The Other Guy (16 page)

I slowed the car down to a crawl. It was late afternoon, so most of the kids were long gone, and the school building stood silent, a gray shell against a gray sky.
We circled the block, and Nate tapped his finger against the window as we passed the football field.
"And under that bleacher on the far end is where I got my first real kiss," he said, perking up a little at being able to share a memory from so long ago.
"Which is different from a first not-real kiss?" I said, squinting out the window, like if I squinted hard enough, I might just be able to make out the ghosts of a young Nate and his paramour in between the slats of the bleachers.
Nate smiled -- actually smiled this time; I saw it full on
- and said, with total assurance, "Dares and bottle-spinning don't count. It doesn't count if all you're feeling is complete embarrassment."
"This changes my life completely. All this time I thought Cindy Wells and I had something special in fifth grade," I said, earning a good-natured eye roll. "Who was the lucky guy -- your first real kiss?"
"That would be a fine young man by the name of Jason Sandoval. He was a year older. He was in the debate club, so kind of a nerd--"
"Hey, hey," I interrupted, "I did debate in high school. We were exceptionally cool."
"--but," Nate continued pointedly, steamrolling right over my interjection, "I really liked him."
I looked over at him as we left the school behind and came to a red light. "So, young Jason was in debate and therefore incredibly cool," I said, "and how about you? High school you?"
One side of his mouth tilted upward. "Less cool," he said, leaving it at that, his lips playing with a smile, remembering something that existed only in his head as far as he was concerned.
"That's all you're going to tell me? Less cool?" I shook my head, dissatisfied. "I'm going to ask Julie for yearbook pictures."
At the mention of her name, I felt Nate shift uncomfortably.
"Emory. Why are you here?" he asked.
"I told you; Julie called. She thought you might want a familiar face around," I said.
"I'm sorry she dragged you out here. She doesn't really get the concept of minding her own business sometimes."
I couldn't tell from his tone whether he was frustrated, whether he meant it in displeasure. I glanced at him quickly in between long views of the road but couldn't get a good read on him that way either; maybe driving around while having this conversation wasn't the safest idea in the world.
"Um, if you're mad," I said, trying simultaneously to be placating and to read a street sign, "don't be mad at her, okay? I mean, yes, she did call me and ask me to come, but it was my decision in the end, so if you're mad, please be mad at me."
Nate looked my way. "I'm not."
"Oh. Okay."
"Thank you for coming."
It wasn't the same as saying
I'm glad you're here
, but I didn't push it.
"Of course," I said.
There was a lot more I wanted to say than that, but it was also the kind of thing you had to actually sit down with someone and look them in the eye to be able to say it properly. Things like
Hey, we should get some ice cream
pass as acceptable conversational sallies in a moving vehicle; things like
I love you and I look like a zombie when you're gone, please come back to me so I can stop scaring the small children in my building
usually do not.
I stopped the car on the side of the road.
Nate looked at our surroundings, confused as to why I had pulled over in front of a derelict single-story with a drycleaning sign one thunderstorm away from falling off completely.
"Nate," I said. "I, uh..."
I couldn't finish. Not because I didn't mean it, not because I didn't want to say it, but because he looked at me then with such a lost, fragile air that I couldn't.
Of course I couldn't. What kind of insensitive lunatic tries to win his ex-boyfriend back when his ex-boyfriend's father has just died?
In my defense, I was running on a profound lack of sleep, plus the fumes of a broken relationship. But even so, I'd probably have cast my vote with the prosecution. I was being an insensitive lunatic, and this was neither the time nor the place for me to show him just how much sanity I did not possess.
"I'm here for you, okay? Whatever you need," I said. Nice save, Emory.
"Yeah," he said, dredging up a smile from some hidden reserve.
"Well," I said, peering out the window at the empty, peeling husk of someone's dry-cleaning dreams, "is there anything else in town you want to see?"
He looked around apologetically. "Uh, I don't actually know where we are right now."
"And that's why you should never let me drive you around indiscriminately," I said, sagaciousness very much becoming me.
"Oh, I see," Nate said, a smile behind his mildly affronted tone. "So you're saying this is my fault?"
