Foxes (38 page)

I glance at my phone just to see Micky’s sunny smile on my lock screen. I have a text from him.

I love you
, it says.
I’m at the café. I’m waiting for you.

It’s as though he always knows what I need and when I need it. As though he can read my mind.

I can do this. I am doing this.

Outside in the street, the New York heat is even more stifling. It’s late summer and although Micky warned me about the heat, I still can’t quite believe how hot it is. It’s the hottest place I’ve ever been.

I see the café immediately. It’s busy, but there’s a young man sitting next to the window who glitters so bright he’s hard to miss. He draws my gaze—he takes my breath away. His wavy blond hair is getting long, and he wears it tucked behind his ears. He’s slight and beautiful, though he’d probably flutter his eyelashes more if someone said he was pretty. The tightfitting jeans and pink T-shirt look good on him. I’ve seen them before in pictures. Sometimes he wears short sparkly dresses and I tell him he’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. One day I hope he has the confidence to wear whatever he wants, whatever makes him feel good.

I wonder why it’s only me who’s staring.

He’s so focused on scanning the busy street that he doesn’t see me for a full five seconds. I know the moment he does. It’s weird, but I swear I can feel it like a tightness deep in my stomach, a thread pulled taut.

I still have to cross the street, but it’s hard because I can’t take my eyes off him and I walk into more than one person. Micky grins and puts his hand on the window as though he can reach through the glass.

This is taking too long.

Okay, so a café was a bad idea because I no longer want to talk first. I want eight months of touching his skin. Eight months of kissing him. Eight months of lying next to him while he sleeps, of watching him when he thinks I’m not looking, of reveling in the complete, utter peace I feel when I’m with him. The sort of peace no one else has ever given me.

I want eight months of missing him erased from my heart. And we can’t do that in a café full of people.

Before I even reach the café door, I see Micky shove his chair back, and I’m not even fractionally inside the café before he crashes into me, wrapping warm arms tightly around my back and crushing me hard.

He feels so solid and strong and real it takes my breath away. After eight months of seeing him every day in pictures and on video calls, I didn’t think I’d find the difference in his body so noticeable. But it is.

We stay like that until someone shyly asks us to move out of the way so they can leave.

“Can we do the café thing later?” Micky asks.

I can hear the emotion in his voice, feel it in the way his heart is hammering hard in his chest.

“Definitely,” I whisper shakily, letting him take my hand firmly in his and lead me away from the café and down the street.

We get one block before he pulls me into another hug.

“Didn’t think I’d feel like this,” he murmurs. “We talked just before you got on the plane. I want to kiss you so badly.”

I know what he means. This, though—my heart trying to beat its way through my ribs—I didn’t expect either. I want to be close. I want to show him how much I’ve missed him. “How far is it?” I ask.

“A few more blocks. Come on, we’ll run.”

So we run, my backpack bouncing against the small of my back, Micky pulling ahead because he runs every day now—it’s good for his heart—and he has long legs and a natural runner’s grace that means he’ll always be faster than me.

For the past eight months, Micky has lived in his Aunt Emory’s apartment on the Upper West Side. She has a big house in some posh part of New Jersey. Initially she bought the apartment for the odd weekend she spent in the city, but she started to let it out to friends who wanted a break in the city, and for now it’s Micky’s. Micky told me Aunt Emory is his mother’s sister and she isn’t too fond of his father, so she agreed to keep it a secret that he’s staying here.

For the first few months, while Micky was in and out of the clinic, Benjamin lived here with him. Now he comes and goes, depending on school and where he’s playing.

I know what the building looks like before we get there. The inside of the flat too, but it’s not the same as actually being here. The tall red stone building looks more imposing in real life.

The concierge nods at us as we pass, both of us out of breath and smiling.

If he looks at me a little longer than is polite, I try not to notice. I’m different. I always will be. Sometimes I think about my reactions and how they’ve changed, and I wonder if I’m getting better at pretending or better at dealing with things. Or if this is just confidence, having a bigger life, full of more things than worry. I guess it doesn’t matter what it is, really.

Two days a week, Micky works up at a clinic in Queens, doing makeup for people who have scars or skin problems they want to cover up. His therapist set it up for him. He was kind of shy when he told me about it. I wanted to hug him. Probably as much as I do now.

He knows covering the scars on my skin isn’t the right thing for me, though in the past it was all I wanted. Now my scars are too much a part of how I see myself. It’s other people’s reactions that bother me the most. There’s this loud voice in my head sometimes that says I don’t have to look how other people think I should look.

Dashiel was right. So what I work on is not hiding.

We take the stairs two at a time.

Aunt Emory has the penthouse. It has a roof garden. The bedroom Micky sleeps in opens out onto it and the sunrises are spectacular. On one side, the trees of Central Park rise up all green and on the other, the Hudson River flickers grayly, but I don’t care about any of that right now. All I care about is getting in there, somewhere we can say hello to one another properly.

When we reach the door, Micky jams the key in the lock and curses when it doesn’t give. I put my hand over his and twist it the other way, and the lock clicks and the door opens and we stumble inside.

As soon as Micky kicks the door shut, his mouth finds mine. I back him up until I have him pressed against a wall. I hold his hands above his head and lean my weight against him.

“Looks like I maybe missed you a little bit,” he murmurs between hungry openmouthed kisses.

He pulls my bottom lip between his teeth, then drops down to bite my neck and my shoulder, as though he’s marking me so everyone knows I’m his. The thought makes me groan. The sensations are almost too much. Suddenly he stops. He presses his forehead against my chest, shoulders heaving. I let go of his hands and instead hold him tight.

