This is Not a Love Story (16 page)

U
NSURPRISINGLY
, L
EON
isn’t on reception as we leave the building. Julian must have known he wouldn’t be there—he wouldn’t have wanted to face him, not with me.

I convince him we don’t need to stop and get my medicine; it would mean calling through. It would mean someone knowing we had left, and that would mean leaving a trace, however vaporous. I convince him I’m okay, and it’s only by sheer force of will that I don’t cough as soon as we get out of that claustrophobic warmth.

The huge graying space of sky above us feels wonderful, feels free, even if it is cold as fuck. Like tourists in a foreign land, we stop in the middle of the pavement and take it all in: the Technicolor traffic, all exhaust fumes and noise, the consuming crush of people hurrying to work down this busy thoroughfare, pushing past or trying to ignore us. All of it.

Julian glances over at me and, of all things, I smile. What fools we are. What fucking bleakly glorious streets.

By eight, we regret skipping breakfast—but we weren’t feeling as rational
then
as we are now, shuffling along the freezing embankment, hunger gnawing a hole inside us so deep it’s painful.

Funny how rational being hungry and cold can make you feel. Funny what becomes important when you have nothing solid to tether yourself here, no home, no constancy. Funny that, however bad the shelter was for so many fucking reasons, right now I wish I was back there, sat in that soulless common room. I want to be warm; I want to be fed. I want this fucking cough to give up the ghost. I don’t want to think about consequences, about tomorrow or tonight (I might not live that long). I am only certain of this moment, here with Julian. And if I thought he was any sort of tether, I was wrong because we are both adrift, and although hanging on to one another will not bring us back down to earth, it
will
keep us alive—I know it will. It has to. I have nothing else but hope.

Funny that it’s times like these I think about things like this.

An icy mist hangs above the river, hiding the far bank from view. Even the city’s tall buildings are shrouded, made beautifully indistinct, like a pencil drawing unfinished and lost before now. The world recreated in grayscale. All things stretched, like gossamer, between white and black.

This is what I will sketch when we get to Cassey’s and I can feel my fingers again. This empty world. The pad deep inside the pocket of my coat swings against my ribs with every step. A weight, a reminder, an escape.

The sky is now the deep heavy gray of dirty snow, and I hope to God it doesn’t, because being wet and cold out here tonight will kill us. I hope Cassey has some boxes or something we can use as shelter. More deeply, and secretly, I hope that she will take pity on us, as she has before, and let us stay at the cafe. Even though she now rents out the rooms we used, we would sleep on the hard cafe floor without complaint. But I can’t let such desperation, or such hope, rise up to the surface in me.

But long before we reach Cassey’s, we can see something is wrong. We must be around 750 meters away down the embankment when we see there is a blackness about the place that is unfamiliar. Even in the dull morning light that refuses to give substance to anything, the edges of the building that once seemed so solid now seem smudged and insubstantial, the roof whisked away, swallowed by the nights we have been gone. It’s definitely not the mist. Not a dream.

I blink and glance over at Julian, my fingers brushing the hem of his worn-through jumper as he turns toward me, his face as anxious as mine.

Cassey’s
, I mouth.

And we run, skidding on the frost that glitters menacingly in the glare of the street lamps—running until I have to stop and cough so hard I throw up, bile burning my throat. I hit the frozen ground with my hand, frustrated. There is a little blood, which I shift to hide. I tell myself it’s just a reaction to the cold.

Julian crouches down beside me and rubs my upper back with one hand and places his other arm around me. It’s times like these he feels so much bigger than me, so much stronger, even though there’s not much difference, even in our height, anymore.

My body just wants to cough, on and on, until I am spilled out and diminished with every wracking contraction.

“Relax,” he whispers soothingly, then places his lips closer to my ear so his warm breath ghosts across the base of my throat. “I’m sorry, Remee, I’m sorry, baby, we shouldn’t have run.”

The grass looks black beneath my splayed fingers. The color of everything dulled, deadened.

