Waiting for Clark (2 page)

Clark locked his gaze on my face, eyes narrowing like he was reading a complex math equation.
Me.
I was the complex equation. He was trying to see behind the mask, see if I’d changed. I resisted the urge to look away, instead meeting him stare for stare.

Is this going to be awkward
?
he questioned with his eyes. God, there was so much
hope
in the silvery depths of his eyes. It was as if every year of our friendship, including the last, terrible weeks were laid out, memories threatening to overwhelm me.

No,
I lied, shutting down this nonsense by looking down at my boots. If we were playing emotional chicken, I was the first to fold, and I could own that because it wasn’t just hope I’d seen in his eyes. There was heat too, just like there had always been. My throat squeezed tight around all the words I could never say.

“Hey, Clark, tell me all about your research!” Luckily, Tony saved me needing to make conversation, asking Clark all about Oxford and MIT and pumping him for information on his parents, who had a ranch outside of Bend. Charles lumbered up to the booth, his movements hindered by the Captain Atom getup, and got Clark to talk about running the Boston marathon. Meanwhile, I busied myself arranging our already neatly laid-out swag and trying to not act like I was hanging on Clark’s every word. Trying to pretend that the heat and attraction arcing between us was no big deal.

In other words, trying for business as usual as far as Clark was concerned. Even after a five-year hiatus, the game felt depressingly similar. I’d been attracted to him from the moment we’d met as roommates freshman year at Reed, but he was such a goody-goody, following all the rules and so darn earnest. I’d instinctively known that getting busy with a guy who couldn’t do casual and whom I had to live with the remainder of the year was a terrible idea. So I’d resisted. But somewhere along the way, he became integral to our friendship circle. And my life. But then sophomore year, when we weren’t roommates and I might have acted on the attraction, he had Derek. Then junior year I had a mistake named Joe. And finally, senior year we’d both been single… and roommates. Again. And just when it seemed like everything might be coming together for us, it all fell apart.

****

Five years ago

“Oh my God. I can’t believe we did that.” Clark flopped down next to me on my bed. The weary late November afternoon light filtered in through the large window between our beds. His was still littered with papers and both our laptops from the mad dash to finish the project the night before. I knew the mess was making him twitchy, but we were both too tired to care. Two weeks straight of working on our math modeling project had finally paid off when we’d presented our results to the class.

“That may be my sweetest
A
,” I said, groaning. “Can’t believe she didn’t have more questions for us after the presentation of our project.”

“You know you could have a lot more
A
s like this, if you applied yourself—”

“Now you sound like Professor Hanh. If I applied myself like this to every project, I’d be dead. We can’t all be four-point-oh mutants like you.” I shoved his shoulder.

“It worked. It really worked,” Clark said for like the hundredth time that day. I wasn’t sick of it yet or the goofy way he grinned when he said it. He was so darned happy at our success that it was hard not to bask in it with him.

“I could sleep for a week,” I said, rolling onto my side so I could see his smile better. “But first, pizza. Did we eat breakfast?”

“I did.” Clark laughed. “Pretty sure you drank two pots of coffee and called it good.”

“That I did. Remind me again why I signed up for a morning seminar?”

“Because I told you it would be fun.” Clark shoved at my chest, but I didn’t budge. “And I was right.”

“You weren’t wrong,” I countered. “If torture by spreadsheet is your idea of fun.”

“It totally is.” Clark sighed happily.

“Dork.” Our faces were too close together. I knew better, I really did. Time to roll away, order the pizza, clean his bed of papers so he could nap on his own side of the room. But I didn’t move away. Instead, some rogue impulse took hold of me, and I brushed his hair out of his face. It was that point in the fall term where everyone needed a haircut and hygiene took a backseat to deadlines. We’d both done a fast shower and shave before the presentation, and I could see the spots he’d missed with the razor along his jawline.

“Freak. You’d rather take the laptop apart than use it to its fullest potential.” Clark’s voice wavered a bit as he teased back.

“Guilty,” I whispered. My love of taking things apart wasn’t what I was apologizing for, and we both knew it, but he didn’t roll away, didn’t put that desperately needed distance between us.

