Boys of Books

As I started up the stairs to find more straws, Jake was coming down. He brushed the back of his hand against my hand. I stared at it, but my hand looked the same. There had been an explosion, but no collapse. I spent the next five hours sleepwalking, wondering whether he had touched me with intention.

He always seemed to know what people wanted from him, when to be the laughing boy, the golden prince, the weary soldier.

...and you worked harder for him so that you might become the thing he needed so badly.

And you found you did not mind being a devil, so long as you were his.

His mouth was soft, but it tasted wrong, like unhappy endings and hexes.

The professor started sketching diagrams and equations on the board. I copied everything in my notebook. Ivan was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. There was a ragged spot in his jeans just below the knee. It made a much stronger impression on me than the proof about angles.

I felt dizzy from the sense of intimacy and remoteness. Everything he said came from so thoroughly outside myself. I wouldn't have been able to invent or guess any of it.

One time he broke into the house on Devoe Street in Brooklyn, removing the screen, scraping himself shimmying through the window. I was in the shower and screamed when he pulled back the curtain. He was ecstatic, overly proud of himself, and I laughed so hard I had to sit down. We didn't talk about us. I stayed in the shower and he watched. Didn't touch me. By dinnertime he was back in San Francisco.

Then his other hand was on her neck, his cold fingers idly playing with her hair...it felt so unpracticed. As if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to reach out and touch her.

His smile ripples, shifts. Gone is the gentleman; again, the wolf.

I felt him everywhere for a lasting moment, then he was painfully absent all at once.

Sometimes he gazed at her as if he wanted to be her undoing, but just then it was as if he wanted her to undo him.

He held on to her as if she were a grudge, his body rigid and tense, as if he really didn’t want her there, and yet his arms were tight around her waist as though he had no intention of ever letting her go.

'You are...so beautiful.' She knew he didn't mean just the skin and curves and bones.

'It would be hard, I think,' he said, in his sleep-thickened voice, 'to deserve her.'

People come in and out of your life. For a time they are your world; they are everything. And then one day they’re not. There’s no telling how long you will have them near.