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October, 2002
Sam makes you go.
Because she wants someone to dance with. Because Mary Elizabeth is still only a maybe two hours before.
Because she knows you have to.
People are already putting pumpkins out on their front porches and it’s football season and you’re just as much back in high school as you are sitting in the front seat of Sam’s rental car.
She rolls the windows down and it smells like leaves burning on the breeze. Your scarf is new and itchy and you wish there was something better on the radio.
When she smiles at you, you know you’re supposed to feel calmer.
You don’t.
October, 1990
The basement smells like every basement at a party. That scent of being underground just barely covered by the must of a couch that was too worn to remain in a living room. Fabric softener coming in from behind accordion doors every time the heater kicks over. Beer that hasn’t yet had a chance to go stale.
He’d been drinking whiskey in Pete Clancy’s bedroom, listening to Madonna because it was on, when Sophie’d mentioned she was only doing shots since Brad was downstairs playing quarters and ignoring her and she couldn’t deal with that sober.
Everyone knew Sophie had a crush on Brad because she’d never shut up about it.
No one knew that Patrick did because he wouldn’t even say it to himself.
He’d asked for the bottle one more time, the liquor cheap and high school on the back of his throat though he’d long since lost track of how much he’d had.
Getting up from the carpet that’s the same color as his rug at home, using the edge of the desk for leverage, he hadn’t known how he could have been so shaky and so sure at the same moment. He’d said he was going for a smoke but he’d headed for the kitchen with purpose, not even taking the time to right the picture on the staircase he’d accidentally bumped with his shoulder. Had left Pete at 8th grade graduation a little skewed.
And then right there, under the lights gone low by dimmer switch, was Brad. The north to Patrick’s compass arrow, the place where everything seemed to point.
He’d watched for awhile, leaning on the doorframe, trying to pull off being aloof and cool and like the purpose was just to check out the scene. But he’d mostly been trying to figure out if Brad’s face was the same shade of flushed as when he’d come off the field at halftime.
Heather had been hanging on him at the table, draping her body over his shoulders, calling him stupid pet names, despite the fact that Brad hadn’t been paying her any attention. He’d down a shot and then another, passing the quarters as he missed.
But then he’d looked up and seen Patrick. And he’d smiled. And Patrick had felt the kind of warmth snake through him that you usually needed to wait until July in Pittsburgh for.
Brad had announced he was finished, totally trashed and done for, and around the table the other guys had called him pussy, bitch. But he’d just taken Heather’s hand and led her towards the door in the corner. Except first he’d glanced at Patrick and jerked his head. Inviting him.
And then there the three of them were in the basement, drinking from the four cans of room temperature American that Heather had had in her purse, listening to her hiccup through a story about detention.
They were sitting on the floor, their criss-crossed legs making the sides of a triangle, until Heather’s face had gone pale and she’d said she was going to the bathroom, she’d be back. Then they were just a point, where Brad’s knee was touching his, because neither of them moved to follow her up the stairs.
Patrick picked up his beer and choked on it a little, feeling like his windpipe was collapsing. He cleared his throat, but his voice still sounded weird when he’d answered Brad’s question about Mr. Brosnahan’s class.
He asked him back if he’d ever gone to see Pink Floyd at the Planetarium, mostly because the last time Patrick had been there, tripping his fucking face off, he kept seeing Brad’s mouth exploding on the ceiling.
Brad tells him he hasn’t, he was supposed to one weekend but the guys on the team had made him go camping instead. “It sucked, man. Beer before liquor. Never sicker.” He laughs a little then. “Poor Heather. Which, hey, sorry.”
“What for?”
“Well, that’s gotta suck for you,” Brad says, licking a stray drop of beer off his bottom lip and Patrick’s shocked he can hear him over the blood thrumming in his ears.
“Why?”
“I saw the way you were looking at her before.”
“That’s not entirely accurate.”
Patrick takes another drink from his beer even though he’s already drunk because it gives him something to do until he can look Brad in the eyes.
He knows he’s leaning in, that magnetic pull too strong with the alcohol and the privacy, but Brad must have been moving towards him too for their mouths to meet so quickly in the middle.
Patrick feels like a balloon, like dandelion tufts, like things that are just going to float away on breezes. Brad’s hands are warm and calloused on his face as the boiler lights one room over with a whoosh, bringing in the scent of a clothesline on the longest day of summer.
