I am lying on a pillow on the bathroom floor, head pounding, as comfortable
as I’m going to get, back against the nice cool porcelain, and of course my
perpetual flatmate has to interrupt to tell me to go to bed. For the second
time tonight, he says. For my own good, he says. He can’t let me sleep on
the bathroom floor.

You just have to pee, I say. Probably I whine. I instruct myself to gather
the will to twist my neck, to see if he’s wearing the Hugh Heffner robe he
wears after sex or the dress suit he wore to his department party tonight.

Well there’s only one bathroom, he says.

Pee over me, I say, and lower my head back down. I mean it, too. I expect
to hear the whoosh toward the toilet over my bent neck. I don’t even care.
I might get splashed. I don’t care about that, either. I am drunk-sick. My
stomach is bulging in a line over my underwear, onto my knees. He has
already ordered me to bed once, I guess, though I don’t remember. I feel
information-less. I don’t like this feeling. I am shivering.

You’re shivering, he notes, like some genius.

The truth is I love him. This is my great secret, always crouching under my
tongue, waiting hopeful for just the right moment or plus-one or number of
cocktails to come out and change my life.

If you make me stand up, I say, I will puke.

Fine, he says. Good. If you don’t get it out now, you’ll still be sick
tomorrow.

He has to pee so he can return to his room and the bellyless girl he was
flirting with at his department party. That’s where I made myself sick
tonight, trying not to look at them. But he doesn’t seem to be in any rush.
He sinks down onto the radiator next to me. I strain my ears around the
metallic simmer of the toilet, sure I’ll be sick if I hear her, rustling or
moaning or picking through my stories in the magazines he keeps by his bed.
I am better in the long form, one of his one-night girls once told me. I
don’t know if she’s the one here tonight. I feel off-center. I never let
myself end a night without first knowing how he’s ending his. Knowledge
keeps me at an advantage. Caught unaware, I fear the obviousness of the
sadness on my face.

The radiator sputters under his weight. I see at his ankles that he is
wearing slacks. Maybe he is burning them, I think, but only for a second,
because I am too preoccupied with the way the organ of my stomach seems to
have extended into my ribcage and I cannot contort it back down. He says,
Get your head off the floor.

My head is on the pillow, not the floor, but when I point this out he
claims that after two rounds with me tonight, the pillow is as dirty as the
floor.

If you make me get my head off the floor, I say, I will puke.

He cradles my head in one big hand and lifts it off the purple pillowcase.
I hope, if there’s a girl, she walks in right now. I am levitating, my
skull in his cupped palm, and even through my nausea and my shivering and
my stupor I am overjoyed to be here. He is the person who, when it starts
to storm, texts me saying, Don’t walk through lightning, I will get you at
the bookstore. He is the person who, when he goes to the good deli out in
Pikesville, buys an extra quarter-pound of everything and toasts a second
sandwich with the organic lettuce he’d never buy himself and says I hope
you’re hungry. He is the person who ruined one or two other persons for me,
because each time I zipped my jacket and looked at him standing in our
first kitchen holding two full black trashbags and saying it’s okay he
doesn’t need me I should go, I gave up even my kinky tantric Fifty-Shades
sex to stay home taking the trash out back with him. There were rats in the
backyard in that house, too. I saw them rustling the grass.

Lean against the radiator, he says, but I drop my dizzy forehead right into
the crook of his ankle. Close enough, he says, and laughs, and even
inebriated I do not allow myself to interpret his words or his laugh as I adore you.

Close enough, I confirm.

