This is Not a Love Story (35 page)

“B
ABY
. W
AKE
up.”

Although I’m shivering and soaked, it takes me a minute for the world to solidify around me.

It’s already near dark, everything grainy and disappearing fast as birds darting between the trees.

In what light remains, I see Julian is sitting up, submerged in the wet sleeping bag, his body shaking fiercely as he rocks back and forth, teeth chattering hard enough to crack. I just want to hold him until he stops. Fuck.

I gather myself and pick up the stupidly complicated tent. I wish to God I’d tried harder to figure this out earlier.

Hardly able to see what I’m doing, I unwrap all the poles and lay out the dark fabric. By touch alone I work out there is a thin channel along the tent that I need to feed the poles through. It doesn’t take long. And all at once I have a tent in front of me. A shelter I have made. Closing my eyes, I breathe the feeling deep.

After pushing a peg into the soft ground to secure each corner, I unzip the entrance. The whole thing is contained, floor, walls, roof, all one, all waterproof. I help Julian out of the soaked sleeping bag and into the tent, thankful the sleeping bag I didn’t use is still wrapped in plastic and dry.

I’m not quite sure what to do with our wet clothes, but in the end I strip mine off and lay them along the entrance. In the dark I help Julian do the same, before numbly ripping open the sleeping bag, lying down, and covering us both.

With his skin against mine, I’m in a sick sort of heaven. I know he’s not right and doesn’t want me to touch him—he wants to crawl out of his own skin, and he shifts and moans restlessly. But I can’t be this close to him and not remember. I can’t be this close to him and not want to lose myself. In him. We have lain together like this so very few times. At Cassey’s, on those nights where we couldn’t sate the need to know one another inside and out, those nights we fucked so deep I can still feel it. Him. Inside me. I can’t forget. I don’t want to, and yet. I don’t know if it will ever be like that again.

He’s freezing. We both are. I force my hands to flatten out and press them to his trembling chest, pulling him back against me. There is nothing sexual in my touch. I want him to know I understand, or at least I’m trying to.

I fall asleep still locked in thought, the rain beating tiny drums against the tent.

My dreams are the emptiest I’ve ever had.

When I wake, Julian is gone.

A familiar tightness grows in my chest. My breathing catches as though there is not enough oxygen in the air. I unzip the tent, hoping he’s just gone to piss behind a tree. Ghostly flickers of sunlight stream through the branches onto the floor of the wood. My clothes are neatly hung over a fallen tree trunk a few meters away.

Julian is nowhere to be seen.

Get a grip.
I close my eyes. He wouldn’t just leave me here, not after coming all this way. I’m being stupid. I’m missing something, some clue, a vague recollection just out of reach. He was sick, maybe delirious.
Where would he go?

A twig snaps close by. I dart inside the tent and grab the sleeping bag, before standing up and looking around.

Out of breath and unsteady, Julian steps into the clearing carrying a box and several bags. He carefully puts everything down on the ground, looking ready to fall over.

Where did you go?
I sign, shocked by the change in him. For the first time since I found him, he’s more than just an echo of the boy I knew.

“We needed something to cook with and some more clothes.” He hesitates, looking uncomfortable. “I used some of the money.”

I don’t care about the money.

I thought you’d gone!
I sign, distressed, unable to stop myself.

The knot of fear that he
will
just go, he
will
leave me, is not something I can just undo and erase.

He closes the gap between us. His skin is still wan and pale, but as he flicks his gaze over me, there is something in his eyes that wasn’t there yesterday, something I remember. Warmth pools deep inside me. I lean toward him, his clean, soapy toothpaste smell mixing with the green of the wood. He must have washed up in the sinks at the shop.

“I couldn’t bear to wake you,” he murmurs softly, trailing his hand through my hair, his touch lighter than the wind. “You’d have come with me and after everything you did for me yesterday, I thought you needed to rest.”

I lean in closer. We’re almost touching. He swallows.

“I brought you something.” He pulls a small pad and a pencil out of his pocket. “It’s all they had,” he shrugs apologetically.

