I’d given Levi silence. I’d taken from Levi hope.
I couldn’t give him what he wanted. I could give him or take from him what I wanted.
I had to live with that and figure out how to move forward.
It came in the most unlikely of places. Maybe a week later, Jasper and I were eating our cereal out of mugs, and he just said what was on his mind. Why would I have expected anything different?
With his spoon pointed at me and colored puffed corn from Cap’n Crunch dotting his lips, he said, “Si. Just go.”
I nearly choked on my Chex. I looked at him, for the first time with fear.
He was staring in his mug and just kept talking. “So you fucked up. Deal with it. Fix it. Grow a pair and go back to him.” He took another mouthful of sugar and dyes and looked at me like he’d just said Earth is round or the Flatirons are rocky.
I didn’t take my eyes off him, and he finally looked up at me. “What? Do I have milk on my chin?” He took the back of his hand and wiped, looked at it, shrugged, and licked. Then took another spoonful.
I didn’t know how to explain to him what was going on in my head. “But, I don’t ... how ... ?”
“Emilio.” Jasper peered into his mug, then drank the rest of the sugared fluid, smacking his lips. “He told me. Levi told him almost nothing, but we pieced it together.” He tapped his head, “High-sigma confidence on this one, it’s not hard to figure out.”
Levi’s roommate.
I shrank back in my chair. He knew. He knew what I hadn’t done with Levi, and by not doing, what I had done to Levi.
Jasper stood up and grabbed his bag and he walked to the door. He turned back. “Si.” I looked at him. “I’m your friend. I’m trying to be. Your face is doing the thing you were doing in September. It’s December. You were doing so well for you, we got you to come so far. You looked like you were actually having fun. Don’t make me think all my efforts were in vain.” He turned and walked through the door.
I didn’t have class for an hour, and I just sat, slumped in my chair. The weight of the necklace against the back of my neck hadn’t felt this real since I’d put it on on my way home for Thanksgiving. I closed my eyes. I saw my parents, my church, my family. But in my vision, though they beat and throbbed, the house’s letters focused in my view. And Tav. My Big who I wanted to do anything with, if only I could. Big, beefy, someone to hold me and keep me safe and warm.
And Levi. His smile, like the Cheshire Cat’s, materialized behind my closed lids. The scruff around it, and his warm hazel eyes. Easy brown hair, and the flannel.
I opened my eyes in a mild panic: The cross felt heavy, like it was burning. I unclasped it, the first time in weeks, and I threw it on my desk.
There it sat, looking back at me. Itself innocent, judging. Telling me that I couldn’t have what I wanted, telling me that I had to deny other people because of what other people told me was the path.
I picked it up. It wasn’t hot, it wasn’t old, and it wasn’t heavy. A thin leather string and two bars of metal.
I put it down. I grabbed my notebooks and bag, and I walked very slowly to class, head bowed. But not in prayer.
For the first time this semester, I don’t actually know what my classes were about, what the lessons were. I think I took notes. It was habit: Of course I took notes. I don’t know what they said, it could be glossolalia given where my mind was. I trudged back to the dorm, winter sun beating down on me, my breath crystalizing in front of my mouth, and I knew what I had to do.
I put my bag down and took my necklace off the desk. I walked over to the ΔΚΣ house, up the stairs, and I knocked.
I heard the squeak of a chair, soft socked footsteps on old wood, and a knob turning. Levi’s eyes widened, then settled. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, careful, the way you’d look at someone who’d already broken you once, and he turned around. But he didn’t shut the door. I took that as an invitation to walk in; a cold invitation, the worst one all semester, because it was my fault.
“I’m sorry,” I said, before I’d even cleared the doorway. “That’s the first thing. I’m really sorry. You asked me a real question and I made it small on purpose because making it small was the only thing I knew how to do and then I went and found somebody so I wouldn’t have to feel it, and you knew that, and I did it anyway, and I’m ... I’m just sorry.”
He didn’t help me. He let me stand in it while he sat in a chair at his desk.