We sit there for a while. A rustle in his bedroom might be a tree branch or
a leg. Even laid out on the bathroom floor, I have too much pride to ask.
He reaches over my head, peels back the shower curtain, removes a bottle
from the ledge where he likes to keep soap and a beer. I am curled over my
knees like a fetus with its forehead on a shoe. He pops the bottle cap on
the knob of the radiator. He is still dressed in his party-fine
button-down. I realize that I am not wearing pants. All I am wearing is old
underwear and the long gray men’s shirt, half-unbottoned, halfway down my
butt, that I wear every night. He gave it to me when we first moved into
this apartment. Hey, he’d said, and I’d seen the footsteps block the light
under my bedroom door, Weird question, the Gap sent an extra. I’d shut my
notebook and crawled to the foot of my bed and reached over and twisted the
knob. He didn’t come inside. He never comes inside. But the instant he sent
the shirt flying at my head, I said it’s probably too big, I’ll wear it to
bed. That was very smart of me. Because I said that, I can wear it to bed
every single night above any suspicion that I am clothing myself in him.

You’re sick, he says.

I guess I’m still shivering.

Are you going to pass? he says.

Shut up, I say, halfheartedly swatting his shoelace. You smoke, you drink,
you’re dying first, remember?

He is my best friend in the world, not just in Baltimore. We have planned
what to do if the other should suddenly die. (Hide the shower beers from
his Born-Again parents; send the file folder containing this story among
others to my agent.) I have lived with him for four years—ever since I left
my family outside Los Angeles to try and be a New York City writer, then
rode the Amtrak south through an exorbitant glut of cities until I found
one I could afford—and been in love with him every last minute of them. I
would kill him if he died first.

He mimes gagging himself with his finger. Pull the trigger, he says. Get it
over with. End our night here.

I don’t even lift my head from his Oxford. Probably I moan a little, in a
that-sounds-awful way. Really it sounds great. He has called the night ours
and this is the closest he will get to telling me: tonight, there’s no
girl.

Are you brave enough? he says.

If I were brave enough, I would tell him that I am in love with him. Right
here, right on the floor, hairtips wet with toilet, I would say, You know,
I am in love with you. Then I would take his face and kiss him before he
could stop me, or else I would strip off the remainder of my clothes and
lie back down on the tile and say, Yours.

But I am not brave enough. Because I know what would happen after that. He
would pull back. He would say, Courtney. He would say, You’re drunk, or
What the hell are you talking about, or Are you out of story ideas, or Shut
up. He would say, These are the girls I love, and show me the
catalog-perfect pictures I carry in my brain: all of them beautiful, all of
them the type of skinny you look at a millisecond too long when you pass
the space between their leggings on the street, wondering are they
anorexic, deciding not but only by a hairsbreadth. He is that kind of guy.
He is a physicist whom his advisor called one of the best when we discussed
him over cocktails this evening, he left his own Friday-night department
party early to take care of his platonic plus-one, he answers every time
his mother phones, but he is still that kind of guy. The kind who wants
only the paper-thin bodies he’s seen just enough of, lying in his bed like
dolls or starfish, to believe in their reality.

So he would remind me who he loves, and he wouldn’t even need to hold a
mirror to my arms the size of bowling pins, and not the skinny ends. I left
the bikinis of Los Angeles; I already know what would happen next. He would
get afraid of my desire. My beautiful happy indefinite symbiosis with him
here in Baltimore—splitting groceries, scouring Craigslist, taking turns
with the car—would be over.

Or maybe he would say, What took us both so long? and get his ass off the
radiator and crouch down to the tile floor beside me and kiss me on my sick
lips.

You’re not brave enough, he says, sighing, crooking a strand of cold wet
hair behind my ear.

Sorry, I say.

It’s your problem, he says, not mine, but he bends over and fits a
waterbottle between my lips and I know I’m his problem tonight. It gives me
the elusive liquid happiness of reciprocity that he’s my problem, too.

* *

An hour goes by before I agree that something must change. He has been
drinking untold numbers of shower beers over my half-dressed backside. I
have been lifting my head half an inch off his shoe to retch, drily.

Fine, I say, Nothing is happening here unless I make it happen.

Finally, he says. Let’s get you to bed.