“One day I’m not going to be always fucking crying,” he whispers.

“It’s okay,” I whisper back, kissing his hair. “I’m not going anywhere.”

My visa for America lasts six months. Before it runs out, we’re both going back to London. Centrepoint want to talk to me about a volunteer’s position on their street team, and it’s slightly complicated because of his visa, but Micky has been accepted at University College London to do performance art and design.

The earliest Micky can apply for a UK visa after having been removed for being there illegally is a year. So we have at least four months here. We’re not staying in New York all that time, though. We’re going to Arizona. Micky’s going to show me the desert… and maybe his family. He’s not sure yet. His therapist thinks it would be a good idea, in the right setting, with the right support. Micky’s scared that seeing his family will mess up everything he’s worked for these past eight months and he’ll relapse. But he has relapsed, many times, and every time he got over it. He’s relapsing now—it’s why I’m here two months early.

Benjamin is on tour, and although he would have dropped everything, I wanted to come. I was desperate to. Even though it meant not completing any of the courses I was doing. I convinced myself I was ready.

John and Dillon helped me sort out my passport, and it came months ago, but Micky and I decided saying good-bye to each other again would be too rough on us if I came for a short visit and it would be better to wait it out until we could be together properly.

We made it
,
though
, I think, squeezing him tight.

Eight months, a lot of commitment, quite a few tears, and a lot of heartache. But we made it. We made this work. If the streets, a freezing winter, grief, nearly dying, and three thousand miles can’t break us, nothing will.

“
THAT T-SHIRT
!
I lived in that. God, I was a dorky kid. And there is nothing more dorky than a dorky kid with a comic-book obsession.” Micky flops down on the hotel bed next to me, puts his arms around me, and rests his bony chin on my shoulder so he can look at what I’m looking at.

Micky was a gorgeous kid with an adorable comic-book obsession. I can’t hide my smile as I flick through the photo album Benjamin brought over from their parents’ house earlier. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to show Micky photographs of my childhood, if there are any out there somewhere.

“Your mum looks different in this one.”

“Yeah, I like to think she was happy once.” Micky turns his head away and rests it against my back. “Not seeing them is the right thing to do, isn’t it?” he asks softly.

Micky’s parents don’t know he’s here in Arizona. After a week of Micky coming close to self-destructing, we realized the stress of seeing them just wasn’t worth it. Stress of any sort is bad for his heart. He has regular checkups, but his heart will always be a little bit broken. He’ll probably have to take medication for the rest of his life.

Tomorrow we’re heading out of Phoenix.

I reach down and find his hand so I can lock our fingers together.

“What shall I order? Thai, Mexican, McDonald’s?” Benjamin asks, peering around the doorway joining his room to ours.

“Benjamin, if you don’t start knocking on doors before you come in, one day you’re going to get a shock. We could be doing
anything
,” Micky says lightly, pushing himself up, but I can feel the way he has tensed.

“I wouldn’t be shocked if you were having sex. You make too much noise anyway.”

“Thanks!” Micky pulls a face and flops dramatically back on the bed.

Acting as though anything to do with food is not a big thing is what Micky needs from us, but we’ll all go hungry before he answers Benjamin’s question. I know he has a weakness for junk food, but it makes him feel sick afterward.

“Mexican,” I answer. “Not spicy.”

Benjamin leaves and I go back to looking at the photographs. Sometimes Micky points someone out—an aunt, a cousin, Thor in a poster on his bedroom wall—but mostly he leans against me, his fingers tracing circles on my back under my T-shirt.

“Want to go for a walk?” he asks quietly when I reach the end of the album.

“Before Benjamin gets back with the food?”

“Yeah… look.” Micky points out the large window at the sky. “You’ve never seen the sun set in the desert,” he whispers. “Benjamin will understand. I’m not avoiding food, I promise. We won’t be long.”

We head outside. The hotel is on the very edge of the desert. Or that’s what it looks like anyway—all the green sprinkler-fed hotel grass ends abruptly with the narrow stone path we’re standing on. After that there is nothing but rocks and dust and prickles. A hotel at the edge of the world.

Micky takes my hand. For a moment I don’t want to move. I like the idea of being on the brink of something. I glance behind us at the hotel.

It’s a posh hotel. There’s a lot of marble in the foyer and the staff wear expensive-looking suits. Benjamin is paying for everything. As he’s away on tour with the orchestra quite a bit, their parents gave him a credit card. He makes sure he spends a lot of money on Micky. He thinks it’s their parents’ duty to do this even if they don’t know about it.

Micky and I have no money. In two years, when Micky is twenty-one, he’ll have access to his trust fund, but there is no way for him to get to it before then. Even if I knew how much money that was, it doesn’t mean anything to me. Not really. No matter how hard I try to get my head around it, things like that remain stubbornly out of reach.

I never imagined I’d be somewhere like this. It’s a million miles from everything I’ve ever known. For a second I think of Dashiel. I try to imagine what he’d say about it. I do this everywhere I go. My memory of him is a precious bright light I shine on everything. Sometimes I think he took a little piece of me with him when he died, and this is what I have to do to fill the space.

“The clouds are on fire,” I say softly, looking up.

“They’ll set the sky alight in a minute,” Micky says. “Watch.”

And they do. I see it. A fire above the world. A sky so big I can’t catch hold.

Arizona is beautiful. The sky is beautiful. But it isn’t what sets me alight. Micky is my fire, my sun, my sky, my world.

With a smile, he pulls me over the brink and into the desert.