"Yeah, the thing is," I said, taking on facetiousness as a second hobby, which incurred a raised eyebrow on Nate's part, "I did absolve myself of all responsibility before we set off, and since there are only two of us in the car, it stands to reason that this falls entirely on you, my friend."
"Man," Nate said, shaking his head with deepest disapproval, "if we ran out of gas you'd be the kind of person who would make me walk ten miles to the next station for gas, wouldn't you?"
I smiled serenely. "And a soda."
Nate laughed, though he then made a face as though he hadn't expected to hear that sound coming from himself. "You're the worst," he said softly.
"I know."
He looked down at his hands. "I'm glad you're here."
I had earned it after all.
"Me too," I said. "Although, obviously, not ideal circumstances. But it's good to see you. I mean, again, not ideal circumstances."
"Yeah, no, I know what you mean," he said, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.
I restrained myself from reaching out to touch him, instead asking, "Well, think we should drive around like we know what we're doing for the next hour before finally asking someone for directions?"
"That absolutely sounds like something we would do," Nate approved.
"Okay, but just remember that this was your idea," I said, pulling back out onto the road.
Nate didn't say anything, but he was biting his thumbnail with a smile on his lips as he looked out the window to the trees and sky cruising past us.
As occasionally happens, an occurrence not rare enough to make our half of the species relinquish the idea that asking for directions is beneath us, Nate and I eventually started recognizing a handful of street names as we passed their signs.
Well, Nate did more than I, but he'd come with the advantage of having lived here before. I am just a quick learner.
Once we hit a pair of cross streets he definitely knew, it was smooth sailing from there, though the closer we got to wherever he was directing me, the lower he seemed to sag into the passenger seat.
I understood once we pulled into a residential cul de sac and he called the car to a stop at the end of the driveway of a colonial-style two-story home with pale yellow siding and a modest front yard. I could imagine him in his early childhood ruining the grass by triking all over it, as I had in my parents' yard way back when.
They hadn't been too pleased but then took a photo anyway of me reigning over my minute destruction.
"Have you been staying here?" I asked, looking out at the house. The roof still had a lone string of Christmas lights hanging from its eaves.
Lights were on inside; out where we were, what had been a slate gray kind of day deepened into charcoal.
"Julie insisted," Nate said. "She said it would be stupid for me to spend money on a hotel when I could just come home. I don't know how she talked our mother into it, especially when Mom can barely stand to look at me. I think she might just be tolerating my presence for Abby's sake."
His facial expression told me as much, but I remarked anyway, "Must be hard for you."
Nate took his time responding. "It hasn't changed a lot, inside," he said at length. "There are times when I can almost feel like things aren't the way they are."
I knew what he meant. It's those kinds of feelings that are often the most insidious, because when you do remember the way things truly are, it hits twice as hard. It wasn't difficult to imagine the struggle he'd had to undergo these past few days, walking through the corridors of a home that had turned him out long ago.
Before I could think to stop myself, I said, "You're welcome to stay with me if you want, at my hotel. I mean, there's two beds in there, so it wouldn't be-- It's not like-Uh."
A corner of his mouth lifted slightly. "It's okay, calm down. I know you're not trying to seduce me. Or if you are, you're doing it really badly," Nate said, giving me a vaguely amused, dubious look.
"I don't know any other way," I said, shrugging.
"That is such a lie," he said placidly.
I wasn't sure where this line of conversation was headed, so I didn't say anything.
"I do want to come and stay with you," Nate said eventually and slowly, as though saying it aloud was the actual process of making up his mind. "If the offer's still on the table."
"It's permanently on the table," I said, getting very, very far ahead of myself and afield of the current situation. It was too much to take back, so I plowed on. "Do you have stuff you need to get from the house?"
"Yeah, and I should probably talk to Julie at least," he said, taking a brief moment for himself, and then got out of the car.
I watched him walk up the driveway and through the front door, and wondered how he could even do it without bending under the weight of all that strain.
Julie had probably had the right intentions in talking both parties into having Nate stay here, just as she had with getting me to come. It wasn't a totally unreasonable expectation -- tragedy often brought people closer together; the jolt of realization that life was insistently ephemeral made petty arguments seem negligible after all.