He hooks me under the armpits to haul me up. I do not do anything to help.
My whole body is a pair of knees, trying to bend backward. He pulls. I
resist. Unless I close my eyes on the way north, I will vomit. I close my
eyes. I am standing. The world is swaying, though I don’t see it: his old
bedsheet from our first apartment that we use as a windowshade; the mirror
flecked with toothpaste; the trashcan filled with my tampon wrappers and
his floss; the shower curtain stained with black mold that we’re pretty
sure won’t kill us during this lease cycle. He loops an arm around my
shoulders. I loop an arm around his waist. He feels firmer than he did when
we met, four years ago, him 22, me 26. Back then we were both a little
round in the cheeks, a little slobby, a little bad in the kitchen—though
even I knew how to drain spaghetti. But since then he has pursued a
constant self-improvement campaign. In four years he has learned to
salsa-dance, to speak Italian, to tame his cheek hair, to discern between
expensive cheeses, to sprinkle spices into homemade stews. He has grown
muscle where he once had fat. He has bought a new bedset for a new bed. He
has obtained a summer research position at Harvard that is likely to lead
to a job. He is dynamism embodied.

The biggest thing that’s changed for me is how much I am proud of him. A
little, then. A lot now. Otherwise, I have been basically waiting in the
room beside his for him to realize he loves me, or for me to realize he
doesn’t. I have written the same stories about longing. I have looked up
and not applied to the same teaching gigs in other cities, warmer cities
farther south, DC or Atlanta. The same old stuffed animals remain on my
same old bed.

We are both still single. On a typical Friday night—which this is not—we
drink enough to laugh but not enough to wind up with our eyes closed being
navigated down the hall. We go to Mad Maxie’s downtown, where under the
hellish red lights and the swinging cowboy-style door he flirts with the
bartender or buys drinks for some twig at the bar or, catastrophically,
both; I wait in the back booth for him to fail. Usually he does. Then we
split a taxi home and order a pizza and talk about politics or my students
or his brothers or our next apartment until we fall asleep, one on the
futon, one on the armchair. Whichever of us wakes first drapes the other in
a blanket on the way to bed. If it’s him, he leaves a cup of water and a
chocolate by my head. If it’s me, I leave a glass of seltzer and I watch
him for a while. His eyelashes lie long as a girl’s on his cheeks.
Sometimes I think, if I could watch him closely enough, I would see his
stubble at the moment of its poking through his skin.

But I can’t risk watching him that closely.

Jesus, he says, lugging me past his bedroom and through my own doorway,
you’re heavy.

You’re the one who said I needed to stand up, I say.

Well, here, he says. We’re here. Go. Sleep.

I’m still a little drunk. I don’t release him. He pushes me down onto my
semi-made bed, head first, back bent, butt in the air. I open my eyes. I
crawl toward the mountain of stuffed animals at the head of the bed. I
remember that I am not wearing pants. Tomorrow, he will not mention this
aspect of today. I start to slump into the clean pillows against the wall,
but he drops my bathroom pillow at the foot of the bed and then—I can’t
believe it—sits down next to it, so I about-face like a lab rat and burrow
into the purple cotton pushed up against his lap. I wonder how many shower
beers he consumed. He has never touched my bed with so much as a pinky
finger. I ask him is he the drunk one now. He says what, and I think to
myself what are you doing you idiot don’t look a gift beer in the bottle,
so I say, Nothing.

Maybe I have broken all of our patterns by leaving the party first. Because
him on my bed is not part of any routine, typical or atypical. I don’t know
what to do about it. He seems not to know, either. Now that he isn’t
lifting my shoulders or spirit in service of his self-assigned
task—relocate drunk girl—he’s not so assured in how he touches me. He pats
me on the back like a burped baby. It’s quiet enough between us to hear the
ambulance sirens on the street and the tree branch knocking on my window
like a secret code. Now is the moment, I’m thinking: confess and find out
if he has something to confess. If he does, break the lease on this
black-moldy place and share a one-bedroom and start writing stories about
having instead of wanting. If he doesn’t, move the fuck out, stat. He is
looking at me like he’s waiting for me to start changing everything. But
then when you have a secret the whole world looks at you with knowing eyes.
Maybe I just have lint in my hair.

If you keep doing that, I say, toward his patting hand, I’m going to vomit.

You’re not, he says. Unless you make yourself.

