Status: hiatus
Pear
Chapter Four
Come over.
The screen of my phone went dark a long time ago, but I can still see the individual pixels shining in my pupils like the stars of a far off galaxy. I’m not stupid. I know what this means, and yet part of me – the same part of me that has been drowning itself in the violin for three days – is saying that this is it, Hugo, this is the moment we have been waiting for. The message holds the same expectation of compliance that once drew me out like graphite on paper, and I remind myself that nowadays I am trying to be at least a watercolour.
No thank you, I reply, and I pull my best socks on for the oil-paint boy who is waiting on my front steps.
*
Things with Jordan are easy easy. He’s got this kind of slow, loping, puppy-dog smile that disarms me completely and makes my own lips curve up instinctively. Breathing.
“What made you call me back?” I ask, over wine glass rims.
He shrugs.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
The answer is too simple, because immediately I start to count up all the possible reasons why he wouldn’t have and am left more confused than I was before I asked. The thought process must show in the rapid succession of emotions flicking across my face, because he sighs and drops his voice down a few notches in to a quiet bass that makes my hands shake.
“You really want to know?” he asks, cocking his head to one side. I nod. “You’re- you’re like a fairy, Hugo. I don’t know. There’s something in your skin and your wrist bones, and the way you move – it’s like you’re made of glass, or porcelain, or you’re just a piece of chiffon blowing in the wind. You kind of just… hover. It’s hard to explain.”
I nod, wanting, needing him to continue. He sighs again.
“I guess I just spend so much of my life around people who need to shout and proclaim their existence to the world, that to meet someone that just is is very special to me.”
And then I understand, because I know he means that I am the forest and he is the fox, and I guess we are probably two creatures from the same climate.
“Jordan?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you called.”
He smiles at me, puppy dog again, and I feel something long-forgotten go warm in me for half a second, before it’s gone too soon.
“And,” I say, watching my fork hover over my fettuccine, “I think it’s important that you know that I think you are just the first page of a book that I can’t wait to finish”
and when I look up his eyes are Sunday mornings and goose down.
*
Neither of us are quite ready to leave when dinner is over. We stand in the cold of the street for some time, just looking at each other and deciding where to go. Somehow I don’t mind just staying where we are, but the numb of my toes that is slowly seeping up my feet suggests otherwise. Eventually we decide on a small alleyway bar called The Far-away Tree that is usually good for a quiet drink (and keeps the music volume down a little so I have space to breathe), and we set off, too bashful to commit entirely and enjoying this too much to separate, shoulders brushing. The moon is the same shape and colour as the ceiling light of my childhood bedroom, and I feel safe.
When we have entered, wined and seated, I ask Jordan about his family and friends, his aspirations. He tells me about country life in Castlemaine, the wide, buttery roads and the shape of gum trees against blue skies. He has two younger sisters, he says, and both parents. His family still live in the same, two-story weatherboard; the blue walls of his old bedroom covered up with his father’s books and the girls’ artworks. He goes back for Christmas- and apart from that, daily life there seems a figment of his imagination.
He wants to be a teacher, a writer. He wants to help, to inspire, to create. He asks me about my life, and all I can say is that it’s a little broken and beige. He says no one ever made beige look so beautiful. I blush ten shades of beige and more.
Then, as the night wears on and my glass drains away, I tell him more and more. My father, sturdy and introverted, reading crime novels over wire frames, the perpetual smoke haze. My mother, like some vision out of a 1956 Women’s Weekly, all pinafores and aprons and flour. How sometimes if I stayed out of bed too long she might start to smell like gin and regrets. The endless arguments about me, long in to the small hours of the night, and how she would beg to get out and hear some music. How one day I vowed I would bring the orchestra to her, and picked up my grandfather’s violin.
There was the divorce, of course, and all that came with that, but somehow it was all so amicable and understated that it seemed to never really happen at all. So I don’t tell him about that, and instead I ask him about the exact shade of blue that his parents are hiding behind all those books.
*
On my steps he takes both my hands, as I stand one above him. When I tell him his cheekbones look lovely in this light, he snorts and tells me to shut up. And it feels nice.
And when he leans up and tells me soft that he will call me tomorrow, well that feels even nicer.
But when he kisses me goodbye, urgent and sweet, once twice thrice right there on the street? That feels the most nice of all.
