From Him, With Love

“Wow,” I muttered when he pulled away.

“Wow is right,” he replied.

The kiss had been soft, but not so soft that I didn’t feel it everywhere.

“That was my first kiss,” I admitted.

“I honestly can’t say the same."

I laughed a little bit, and heard May yawn. When I looked over, she was sitting up. The off-white duvet she’d been wrapped up in had fallen just above her hips as she stretched out.

“Jack, who’s this?” she asked sleepily.

“Good afternoon, sunshine. This is my friend, Alex.”

“Hey, Alex, I’m May.”

“Hello,” I answered.

“How do you feel?” Jack asked, walking over to sit on the edge of her bed.

“I feel a lot better. I think we should go do something today.”

He leaned over to kiss the top of her head.

“Alright, princess, as long as you’re sure you’re feeling better. Where do you want to go?”

“I want to go to the beach.”

“Sounds like a plan. Are you up for that, Alex?”

“Yeah,” I answered hesitantly.

I didn’t want to have to take my shirt off, because I knew that it would put my cuts out in the open, but I could always just steal Tom's rash guard.

“Okay, well you probably need to go get your swimsuit. We’ll pick you up in half an hour, does that sound good? Where do you live? You could invite your friend Ella too if you want.”

“She loves the beach, I’ll text her. I live two blocks from here in the big house on the corner of D and Thirteenth Street.”

“Okay, we’ll see you in half an hour.”

“That sounds good.”

Walking out of the building, I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear.

Meet me at my house in ten minutes with a swimsuit and a towel. We’re going to the beach with Jack in half an hour.

Ella texted me back in a matter of seconds.

I can’t wait, see you soon.

Back at home, I hurried to get my trash can and empty it in the big dumpster behind the house so that Ella wouldn’t see what it was full of. I honestly didn’t want her to worry about me. I also disposed of the gauze that my hips were swathed in at that particular moment. The action made walking inside extremely uncomfortable, with my jeans rubbing against my hips. I tried to mask my discomfort as well as I could while I walked to Tom's room.

When I knocked, I was happy to find that Tom wasn't there, so I slipped inside and rummaged through his closet for his rash guard.

I managed to slip into my green swim trunks and Tom's rash guard before Ella knocked on my bedroom door. To be really honest, the rash guard was too big for me.

“Hey,” I greeted, opening the door for Ella.

“Hey,” she replied.

“I hung out with Jack earlier,” I told her.

“Oh my god, your joking,” she enthused. “Alex, that’s awesome!! How’d it go?”

I let my fingertips brush my lips, where I could still taste the hints of lemon and Jack Daniel's that Jack's lips had left on mine. I wondered what mine tasted like to him. They probably tasted like salty tears.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Ella squealed. “You two kissed?”

“Yeah,” I smiled. “We kissed.”

The word sounded different to me now that I’d actually done that action.

“Oh my god, Lex, do you know how great this is?”

“Trust me, Ella, I know exactly how great this is. Oh my god, Tom would…”

I had to stop myself from finishing the sentence. Tom would go crazy…if it was four years before. If I told him then, he would probably not say anything.

“I’m sorry,” Ella said. “But please don’t let that ruin it for you. You kissed him, Lex. Do you know how happy I am for you?”

“Yeah, I do. I just wish that Tom would just talk to me already.”

I’d come to the conclusion that my conversation with him the night before didn’t actually count.

She hugged me, and I hugged back.

“Do you want to go downstairs and play Call of Duty until Jack gets here?”

“Sure, that sounds fun,” she replied.

We spent the next fifteen minutes shouting at the TV screen and laughing at each other’s lame attempts to play the game. At one point, Tom came home. I was distracted. My character died. At one PM, Jack showed up. He knocked on the front door, and Tom opened it.

“Hi, you must be Alex's brother. I’m Jack and this is May.”

I could practically feel the look Tom was giving him. There was no denying that Jack was attractive, and Tom was wondering why he hung out with me.

“Um, yeah, I’m Tom.”

“Are Alex and Ella here?”

“Yeah, they’re over there, come on in.”

He pointed in our direction, and Jack and May came in.

“Hi,” Jack said.

“Hi,” I answered, pausing the game.

“Nice house, are you guys ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Ella answered. “Let’s go.”

Jack had rented a car from the airport, a small black sedan. The inside reeked of coffee and vanilla.

“Sorry about the smell,” Jack apologized. “It smelled like this when we rented it. Coffee and vanilla isn’t a particularly good smell.”

“It’s alright,” Ella and I answered at the same time.

The seats were painfully hot from all of the heat trapped inside of the car, and I had to sit on my towel. I offered Ella the other side of the towel, and she graciously spread it onto her seat.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem.”

“So,” May began. “I guess no one was kidding about how hot it is in Australia.”

It was about twenty degrees hotter than it had been the night before, and we were all practically baking in the ninety degree heat. It was winter, even if it was just the end of it. Tomorrow would mark the beginning of Tom's last week of school before winter break, AKA my last week of Tom not being home to hate me at all times. I swear to god it was like the boy had no friends.

“Yeah, it’s almost spring, so it’s heating up.”

“Yeah, I figured. How hot does it usually get during the summer?”

“Up to, like one-hundred five degrees. Sometimes it’s too hot to leave the house,” Ella explained.

“Yeah, it gets too humid to leave the house in Baltimore too sometimes,” Jack informed us. “What do you do when it’s too hot to leave the house?”

“Usually we just do exactly what we were doing when you got there. What do you do?”

“Well May's too old for board games and too girly for video games, so she’s usually just content to bury her nose in a book. I usually pass the time with cold showers because the air-conditioning in our house is the worst.”