Fine, I say, you’re right. Still. If you’re going to touch me, touch me
nicely or not at all.

I am not surprised that he picks not at all. But then he does surprise me:
He keeps on staying. The streetlight through my window casts him in a warm
yellow. He picks up a stuffed crocodile from my menagerie. My head is on
the purple pillow in his lap. As good as in his lap. He pushes a stuffed
hippopotamus into my hands. For a second as he looks down, I can see a
glowing patch of skull through the dark hair at the crown of his head. He
is nine inches taller than me; I never see him from above. He has a bald
patch. Instantly, I adore it. I poke a finger into this mysterious new part
of him.

His crocodile claw punches my hippo in the snout.

Hey! I say, pulling my arm away.

Fight back, he says, but my little hoof has already kicked the green felt
of his tail.

We fight. He bites me on the button nostril; I paw at his screenprinted
scales; we make little oof sounds, his hissing and reptilian, mine low and
lumbering, until we mix up each other’s noises and the commentary stops
aligning with the scuffle. I want to win. I’ve got his crocodile in a
headlock. But then he says, Be nice now, and I let the little figure fall
to his lap because the fight goes out of me instantly.

On the nights when he doesn’t fail, I try my best to flirt with somebody,
too. Usually I succeed. To him I am fat but I am not, to others, even ugly.
To some I am cute, to some outright hot. I touch their knees or giggle at
the things their mouths say, but I don’t even see them. I am looking over
their shoulder, behind their ear, tracking him closely. If he kisses his
papergirls, I kiss my invisible boys. If he leaves the bar with his, I
leave the bar with mine. I never leave first. Sometimes he decides to spend
the night with me instead of them, even after he has kissed them, and those
are the sweetest nights, because on those nights he says Thank God I have
you, and if I fall asleep first, no matter how late the next day I wake up,
he hasn’t left the living room to sleep alone.

My hippopotamus props his crocodile on his knee. Before I can second-guess
myself, I press their snouts together. Our real hands touch, hot and hard
around the plush.

He doesn’t pull back, his hand or the toy. He applies pressure into my
knuckles. He makes a suctioning noise with his lips. The wet lick-sound of
a kiss. He would make a roguish father. Playful. Kind.

I sit up. I look him in the eye, the scalp, the jaw where our animals are
joined. Now is the moment. He is waiting on my bed for me to start. I have
to be undaunted.

Are you in love with me? I say.

He is looking at my lips with such familiarity that I wonder, for the first
time, whether on the nights he wakes up first he watches me the same secret
way I watch him.

No, he says.

I flinch. But then I rearrange my face. Undaunted, I tell myself. It’s
possible that he is as afraid as I am of the consequences of admission.
It’s possible he doesn’t want to lose me, either, my friendship, this
little pseudofamily we’ve made. It’s possible that, if I’ve faked it all
this time, he’s faked it too. He might not know the time for faking is
over. So I say, Would you tell me if you were?

A long time passes. I notice that I don’t feel drunk anymore. A rustle from
the kitchen might be a plastic bag unfurling or a mouse. He fidgets. On the
nights when he doesn’t fail, when he does leave the bar with his papergirls
and I follow suit with my invisible boys, I end up sleeping with them and
feeling nothing between my legs but the story I will tell him tomorrow.
Then he and I meet for breakfast, early, because we both want out. I eat
pancakes and I look at the neon sign for the laundromat instead of at his
eyes, and I tell him I am sad about boys and maybe I even cry, and I feel
relief seep like a muscle relaxant through my ribcage. I feel the rock of
my heart turn to feather. I feel ten times lighter. I have gotten to tell
the truth before him, instead of suppressing, waiting, taking what little I
get.

Would you tell me if you were in love with me? I prod, in my low hippo
voice.

In one sudden, violent motion, he sweeps the plush-and-cotton junk off his
lap. He uses a low person voice I’ve never heard before to say, Yes.

Something falters inside me.