The screen of my phone went dark a long time ago, but I can still see the individual pixels shining in my pupils like the stars of a far off galaxy. I’m not stupid. I know what this means, and yet part of me – the same part of me that has been drowning itself in the violin for three days – is saying that this is it, Hugo, this is the moment we have been waiting for. The message holds the same expectation of compliance that once drew me out like graphite on paper, and I remind myself that nowadays I am trying to be at least a watercolour.
No thank you, I reply, and I pull my best socks on for the oil-paint boy who is waiting on my front steps.
*
Things with Jordan are easy easy. He’s got this kind of slow, loping, puppy-dog smile that disarms me completely and makes my own lips curve up instinctively. Breathing.
“What made you call me back?” I ask, over wine glass rims.
He shrugs.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
The answer is too simple, because immediately I start to count up all the possible reasons why he wouldn’t have and am left more confused than I was before I asked. The thought process must show in the rapid succession of emotions flicking across my face, because he sighs and drops his voice down a few notches in to a quiet bass that makes my hands shake.
“You really want to know?” he asks, cocking his head to one side. I nod. “You’re- you’re like a fairy, Hugo. I don’t know. There’s something in your skin and your wrist bones, and the way you move – it’s like you’re made of glass, or porcelain, or you’re just a piece of chiffon blowing in the wind. You kind of just… hover. It’s hard to explain.”
I nod, wanting, needing him to continue. He sighs again.
“I guess I just spend so much of my life around people who need to shout and proclaim their existence to the world, that to meet someone that just is is very special to me.”
And then I understand, because I know he means that I am the forest and he is the fox, and I guess we are probably two creatures from the same climate.
“Jordan?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you called.”
He smiles at me, puppy dog again, and I feel something long-forgotten go warm in me for half a second, before it’s gone too soon.
“And,” I say, watching my fork hover over my fettuccine, “I think it’s important that you know that I think you are just the first page of a book that I can’t wait to finish”
and when I look up his eyes are Sunday mornings and goose down.
*
Neither of us are quite ready to leave when dinner is over. We stand in the cold of the street for some time, just looking at each other and deciding where to go. Somehow I don’t mind just staying where we are, but the numb of my toes that is slowly seeping up my feet suggests otherwise. Eventually we decide on a small alleyway bar called The Far-away Tree that is usually good for a quiet drink (and keeps the music volume down a little so I have space to breathe), and we set off, too bashful to commit entirely and enjoying this too much to separate, shoulders brushing. The moon is the same shape and colour as the ceiling light of my childhood bedroom, and I feel safe.
When we have entered, wined and seated, I ask Jordan about his family and friends, his aspirations. He tells me about country life in Castlemaine, the wide, buttery roads and the shape of gum trees against blue skies. He has two younger sisters, he says, and both parents. His family still live in the same, two-story weatherboard; the blue walls of his old bedroom covered up with his father’s books and the girls’ artworks. He goes back for Christmas- and apart from that, daily life there seems a figment of his imagination.
He wants to be a teacher, a writer. He wants to help, to inspire, to create. He asks me about my life, and all I can say is that it’s a little broken and beige. He says no one ever made beige look so beautiful. I blush ten shades of beige and more.
Then, as the night wears on and my glass drains away, I tell him more and more. My father, sturdy and introverted, reading crime novels over wire frames, the perpetual smoke haze. My mother, like some vision out of a 1956 Women’s Weekly, all pinafores and aprons and flour. How sometimes if I stayed out of bed too long she might start to smell like gin and regrets. The endless arguments about me, long in to the small hours of the night, and how she would beg to get out and hear some music. How one day I vowed I would bring the orchestra to her, and picked up my grandfather’s violin.
There was the divorce, of course, and all that came with that, but somehow it was all so amicable and understated that it seemed to never really happen at all. So I don’t tell him about that, and instead I ask him about the exact shade of blue that his parents are hiding behind all those books.
*
On my steps he takes both my hands, as I stand one above him. When I tell him his cheekbones look lovely in this light, he snorts and tells me to shut up. And it feels nice.
And when he leans up and tells me soft that he will call me tomorrow, well that feels even nicer.
But when he kisses me goodbye, urgent and sweet, once twice thrice right there on the street? That feels the most nice of all.