I slump down, sitting just inside the tent with the pad.
You look better,
I sign, feeling a wave of exhaustion take all my strength despite Julian saying I slept well.

“I brought you some breakfast.” He opens the box and shakily hands me a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate. “I bought a cooker too.”

I nod. It’s stuff we need.

“I’m sorry you thought I was gone.” He sits next to me, arms hugging his knees. “I wouldn’t leave you.” He tries to meet my eyes.

I’m going to lie down,
I sign.

“You were crying in your sleep.”

I nod tightly. I know.

D
AYS
PASS
.
Mostly we sleep. There is nothing to disturb us. The weather is cool but not cold, the bright sky hidden by a web of dark branches. Sometimes I remember the dreams I have, but I’d rather not. They always start with a dark figure standing on a platform at a train station, but however hard I try to reach him, he remains just out of reach.

Nearly a week has gone by when we finally move on. Julian is more himself, though he’s still weak. Packing our belongings fairly between us, we follow the windy roads, the signposts to Penzance.

But after two days of walking, we realize we’re lost. There are roads, but they’re narrow and unmarked. The air has changed too, the wind sharper, as though it has a purpose, the distant trees sparse and bent toward the ground. And even though I have never been there, I know we are heading toward the sea.

I think Julian feels it too. Our pace picks up, as if we’re being pulled onward by a greater force than we have ever known, and we head straight across newly furrowed fields and down into a wooded valley. At the bottom of the valley, Julian catches me as I stumble across a metal rail—a railway track long disused and hidden by the undergrowth. We follow it, walking between the rails as the valley stretches up around us. We pass a tiny dark-eyed house I can’t help looking back for long after it is out of sight. There were vines and bushes growing out the windows and through the roof. They were ruining it beautifully. I want to go back and draw it. I want to sleep inside.

But later.

Young trees just coming into green line our way, and sometimes block it completely—but we climb over their branches, sometimes pushing aside the vicious tangle of thorn bushes, tripping on sticks and vines, as if we do this every day in our hurry to get somewhere.

Up ahead, the train line stops as abruptly as the trees, as though we have reached our final destination—a massive landslide is barring the path, a dirty mound of mud and vegetation higher than a house. Taking off our backpacks, we climb up onto the top of the slip, and there, unrelenting and blue-gray as forever, is the sea.

Blindly, Julian’s hand finds mine, but I can’t look away—I am transfixed. All the land has dropped away, a scattering of rocks into the sea, and I feel as though I am standing at the end of everything. At the end of all I have ever known.

Eventually, we scramble back for our bags and head closer, struggling across the sand dunes, razor grass cutting our legs through our jeans. Julian halts suddenly in front of me, and we crash together. And when he turns there is a wildness in his eyes, a flicker of heat and fire I don’t understand the reason for.

We start to unpack the tent, blinded by the blowing sand—still it doesn’t take long. We’ve grown pretty adept over these past few days. We weigh it down with a few well-placed stones so it doesn’t blow away. And then we sit just inside, barely shielded from the battery of wind, staring out at the sea.

I don’t know why, but it seems as though our whole journey has led us to this point. There is no farther we can go now. All that’s happened to us seems so small, our lives so small in the face of this—we are insignificant, unimportant, and yet that only makes me want to burn all the brighter.

I don’t know how long we sit like that, lost in our thoughts. I don’t know if Julian feels as raw as I do—the surface of me scratched away and exposed by the salty wind, dissolving in the sea spray.

If he asked me right now what I would change, I would sign without thinking.
Everything.
Then I would look at him, and I would realize.

I would change nothing.

In my back pocket weighing me down, Crash’s face, the picture I drew. I take it out, unfold it, watching how it flutters in the wind before I open my fingers, and let it go
—
the paper racing fast as a kite out to sea.

“He has a piece of your heart, doesn’t he?” Julian asks bleakly.

You have the rest,
I sign.