One of these Fridays he will find a skinny girl for keeps, I think. I am
lying an inch away from him in the near-dark and seeing this future with
utter clarity. Maybe they will play and drink and fall asleep on each
other’s shoes on the bathroom floor; maybe she will try to wear his too-big
shirts and fall right out of them; maybe they will let each other rot
through nausea or thunderstorms or the unknown first-response of a sudden
death. I will never know. Over four years I have seen him shave and cook
and bald, but I have never seen him want a girl like me. Some truths don’t
change, as surely as some truths stay hidden.

Are you in love with me? he says, in that dangerous bass.

He is leaning so far away from big ungainly me that his bald patch is
halfway out the door. Over four years on the east coast, ocean always
slapping in the wrong ear, he’s become the only family I’ve got. Yes is the
only true thing I can say, but I can’t bring myself to say it.

I’m shivering again. I lay my head back on his lap, where the pillow isn’t
anymore. I am careful to keep my head light. My neck strains. I reach back
and pull the quilt over myself, wrongways, flipping it down from the head
of the bed so the cold satin upside covers me instead of the warm downy
inside.

Would you tell me if you were in love with me? he says, when after long
minutes I don’t answer.

He hasn’t budged. My silence hasn’t edged his head back into the room. I
decide to be a little brave. No, I say. I wouldn’t.

It is as good as an admission. I feel this instantly. His new muscles tense
so fast the mattress lurches. He stands, lets my head collapse low to the
mattress, tosses a chocolate from his pants pocket to the bed, misses,
steps on something soft that rocks his balance as he walks out the door. He
leaves. I wonder will he ever come back. I wonder if he will move away
before I get the chance to, clear his things out overnight so when I go to
the bathroom tomorrow morning there’s no curtain and only one toothbrush
and a trashcan full of tampons. I wonder if he will find a sublettor or
call the leasing office or mail me next month’s check.

I’m cold. I was never this cold back in California. I don’t want to have
spoken and lost him. What will I do with all this knowledge, about his
brothers and his shower beers and the way he takes his coffee? Without him
I have no life. Tomorrow I will have to move away and start from scratch,
again, four years older and so much more tired. From the edge of the bed, I
can see the chocolate wrapped in foil on the floor. I plan not to eat it,
knowing I will.

* *

And then, out of nowhere, he comes back. It must be five a.m. I haven’t
moved, or slept. I stare at the yellow silhouette of him in the doorway. He
is the most precious shape. Broad shoulders, thin calves. Like a bowling
pin, inverted. Maybe I can see his stubble poking through his skin. Maybe
he is here to say he lied like I lied, he has been as cowardly as I am.
Maybe he is here to be the one of us who’s brave.

He retakes his seat next to my head. My shoulders where the flipped-down
blanket doesn’t reach are goosebumped. If he would only be brave, then our
whole lives are set. If he says they weren’t true, the lies he said before,
then I will hug him and scrub the black mold and always buy groceries and
say he is absolutely categorically forbidden from dying first.

Courtney, he says.

Right here, I say.

I was thinking, he says, and then he says, You should write a story called
Tactical Chunders.

I wait a long time to speak. The muddy yellow of the streetlight is ceding
to the shrill yellow of the sun. The first thrums of a headache are
pounding through my temples. He is acting normal. Giving me an out. I was
drunk tonight, was all. We don’t have to remember if I don’t want to. We
can pretend I fell asleep first, right there in his shirt on the bathroom
floor, after pulling the trigger and ending a typical Friday night, and
that I kicked my stupid old unchanging playthings to the floor when I woke
beside a piece of chocolate and walked myself to bed.

You dare me? I say.

He nods his head, but not in the joking manner of the wanting-to-forget. A
little bit of bald glimmers. He’s not packing up overnight. Not if I’m
careful. If I’m careful and a liar, and he stays, then I can stay. And
yet—he is nodding in the most slow, serious way I have ever seen him nod.
Like maybe if I just said yes and did it he would love me back.

No fucking way, I tell him, and laugh, and kick him out of my room, and
then I curl up in the hot place where he was sitting and make myself small
so I can fit my whole body where his body was and cry a little and try to
hold his heat until it goes away.