October, 2002
You’re trying not to drink so much any more because of a lot of reasons including four day hangovers and supposedly being a responsible adult. But you’re at your ten year high school reunion and they’re playing Michael Bolton and you were so much more confident before you walked into this room.
Sam is talking to two girls you don’t recognize while the bartender fills a tumbler for you but then you turn and there’s Brad, hugging her. Straight ahead of you. At zero degrees.
November, 1990
Brad is whooping through Pam Negley’s house, announcing to everyone that they won Homecoming, like it’s news. Patrick can still hear him in the living room even though Brad bounded up the stairs ten minutes ago. He laughs out his last toke as the light fixture above the coffee table rattles.
Sam takes the joint from his fingers, her lipstick leaving an imprint on the damp paper. He wonders if there’s an extra can of cranberry sauce at home, the craving sudden and bizarre, but he wants something red and tart and that tastes like fall.
Brad’s voice echoes from around the corner, chanting the name of their high school over and over again, trying to start a chorus that no one else is joining in on. So Patrick repeats it with him, his own voice rising up in volume even as Sam rolls her eyes and relights. When Brad stumbles around the ottoman, he’s all blown out pupils and big smiles, and that longing for something Patrick doesn’t have forgets immediately about Thanksgiving side dishes.
Brad announces that he’s taking what’s left of the joint and Patrick because they’re going to celebrate being the only two with any sort of school spirit, and Patrick lets himself get dragged through the back door.
It’s cold out, freezing or hovering just above, and neither of them are wearing coats. Patrick shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans as far down as they’ll go while Brad launches himself off the patio, circling the trees and a very past it’s prime swing set.
“Did you see me run that play tonight? It felt like I was flying.” Patrick had seen it, the whole thing, the yards and offensive line falling behind Brad like they were never there to begin with. “Fuck, man, I feel good!”
He’s lit up in more ways than one, but Patrick tries just to think about the joy and not the joints. “Let’s go in. Or get in the truck at least.”
Brad flops onto one of the plastic swings instead, hard, nearly falling over except for the way he latches onto the chain at the last moment. “No, I want to stay out here. Soak in the night.”
“It’s so cold,” Patrick says, the goosebumps already up on his arms and a chatter starting to enter his speech.
“Yeah, it’s so cold no one’s going to bother us,” Brad says with an indecent smile once he’s fully upright. “Plus I’ll warm you up if you can’t bear it any longer.”
Patrick’s halfway across the yard before Brad even finishes the second sentence. He sits down on the adjacent swing and let’s the metal bite into his palms with a pain that feels almost like burning. “Betcha I can get higher,” he says, pulling the seat back until the whole structure groans.
Brad answers, “Oh, don’t even try,” reaching into his pocket for an orange Bic. “I’m the highest person here.” He starts giggling then, in that had too much gas at the dentist kind of way. “Wait, you meant with the swings, didn’t you?”
Patrick laughs even though he can no longer feel his fingers. “Yes. I meant with the swings.”
There’s a glance that Brad gives him before he looks down at his Nikes and the scuffed up patterns they’re making in the dirt. His swing’s swaying just a little bit in tiny circular movements, while Patrick watches, tautly.
“My dad was really proud of me tonight,” Brad says.
“Yeah, I’m sure he was. He should be.”
“Yeah?” Brad asks, unsure.
“Yeah,” Patrick confirms, pushing back just a little more before tucking his feet, feeling the wind slam against his face on the upward arc. “Cause you kicked ass in that game tonight!”
And suddenly Brad’s all bright again, howling up at the night sky like a coyote. Patrick tilts his head back, feeling winter rushing on every inch of his skin. He can hear the click of the lighter, see the little flame peripheral, but it’s still a surprise when Brad grabs his wrist and stops his movement with an unbalanced lurch.
“What the f-” Patrick starts, but Brad pulls their swings closer together and looks at Patrick’s face while shotgunning a hit directly into his mouth before he can finish.
He kisses him after, the way a boyfriend would kiss, Patrick thinks. Just a kiss that doesn’t necessarily have to go anywhere else. Just a kiss to say I like kissing you sometimes. Just a kiss that tastes like resin and Big Red and strangely, somehow, fall.
“I heard you up in the stands. The whole game, I knew you were out there.”
Weightless on THC and hypothermia and the tone this boy is using to speak to him, Patrick just looks at Brad. Feeling something he’s pretty sure is hope.
“Now let’s get your ass inside before you drop dead, your lips are almost blue.” He slaps his back and then races towards the house, Patrick not even trying to catch him, still feeling Brad right beside him.
