Skeletons Skeletons Skeletons in My Coat Closet

It's midnight and he's lonely plucking the strings on his guitar. Everyone else is downstairs playing beer pong, drinking Millburn, Lambrusco, and everything else from the wine cellar beneath the house. The stereo in the living room under him pumps acid rock and reggae through the cracked jaspe printed walls, the house jolts during the chorus of a song because everyone is downstairs jumping. He pats the headstock when the cadence picks up.

The door opens and Simon quickly jumps off of his bed to his mirror. He adjusts his tie and brushes his hair with his fingers, pursing his homespun lips together as he watches the reflection of legs and heels in the pier glass.

Simon sighs, "Oh, it's just you."

"Yeah, just me," Lena says, rolling her eyes.

He frowns at her quip and loosens his tie until it slides right off, unbuttoning a stud on his shirt afterwards. There's uncertainty on his face, it's in his furrowed eyebrows and tight lips and carping fingers. Lena taps her foot on the floor, the clicking noise from her spool heel bothers Simon and he turns around to face her once he finishes playing with his barrel cuffs.

"How do I look?" Simon asks.

"Like you're looking to get laid tonight."

He grunts, shocked by the brutality of her answer. "Maybe that was my intention," Simon mumbles, fastening the stud back. "Why is your attitude so lousy?"

"Because your parents keep asking me when you'll be downstairs and I can't give them an answer because every time I come up here to ask you ignore me." She glowers at the guitar laying face down on his wrinkled duvet. "You were playing that guitar weren't you? I knew I should've just bought you a skateboard or a snowboard or a fucking wallet instead."

"I'll learn how to play, Len."

It seems now that Simon has given up on video games. He's long since forgotten about Slayers and John Tillman and the invention of those self-replicating nanites that he can't even begin to explain, something about androids and robots or machines and a nanometer scale. It's difficult to understand but Ken Castle is dead now so no one will ever be able to explain the labyrinthine of his engineering.

"No, you won't, Sim–" Lena pauses, leaning forward a bit to see a torn page from a gazette pinned to his wall. "Simon, what is that on your wall?" It's beside the copper Mariposa table lamp on his side dresser and he pretends not to see it.

Simon's lips are pulled into a crooked smile. "It's a part of a series of articles on molecular nanotechnology, this one is about mechanosynthesis."

"I thought that your days of gaming were finished!" Lena groans, tossing her hands in the air. "And what is mecha–whatever the fuck it is?"

Simon laughs, filching her cheeks between his fingers. "Say it with me, mech-ano-syn-the-sis."

"Mech-ano-syn-the-sis."

"There you go," he says, letting go of her face.

"Geek," Lena snarls.

Simon's brambly hands are clamped over her wrists now, fingertips mended into her skin like a basting stitch. Lena tries to pull her arms away but his grip is cutting like pleats on pants that are already too tight, it's just a game, though, it's not always fun but at least she knows that it's a game. They're reeling and sweating and wrestling with each other, a few resonant chuckles are even exchanged between the two. She kicks off her shoes because she doesn't want her spool heels cropping his body like some photo emending software.

He pushes her down on his bed and pins her hands above her head, hedging her waist. Lena's blue eyes are clear now, purified glass or a thin, translucent sea, a swell crashing onto the waterside. Simon's eyes are blue too, but he's never been so consumed, so swallowed up in someone else. The feeling doesn't comprise desire or weakness or compulsion, interest rather.

Their lips are together just to subdue the clumsy silence. But they both feel something, cavities - they're somewhere deep inside of them, laced within their entrails, just constantly opening and opening until they inhale anything and everything inside of them. Simon sweeps her chapped lips with his tongue but she refuses to open her mouth for him. He rolls Lena over so that she can have the top, figuring that's what she wants, therefore allowing him admittance to her mouth, but she still refuses.

"What's wrong? Am I doing something wrong, Lena?"

Lena shakes her head. "No, Simon. You're wonderful, everything about you is wonderful." Her hair pervades across the duvet, almost like she's smeared out by the fingers of an artisan. "I just, have this fear of attatchment. Every boy I've ever been with has only wanted something so far from love and comfort that I just stopped trying. I'm not a virgin, but that doesn't mean I'm having sex with just any boy I meet, ya know?"

His eyes are wide. "You're not a virgin?"

"Don't play dumb, Simon. You've known this since freshman year of high school, the two Hopkins boys, remember?"

"With the two of them!? Christ, Lena. What is wrong with you?" Simon pushes Lena off of him and sits up on his bed, head in his hands, pulling small tufts of his hair. "You are all sorts of crazy, just messed up!"

"Not at the same time, Simon!" Lena sits up next to him, adjusting her sheath dress. It's pathetic but she's been reduced to tears by his words, cutting her into tiny little sub-par pieces just splayed out across the counterpane. "Who are you to judge anyway? During freshman year you wore those crew neck t-shirts with stupid sayings on them and you had a stupid leather messenger bag and always carried around that stupid fucking lorgnette!" She stands up and throws her hands out in front of her. "And they didn't even make you look smart!"

Simon scowls. "You don't mean that. How could you mean that?"

"I meant every word, because I might be 'crazy' and 'messed up', but at least I wasn't a loser."

Simon stands up quickly, too quickly because it seems he hadn't had the time to piece himself together. He catches himself before falling. Simon snarls and his lip arches, unveiling his bared teeth before he grabs onto her wrists again, pressing her against the wall. Lena doesn't struggle or fight back, she just stands there, face stolid and relaxed.

He kisses her once more, only this time tender cannot be used to describe how his lips felt on hers. Frantic hands and fleeting moans leaving their wet mouths; Lena's hands are in his hair, fingers brushing the sweat soaked ringlets across his forehead. His mouth on her neck, lips smacking sucking, teeth gently biting and scraping against her collar bone.

The tremors from the music pulse through those fractured walls, brindled veins of coalesced colors. Lena can feel the vibrations against her back as Simon is pressing her harder and harder into the paneling, almost as if trying to engrave her sharp angles and attributes in for likeness, a hard copy of her, so to speak.

Lena knows that Simon isn't a loser, but what else was she to say during that fit of rage?

Their lips are away from each other, eyes boring into flesh and cartilage and tissue. Simon puts a hand on her head, his fingers full with the swell of teeming curls, but he can't stop his mind from purling and he can't stop staring at her eyes, blue blue blue brackish water azure maybe a hint of teal.

"I'm not going to say I love you, Simon," Lena says. "Because I don't. As a friend, sure, of course, but nothing else."

Simon is a bit taken aback but he saw this fog and confusion in the forecast. "You thought that I was going to say 'I love you'?"

Lena shrugs. "Well, you've seen those movies. When two people are in the moment and one of them says 'I love you' when they obviously don't mean it. I knew that it wasn't going to be me, so I had to have been you."

"Well, I wasn't going to say it."

"Oh."

It's quiet and their bodies rest against each other, arms wrapped around bony forms, reposing. "I think we should get back to your birthday party now."

"Sounds like a plan."