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I heave the box of books onto the desk and try to pry my hands from its edges, though they feel molded to it after lugging it in a death grip up two flights of stairs. I grumble and massage the angry red creases in my fingers. Why am I the one carrying this, anyway, when he practically picked up the goddamn sofa on his own?
“Hey, you up here?” My voice echoes against the high ceilings. The building is turn-of-the-century and he’d raved about the headroom, the vertical nature of every room, raising his arms above his head and twirling around, as if he had never allowed himself to stand tall until that moment.
When there’s no response, I whip my hair out of my eyes and stalk down the hallway and into the next room.
“Dude, wha—“
His legs are folded under him like a new-born giraffe, knees stacked upon themselves as if he’d just spiraled down on the spot so that a beam of sunlight could find its mate in the golden feathers of his hair. His eyes are closed, head angled against the white panels of the bay window, the barest wisp of a smile lingering on his lips.
His smile was the first thing I remember about him. He had barged into the piano studio and had filled the room, his smile running through me like an electric current. It made me respond in kind without realizing it, pushing me past the bounds I had grown accustomed to, those reserved nice-to-meet-you expressions that I was schooled to adopt when starting a new project. I had told myself that I’d been doing jobs like this long enough that I’d be ready for anything, jazzed to handle whoever would show up next—a narcissist or an introvert or a buffoon.
But nothing could have prepared me for him.
He was larger than life, a walking bear hug, a riptide that had carried me out to sea in a way I’d never experienced before. He was always in motion, but not in the fidgety way I was; he always seemed to be seeking, learning, soaking into himself everything around him. He had a way of caressing a room, marveling at the smallest detail, of turning even mundane objects into treasures by gracing them with his eyes, his touch.
And, shit, he is gorgeous. That’s obvious. His teeth are straight and his muscles are firm and his eyes are piercing. Still, it pisses me off that he’s known for that alone, that people are satisfied with that, with treating him like a brainless mannequin, and they don’t bother to look any further. But he’s not a fucking Ken doll. He is perfect, perfect in every way that matters, and if you’re ever lucky enough to spend time with him—to smoke a joint with him and listen as he riffs on the last book he’d read, to wander next to him through the woods and hear him gush about birds of prey or redwoods or whitewater rafting, to giggle with him over nothing until your sides hurt and your eyes are blurry with tears, to lie in an empty hotel room where the only light is the full moon outside the window and fall asleep to his voice through the phone line singing a hushed lullaby—it would be impossible not to fall in love with him. I mean, I’ve said so, said it a hundred times in interviews, and it was so easy to confess. The truth always is.
My truth? I knew I was gone, hopelessly gone, when I started to catalog his smiles.
The shy twist of his lips when he stared at the floor and confessed we’d almost never met, that he hadn’t thought he could handle the role, that he didn’t think he was good enough, that he was terrified to walk out on a plank too far and hang over the water when there was always someone behind him with a saw.
The weak, bloodless draw of lips he’d tacked on when she had tossed her head and cackled to a table full of guests that she wouldn’t be taking business advice from a guy who hadn’t even graduated from high school.
The shocked, open-mouthed grin that showed his tongue hanging high in his mouth when I surprised him on location with a bottle of prosecco to toast our Crema-versary, the kind we would always drink at our favorite cafe there.
The hard smirk when he told me he had written her love letters in the beginning, until she told him his handwriting was girly and pointed out that he’d misspelled a word.
The wide-eyed, gaping joy of his lips when his daughter had run down the sidewalk toward him, her chubby little arms outstretched.
The radiant tooth-filled beam he’d aimed at a camera from behind her extravagant red-carpet pose, her ubiquitous up-do in his face and the points of her designer dress thrust to the foreground, while his eyes remained untouched, floating empty above the dividing line of his nose, hiding his misery in plain sight.
The smashed, closed-lipped curl that held in his tears when I couldn’t take it anymore, when I sat in the ratty chair of my old apartment and finally vomited everything up, how I ached constantly and dreamed of the smell of his skin, how everything I did without him was a pointless blur because he was my one touchstone, my one confidant. My one.
The soft curl of wonder that drew his chin up the first time he was seated fully inside me, my body arched toward him, my hands clutching desperately at his back to try to get him even closer, while he petted my hair and traced the bones of my face with the barest passes of his finger pads, like he couldn’t believe it, like he thought I would disappear in a puff of smoke, like he wanted to remember every part of that moment so he could replay it when I had to get on a plane and disappear to Europe and leave him behind.
I remember them all.
This one, though. This one is new.
I toe off my tennis shoes and climb gingerly into the window seat opposite him, watching the way the sun glints off his eyelashes and glows red through the thin skin at the tip of his nose. His old sweats are bunched up around his calf. He’s wearing the A hoodie that we trade back and forth, the one neither of us wants to wash when it comes back smelling of the other.