October, 2002
You’ve thought about what it would be like, to run into him again. Sometimes you were on an airplane. In the supermarket. Sometimes you were right where you are now, the ache of too much ice in your glass spreading out through your hand.
He looks the same in that way where people still look like themselves even though everything has changed.
He’s leaner and his hair is darker and it’s cut in a way you’ve never seen his hair be cut before. You knew Brad fully, all the parts and pieces of him, and not recognizing something like that, lacking it in your mental inventory labeled with his name, makes you feel a special kind of tired.
But then he turns, following the point of Sam’s finger and he’s looking at you. And you’re seventeen again.
April, 1991
There’d been a buzzy kind of energy in the hallways, being fed by open windows and at least one person in every period asking if they could have class outside, come on, please? And Patrick had smelled something on the breeze on his way in that morning, the way the sun was baking the damp earth, that made it seem like everything was possible and waking up and getting better.
Patrick could barely remember what life was like without a coat and a numbness in his fingers while he smoked a cigarette, but here it was, this first perfect day of spring, even though it was kind of a month late.
He’d kissed Brad while snow flurries had blanketed the truck’s windshield, hiding them from the world. Had felt his cheeks grow pink and chapped until he stopped feeling them at all behind the fieldhouse. But now he was going to get to know what it was like to have Brad on top of him and the grass underneath be green instead of dead. And maybe everything would seem a little brighter as the days grew longer, as they got closer to that intangible calm that settled over everything once you no longer wanted the heat to come up in the morning.
Patrick had passed Physics and Trig and all the classes in between staring at the parking lot, thinking about Brad in t-shirts, Brad with freckles coming out on his shoulders, Brad touching him with hands that didn’t need a few extra minutes to warm up.
And then he’d run into that parking lot after the last bell and a stop at his locker, to find Brad leaning against his passenger side door, having even apparently skipped dropping off his books. “Let’s drive around, I’ve got nowhere else to be,” he says while Patrick pops the locks.
He heads straight for Arby’s without even asking, since Brad will just pick a fight with him if he’s hungry. They get Beef N’Cheddars and Cokes and Patrick tries not to notice the way Brad adds some Popov from the glove compartment every time there’s enough room in the cup.
But he laughs more and louder as the sun moves closer to the horizon, turning the sky into rainbow sherbert. It feels good to hear Brad happy like that. Even if it’s not genuine in a whole way. Because Patrick knows pretty much nothing is.
Everything sounds loud in the truck’s front seat. Brad, and the air rushing in, and all the traffic sounds that have been muffled for ages. The radio playing Morrissey on some cassette that Sam told him he had to listen to a minimum of thirty-five times before he could tell her how he felt about it.
There’s life happening, here, between the dash and the leather bench, pulsating and messy and as warm as how he’s felt all day.
Patrick taps a tempo out on the steering wheel and Brad feeds him another curly fry with lots of ketchup and someone should write a song about this and put it on a tape and never set a number of times someone should hear it Patrick thinks.
“Let’s go to the golf course,” Brad says while afternoon slips into dusk, the streetlamps already glowing. “Instead of just talking about it, we should actually go.”
And so Patrick hits his turn signal and switches lanes and Brad smiles the whole time, looking like a kid.
The truck gets parked on some side street and a fence is hopped and then there they are. Sitting on the top of this hill on the eighteenth hole in the not quite night, the whole world seeming like it’s underneath them.
Patrick turns to Brad and kisses him, hard, because wanting to has been caged up inside of him for ages. Kissing Brad, it’s like everything about today rolled up in one action. It’s all the good things Patrick can think about and some of the things that are too much and too new seeming even though they’re familiar in a hazy sort of way, and there’s that little bit of fear that there’s no way this much anticipation can turn into fruition.
He’s alive and Brad’s alive and everything is coming alive around them and this is what fullness is to him. This moment in the dark where two boys in love are kissing even if they’ve never said they felt that way.
Patrick slides down the hand that was cupping Brad’s jaw and Brad makes a sound that Patrick would like to hear always when the button of his fly is worked loose. It’s not quite a whimper and not quite a moan, just something desperate and human that Brad repeats, a little higher pitched, as Patrick pulls back on the waistband of the jeans.
He bends his head, tracing a stripe down from Brad’s mouth with his own until he can latch onto Brad’s collarbone. Feel the pulse racing under his lips. He sucks and it makes Brad trash a little bit more into Patrick’s palm. When he bites down, Brad gasps out the words fuck and please and it makes Patrick fully hard so fast it almost hurts. He keeps licking that spot, not changing the pace of his hand at all, apparently driving Brad insane enough to babble.
