24
WYATT
Ely: Can you come over?
The text appears on my phone when I’m midway through washing dishes—another gourmet meal of boxed mac and cheese—and I pretty much immediately give up on cleaning. (Not that I wasn’t already looking for an excuse.)
Of course, I start typing, but this doesn’t feel like a texting sort of situation. So I hit Call instead and listen to the phone ring twice, three times, before Ely picks up.
“Hey,” she says. Her voice is a little shaky. Maybe someone else wouldn’t notice, but I’m listening for it, and I know her. I know the sound of someone trying to sound cool, sound normal, even when they’re falling the fuck apart inside.
“Hey there,” I say back. “What’s going on?”
Her exhale is low and somewhat ragged. “I just…Rough night. I feel like my mind keeps circling the drain and I can’t shut it off. I don’t…I can’t be alone right now.”
I check my watch. It’s 9:00 p.m.—late but not middle of the night. Haze will be fine parkouring off the furniture without me.
Not that I think the time of night would have actually made a difference in the end. I knew what I was going to say before I even picked up the phone.
“I can be there in an hour,” I say. “Are you going to be okay until then?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be fine. I can…watch Schitt’s Creek or something. I’ll be okay.”
“Okay. If you’re sure. I’ll head out right now. Text me if you need to talk while I’m on the way.”
The commute from Bushwick to Astoria is terrible, and I find myself furiously staring at my phone every time we pull into a subway station, waiting for the little signal bars to pop up, bracing myself for a text from Ely. I should have taken a cab. An hour is an hour, but it’s also a long damn time when you’re fresh out of a relapse. Anything can happen in an hour.
You can’t be a helicopter parent. Or a helicopter…whatever Ely and I are.
This is kind of a thing of mine, though. A couple of weeks after I adopted Haze, he got sick with some kind of respiratory virus. I could hear him wheezing with every breath. The vet seemed okay about it, but I stayed up all night for two nights in a row just watching that cat breathe. Making sure he was still alive.
I want to stare at Ely all night and make sure she’s still breathing too.
The bus drops me off, and I ring the bell at Ely’s building and stand there for the world’s longest twenty seconds waiting for her to buzz me in. But even after she does, as I stride up the stairs to her floor two at a time, my shoulders still don’t descend from their tense posture up by my ears.
I know better than anyone that alive isn’t always the same thing as okay.
But then Ely opens the door, and my gaze reflexively skips down her whole body, looking for signs of—of I don’t even know what. But whatever I’m looking for, it isn’t there. She looks normal, her dark hair drawn up in a messy bun, the bluish smudges under her eyes no more pronounced than usual.
“Sorry it took me so long,” I say.
She musters half a smile, at least. “You literally came from Brooklyn. I’m impressed you got here on the same calendar date.”
I’ve never been inside Ely’s apartment before. And maybe this isn’t the time for it, but I can’t help a quick, surreptitious glance around…even if the pink velvet sofa and baby-blue credenza probably speak more to her roommates’ tastes than to her own.
“Back here,” she says, and leads me through a door across the living room.
Ely’s bedroom is tiny, about the size of a moderate-to-large suburban bathroom. The bed itself takes up most of the space, with a rickety desk crammed into what remains, its chair facing the window that peers out over the street below.
She kicks the door shut behind me and drops down onto the edge of the bed. I choose the desk chair, even if it—frankly—looks like it may not hold my weight.
Being here, shut in a bedroom with Ely, feels illicit. I can’t quite figure out where to rest my gaze; it ends up settled on Ely’s hands, watching her fingers clench and flex against the duvet fabric.
I remember how she gripped the sheets as I drove into her that first night. Our only night. The perfect shape her mouth made as she moaned. The line of her arched throat, her thighs tightening around my hips.
Think about cats think about cats think about cats—
“Thanks for coming,” she says eventually, which—thank god—puts a halt to my obsessing over her hands and everything they remind me of. I drag my attention back up to her face, but she’s looking away, staring at an empty spot on the opposite wall. “Seriously. I know this is probably…a lot. It’d be a lot for anyone, but you’re in recovery too, so…If this is too much, I understand. I don’t want to trigger you.”
“What? No. No, don’t even worry about it. I’m fine.” I had no idea she was even concerned about that. “I’ve been clean for years. It’s a lot easier for me to just not think about it, most of the time. You aren’t triggering me at all.”
Her lips twist into a sad facsimile of a smile. “I wish that were me. I wish I could just not think about it.”
“It will be, if you stay clean long enough. Recovery takes time.”
She nods slightly. “I felt like I was getting there, maybe. This past year or so…I was able to forget. It felt like I was just like anyone else. And maybe that made me cocky, because I swear, I thought…”
I know what she thought. It’s the same thing I thought before my relapses: I can do this. I’m better now. I can handle it. But I couldn’t handle it. And Ely is no different.
I just wish it hadn’t taken this slip for her to figure that out.
“Remember what you told Haze the other day. It’s just a blip, and you’re continuing. That cat will hold you to it. Trust me.”
It earns me a brief, muffled laugh, which is something.
My hand is on her wrist. For a moment I tense—I should move; I should stop touching her—but then I curl my fingers around those delicate bones, and she draws back just enough to press our palms together. Her fingertips rest light atop my veins. Against my will, I shiver.