“Wow, that’s got to add up to a lot of time in the shower, huh?” Ella asked.

“Yeah, it does. Hours of practicing his singing, and he never gets any better,” May laughed.

Ella laughed and said, “I’m sure he’s not that bad.”

"I'm more of a guitarist."

I’d sort of backed out of the conversation, and I was staring out the window. The sky was completely cloudless, but what the sky lacked in fluffy white clouds, my mind made up for in grey rain clouds. I was stupid to think that one good thing in my life could make up for years and years of building depression into a habit.

I could be happy, but I was always still trapped in my depression, because happiness was an emotion, but depression was a state of being.

Ella was the first to notice that I’d drawn out of the conversation. She was my best friend, after all. Even if she couldn’t sense how upset I was at most times, she was pretty observant of my temporary actions, such as subconsciously leaving a conversation.

“Alex, are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just really tired.”

“You look really pale. Are you sure you’re not getting sick?”

“I’m sure.”

“Do you need something to eat? I have a granola bar in my bag.”

She seemed genuinely concerned, so I accepted the granola bar as a way of appeasing her. I ate the whole thing, trying to be discreet about checking the nutrition facts. It was a hundred fifty calories. The beach showed up in the distance, and it was only a couple minutes more before we reached our destination. Jack parked the car, and I told them that I needed to find a bathroom. I grabbed my bag and walked until I found a shower house with a bathroom. In the bathroom, I emptied the contents of my stomach into the toilet. I didn’t feel good, but I pulled my toothbrush out of my bag as well as a travel sized tube of toothpaste.

The smell and taste of the toothpaste made me want to throw up again, but there was nothing in my stomach to throw up. When I was done brushing my teeth, I swished some water through my mouth and tucked the toothbrush and toothpaste back into the hidden pocket of my bag. Finally, I walked back out. Ella stood outside with her hands on her hips.

“Do you want to explain why I heard you throwing up?” she asked, irritated. “You told me you weren’t sick.”

“I just don’t feel very good,” I covered.

Her tone softened a bit, “Alex, you didn’t have to lie to me. I just wanted to help you. I have some tums if you want one, or we could catch a taxi back to your house in case you throw up again.”

“Thanks for looking out for me, El, but I’m fine. I feel a lot better now.”

I gave her a hug, and she hugged back. Ella was the only person I was close enough to hug. Jack was just a brief exception, and I wanted to let him in, but I wasn’t sure if I could trust him. Two weeks wasn’t enough time to be sure, and I would just have to take it and run. I kicked off my shoes, and looked over at Ella.

She was pretty…beautiful really. If I swung that way, she would probably be the girl that I would like. The sun bounced off of her carelessly thrown together brown ponytail, and you could see the emerald green color of her eyes better when she wasn’t wearing makeup. She stood with a slightly slumped posture, but she was still relatively tall for a girl. Her skin was much tanner than mine, as she spent every second that she wasn’t with me outside caring for her garden. She was the only girl I knew that had enough time to nurture a garden. She obviously wasn’t the most practical girl, and she preferred to plant different kinds of flowers over things that could actually be useful.

Her garden was her pride and joy, and with good reason. She was the only person I knew that could nurse roses, carnations, and tulips in the same space. The garden basically overtook the entire front lawn of her house. Her parents wanted to make her buy her own living space, but they didn’t have the heart to make her start another garden in another place when the one she’d been working on since she was ten was at their home. I guess that the flower garden warmed her heart in more ways than one.

“Do you want to race?” I asked.

“You’re on.”

She wasn’t a runner and I was, but there was no question that she would win. I was too light-headed to run fast enough to beat her.

With the knowledge that I wasn’t feeling well, she ran slowly so that I could sort of keep up, but she still beat me to the place where her, Jack's, and May's towels were laid out.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“They’re in the water, I assume,” Ella answered.

“Let’s go.”

I rushed ahead of her into the warm water. Jack was only about three meters from the shore, and May was sitting about thirty centimeters from the shore.

“Hey,” I said, sitting next to her. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t swim,” she answered.

Jack was trying to coax her to where he was standing.

“Come on, I’ll teach you.”

I grabbed each of her hands and helped her stand up. She reluctantly followed me to Jack.

“She can swim,” he whispered in my ear, and his breath sent chills down my spine. “She just doesn’t want to admit to you that she’s afraid of sharks. She has a little crush on you.”

“Jack!” she exclaimed. “You didn’t have to tell him that!”

Her cheeks were a bright shade of pink, but I smiled at her.

“Is that so? Well, I suppose you have a good reason to be afraid of sharks. They scared me too when I was your age. I wouldn’t even get in a swimming pool.”

For her sake, I was going to pretend that Jack hadn’t just told me that she had a crush on me.

She laughed a bit uncomfortably.

“I’m sorry, May,” Jack said.

“It’s okay, I guess.”

“You don’t have to go any deeper than this, if you don’t want to,” I assured her.

“Okay, I don’t want to.”

We just stood there in silence until Ella got there, and then for few seconds after that. Finally, Jack cracked a smile, trying to hold back laughter. We all followed his lead, and it wasn’t long before we were all laughing.

“You know,” Ella said, turning to me. “Today sort of reminds me of prom night two years ago, just because it’s such a good day so far.”

“That’s funny,” I answered. “I was just thinking of that a few minutes ago.”

“What happened on prom night two years ago?”

“Ella was upset because her date didn’t show up. My date broke his ankle three days before prom. So, instead of just being sad, we decided to go together. We got there, and everyone kind of looked at us funny because they knew I was gay, and it was one of the best nights I’ve had.”