“I was thinking about this...all day...I just kept...kept...thinking…” He groans. “But I was...you and you were...me...and...you...were coming and...oh God, I’m so close...fuck...I was hard all of World Lit...Patrick...shit...just...don’t stop...don’t stop.”
His heart is jackhammering in his chest but Patrick keeps up the twist and stroke, just the way he likes it himself, just the way Brad tells him always makes him crazy.
And then Brad is arching and grasping at Patrick’s shoulder for purchase as he’s coming on the lawn with a string of expletives.
The only sound then is their breathing, ragged and winded, and Patrick feels like they sit there for hours, his dick pressing up painfully against his zipper as he wipes his hand on the grass. More and more lights come on in the houses below them, as people come home and start dinners and watch the news. And while Patrick is wondering how many pot roasts are being served down there, Brad leans over and returns the favor.
That part doesn’t take long, Patrick pumping his hips up at Brad’s mouth as he imagines Brad picturing it, just like this, why he suggested the golf course in the first place, hard while reading Heart of Darkness in a classroom with this event in his mind. There’s the sensation of his body bursting apart from the base of his spine and the fireworks behind his eyelids and when he can finally look out at the world again Brad is brushing at his lips with his thumb, smirking.
Patrick draws out the word shit while Brad laughs again, boisterous and happy and probably still a little drunk. It makes Patrick want to yell stuff, like this hill is really a mountain. Like he’s allowed to stop keeping things a secret.
The sweat evaporating off his throat makes him realize how without the sun it’s gotten cold again. He stands up and brushes off the back of his pants, pushes the hair off his forehead.
They walk back to the truck, quiet, both of them with their hands in their pockets like someone might catch their fingers interlocked if they were to keep them loose.
October, 2002
You think about how the last time you heard his voice it was in a dream over a year ago and you woke up sweating not even sure it actually sounded like him. That’s what you accomplish as he crosses the ballroom.
And you didn’t expect him to hug you, he never used to touch you where people could see, but suddenly there you are in Brad’s arms again and you almost drop your glass.
“How the hell are you, Pat?” he asks, and there’s no way that dream voice was his
“Good,” you breathe out on an exhale that’s been in you since graduation. “Really good.”
June, 1991
“We’ve only got one hundred and eighty days left before we’re done,” Brad announces while they’re lying in the flatbed of the truck.
Patrick informs him, “One hundred eighty two, they pad the year,” because he wants those two extra days of high school. High school makes sense after all this time and nothing else does, especially as Brad’s resting his head on Patrick’s chest.
“One hundred eighty two then. But still, fuck, man, like...that’s it. How insane is that? I can’t even wrap my head around it.”
The part of Patrick that wants to say there’s very little Brad can wrap his head around as stoned as he is right now wants the fight. It wants Brad to shove him and curse him off and bite a bruise into Patrick’s skin as a reminder that Patrick doesn’t get to judge what Brad does. But Patrick doesn’t want to wear that memento to the pool, or the lake, or to his own bed at night, so he murmurs his agreement, feeling a weird emotional weight pressing down on him along with the humidity.
But it’s fine. Because it’s summer now and the world is better when it’s summer and you’re almost eighteen and you’ve got one hundred and eighty two days still to get it right.
Underneath Brad’s head, Patrick’s t-shirt is sticking to his chest and his arm is all pins and needles. Like a colony of ants is marching on him.
“We should take a road trip before September and just...drive. Until we hit a coast. Stick our toes in the ocean.”
“They've got all the music in Seattle,” Patrick says, thinking of a beacon pointing west.
“I just want to be somewhere that isn't here. For awhile. Just somewhere where we're us, but we're not. Where we're different. Where everything is different.”
His voice got sad in the course of saying that and Patrick wants to make Brad look at his face and be this honest, even though it’s only happening because he’s gazing up at the stars instead. Plus, if Brad could see the way that Patrick crumples on the inside sometimes when things are like this, he’s not sure it would make any difference and that’s too terrible to think about.
“Do you wish I was a girl sometimes?” Patrick asks the question somehow like it’s a new thought, like it’s not the one that keeps him up at night.
“I wish I fucking knew,” Brad says around a sigh and then the only thing Patrick hears is the katydids all around them.
He closes his eyes and takes as deep a breath as he can under the pressure. Tries to taste summer on his tongue.