Instead, we shifted closer to each other. I wasn’t sure who moved first, but suddenly our faces were closer than they’d ever been. I’d avoided this moment for three and a half years, but now that it was here, I was powerless to run from it. He sighed, full pink lips parting, and that was it, game over, take all my tokens.

I slid my lips over his like we’d been doing this for ages. I’d wanted to know what he tasted like for years now, but in that instant I realized I’d known all along: he tasted like the memory of all my favorite things. Sunshine. Coffee. Laughter. Cinnamon. Clark. Mainly that. He tasted like Clark and that made him automatically my favorite flavor on earth. There was no hesitation, no awkward bumping of noses or clacking of teeth. Our bodies were far ahead of our brains, hands seeking, mouths knowing, lips and tongues moving in concert.

He moaned. Or maybe I did. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were finally here— we’d finally tipped over from the weird land of “too close for friends but not a couple” we’d been in ever since the school year started. Our friendship had been building to this moment for three and a half years, and now that we’d finally kissed I was giddy. Felt like I could kiss him for hours, just acquainting my tongue with everything my eyes knew by heart. And I wanted to touch him too. I pulled his shirt loose from his belt— we were actually both wearing his shirts as I hadn’t had one clean. I slid my hands under the crisp cotton, seeking to know all his contrasts— smooth and fuzzy, warm and cool, muscle and softness.

Still kissing him, my hands ventured to his belt. I needed to feel him—

“Wait. Wait.” Clark pulled away from me abruptly, not only rolling away but also sitting up. He scrubbed at the soft hair I’d stroked only moments earlier. “We can’t do this.”

“Why?”
Please don’t tell me you’re back with Derek.
Anything but that. This was
our
time, damn it.

“I got a Rhodes Scholarship.” Clark looked like he might puke; green and pasty skin, trembling hands. My own were none too steady, as I shook my head, not sure whether to trust my ears. “They called last week. I didn’t want to disrupt our project by telling you yet—”

“Oh no, we couldn’t risk our GPAs.” My tone was biting and I didn’t care. “What the hell, Clark? You win one of the most prestigious scholarships for students in the entire country and you don’t tell me? And what the heck does that have to do with us kissing?”

Even as I asked, I knew it had
everything
to do with us kissing. And everything to do with how I’d grinned dopily at him two nights ago, thinking that maybe after this project was done, it would finally be time to… but no. It wasn’t our time. Not at all.

“I’ll be going to Oxford for two years in the fall. Three if I get the renewal I’m hoping for. And I got the letter from MIT yesterday too. I’ve got a position at the lab starting in the spring, then deferred admission while I complete my degree from Oxford.”

“Fuck.” Unlike the rest of us mere mortals, Clark was on track to graduate in December. I’d known he was looking at research positions he could do while waiting for grad school to start in the fall, but it hadn’t hit me until this moment what that really meant. Clark was leaving. He’d be gone in a little more than a month. And of course, genius boy had already lined up not one, but two prestigious graduate programs in mathematics and computer modeling.

“So you see, we can’t start something now—”

“No one was trying to start ‘something.’ Just two friends getting off.” I lied so hard my molars ached.

“Well, maybe you can do casual, but I can’t. I can’t just mess around with you for a month and then leave. And I’ve got to go, Bryce.”

“I know you do,” I said roughly. I might be bound to another semester at this school, bound to this city thanks to my father’s health, but Clark had had the Rhodes dream ever since I met him. No one deserved success more than him.

“I could fall in love with you. So easily,” Clark whispered.

I was already there. But of course I didn’t say that. “So you don’t want to kiss me again because you might fall in love with me?” I said instead, trying to wrap my head around what was happening.

Clark nodded. “I don’t see any way this ends without both of us getting hurt. Do you?”

I shrugged, my chest aching like I’d smashed a fifty-pound dumbbell into my sternum. “Guess not.”

We’d both witnessed our friend Tony barely survive a two-year, long-distance relationship that was more akin to a drubbing with a club than a romance. We’d laughed in private even as we empathized with him, sworn we’d never, ever do the distance thing with someone.

“It’s better that we don’t start. That way we can stay friends.”

I nodded once, throat too full of razor-sharp emotions to speak.