It puzzles me how he can think I’d ever feel this way about anyone else. Crash is my friend. It’s not the same.

He has no right to ask me what he wants to ask me, and he knows it, even though the sea is drawing all the truth out of me
—
I can’t see how it would make any difference how close he thinks Crash and I got, whether or not we fucked. After everything, he must at least understand that.

But I’m not going to lie about how I feel.
I miss him.

“I know… it’s okay.” Julian’s body language betrays him. “You want to go back… it’s okay.”

I don’t want to go back.
I put my head in the circle of my arms and stare at the dark space of sand beneath me. The wind is like cold fingers on the base of my skull.

“But maybe you need to… for a while….”

I look up, and Julian is staring out over the waves, his eyes as gray as the sea.

Does he want me to go?

The resigned slump of his shoulders tells me
no
more powerfully than any words could. But then, all at once it hits me: even if it’s not what he wants, he’s letting go his hold on me because he has to, because we have to trust that we’ll come back to one another, or this is not going to work.

He’s telling me I have to let go of him too. Somehow.

“This is nothing to do with leaving one another,” he says quietly, as if he can read my mind.

He gives me a sad, lopsided smile that breaks my heart a little bit.

“I’m yours and I always will be. I will wait for you here. I promise.”

I turn away, biting my lip. I don’t understand how I can be homesick for a home I never had, a city I hate, a man I never knew. But Julian can’t run anymore, and I can’t either.

It tends to rain here early afternoons. Right on cue, a fine mist descends, and I shift deeper inside the tent, wanting Julian to come lie down with me, wanting to forget about everything, wanting to put my arms around him and settle into his warmth as the clouds break apart above us. Instead he stands up and looks at me, really looks, intensely, before pulling his jumper off over his head and impatiently wrestling with his shoes and socks. Bemused, I can’t help but smile. It’s all pretty comical until I see the bruises down his spine as his T-shirt rides up, the dark purple bloom over the front of his hip that disappears into his trousers. He sees me looking and stops pulling at his sock; instead he slowly brings the T-shirt up and off, his eyes on mine, his expression open but unsure, waiting for my reaction.

I’m slow on the uptake, but I realize suddenly he’s stripping for me.

It feels strange, I suppose, as if our roles have been reversed somehow, and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to react, but I don’t want him to stop. With casual grace he lifts his arms above his head, his fingers pointing at the sky. It’s like a dance.

I scan the beach, half-afraid I’ll see some dog walker wandering toward us, but there is no one.

“That’s not doing a lot for my self-confidence,” he murmurs, catching my wandering eyes.

His awkwardness is turning me on, more in fact than the stripping. Maybe because he’s doing this even though he feels vulnerable, maybe because he’s doing this to prove something.

No one else gets to watch,
I sign, still a little dazed at his behavior but focusing my attention on him fully.

I could look at him all day—the rain against his skin, the perfect hollow of his collarbone, the pinprick of scars on his arms, the bruised skinny arch of his ribs, that fascinating line of fine hairs that runs from his navel to beneath the top of his jeans, the sharp defined ridge of his hips. Any and every bit of him.

Hands skimming his sides, he unbuttons and drops his trousers and stands shivering in his underwear. I try not to stare at his crotch.

“Come swimming with me?” he whispers conspiratorially, a shaking arm hugging his chest.

I sit up. I don’t know quite what’s got into him. Or me.

I look out at the wild gray weather, the wind whipping up the surf, and unceremoniously drag off my clothes.

I grip his hand as he steps out of his underwear and we run naked across the sinking sands to the sea.

It takes my breath like nothing else. I choke down laughter, salt water, kisses, as we tumble into the waves. Everything unfamiliar but him. Always him.

Later, we lie together in the half dark, no longer cold, no longer awkward. The torch is dimming as the wind billows against the fabric of the tent, noisy and heavy with spray from the sea, but nothing can touch us in here, no force of nature but time. I trace the bruises on his chest as he talks.

“I will be waiting for you here. I will never leave you,” he whispers. “I love you for always.” Over and over.