He takes a deep breath—I feel it shudder through him—lets his head fall against my shoulder, his soft hair brushes the back of my neck, and I know he’s seen it, seen the burned-out shell of Joe Brown’s cafe—
Cassey’s
cafe—that’s on the very edge of my vision, though I’m trying hard not to look.

W
E
SLIP
inside the boarded-up entrance. By the looks of it, we are not the first to have done so.

It might be my imagination, but I can still smell the acrid black smoke that must have darkened the sky. I can still taste it at the back of my throat as we pick our way across the ruin. Water drips on us from the few skeletal beams left above, forming large black puddles that cover the floor, their dark edges paralyzed by ice.

Tables and chairs lie mostly intact but scattered and overturned, their legs bowed and buckled, as though dropped from a height. The till is broken open and empty.

On the floor behind the counter, under the mess of broken cups and plates, is the picture I drew of two boys kissing, the lines all blurred and faint, the heavy paper soaked to near transparency.

I pretend I don’t see it. It’s easier that way.

There is a bare bit of shelter in the back room. The roof in here still holds tight, and though the room is wet, the walls black with smoke, Julian picks up two sturdyish chairs and urges me to sit down on one of them.

He cradles his head in his hands briefly, then takes a deep breath and looks up.

“What do you think happened?”

I shrug, clueless, and not actually wanting to think about it really. I’m half-aware, avoiding the screaming truth. I’m still only looking with the corner of my eye. I can’t face it full on.

“Cassey will be okay.” He touches my hand. If I could say the words back to him, I would. As it is, I just nod. But it’s not enough.

“What are we gonna do?” His voice breaks horribly over the whisper. I can hear the anguish in it.

I wish I could pull him into my arms. I wish I was strong enough, but I’m not right now. I’m too brittle, I’m made of glass, and I don’t.

This place was always our shelter, countless days we spent warm within these walls. This place was our hope. Cassey was our hope.

Where are we going to go now?

We shouldn’t stay here
, I sign.

“Why not?” There is an edge to his voice I don’t usually hear.

I’m struggling to find words, reasons.

We could go to Gem’s.

“No.” He shakes his head. “We’ll be okay here for a while. It’s sheltered.”

He’s being blind. And I know just beneath the surface he’s distraught, but I push it.

Is it, though?
I write quickly on the back page of my pad. The page already half-full of our scribbled conversations, stupid doodles, I-love-yous.
Yeah it’s sheltered from the streets, but we’re not the first to find our way in, and we won’t be the last and….
I stop writing. It hurts to see the place reduced like this to a cinder, and I can’t stay.

And now I reach out, touch the still-bruised skin on the side of his face, feel his hair fall against my fingers. There is so little light, and the room is so dark we are but shadows. So dark that when he snaps, I don’t see it, but I feel the tension jolt through him, sudden and electric as he stand up and kicks over the chair.

“You look to me like I know what to do
all the time
. And I don’t, Remee, I don’t have a fucking clue. I don’t know what to do to make this okay. I don’t know what to do now. I’m
trying
to make the right decision!”

Spinning around, he vanishes farther into the gloom, pacing back and forth across the debris-strewn floor.

He stops in front of the boarded-up window, hits the frame with his fist, and then collapses against it.

Unsure of how I feel, I go to him. Wrap my arms around his shoulders. Sign
it’s okay
against his chest.

I think he’s going to push me away, but he turns in my arms, hugs me back, and sobs, “It’s not okay. None of this is okay. I can’t do it anymore… I can’t, Remee… I can’t.”

I search his face with my lips, kissing his closed eyes, his nose, his cheeks. Suddenly he spins me—I feel glass crush beneath the thin soles of our shoes—pushes me against the sheet of plywood covering the window, and finds my lips with his, crushes all the air out of my lungs, so I can’t cough, can’t do anything but kiss him back, suck his tongue into my mouth, and hear him groan helplessly.

We are lost.

I never want to be anything else.

He holds my hands high above my head and leans against me, pinning me in place. His teeth nip my jaw, then pull at the neck of my jumper to expose more skin to his mouth.

