Every Man I Fall For

I wake from my dreaming with a jolt. It’s only 5:30pm on a Friday, but this week has left me so tired that I had fallen asleep almost as soon as I got home after school. Now I couldn’t sleep if I wanted to.

It’s been like this all week. The days drain me of all my energy, and as soon as I close my eyes at night I’m tortured by memory after memory, snapshot after snapshot of a life I thought I’d forgotten. Your voice, muted with time and harsh suppression, is slowly dripping back in to my life like poisonous honey. My name.

I love you, Oliver.
I miss you, Oliver.
I need you, Oliver.
Yes, right there, please Oliver.

Fuck you, Oliver.

There’s something about the way the new boy moves, and the way he cracks his neck. Something in the shadows his eyelashes cast on his cheekbones, and the popping veins in his skeletal fingers.

Something in the way he says my name.

Oliver.

He’s so different from you, so far removed, but at the same time, I can’t seem to find the line where one stops and the other one ends.

I need to see him.

*

Twenty minutes later, and I’m barely dressed outside Thom’s house. I don’t know why I’m here. Or rather, I do know why I’m here, but I don’t want it to be. I want to have a purer reason, or a more logical one, but the kid has a smile like heroin and I’m scared and confused and anxious and I feel like I’m strung out on it. Shaking. Craving.

I ring the doorbell.

”Coming!”

It’s a girl. I hear quick footsteps on wood, before she meets me at the door with surprised eyes. They quickly warm, knowingly.

“Hey Oli!” she says, and I shake off the irritation. “come on in. I’ll go get Thom.”

I take a seat on the couch, and fold my hands softly in my lap. I can hear the faint sounds of their conversation, a low buzzing, and then WHO!? as a chair scrapes back quickly.

He jumps down the stairs two at a time and lands in front of me within seconds, grin stretched impossibly wide across his face.

“Oliver! What are you doing here!?”

This is a sensory overload, here in this house that smells like cumin and mothers and washing powder, and it takes me a minute to formulate a response that is delicate enough to hide the truth.

I needed you.

“I just wanted to chat a bit, I guess. I hope you don’t mind. I feel rude…”

I trail awkwardly, realizing that yes, actually, I do feel rude, exceedingly so, as I invited myself in to his home.

“Don’t be silly” he scolds jokingly, “come on up to my room.”

He pulls me up the short flight of stairs by the wrist, and we pass his sister pressed in to the wall. She is laughing to herself and I’m confused, but I shrug it off.

Thom’s room is smallish, but not a box. The walls are a pumpkin orange that immediately feels oppressive, and his bookshelves are Ikea beech. The window is tall, with a seat in it. The curtains around it create the perfect place for reading, as his queen-sized bed takes up most of the floorspace. A red paper lantern hangs from the ceiling, and I wonder how a person so bright can confine themselves in a space so dark.

Cautiously, I approach the bed and perch awkwardly on the edge, my eyes trained on the floorboards. After a minute his voice, soft, breaks the silence. It’s almost as if he is speaking to a child.

“You can take your shoes off.”

I comply, and push them under the bed, leaving my socks on. I cross my legs. The socks have pictures of pineapples on them, and I pick at the pilling on my ankle.

“I’m glad you came to chat, Oliver. I thought you would be getting sick of me.”

He’s been with me for the last two weeks, in every minute, behind every breath. It’s ridiculous, I barely know him, and half of me is trying to assign his smile to a time he never knew, but still I feel like the pulse on my temple is beating out a steady rhythm. Thom Thom Thom…

I look up through my fringe, and he is standing just in front of the door, looking like he doesn’t know what to do with his arms.

“Are you gay?” I ask suddenly, knowing I have to.

His eyes sharpen suddenly, like a microscope brought in to focus, and he furrows his eyebrows at me. He sighs once before responding decisively.

“Yes.”

“OK” I say, and go back to my socks.

He moves across the room and sits next to me, watching my busy hands.

“Are you?” he asks, after a minute of silence. I think.

“No” I answer finally.

“Oh.”

He sounds dejected, and when I look up he’s biting his lip. His eyebrows are still furrowed, and I don’t like it, because I don’t want him to be sad, I don’t want him to frown at me.

“ I don’t like boys,” I qualify, “I like people.”

“Oh” he says again, but this is a different kind of ‘oh’, and he’s not frowning anymore.

We lapse back in to silence for a moment.

“Do you like.. me?”

“Yes” I say, a little too quickly, before looking back at my socks. The pineapples look silly on my feet.

I can feel his smile radiating out of his face like a lamp. I want that to mean that he likes me, too. I want that to mean that he doesn’t mind that I talk too softly at the wrong times, and that I don’t always laugh at his jokes. I want that to mean that I can eat the food he doesn’t want at lunchtime, and maybe even that he wouldn’t mind seeing me and my pineapple socks over at his again sometime.

“Is that what’s been on your mind recently?” he asks, voice now laced with concern. My head snaps up.

“What?”

“The last few days…”

I know what he means, and there’s no point hiding it, so I sigh and uncross my legs, leaning back on my arms.

“Sort of.”

“Something else?”

I’m staring at the roof.

“Someone else.”
“Oh.” And it’s the first kind again.

I smile weakly.

“Not the way you think. At least, not anymore.”

“Okay. Then how?” his curiosity is piqued.

He leans back next to me and we stare at the roof together. It’s quiet for a little while, as I wonder how much I will tell. How much I can bear to hear my voice say, how open I will leave myself to this near stranger.

I nearly give up, but then I think beige. And I’m so tired of running from the past, so tired of the things I can’t control. So tired of Quiet Boy. Adrian is allowed to shriek it from the top of his lungs. At least I can still whisper.

“His name was Nicholas.”