In the Middle of Somewhere (18 page)

Rex stands abruptly and opens my refrigerator. He shakes his head and I know he’s seeing my collection of takeout condiments and a stain from last week’s leftovers that leaked.

“You don’t have any food,” he says resignedly, and waves me off before I can make any excuses. He opens the freezer and takes out… something. He rummages through my cabinets and pulls out a can of beans and box of instant rice and starts fiddling with my stove.

“You have to light it,” I say. He picks up the fireplace matches that I’ve jammed into the oven door handle and gives me the same look Ginger gives me when she thinks I’ve said something particularly childish.

“Daniel,” he says, bending down to look at the stove. “You really need to talk to Carl—this stove doesn’t have a sensor on the pilot light.”

I walk over, but it just looks like any other old stove to me.

“Uh. Is that bad?”

“It’s not safe. If the pilot light goes out and the gas is still on… it’s not safe.”

“Okay,” I say, trying not to snap at him for patronizing me, since it’s obvious he’s freaked out about something else.

He puts a hand on my shoulder.

“I’m serious. Are you going to call Carl?”

“Um, I don’t really think he’ll get me a new stove, Rex. Besides, I hardly ever use it.”

His hand tightens on my shoulder like he wants to fight me on it, but he just turns back to the counter.

I don’t know where he found it, but he’s chopping a small onion and stirring it into the beans before I even see him find a knife that must have been here when I moved in. As happened before, after he’s been cooking for a bit, his shoulders relax and he starts to talk.

“I don’t want to get all heavy on you,” Rex says.

“Hey, come on. I started it by talking about my brother. Just tell me why it flipped you out so much. Here, I’ll put on some music,” I say when he doesn’t answer right away. I flip through my CD books for a few minutes trying to find the right thing. But what’s good background music for an unexpected confessional from the guy you just started dating and whom you barely know? I figure you can’t get more confessional than Tori Amos, and put on
Little Earthquakes
.

“You like Tori Amos?” Rex says, his back to me.

“Tori Amos is fucking amazing,” I say, ready to go to the mat for Tori.

“I know,” he says, “I guess I just thought you liked… I don’t know, harder rock stuff?” He says this like he wouldn’t know this “harder rock stuff” if he tripped over it. “Just, you’re all edgy and stuff.”

I’m about to prickle at this assessment when he sets a plate in front of me that looks like I’m in a Mexican restaurant. There’s fluffy yellow rice and beans with onion that smell like spices I know I’ve never bought, and a miniburrito, which must have been what he found in my freezer.

“What the hell?” I laugh. “Wow, thanks. Have some,” I say, but he waves it away.

He wanders around my apartment like he’s hoping to distract himself, but he’s shit out of luck because there isn’t much to look at except one bookshelf and a bunch of CDs.

“I didn’t have any friends,” Rex says, looking out my window toward the woods. “In school. We moved so often I never had time to make any. And anyway, I was so shy I couldn’t talk to anyone, even if I’d wanted to.”

He wanders over to my bed, and then to the stereo. He flips through the CD book I left out and then turns the stereo off, Tori cutting out mid-”Winter.”

“But people didn’t really mess with me either. I was just invisible.”

I can’t imagine it. Rex invisible. Even now, it’s like the whole room has arranged itself in relation to him.

“When I was fifteen, we moved back to Texas because one of my mom’s boyfriends had some business there. Shitty little town called Anderson. The school was smaller, though, and after about a year, I made this friend. Well, he made me, really. Kept talking to me all the time at school even though I didn’t say anything back. Real chatterbox.” Rex smiles. “Funny-looking kid. This wiry red hair and a big old grin. Kinda scrawny. Anyway, he’d show up at my house and just take me with him wherever he went. He’d talk and I’d listen. And then one day he kissed me. I was so surprised I about fell over. He socked me on the shoulder and said, ‘Just wondering,’ and smiled at me. When I picked my jaw up off the floor, I kissed him back.”