The pressure hurts me, and I want it to. I want him to leave a mark.

I’m stretched so tight I’m panting as he pushes my jumper up to expose my stomach. His teeth grazing my ribs send me beyond coherent thought.

I don’t remember taking off my trousers or wrapping my legs around Julian’s waist as he lifts me. I don’t remember the sharp sting as the plywood grazes my spine, or the pressure and sudden pain as his fingers push inside me, causing me to sob into his neck. I don’t remember him spitting into his hand, the wet heat of him as the head of his cock rests against the back of my thigh, and I don’t remember begging him in my mind to just push inside.

I don’t remember any of it until he stops and says, his words slow, his breath heavy with the exertion of holding me up and holding himself back, “We shouldn’t do this. We should use a condom.”

I shake my head. Fuck me. Just fuck me and make everything but this stop.

This need overrides everything. I take his hand and guide him, push my body down, feel the way it burns and the pressure builds as I take him inside me.

He mumbles wordlessly into my hair, kisses me, strokes my back, my neck, my cock. I feel him everywhere. He steadies himself on the window frame until he is sheathed so deep inside me I can’t breathe. It hurts. But the pain is good, thrilling, necessary.

For a moment we cling to one another in perfect stillness. The constant drip of dirty water, the distant rush of traffic, the voices in the street outside, are nothing, are not connected.

Everything stops.

And moves on.

In the tight crush of his arms, I can feel the faint tremor of his body as he cries silently into my hair. The wordless mumble becomes more coherent, and I feel the pressure build up behind my eyes too. I don’t want to fucking cry. I want to be fucked, and I want to forget.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he whispers over and over as he strokes me, his body barely moving against mine, barely pulling out, but it’s enough. “I’m sorry.”

And he feels so close, so fragile, I’m afraid I will feel him breaking apart inside me.

After, we curl into one another on the floor, away from the glass. We stay like that for hours until I can’t stand it anymore and I drag him up, ignoring the sharp pain in my chest, because now when I cough, it hurts.

We have to move. If we move, we’re still alive. If we stay here like this, it feels like we’re lying down and taking it, letting the shit pile on top of us and not fighting anymore. This place is gone. We’ll deal with it; we’ll find somewhere else.

Julian makes no protest. And while it’s easier for now, I know that ultimately it’s worse.

T
HE
STREETS
are too crowded now. It must be lunchtime already. We seem to be heading toward the financial district, toward the blank-eyed divide we usually avoid. I don’t know why I’ve come this way, making the both of us struggle through a tide of fucking beige-gray people all wrapped up in their fucking beige-gray little lives, pushing and glaring and just about fucking stepping on us as if we shouldn’t exist, as if our passage through the streets is somehow less important than theirs.

And it should all be bright sensory overload, the way cities are meant to be, but the fumes and the rain grind everything down to dull shades of gray. I drag Julian onward, my fingers twisted in the sleeve of his top, walking recklessly across busy road after busy road, stopping the traffic, daring the stupid cars to hit us. The rain picks up, and it might as well be snow, it’s so fucking cold. I need to stop and rest, I’m coughing so hard, but I know if I let go of Julian right now, he’ll sink down where we are, and I don’t have the strength to drag him up again. The emptiness in his expression is scaring me, and Gem is the only one I have to trust right now, the only one who might know what to do to help us.

But I’m not walking to Gem’s.

The rain becomes heavier, a gray mist obscuring our vision, soaking us to the skin. I search street after street before dragging us into a graffitied and drafty bus shelter, the sort with the red plastic seats that tip you off so you don’t get too comfortable and want to stick around too long. For an area so full of moneymaking businesses, it’s surprisingly rundown.

Without thinking I hold Julian close to me, slipping one arm around his waist, keeping the other still gripping his sleeve. Even as skinny as he’s become, he still feels solid to me. And all my anger drains out of me as the warmth of him touches me—warmth that colors the filthy streets with brightness, lightens the ashen sky—his body takes my weight and makes everything bearable. Almost.