“You’re my best friend, Bryce. I don’t want to lose you.” Clark stuck out his hand like we were making a bargain, and fool that I was, I took it instead of kissing all this logic out of his brain.

Despite Clark’s intentions, things were beyond weird in the weeks that followed, the memory of what had happened— and more importantly what could have been— hanging over even harmless interactions like what toppings to order on the pizza. Then he was gone, and I was left with a half-empty dorm room and a closed-off heart.

****

Chapter Two

Clark,
Present Day

Bryce Weyland was the most stubborn man ever, and I’d known coming back to Portland wasn’t going to be easy. One look at Bryce in his Batman costume had confirmed I was going to have to work to get mere civility, let alone any glimmer of the friendship we’d once had. His chiseled— and decidedly scruffy— jaw had locked down at the first sight of me, and behind his ridiculous mask, his eyes had clouded over. I wanted to pull the mask off him, wanted to know whether he had laugh lines now, wanted to see more evidence that he’d changed than just an unshaven jaw.

I’d seen the murky eyes more times than I could count, especially in my final weeks at Reed. His muscles were even more built than I remembered, but some of that might have been the padding on his costume. Although I was talking to Tony about my projects, it was Bryce who had all my attention. His arms flexed as he straightened a stack of shirts and moved a sign three millimeters to the right. Nope, no padding in
those
biceps.

“Ohmigod!” A teen girl with huge glasses and a sailor-suit dress squealed, coming to a stop right in front of me. She was accompanied by friends dressed in a similar style— probably cosplaying an anime ’verse I wasn’t familiar with. “I
love
your cape.”

“Thanks. Did the lining myself.” I gave her a spin to make her smile.

“You
sew
.”
She giggled some more and turned and fanned herself to her friends. She appeared to be all of eighteen and I was twenty-seven and very much gay, and she still made me squirm with her unabashed approval.

“Yep.” I’d ordered the costume online, looking for the best quality I could find, and this worn-once, movie-quality suit seemed to fit the bill until it arrived with a fraying cape with a giant rip in the lining. Enter the also-used-once flag I had from last year’s Boston Pride, left over from the boyfriend with even less mileage than the suit or the flag. I could sew, thanks to all the years my mom made me do 4-H— the same youth group that taught her all the necessary rural life skills— so I’d pulled out the old lining and put my flag in. I’d done way better with the sewing than raising the pygmy goats the 4-H leader gave me one year. No biggie, but the girl acted like I’d solved a complex equation using a Fourier transform.

“Can I get a pic?” She held up her shiny red phone.

“Sure.” That was why I was there— Tony had told me he and Bryce figured having a variety of characters available for photo ops would help booth traffic.

“You and Batman please.” She made a begging face. “And stand close together.”

She giggled again, and I had a feeling we were about to end up on her Instagram with a slash-riffic hashtag like #KissingSuperheroes or something equally twee. But the chance to cozy up to Bryce? I didn’t mind that one bit. I threw an arm around him, swishing my cape a bit and using our height difference to clamp him in place. He smelled different. Not the aggressive, mountain-scented soap he’d favored in college, but something more expensive— a subtle herb-laced scent that tickled my nose and made me want to nuzzle him all over to find its origin. Hair product? Bodywash? I was game for a full-body scan.

The girl clicked the picture. “Only thing better would be if you guys kissed.”

“Not happening.” Bryce pulled away abruptly, answering any questions I had about whether “The Kiss” was as vivid in his mind as in mine. The memory was right there in his eyes— no mask could hide the exact shade of gold his eyes had turned while we’d kissed, and his eyes flashed that same shade before he looked away. However, while forgive-and-forget was item one on my agenda, forgiveness didn’t seem to even be in the same room with Bryce. Not with the glare he was shooting me as he went to go fiddle with a display.

To anyone else he probably looked industrious, but I knew Bryce— relaxed and happy Bryce lounged around, while nervous and angry Bryce messed with things that didn’t need it. We’d had more than one argument with him deconstructing some piece of electronics while we bickered over who should clean or how to approach a project. And our dorm room was never as clean as it was the last two weeks before I’d left for MIT.