“The answer to your question,” and my voice did the thing I hated, where it tightened in just the way that made it known to everyone how exposed I felt, “the which-one-is-it question. The real one. You’re the real one. Since the coffee, since the first night you didn’t reach across the table. I’ve known it the whole time, and I couldn’t say it because the only thing I was ever taught is that the second somebody really knows me – the real me – that’s when they leave, or that’s when they stay and try to ‘fix’ me. You didn’t deserve that, and I came to say I don’t want to run away anymore.”
My heart was going like the house’s bass during a party. I’d done it. I’d stood up in the middle of the service, and I’d turned my back on it.
Levi was still quiet.
I took off my jacket. I looked at him. I reached up and I took off the necklace and I put it on the table. His eyes followed, then went back up to mine. “I don’t want to be scared of what this means anymore. I don’t want to be held back by what that means anymore,” I added, pointing at the metal and leather.
He was quiet a while. Levi-quiet, which was quiet in a way that you knew said so much, but you weren’t quite sure what exactly it was.
“Okay,” he said finally, and something in my chest let go a tiny bit. I think I breathed.
Then he came close, closer than the few feet we’d kept like a commandment, closer than he’d ever come before when we were alone. He put a hand along my jaw, and I leaned into it like a plant to the sun, and he brought his lips towards mine. His scruff tickled my face, and then he pressed his lips to mine, and we kissed. Finally, after months of not doing it, months of hookups and months of distant heat from Tav, Levi’s kiss was like fresh pine needles and crisp mountain air wrapped in a warm flannel blanket, pulling me in. I breathed him in, deep, and I saw his eyes close out-of-focus, so I closed mine.
I raised my arms to hold him, and he broke it. Eyes open. A gap between our mouths. His hands holding back my arms. And my heart raced.
“No. Not yet,” he said.
He walked back to his chair and sat down, and he gestured to the bed, where I sat, hoping. He looked at me. “No, I didn’t ask you to my bed for that. This isn’t a ‘no never.’ It’s ‘no not yet.’ Si, I’ve watched you all semester use this to not feel things. I watched you do it a few days ago. I’m not gonna be the thing you run into next. If we do this, the whole thing, I want it to be because you actually want me – you want us – and not because it’s the move you reach for when you’re scared.” He started to reach out to my hands, then pulled back. “I want us both all the way okay first. I can wait for that. I’m good at waiting. You may have noticed.”
I’d been stopped from things my entire life. Things like: Don’t, can’t, shouldn’t, not for you, never for you, damnation, sinful, wicked.
This was the first time in 18 years that being told to wait didn’t feel like a door closing. And I wanted it to. Or, a small part of me wanted it to feel like a door closing. That this was a rule, another thing that someone was telling me to do, so I didn’t have to think, so I could blame someone or something else for withholding something from me. But I looked into Levi’s warm eyes and, instead, I felt like I was being handed something. It felt like a person caring enough about the real version of me to not let me trade it for the easy version, the orgasm, the sudden rush of hormones and neurotransmitters and cu— and semen, even when I was the one offering the trade.
We talked. At some point, Levi broke out two packs of ramen, and we kept talking. At some point, he joined me on the bed, and we sat almost touching. At some point, I cried, and he said it was okay. At some point, my head was on his shoulder, and his fingers went through my hair, slowly, like he was conveying multiple things with a simple motion. I told him things I’d never told someone before, about my efforts to be normal – to appear straight – about the speed limit and my speed, about changing clothes at a rest stop on the way back home, about learning to be quiet so my parents wouldn’t hear, about the proxy websites so my parents wouldn’t find out.
At 2am, Emilio came back. He looked at us, and he backed out the door, and Levi gestured for him to come in. I grabbed my coat and I said goodnight. I was at the door and he called after me.
He was holding up a piece of leather cord, a pendant on it that was made of two straight pieces of metal.
“No,” I told him. “I’m done with that holding me back. You hold onto it.” I turned and walked out the door, down the stairs, out of the house, and back to my dorm. Half-way there, I realized I was smiling.
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