“I wish.”
“I’m totally serious, dude. I have a whole break-in planned.”
I snuggle into my pillow while Zach summarizes the proposed crime, a plan that somehow includes chain saws, bubble gum, and an impromptu a capella performance of “End of Everything.” He’s talking total crap, and we both know it, but I don’t cut him off. It’s just nice to hear his voice, and pretend he’s lying beside me, whispering into the dark while we put off falling asleep. In the end, it’s not me who cuts him off, but a knock at my door.
Mom pokes her head in as we hang up. “I thought you were asleep already,” she remarks. “Then I heard voices.”
“I wouldn’t go to bed without saying good night.”
“Hmm, you better not.” A smile plays on the corner of her lips. “I’ve had too many nights without any kid to say good night to. It’s good to have you back.”
This is the thing about Mom. The thing that makes it so hard to know how to manage her. She’s got a nasty streak, but it’s not because she hates me. It’s just sort of … how she is. She has a soft side, too. In a lot of ways, the soft side makes it harder. If she was awful 100 percent of the time, it’d be easier to cut off contact without guilt. But knowing that to lose all the bad stuff, I lose the few good moments in the middle, where I have a mom standing in my doorway implying she missed me … even though the good stuff isn’t worth all the bad, it does make it tougher.
“Mom?” I ask.
“Yeah?”
What I want to say is, Zach and I want to come out. I’m worried they won’t let us. I’m worried what they’ll do to all of us if something doesn’t give.
But then our chat in the living room comes back to me, and I think better of it. “Can you take a photo of me tomorrow before Zach comes for my stories? If I can get Chorus’s permission?”
Her eyes sparkle. I feel dirty. Like I somehow just took responsibility for tonight’s disagreement. But sometimes, it feels worth it just to placate her. “Sounds great. Want the light on or off?”
“Off’s fine. I’ll go to bed soon. Night.”
“Good night, sweetie.”
See? To hear her voice like that, all happy and warm, is worth the dirty feeling.
Kind of.
My phone lights up, and I grab it to find a message from Zach already.
Hey so … you’re still on PrEP, right?
The message slams into me as I finally understand the context of our chat tonight. I mentioned that I’m on PrEP, a preventative medication against HIV, to Zach a few weeks ago. Not as a nudge, but just as a, “Hey, here’s something you might not know exists, given you only just came out.”
But this text feels like a lot more than a nudge. It’s closer to a shout.
Zach’s coming over to sleep tomorrow. And he wanted to know if he should bring anything. I now have the feeling that “anything” might have been more along the lines of “condoms and lube.”
Heat pools in the pit of my stomach and starts spreading downward, and I climb beneath the covers. My fingers slip beneath the waistband of my pajama pants as I replay Zach delicately broaching the topic of tomorrow’s visit in my mind. Then I think of him next to me again, without any guards on the other side of the wall, in my own bed, with no alarm clock in the morning. I think of him reaching beneath the covers, and pressing his lips against mine.
I hold that image in my mind even after I finish. Then a strange feeling washes over me. A draining sensation, like everything’s slipping away from me, sand in an hourglass.
We have tomorrow. But I don’t know what lies beyond that.
And I don’t know if I’m quite ready to find out, yet.
* * *
I pull Zach into me roughly the moment his driver is out of sight. I feel ridiculous, given we’ve barely been apart for two whole weeks, but I’ve missed him with a ferocity that’s stunned and, to be honest, frightened me.
Thankfully, my parents are both at work, so we don’t need to worry about forced pleasantries.
“I forgot how fancy your house is,” he says as we traipse upstairs to dump his stuff in my room. He’s practically bouncing. I try to match his mood, but I’m still laden down with the feeling of dread from last night. If anything, it’s been growing today. “It makes me want to get my mom a T-shirt,” Zach goes on. “‘My son’s an international pop star and all he bought me is this apartment.’”
“Penthouse apartment,” I remind him. “She’s not exactly hard done by. How are things with her, anyway?”