October, 2002
“You still in Washington?” Brad asks and you nod.
“Every year there’s something that makes me say I’m quitting, I’m going home, I’m going to figure shit out, and then every year there’s something else that makes me feel like I can never leave.”
You don’t realize what you’re saying until it’s already said and Brad gives you one of those closed mouth smiles that makes your chest constrict just the tiniest amount.
He says, “I hear it’s awesome out there,” and you nod again, like a bobblehead, scared of putting your foot back in your mouth. You sip your whiskey and it’s awkward. “I was hoping you’d be here.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Brad answers, surprised. “You’re like one of the only people I actually wanted to see.”
You’d forgotten that Brad could be earnest. That you got a glimpse at the side of him that no one else saw. And it makes you feel that same weird powerful obligation that it did junior year, where you had to take care of him, you had to watch out for him because no one else knew there was anything to be afraid of.
The specific anxiety flooding your nervous system after all these years is a little too much and even though you swore you were quitting, you weren’t going to smoke tonight, you ask him to grab a cigarette with you.
And he agrees.
July, 1991
Brad’s been on the back porch, chain smoking between shots of tequila for most of the night. And Patrick knows it, like some innate awareness, even though he’s been talking to Mary Elizabeth in the living room about feminism since she walked through the door.
Everyone keeps murmuring under their breaths about what Brad’s doing here and it’s making Patrick’s skin crawl. He feels too hot even though the AC is on full blast and he doesn’t know why he let Sam talk him into inviting all these people to their house. And so despite how he’s already sweating and Mary Elizabeth is only on point six of what he’s sure is a list a mile long, he says he needs to get some air.
Opening the back door is like walking directly into a mouth, just a wall of wet, heavy air, and it makes Patrick feel wrung out almost instantly.
Brad has his feet resting up on the barbeque, sitting in one of the plastic lawn chairs Patrick told his mother he was going to clean this week but never did. He’s got a cigarette in his mouth and the bottle of Sauza in his right hand and Patrick doesn’t have the strength to do anything but go and sit down on the concrete next to him, facing away.
He takes the bottle and swigs. It’s disgusting and he has no idea who brought it, but he hates them. He takes another anyway because it’s there and maybe Brad shouldn’t be the only one who doesn’t have to remember in the morning. He’s just angry all the time now and it would be nice to forget that for awhile.
Brad nudges him for it back, and Patrick passes it over, the sweat rolling down his spine and the annoyance churning in his stomach. “Everyone inside wants to know what the fuck you’re doing here.”
“You know what I’m doing here.”
“Don’t you have your own backyard you can get shitfaced in?”
Brad takes a drink and grimaces after he swallows. “You know, I’ve been sitting out here all night trying to muster up the balls to ask you to go upstairs with me.” Patrick tries to turn his head enough to read his full expression, but can’t get the angle quite right. “So, what do you say we go on up to your room, Pat? Think we could do that?”
He starts to stand up before Patrick can answer, holding onto the arm of the chair in an attempt to get his feet underneath him fully. Patrick feels the furniture wobbling behind his back any way.
Brad says, “Come on, don’t leave a guy hanging,” like it’s going to kill him if Patrick turns him down. And it’s not like Patrick doesn’t want to, he’s wanted to since the basement at Pete’s house, probably even before that, but everything has felt so fucked up recently. Like they’re people made of ashes and all it’s going to take is one gust of air for them to fall apart.
But maybe the way Brad is asking means they’re going to be able to hold themselves together a little better. Maybe they won’t disappear after all.
“I’ll meet you up there. After a cigarette,” and he hears Brad open and close the door with a slam that reverberates in his teeth.
He’s got condoms and lube and a letter he’s started four different times to Brad in his nightstand. And he’s apparently going to fuck his sort of boyfriend tonight. He has that one cigarette slowly, knowing that once it’s gone everything is going to change.
Because then there’s Brad on his bed and Patrick’s never seen him on a bed before. He’s only managed to get one of his socks off and it makes Patrick laugh and when Brad calls him a jerk it only makes him laugh harder.
“Help me if you think it’s so funny,” Brad tells him, and Patrick does. He takes off the stubborn sock and Brad’s Pirates t-shirt and kisses him here on this bed that’s the softest place the two of them have ever been.
And that’s all he does for awhile, just kisses him, reveling in how this a normal thing teenagers do. They kiss on beds at parties and they’re not weird and they shouldn’t be ashamed. And he hopes Brad feels this same way, like they’re okay. Like they’re good enough.