Rex wanders over to my bookshelf and he scans the titles. He goes right for
The Secret History
, running a finger over the mud-spattered spine. When he speaks again his voice is strained.

“We’d have sex in the woods, near this little park. No one really went there. One day these three guys found us. I didn’t hear them. They started… you know, whaling on us. And Jamie. He was a little guy.”

Rex walks back to the window and looks out, hands in his pockets. From the way he’s talking, it’s clear that Jamie wasn’t just some fuck in the woods. I want to ask about what he was to Rex, but I don’t want to interrupt. I can barely hear him when he starts talking again, his deep voice gone low and tight.

“One of the guys picked up a stick. Started hitting us with it. I kept trying to get up. To stop them from hurting Jamie. But I wasn’t strong enough.” When he says this, his muscles flex, arms tightening and shoulders bunching. “They ran away when some trucker wandered over to take a piss in the woods. He’s the one who radioed for an ambulance, they told me later.”

My stomach is in a knot. I stopped eating about two bites into Rex’s story, but I wish I hadn’t eaten those. I walk over to him, but his posture radiates “Stay away.” I sit down on my bed facing him.

“What happened?” I choke out.

“I was out for days,” he says, squinting at something out the window. “Busted eye socket and chin. Broken ribs. Took my appendix out.” He rests his forehead against the window. “Jamie never woke up. Head trauma.”

My swallow sounds loud in the quiet of the room.

“Fuck,” I breathe. I don’t know what else to say.

Rex taps the windowsill with the heel of his hand, and I can see him getting it together. “So, you can see why I don’t take real kindly to your brother.”

He sits down on the edge of the bed next to me and bumps my thigh lightly with his closed fist. “Listen,” he says, “I think maybe that’s not the kind of thing you talk about on a date. But I’m not real good with polite get-to-know-yous. So.”

I like this about Rex. He goes for things and explains them if he thinks they need to be explained, but he doesn’t seem to second-guess himself and he doesn’t seem to regret anything he says.

I turn my nose into his shoulder and breathe him in.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I know that’s not—”

“Thanks,” he says quickly, and I can tell he’s done talking about this.

I scoot backward and lie down on my bed, holding my arm out to him.

He hesitates, but then sinks down beside me, turning into my body and throwing his arm over my stomach. I hold him as close as I can.

“After that,” he says softly, leaning into my touch, “I knew I had to make it so I’d never be in that position again.”

His voice is muffled in my neck and I feel the words before I hear them.

“I had to be strong enough. For whatever happened.”

“Rex,” I say, “it wasn’t your fault.” It sounds like a useless cliché before it’s even out of my mouth.

He slides his hand under my shirt to stroke my back.

“Hey, Daniel?”

“Hmm?”

“Could I, maybe, stay here tonight?” He tenses, waiting for my answer. I’m embarrassed because my sheets are dirty, my bed’s a saggy piece of shit, and I don’t even have coffee to offer him in the morning. But his weight feels right.

“Yeah, please stay,” I say.

I mentally run through all my clothes to see if I can offer him anything to sleep in and come up with nothing that would possibly fit him. I wonder if it’s ungrateful to leave the food he made me congealing on the table. I should definitely brush my teeth.

Rex just strips and climbs under my covers. I jump up to make sure the door’s locked and turn off the lights, and I duck into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I set my phone alarm and toss it onto the windowsill. Then I drop my clothes on the floor at the foot of the bed and crawl in next to Rex, shivering. His skin is giving off enough heat that I can feel it without even touching him. I press a small kiss to his shoulder and lie on my back beside him, barely touching. I’m not sure if he wants me to hold him or to be left alone. After a while, he grabs my hand and squeezes it, like we’re a part of a string of paper dolls joined at the wrist.

We stay that way for a minute, and then he reaches over to my other hand and pulls me toward him. It’s kind of awkward the way he hauls me onto him and I’m not sure what he wants. Then I realize that he’s positioned me the way I woke up on Sunday morning, half on top of him with my leg thrown over his hip and my cheek on his chest. He’s asleep before I can decide if I like it or not.