But, apparently, not always.
Nate emerged within about ten minutes with a duffel bag in hand, Julie walking with him back out to the car.
I got out, unlocking the trunk for Nate's things.
"Hi, Emory," Julie said as they approached. "I'm glad you could come."
"Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for getting in touch with me," I said.
Nate slung his bag into the trunk, and he and Julie shared a tight hug. When he got into the car and we waved goodbye, Julie told me to take care of him, and I had the inexplicable feeling that she was passing some kind of torch to me. She had looked out for Nate since they were kids, and now it was my turn.
It seemed a presumptuous move, to be honest, but also to be honest, it was a move I didn't mind at all. Where Nate actually stood on the matter was a different story and currently a closed book to me.
We were still broken, after all. Just because I had come and he hadn't made me leave didn't mean we were fixed.
The hotel was about a ten-minute drive away, and we made the journey in total silence. The radio tried to cheer us up with a string of peppy golden oldies, but it served only to highlight the depth of the gloom in the car.
It had been Nate's choice this time, his escape, but I didn't suppose leaving home again was much easier the second time around when nothing else had changed from the first.
I remembered the night in Thailand when I'd had my first of many inner crises and Nate simply giving me a hug with no expectations attached, and when we got inside the hotel room, I returned the favor. He seemed not to mind, leaning heavily into me, his face pressed into my shoulder.
There didn't seem anything else to do after that except crawl into bed -- separate beds -- and go to sleep with dreams of something better in the morning.
Sleep chose not to come, though, for either of us. I could hear him, across the aisle between our beds, shifting and twisting underneath the covers, while I stared up into the dark, wishing I could just reach over and soothe him to sleep.
"Emory," he said finally. It wasn't a whisper, so he obviously knew I was lying awake too.
"Yup."
More shuffling, probably to turn toward my bed. "This is weird," he said.
"What's weird?"
"That we're in the same room, but you're so far away."
"It's, like, two feet."
Nate was quiet for a moment. "You're being deliberately obtuse."
"Yes."
"Why?"
I sighed, a long exhalation. "It's not me, it's you."
The light on the nightstand between our beds snapped on, and there was Nate propped up on one elbow, looking in my direction with what would have probably been an affronted expression on his face, were it not for the substantial amount of squinting he was doing.
"That light is extremely bright," I said, shielding myself from its glare with one arm.
Nate tossed a pillow at me to get it down. "What do you mean it's not you?"
"It's not me," I reiterated, probably unhelpfully. "Under different circumstances I would have tried to-- to do many, many things by now."
He eyed me with sullen suspicion. "Like what?"
"Like say I'm sorry," I said, turning to face him at last, "for hiding what we had from everyone. And say I'm sorry for putting you through all my bullshit. I'm surprised you're still willing to even look at me after all that. And say I'm sorry in general for, um, umbrella coverage of any other stupid things I did."
Nate looked away for a moment, ruminating on my apology. "What else?" he demanded.
"Tell you that I told everyone," I said. "Although, to be perfectly honest, I haven't gotten around to my parents yet. But I was going to, when Julie called."
I could see that he was having an internal battle with himself, curious to know the details of what telling everyone meant but still wanting more of the list of my many, many things.
"What else?" he decided.
"Tell you that Michelle's gone, that if I had been more honest with myself she would've been gone a lot sooner," I admitted. I had the feeling he was going to what else me again, so I carried on, cresting on a wave of words kept for too long to myself. "Tell you that I miss you so much it hurts, and I can't sleep, and it's making me look like an extra in a horror movie."
We were both gathered at the edges of our beds now, knowing full well we could step over the two-foot divide at any time but fearful that traversing the connection would break it somehow.
Nate took a deep breath. Somehow knowing I had more, or hoping I had more, he said again, "What else?" I glanced down at the carpet. "Kiss you."
"So kiss me."
"No."
"Or be really infuriating."
"That I can do," I said, as he glared at me. I softened my tone immeasurably. "Nate, you're hurting. Letting me seduce you, however ineptly, isn't going to make it go away."