forthright taste fills every corner of my mouth.
Yanking up his jeans, he focuses on doing his belt one-handed while I focus on forgetting about the damp patch on my shoulder, the way his shaky breath sounded right against my ear.
“I wish you a safe and pleasant rest of your trip.” Once he’s decent, I slide the latch and tug open the door, letting in a rush of cold air that stirs against my sweaty skin. “I don’t recommend bottling this up. Coming out of the closet feels like the end of the world now, but it can be very freeing.”
He scoffs bitterly, the last sound I expected to hear from him. “I don’t think you remember what it’s like to be twenty-three years old.”
I arch an eyebrow at him. “I can assure you, I was nothing like you when I was twenty-three.”
Only one person shoots me a skeptical look as I return to my seat, everyone else asleep or engrossed in their laptops. The flight attendant I tipped keeps her eyes on her phone, leaning on the counter behind the bulkhead.
My brain seems to have thrown out everything I read today, so I skip around my book, skimming the parts I underlined and trying to remember why. The boy slides into his spot two minutes later, folding his knees to his chest, his sneakers balanced on the edge of the seat, and pulls his ball cap down over his eyes. He doesn’t move for the next hour, but his chest rises and falls too quickly for him to be asleep. I’ve learned a lot of mind games to keep my cock down, but it’s aching like hell as I try to think about anything besides the stump of his arm resting soft and vulnerable next to my elbow.
When the flight attendant announces our descent into JFK, I want to offer her another hundred simply because I’m so damn grateful to get away from him. I lean over to study the intricate miles of trees below us, cut through with hundreds of winding roads like a puzzle I’ll never solve, surrounding the vast, glittering sprawl of New York City.
My seat shifts, and I catch the boy climbing half out of his chair to see over my shoulder. When he notices me watching him, he grabs the magazine from the pocket in front of him and flips through it, pretending to read an article about fifteen of the most underrated wineries in Tuscany.
“Do you want to trade seats?”
The skin around his eyes still looks red and tender. Chewing the inside of his cheek, he nods without looking at me.
“Get up before they switch on the seatbelt light.”
As I shuffle past him in the aisle, my hand unthinkingly brushes his back, the fine ridge of his spine under the softness of his threadbare t-shirt. He stiffens, then scrambles into my seat and glues his forehead to the window.
He’s made a disaster of his area, headphone cables tangled with the seatbelt and the contents of his bag rolling out onto the floor: a business textbook, an alarming number of broken pens, and that water bottle, covered in peeling motocross stickers and a yellow vintage NASCAR logo. He strikes me as one of my least favorite kinds of people, the ones who make a mess everywhere they go simply by existing. I kick most of it back under the seat.
“It’s not raining here.” When I glance up, he’s smiling at me, hesitant but genuine. His dark eyes catch the sunlight and hold it like liquid gold.
“So?”
“It was storming at home and in LA, but we finally escaped. It doesn’t rain everywhere you go.”
“That’s hardly—” I stop, but his gaze drops to his hand curled in his lap.
“Ignore me. I say dumb shit.”
He rests his head against the window, his breath clouding the pane, and doesn’t move again until we’re on the ground. As they open the doors to a rush of humid spring air, I hand him his bag and he offers me mine in a silent exchange. He taps the corner of my book. “Hope the guy has some fun before he dies.”
Faster than he rushed onto the plane, faster than he ruinedJohn Adamsforever, faster than he came in my mouth, he runs up the passageway into the terminal without a backwards glance and disappears in the crowd.
I have two suitcases and four boxes coming down on the oversized luggage conveyor, the only pieces of my life I cared enough to keep. Starting over should feel momentous, I suppose, like the beginning of a journey. Instead of wondering why I don’t feel anything, I break my afternoon down into smaller and smaller steps until there are too many to keep track of without occupying all of my attention. Collect luggage. Find my hired car. Dig up the address to my apartment. Watch unfamiliar streets flicker past as we navigate toward the Upper East Side.
A storm must have passed through earlier in the afternoon, leaving behind wet brick and swollen gutters and droplets on the car window that blaze in the setting sun. I suppose it does rain everywhere after all.
The radio reports a story about mold found in the ventilation system of a local hospital. Out of habit, I pretend I’m suing the hospital on behalf of a patient. Then I switch and imagine I’m the hospital suing their maintenance company. It’s like fantasy football for intellectuals with no friends.
We slow down on a narrow street lined with brownstones and five-story, dove-colored apartment blocks decorated with elaborate stonework and wrought iron detailing. I’ve purchased, sight unseen, an apartment that occupies the fourth and fifth floors of a corner building.
As we pull up to the front, I spot a man in a tweedy suit and lumberjack beard perched on the stoop, reading. It’s been twelve years, but I’d know his distracted expression and bird’s nest of brown curls anywhere.
Before I can ask the driver to take me anywhere else, my welcoming committee scrambles to his feet, waving. I haven’t even put my shoes on the sidewalk when he rushes me with a handshake. “Welcome to New York!”
“You really needn’t have bothered, Avery.”
My old law school roommate just laughs. “Don’t try to hide how furious you are with me right now. You wanted to go upstairs and brood and not speak to anyone for months on end. I brought wine.”