Eventually though, Brad reaches a hand inside Patrick’s waistband and says fucked up beautiful things like how he didn’t even know this was what he wanted to do until he met him. How if Patrick fucks him maybe he’ll feel whole the way he’s supposed to.
Patrick kisses him again because he can’t listen to it. Reaches for the stuff in his bedside drawer not long after that.
While Brad is panting underneath, Patrick moving as slowly as he possibly can inside him, he thinks about Brad laughing. Brad hearing Patrick in the stands. Brad fitting into that spot on his chest like it was destined. And he knows they’re making love even though Brad referred to it as fucking.
When he hits some spot inside Brad that makes him keen for the fourth time, Brad comes and comes and Patrick follows after him, probably leaving finger shaped bruises on Brad’s hip where he’s holding on.
And in the place where there’s usually almost silence, only the sounds of their bodies coming back to earth, this time there’s Brad crying.
October, 2002
You go out to an alley with him, off the kitchen by a dumpster, probably where all the waiters take their breaks, and after you’ve both lit up from the pack of Native American Spirits you bought at the airport and really look around, you can’t stop laughing.
“This looks like exactly the kind of place we would have ended up at a party in high school,” he says, and he can still do that thing where his cigarette doesn’t even come close to falling out of his mouth while he talks around it.
“Well the whole point of tonight is being nostalgic.”
“I can’t fucking believe it’s been ten years. How the hell are we almost thirty?”
“I try not to think about it,” you say, because you don’t. “Like, I’m twenty-eight, and what the hell do I have to show for it? Or is this the exact opposite of the kind of thing I’m supposed to be saying right now?”
“I think everyone in there is probably making a tremendous deal of all the little shit they’ve done, but your way feels right out here.”
“To be fair, I do have my own apartment with shitty water pressure, a job I only hate half the time and if my next tax return pans out like I hope it will, I might be able to fix the heat in my car, so, I don’t want to make everyone else feel bad in comparison.”
“Wow, big dreams with that heat repair thing, Patrick.”
“Well, yeah, I mean, that’s part of the glamour of owning your own piece of shit car.” You flick some ash on the ground. “And what about you, what legacy are you leaving behind?”
“Well,” he chuckles a little. “I have a kid, so...that.” All these images of Brad’s heterosexual and conventional life skip through your mind as you regret being honest.
“Really, man? Fuck, that’s awesome,” you say because it’s what you say when someone’s grinning and telling you they’re a dad. “Boy or girl?”
“Girl,” he tells you. “Tessa. She’s almost two.”
Stubbing the cigarette out on the brick wall behind you, you say, “You can show me a picture. I think it’s noble you didn’t just whip it out, but I know you want to.”
He reaches for his wallet, an actual nice grown up wallet and not the thin piece of garbage he used to use in high school. “That’s her at the beach this summer,” he says, almost caressing the photograph in how he’s holding it. “She’s bigger now though, like, it’s crazy how different they get overnight,” his face all lit up like the fourth of July. “It’s incredible to watch.”
“I bet,” you say, trying to take in his reverence. “And hey, I’m sorry I didn’t know you’d gotten married...”
“Oh, I’m not. Tessa’s mom and I were...I don’t even think you could call it in a relationship. She was just someone I was seeing.” He goes to tuck the picture back in its slot, putting away the little face that has his hair and the curve of a chin.
You want to ask how many women there have been that he’s seen like that, and how many men, and if anything compares to what the two of you did when you were young and didn’t know any better. If you were still eighteen, you’d probably ask. You were that open and willing to have your heart broken then.
“Are you seeing anyone?” Brad asks you in a cadence that suggests he’s not just making conversation. You drop your head, bashful, like you’re in middle school talking about a crush.
“Not right now,” you answer with maybe a little bit of a blush in your cheeks.
He kicks at some rocks on the ground and rubs the back of his neck while you watch the breath come out of his lips in clouds.
October, 1991
The pebbles plink against his windowpane, little vibrating bursts of communication, and Patrick’s sure that Sam’s forgotten her key until he glances down at the lawn.
Brad’s wearing his letterman jacket, his arm pulled back to launch another volley up towards the second floor, all perfect form and football scholarship on the horizon.
And it feels like a year ago again, like Patrick is grains of sand, like he’s light enough to go anywhere he wants.
October, 2002
At the end of the night, you squeeze Brad’s shoulder and promise you’ll call.
You’re happy Sam made you come.
Because you had to.