You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(89)

I am your dog. I come when called. I climb into the bed with you. There is nothing for me to do or say. Talks like this can’t happen in the wee hours. You roll over, and I comply. I am the big spoon again, the one that holds on to the little spoon because it just can’t fucking help it, because even after what the filthy, wounded selfish little spoon did—you cheated on me, you abandoned me—well, even after all that, the spoon still fits. That’s love. It’s inevitable when it’s real and my sad arms are too limp to hold you properly tonight.

You wiggle. You squirm. “Babe,” you say. “Not so tight, okay?”





32


I didn’t sleep. Lasted in the bed about five minutes and went back into your living room and found your bleach. I did your floors, same way you did Dick. I am atoning…but also, I am testing you.

Things always look a little clearer in the morning, and yeah…You should’ve been stronger. Carrie resisted the caterer slash artist. You should’ve had faith.

You emerge from your chambers. Sleepy-eyed and soft in my mother’s Nirvana T-shirt. You rub your eyes, you sniff. “My oh my, what did you do?”

I didn’t blow Dick on my birthday. “Nothing. I couldn’t sleep.”

You ooh and you aah and you are bashful like you don’t deserve a guy like me, a guy who pulls an all-nighter turning the house you’ve lived in for a long-ass time into a home. You are amazed by your squeaky-clean apartment. You prance around like a princess and you call me the best. I go with it.

“Well, it’s for me too. I like a clean house. I told you. I couldn’t sleep.”

You pick at a hole in my mom’s shirt. “Ah. So this is just like…You just were antsy.”

Watching your heart break a little is a thing that breaks mine. I might hate it, the way your sadness wins. Without even deciding to go to you, I do it. Love love love love crazy love doesn’t allow me to stay mad at either one of us. I put my hands on your shoulders. “No,” I say. “This was for you, Vail. Just for you.”

It works. You perk up and pour expired pre-ground coffee into the machine that needs to be cleaned. You tell me stories about the way you used to be so neat, so obsessive with your Cabbage Patch Kids, lining them up and making everything just right. “Something happens when you get to college, you know?”

No, I don’t know, and you should know that, but maybe you don’t carry me the way I carry you. “Sure.”

You go on, and I am not on your radar, not right now. “It’s probably a form of rebellion or something. This fear that if I go into happy homemaker mode, I’ll get stuck crocheting a bath mat or something and never figure out what I really want to do, you know?”

OR MAYBE YOU’RE JUST A LAZY AND SPOILED COMPULSIVE FUCKING DICK-EATER. Sorry. I didn’t mean it. Soft as a butter knife: “Do you have an ice pick, Vail?”

You gawk at me. “An ice pick? Like in Basic Instinct?”

I am not going to let one drunk blow job get the best of me. But I am also not gonna put up with any more fucking movie references at this moment in our life. “Yes.”

You don’t have an ice pick, and I need to get away from you, from the bleach.

I leave.

Outside, the air is fresh. No hot dogs to smell, not just yet. I walk to Third Avenue, and Dick is somewhere in this city. Dick whose dick was in your mouth. I enter the nearest hardware store, and I can’t help but wonder…Did he enter you later that night? Would he defrost your freezer while you were sleeping? I buy an ice pick.

The flirty clerk who’s pushing fifty smiles at me. “I love that movie.”

Maybe all women are all part girls giggling over dirty movies. Maybe they all see a young guy like me as a toy. Maybe they never grow up, not fully. Does it matter? Do you love me?

I walk back to your place and climb the stairs. Full-blown Best Boyfriend Ever. I climb like Dick isn’t in there, exposed for all eternity under your filthy fleabag of a sofa.

You open the door. Are you blushing? “I should give you a key.”

YOU SHOULD GIVE ME YOUR HEART. “Yeah, cool.”

You are you. Too nervous to ask me what’s wrong, choosing instead to babble about Basic Instinct and erotic scenes and Al Pacino in Sea of Love and some story about how Sharon Stone is a genius and some bullshit you read about in Entertainment Weekly.

I am an idiot. A tool. But at least I am a tool with a tool. I tune you out.

I open the freezer and toss the expired frozen things into your kitchen sink. And then I begin the real work. There’s nothing like that moment the ice finally weakens and an actual chunk of it hits the floor of the freezer. A war is a bunch of battles, and I am in it. An all-day fucking endeavor. You go to your sofa, sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair, and you do God knows what on your laptop. Soon enough, the noise bothers you.

“I feel so Carrie when Aidan was doing her floors, you know?”

That is your way of trying to tell me that you know I’m mad, that you’re trying to reconnect with me through Sex.

“Sorry, but there’s no way around it. Defrosting a freezer that’s been neglected for this long is a loud and long endeavor.”

You rub your eleven toes. You’re still in my mother’s Nirvana shirt like you know I might leave you. “Well,” you say. “You don’t have to do it, Cusack. You already did so much.”