Heart the Lover (6)

‘It wasn’t that bad.’

‘It was that bad.’

‘My parents loved her.’

‘His parents loved her. Even after that. Good people. Good country people.’

‘Shut up, Rooster.’

‘They’re a tad religious.’

Sam pants. ‘A tad.’

‘A speck. Sam is the rebel. Can you imagine? This is what a black sheep looks like in the Gallagher household.’

Sam is unreadable, looking down into his coffee cup.

‘I have to go,’ I say. ‘Unlike you overachievers, I haven’t even started Dryden’s essays.’

My sweater is upstairs by the bed and I think about leaving it, but my mother knit it for me in high school. I go upstairs. Sam’s in the hallway when I come back out with it. I can hear Yash clanking things around in the kitchen. Sam puts his hands under my shirt and slips them down the back of my jeans. He tastes like the coffee percolator and moves me back into the bedroom. He shuts the door. We don’t make it to the bed. We slide down to the rug and I have my back against the door and he pulls off my jeans and his tongue isn’t on me for more than half a minute before I come and he rocks me with his hands beneath me and does not take his mouth off me and I come some more and I can hear the door banging a bit and I try so hard to be quiet but I can’t do anything but let it out.

He was very good at that.

‘You’re very good at that,’ I say.

He grins up at me. ‘There are some advantages to abstention.’

‘You really haven’t had sex?’

He doesn’t answer.

I know I should ask more questions but I reach for the button of his jeans—no belt today—and he doesn’t stop me.

Everything but, we used to say in high school. Sam and I get really good at everything but.




Carson and I share a room in a house with eleven other people. We pay forty-four dollars in rent each month. There’s no heat and at the end of November we all pitch in and buy a large propane gas heater we call Mavis and keep her in the living room. To be warm in that house in winter you are either asleep under blankets or draped over Mavis. I start spending more and more nights at the Breach House—Dr. Gastrell named it after D. H. Lawrence’s childhood home—where there are tall radiators in every room that crack and sizzle with real heat. Utilities are included in their free rent, so they keep the thermostat cranked. The first time Carson comes over she cannot stop talking about the temperature. She sheds layers, piles them on an armchair. ‘I feel like I’m going to get malaria in here.’ She strips down to a T-shirt and twists her raised arm around. ‘I have not seen my elbows in weeks.’

‘You don’t shower?’ Sam says.

‘God no. You can’t shower on Pye Street in winter. You would die. I shower at the gym.’ Carson was on the volleyball team. ‘Fast. All my teammates want me.’ She flashes Sam her big smile.

I take her upstairs.

‘It’s even hotter up here. Jesus.’

‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain in this room.’

She looks at the bed. ‘So this is where you don’t fuck.’

I shush her.

She looks at the books on the bedside table I’ve told her about. ‘It’s not going to end well.’ She shakes her head. ‘But the heat.’ She flaps her bare arms around. ‘I get it.’

Ivan teaches us a new card game called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster that some girl from Connecticut taught him. He removes the fives, sixes, sevens, and eights from the deck and with the remaining cards explains that each suit is a family, every king the head of his family: Spade the Gardener, Club the Policeman, Heart the Lover, and Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, who is the king of diamonds. The remaining cards are different members of each king’s family. The first person to collect a full family wins. All the cards are dealt out and the only way to obtain cards is to ask another player for one, but each request has to be spoken with the exact same polite phrasing, and you must say thank you before you touch a card someone gives you. If you mess up, the first person to scream ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster!’ gets your turn.

‘Sam?’ Ivan says.

‘Yes.’

‘May I please have Spade the Gardener’s twins?’

‘Yes, you may.’

Sam slides the two of spades across the table.

‘Thank you,’ Ivan says, but too late, after he touches the card, so we all scream ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster!’ as loud as we can. Then we argue about who started screaming first.

You have to pretend you’re not looking for the suit you want, and you’re always trying to disrupt others from getting what they’re looking for. There is ganging up and subterfuge. We all have our tics and tells. I always ask for the parrot—the three—of the suit I’m pursuing. Sam always asks for the eldest son. Ivan never learns to say thank you before touching the card he’s asked for, and Yash always forgets about the donkey. Sam cannot scream ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’ without leaping up and knocking things over. When I scream, Yash says my eyes look like they’re going to pop off my face like buttons.

It’s deeply satisfying to win that game, to fan out a whole family before anyone else does.

In bed that night after a few hours of Sir Hincomb and then our celibate sex, Sam tells me about his relationship with Valerie. She was Baptist like him, very pious, he says, and made it clear on their first date that she would not have sex before marriage. They fell hard in love and were together for months until they lost control one night and did it. He covers his face. ‘We prayed, we went to each other’s ministers, we stopped receiving the sacrament. But it ruined us.’