Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 87856 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87856 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is an asset, not a liability.
Or maybe I'm full of it.
That's a strong possibility.
He emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, wet hair sticking to his forehead, water rolling off his chest.
He looks good here. And, more, this feels personal, like we're really in each other's lives.
Experiment notes: Subject went off-script with social media dives. Add new rules, to forbid these kinds of things, and repeat with a more compliant subject.
Or maybe give up on the whole separating sex and love thing.
Focus on the what-do-I-like instead.
"You okay?" He adjusts the towel.
My eyes flit to his crotch instinctively.
He smiles. "I can drop it."
"I've seen it before."
"My ego."
"That's not what I mean."
"I know," he says.
"We can talk. If you want. Or you can talk. I can listen."
"About Deidre?" he asks.
"Or anything," I say.
He moves to the dresser, dries, pulls on a pair of boxers. "Is that what you want?"
I don't know what I want. "I want to sleep."
"Good news." He motions to the bed.
"I can't. Not right now. I'm too wired."
"My ego again."
"Tricky—"
"I know." His voice is soft. "Someone told you last night?"
"Dare, yeah. He was worried about you."
"Really?" Surprise streaks his face. "Darren worries?"
I nod.
"He's never said anything." He runs a hand through his hair. "Dare is like me. He's always been like me. He runs away from hard, complicated things."
"You were middle school friends?"
"Yeah, instant friends. Deidre called us Rosencrantz and Guildenstern."
I can't help but smile. "She really was an English major."
"Yeah. Even when we read Hamlet in high school, well, when I read the SparkNotes, I didn't get it."
"They're on the outskirts."
He nods. "She had to explain it to me. They're the comic relief. They're not part of the main events. They're not making things happen."
"You were watching your own life?"
He nods. "I was hanging back, watching, never taking anything seriously. I had problems, sure, but nothing that forced me to introspect. Hell, until I discovered drawing, I never even sat in silence. I was always filling the space with something. TV or music or dumb jokes with a friend."
He leans against the dresser, lost in thought, two feet away. Close and far at the same time.
I want to wrap my arms around him. But I want to stay here too, listening, giving him space, letting him come to me.
Is this love?
I don't know. But it's something.
Patrick continues, "When I got older, I started using women and alcohol to fill the space instead. I knew something was missing, deep down. And sometimes it caught up to me. I had these moments where I felt a pang of longing I couldn't place. I'd feel this sense of falseness, that everything was bullshit, but I chased it away with another drink or another fuck."
"I know what you mean."
"You avoided introspection?" he asks.
"When things were too hard," I say. "I tried to fill my time. I tried to stay too busy to really get into my head. But I picked the wrong sport. An hour and a half in the pool is a lot of time to think, even if I'm exhausted afterward."
"What were you running from?"
"The same things you were." Sort of. "The things that were too heavy and complicated for me. I thought it was cool to be a damaged artist. To cultivate misery."
"Like Sylvia Plath?"
"Yeah. It seemed romantic, how she—"
"I know she killed herself. Everyone knows that."
"You knew before your sister?" I ask.
"No," he admits. "But I found out when I started reading her stuff."
"Right. I guess most thoughtful young women go through that phase, where they admire the women with guts. It's fucked up, but it…"
"It is a gusty thing to do," he says. "It doesn't help anyone to pretend otherwise."
It is. I hate when people say it's cowardly. It's not like depressed people are any less afraid of death. But this isn't about me. "Do you think of her as brave?"
"She was always brave, yeah."
"But not brave enough to talk to you?"
He looks to the floor. "I wouldn't have heard her if she did. I don't know if she tried to talk to Molly… but Molly is like me. She hides from the heavy stuff with work, but she hides all the same."
Maybe we all do.
"How did you run from stuff?"
I owe him this much honesty. "I didn't have the nerve to really dip into self-destruction. Or maybe I was too sheltered. People at my school weren't having wild sex or buying drugs off the street. They were making out and stealing their parents' wine. And we'd get caught, get in trouble, get too scared to do it again."
"It's not as fun as it sounds."
"I know. I had my phase where I went through guys like it was going out of style. Not sex."
His shoulders fall.
"You really are a man, huh?"