Every Man I Fall For

It feels like it takes days and days, but it might have only been an hour. I didn’t stop or break, I didn’t choke, it just tumbled out of me like receipts in the bottom of a shopping bag. He lay there in silence and watched the ceiling plaster while I painted my picture for him.

Brown eyes over a coffee shop counter.
A little older.
A little smarter.
A week.
Two weeks.
A month.
Sweat, too much sweat in the unnatural heat.
Hours and hours.
A party.
A phone call.
An Oliver-shaped shell.

At the end I stop abruptly, and it feels much too short even though I’ve exhausted my words. At least, the parts I want to tell him. I turn to face him, but he is still staring at the ceiling through our silence. Then slowly, slowly, and then all of a sudden, his head turns to me and his eyes are wide and so so green and bright and I can feel his breath stirring the downy wisps of hair around my temple.

For a minute I’m lost in him and he’s lost in me and my heart feels so light and it strikes me quite violently that this isn’t Nicholas, he was never Nicholas.
Then,

“What a cockhead.”

And there is silence for a split second before I am shrieking with laughter, curled up in a ball and clutching my stomach, and I’m not sure if the tears running down my cheeks are from my tiredness or my anger, my sadness or the overwhelming sense of peace that Thom’s presence puts in to my heart.

He’s laughing at my laughter, and we’re both breathing heavy minutes later as my giggles subside. There’s silence again for a minute.

“I’m sorry, Olive.”

Olive?

“It’s OK, T-bag,” I begin. Thom snorts. “people make mistakes.”

“Like calling me T-bag?”

“Or me Olive.”

But I’m lying, because I think Olive is cute, and he knows it.

He sits up.

“What do you want to do?”

I put my hands behind my head and I look up at him. He’s watching me carefully, as if I am some exotic butterfly that has just landed on his wrist. Something in his gaze is so homely that I don’t feel studied, though; I feel more admired than anything, and it makes me blush, because I’m just me.

I want to be Thom’s butterfly, though, so I sit up and across from him, our knees touching. And in the silence of the room I lean across and take his right hand, and turn it over. Count the veins. One, two, three, four, five… spiderlines of life. They’re a pretty peach-blue, and a little raised, and when I run my fingers over them I hear him take in a little breath, and when I look up his eyes are watching the path of my fingers over his pressure point.

I trail down his palm to his fingers (lifeline, heartline…) and his knuckles and his nails, and I try to memorise the length of his cuticles and the number of wrinkles on each joint of his pointer. I am hearing music.

“Can we just… be here? Be apart and together and watch and learn and whisper and maybe we can make a fort or maybe we can just sit here for hours, and breathe in time. Because I want to watch the sun go down in your eyes. Is that OK?”

And his eyes go wide in wonder and I’m scared because I don’t talk like this normally, I don’t speak like I think, and I wonder if I missed an important connection there, if there was a conjunction missing and he can’t hear my words as they fall out of my heart. Or if maybe I’m too strange and impulsive or if I am even right, if I fit here, and fuck, am I beige again? And all my insecurities are coming back thick and fast in one second as he watches me and I want to die and sink and flower underground because I’m not Adrian.

“That sounds lovely.”

I am frozen.

And then, much later, hours later, as we lie in his now dark room, after he has let me watch the sunset in his eyes:

“I like your socks, by the way.”