This is it: This is the point where I always pull away. Every relationship, it feels like. They open up, they become vulnerable, and the pressure to reciprocate that vulnerability makes me want to run.
I don’t want to run this time.
“When I was first starting out,” I say, “I had a really hard time breaking into the scene. I felt like I was pouring everything I had into my work and no one cared. I was telling people who I was, and they were looking right at me, looking into my soul, and rejecting it. I mean, that’s what art is, right? It’s personal. So when people hate it, it’s like they’re saying they hate you.”
Ely is watching me with her big dark eyes, and right now it feels just like that: like she’s looking at my art. Peering past all the layers I have wrapped around myself into a part of me I haven’t shared with anyone.
“I thought about quitting. So many times. Honestly, I’m surprised I didn’t. I was barely holding it together at that point. I was just a few years out from everything that happened with my family, and I just…my head went to a dark place. Too many times. My dad was an asshole. The violent kind. I guess that left a mark on me in more ways than one—I kept thinking maybe this was what I deserved anyway. Kept hearing his voice in my head saying I was a piece of shit, better off dead. And then out of nowhere my work got noticed by the right people, and suddenly I had a gallery show, and I was selling work, and I’d finally fucking made it—or at least I was well on my way.”
It felt like a dream. And my first instinct—god, I hated this—my first instinct was to call my mom.
Instead I called everyone else I knew. Maybe it was spiteful in part. I’d been the last person to succeed. I’d been the one they’d all pitied. But here I was, and my gallery was better than theirs had been, my art was selling for more, and a fucked-up part of me wanted them to know it.
I hope I’m a better person now than I was back then, but sometimes I’m not sure.
“So after the opening night, some people took me out to celebrate,” I say. “Important people. And I figured…why not, right? I had earned it. It was worth it. And it wasn’t a big deal just this once. So I had a glass of champagne, which turned into a few, which turned into shots at the bar. And that one night turned into a relapse that took me months to claw my way out of.”
Ely’s hand tightens around mine. I hadn’t realized we were still holding hands. After a second, I squeeze back.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is…you aren’t alone. And you aren’t the first person this has happened to, not by far.”
Ely attempts a smile, but it comes out tremulous. I wish I could squeeze her hand tighter, but if I did, I’d worry about breaking fingers. “I just feel stupid. I should have known better.”
“If you’re stupid, then I’m stupid too. Maybe we can just be idiots together?”
The smile is still shaky, but it widens slightly. She lets out a shallow breath and says, “I’d like that.”
“I’d like that too.”
It’s too far. It’s way too far.
It isn’t far enough.
She’s the one who shifts in and slides her nose along my cheekbone with a soft sigh, her exhale hot on my skin. I can smell the clean-linen scent of her detergent—or maybe it’s her shampoo, as a lock of her hair drifts forward to graze my jaw.
We are held together in a castle of our own making, an existence of breath and skin and the marvel of Ely’s lashes skirting her cheek.
I kiss her, and I don’t regret it.
She makes a soft sound against my mouth, as if she didn’t think I’d actually go so far—but then she kisses me back, parting her lips for me. I’ve leaned in so far that I’m in danger of falling out of the desk chair and right into Ely’s lap. And that seems to be her idea too; both her hands are on my back, dragging me in closer, and god, I want to go there. I want to go wherever the hell Ely Cohen takes me.
The chair finally tips me out and I stumble forward, half knocking Ely back onto the bed. My self-control gives in about as easily as the chair and I follow after her, pushing her the rest of the way down. She hums against my mouth, dragging one knee up along my side to curl her leg around—
Shit, stop, stop, fuuuuuck.
I yank my mouth away from hers. Even if I can’t quite make myself stand upright yet, I can do this: stay here half-crouched over her body on this tiny twin bed with my face turned sharply away from hers, gasping.
“Sorry,” I manage at last, around the time I gather the ability to slowly push myself away from her and back into the precarious-feeling desk chair. “Wasn’t really supposed to end like that.”
Ely is still half-reclined on the bed, propped on one elbow with almost-black hair tangled in front of her face and a flush of color high on her cheeks. “You can end it like that anytime you want, mister.”
Jesus Christ. Even looking at her feels sinful.
“Yeah, no, rules, et cetera; you’ve heard the lecture before. Good lord, I’ve got to get out of here. You just relapsed. I shouldn’t be doing this right now.” I let out a fragile laugh and wonder if I sound as terrified as I feel. “Are you going to be okay without me?”
Her brows lift and she says, “I mean, if I say no…?” But then she sighs and nods. “Yeah. Sorry. Not trying to play the woe-is-me, I’m-vulnerable card. You can go. I’ll be all right. I’ll just be lying here wishing you’d stayed.”
Probably thinking, What the hell happened to his boundaries? because that’s what I’m thinking right now. I still feel overheated, as if the radiator’s on even though it’s late June. I scrape both hands back through my hair and blow out hard. “You don’t make it easy, do you?”
“Would you like me any better if I did?” she says with a sly grin, and as always, I’m the one left on the back foot.
I don’t even have anything to say to that; I just shake my head and fumble around to find my phone and shove it in my back pocket as I stand. She still hasn’t moved. Because why would she? She’s got me right where she wants me. Right where I’d want to be too, if only I weren’t so infuriated with myself for losing control. Again.
I do finally make it out, but I text her from the bus and again from the train just to check that she’s still okay.
Looking, maybe, for an excuse to go back.