“I masturbate in that thing, you know,” I once told him.
“Do you?”
“Shit, man. Every. Single. Time.”
He’d just chuckled darkly. “Glad to know I’m not the only one.”
I reach out an index finger and wrap one of the hood’s strings around it. “Hey, old man. You taking a break or something? Making me do all the work?” My voice decides on its own to emerge as a murmur, softened under the sunbeams and the silk of the baby hair at the base of his skull that my hand finds without my consent.
He inhales deeply through his nose but keeps his eyes closed. “This is my favorite spot in this whole place.”
I huff, “Yeah, I think I got that.”
When the realtor had first shown us the place and walked us past the master, Armie had made a strangled noise and rushed over to the window. “Tim, look!” He’d sat in the center and scooted back until he had pressed against the glass, passed his palms along the wood, staring at me with his bottom lip clenched between his teeth. “I’ve always wanted one of these!”
“You…what? Seriously?”
“It’s like when I was a kid. I’d cut myself a little alcove in the reeds behind our house, like a private cubby hole to, I don’t know, read comics I could find lying around or listen to music or make up shit stories of my own. But it was like my secret, my spot, know what I mean?”
He’d stopped my heart. He was chattering on, working his ankles back and forth, the paddles of his feet dangling over the edge and flopping noisily against each other, his face flushed and eyes twinkling. He could’ve been ten years old, opening his one and only gift on Christmas morning. “Oh, God, this is so cool!”
Suddenly, I had flashed to sitting on the floor in front of the sofa in my apartment in Italy, him next to me, our legs outstretched and scripts tossed aside after running lines had devolved into swapping confessions, painful ones we’d never disclosed to another living soul. I had told him about growing up feeling extraneous, like a disappointing afterthought for my parents when it was obvious that they already had the perfect child. But Armie? Jesus. He had told me that he’d never felt safe before. “I don’t even know what the fuck that means, Tim. People just don’t care about me that way…or maybe it’s they don’t care that much…yeah, I guess that’s it…not without their strings, their conditions. That’s what it’s always about for—for them, whoever that is at the time. I can’t ever let go. I can’t ever fucking hide. There’s just…there’s nowhere to go, not for me.” The distant, hollow look in his eyes that night had eaten at me, had haunted me ever since.
So all I could do in the moment was stare at him, suspended, feeling hot tears bubble behind my eyes, utterly helpless. There he was, in that window seat, running his thumbs along the curved molding and wearing glee like a magic cloak, and if I hadn’t already known I was embarrassingly in love with him, I’d have fallen to my knees with the force of it. Right then, I would have sliced myself open on the spot and handed over my fucking kidneys to keep that look on his face for the rest of his life.
I had scrubbed my hand up the back of my head a few times and turned to the realtor, who’d been lurking in the doorway, trying miserably not to eavesdrop. I’d shot her my best winning smile. “I, umm…I think we’ll take it.”
He opens his eyes now, and I feel my breath catch.
There is no war in them.
They are a smooth blue, the apex of the sky on a cloudless afternoon, none of the agonizing fractals that for months—no, years— had so often made his gaze brittle and sharp, ready to slice or defend, tragic orbs of broken glass just barely preventing his soft interior from bleeding out to the pavement to be tracked through by stiletto heels.
It’s like I’m seeing him, really seeing him, for the first time. I hover there, swallowing thick lines of nothing, a rush of urgency making my stomach twist and my eyes volley intently between his. Can you see it? Do you know, really know? Do you have any fucking idea how you make me want, how you fill me up, how you are it for my entire fucking life??
His smile deepens, only adding impossible dimensions to his ethereal charm. He lifts a hand to slowly move my hair away from my eyes, and I circle my cheek in the cup of his huge palm. He tugs on my arm and pulls me into him, unfolding his legs and turning me gently until I am nestled inside the cocoon of his limbs, my back melting into the heat of his chest. I kiss his bicep and rest my jaw against it, letting my eyes sink closed.
His ribs expand and contract with a massive sigh that draws me in tighter, long arms crossed over my stomach, hands cupping my waist. His lips settle on the shell of my ear. “Is this what it’s like, Tim?”
“What?”
“You know. I know you do. Is this what it’s like?”
There’s a note of wonder in his voice that kills me. I push my head back until it rests on his shoulder. “You tell me.”
He hums and kisses up my neck, excruciatingly slow. I cannot stifle a soft moan or keep my hands from extending down to his thighs, kneading them in time with his tongue as it swirls against my skin under the umbrella of his open mouth.
When he reaches the top, he scratches at my cheek with his scruff, noses the hair behind my ear, pulls at some of it with his teeth before he snugs down again, sealing us even tighter. “I think it was worth the wait.”