October

I
T
’
S
BEEN
a week and a half since my date with Rex and I’ve only seen him once, when we met for a quick coffee at the library on Saturday. I don’t know why I thought I’d be
less
busy than I was in grad school once I got a job, but I was obviously wrong.

Peggy Lasher is officially my arch-nemesis. When I got to my office on Friday, I found an e-mail from her (with Bernard Ness, the chair of the department, cc’d) thanking me in advance for being willing to cover her classes in the coming week because her husband’s mother had died and she would be leaving for New York immediately. I’m not proud of the fact that my first thought wasn’t to feel sorry for her loss, or even pissed that she’d assumed I’d help her out; it was a gut-deep jealousy that she would be within two hours of Philly—unless by New York she actually meant Buffalo or something.

Of course, being pissed followed swiftly. When I mentioned it to Jay Santiago, who has become my go-to for reality checks about the department, he said that since it was such a small school the newest hire was often asked to cover classes. This was apparently school-specific, because as far as I know nothing of the sort was the culture at Penn.

Peggy’s a Romanticist—not a specialty of mine—so I had to do some major cramming to feel comfortable teaching her classes. One was an intro to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lit, which was okay because it was mostly stuff I’d read in grad school. But her second class was a 300-level class on Romantic poetry for English majors, which took every spare moment of my time to prepare for.

In a school the size of Sleeping Bear, reputation is everything. The students all talk to each other and if you have a reputation for being a bad or boring teacher, your classes won’t fill, which is the first sign that a department won’t keep you around. So, it was very much in my best interest to make Peggy’s students think I was awesome so they’d take a chance on my classes next semester.

Friday morning, after Rex spent the night, we’d made plans to spend the weekend together at his house, so when I found the e-mail from Peggy I was doubly pissed because I knew it meant the end to our relaxing weekend. I explained about subbing for Peggy and he said he understood, but I’ve been a little worried that Rex feels like I abandoned him after the story he told me Thursday night. I can’t stop thinking about it. Now that I know his mom and his first lover both died, his protectiveness makes a lot of sense. I still can’t exactly picture Rex as the shy kid he described, but the idea of him going through something like that makes me feel sick.

And, somehow, more even than the beating and Jamie dying, it’s Rex’s decision to change his body that hits me the hardest. His need to believe that if he were only physically strong enough then he would be able to protect everyone he cared about. He didn’t mention it, but he must feel like his size protects him too.

W
HEN
I
get to Rex’s, he’s sitting at a small table in the living room grumbling while sketching something that looks like the plans for a dresser, Marilyn lying at his feet. There’s a fire crackling, and the whole house smells like cedar and pine and maple, like maybe Rex ate pancakes for breakfast. He’s wearing dark gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt worn thin, its sleeves pulling tight over his biceps every time he tenses his arm to erase.

“Hi,” I say, and I dump my stuff next to the table, slinging my jacket over the chair opposite his. Because of all the time I spent covering Peggy’s classes this week, I’m behind on my own grading. Rex told me to come on over and do it at his house and we could have dinner whenever I was done.

“Hey,” he says, and reaches an arm out to me. He slides his chair back enough to pull me onto his lap, something I thought only happened to children and, like, cheerleaders or girls who were about to get proposed to. But he’s warm, even in a T-shirt, and he smells so good.

“What are you grumbling about?”

“Hmm. Just work.”

“What’s up?”

“Oh, I want to do more woodworking and less odd jobs. Don’t get me wrong,” he says quickly, “I’m really glad the work’s there. I just—well, I’ve been trying to figure out if I could, I dunno. People around here know that I make furniture, but it’s not a big town. Obviously,” he adds at my snort. “So, I was just thinking about how to make it more of a business. Transition more into custom jobs like that. Just a thought.”