“Thanks for the head’s up, Bernie.” I close my door. Returning to my desk, I hold my head in my hands and breathe out. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Chapter 18
Halston
“What are you reading?” Kerouac asks. It’s a rainy Tuesday night in August, three weeks until school starts.
“Rebecca.” Lightning flashes outside my window. “For the fourth time. Started it again a couple weeks ago, then I got busy. It’s crazy how much time you have when you’re not working though. I might read it a fifth time just for the hell of it.”
“A classic. Read to me.”
“Why? So you can jerk off this time?” I chuckle.
“No,” he says. “I did that a half hour before you called.”
“Were you thinking about me?”
“You and only you,” he says in such a way that I wholeheartedly believe him.
I smile, cracking the spine of Rebecca. “I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.”
“Have you ever loved anyone, Absinthe?” he asks.
“Not in any remarkable kind of way.” The roll of thunder in the distance rattles the windows.
“Has anyone ever loved you?”
“Not in any remarkable kind of way,” I echo, chuckling once. “Plenty of guys have claimed to have loved me. I’ve yet to say it back to anyone. I don’t want to say it until I know for sure that I mean it. What about you? Have you loved anyone?”
“Not so much that I couldn’t live without them,” he says. “So, in a way, no. Because if you truly love someone, you can’t stand to be without them. I’ve never felt that about anyone.”
“Mr. Complicated.”
“Always.” He sighs. “Love is overrated anyway. But sex? Sex is … everything.”
“My thoughts exactly.” I play it cool, neglecting to inform him that on the nights when my body refuses to rest, I lie in bed thinking of the two of us. And when I think of us, I think of the prospect of love—something I’ve yet to think about with anyone else.
And maybe it doesn’t make sense. But it means something. I just don’t know what.
“As much as I’m at odds with the idea of love, I can’t help but find myself in love with the idea of you,” I blurt.
It comes out of nowhere. I didn’t rehearse it, didn’t give it a second thought before allowing it to leave my lips. It felt like the right time to bare my soul, a decision I may come to regret in the immediate future because my words are met with dead silence.
“Absinthe,” he says an endless moment later, speaking the way a teacher would scold a student for talking out of turn. “You’re idealizing me.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” I ask.
“You shouldn’t idealize anyone. That’s how people get hurt. Hearts get broken.”
Pretty sure my heart is titanium or elastic or whatever Sia sings about.
“You’re giving yourself too much credit, Kerouac,” I say, trying to cover the quick bruising of my ego. Rain beads gentle on my window. Outside the storm is passing, but inside it’s only getting started. “You’re just a voice on the other end of a phone. A faceless man with a dirty mind and a love of books. I might be in love with the idea of you, but trust me, you could never break me.”
Many have tried.
None have succeeded.
If he only knew what I’ve been through, he’d know it would take a lot more than an innocent crush on an Internet stranger to damage this heart. My entire life, nothing’s ever come easy. The kinds of simple luxuries afforded to everyone else seem to have skipped over me.
Some people are born with silver spoons. I was born with a rusted paring knife.
And still, it didn’t break me.
“Maybe we’ve crossed a line.” He exhales.
I sit up.
His single sentence takes this entire conversation in a completely different direction.
“No,” I say. The room begins to tilt.
“This was supposed to be phone sex and meaningless conversations,” he said. “I think we took it too far.”
“Why are you saying this?” My chest burns, swells. A moment ago we were talking about Rebecca. I want to go back. I want to go back to that so I can take back what I said.
“Because I feel the same way about you—I’m falling in love with the idea of you, of you I’ve dreamed you up to be.”
I exhale, sinking into my pillows, relief washing over me. He feels the same way. We can work with this.
“So what now?” I ask, drawing in a cleansing breath. My mouth curls into a gentle smile. “I’m in love with the idea of you. You’re in love with the idea of me. Sounds like the premise for an amazing F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, don’t you think? Now we just need a good twist and a couple of complications.”
“This is the end, Absinthe.” He says the last words I expected to hear, going in a completely different direction than the one I anticipated.
My eyes blur, fat tears dripping down my cheeks, leaving cold, itchy tracks. I’m at a complete loss for words for the first time with him. In fact, I can’t even breathe right now.
“Absinthe,” he says after a bout of silence.
“Seriously? Just like that … you don’t want to talk to me because you’re feeling something?” I manage to fire back at him. “This is bullshit.”
“I told you I was complicated.”
“You’re not complicated,” I say, teeth gritted. “You’re a coward.”
“I’d only hurt you.” Kerouac exhales. “I hurt everyone. That’s just how it is.”
“So, we can’t even talk on the phone? You just … you just want to cut ties? Walk away like this never happened?”
“No.” His voice is louder. He’s never taken this tone with me. This man, this Kerouac, I don’t know him. “That’s not what I want. But if we keep talking, one of these days I know I’m going to give in. I’m going to meet you somewhere. I’m going to fuck the hell out of you. I might even convince myself that I’m in love with you after a while. And then I’m going to break you. And I don’t want to do that to you. You mean too much to me.”
“You’re so full of shit.” I release an incredulous laugh. “And you don’t know that’s how it would go.”
“I do,” he says. “You’re not the kind of woman I could just fuck and not think twice about the next day.”
“And that’s a bad thing?!”
“It’s a bad thing if you’re me.” He’s quiet for a moment. “I don’t do commitment, Absinthe. Never have. And even if I did, I’m not in a place in my life where I have the time to dedicate to a relationship.”
My heart sinks. It feels like a breakup, but it hurts a hell of a lot more. The physical sting radiating through my body, the gasps of breath in my lungs, the weight on my chest … it’s all too much.
“Fine.” My voice shakes with that one little word. “Goodbye, Kerouac. It’s been nice talking to you. I hope someday you find exactly what you were looking for. I’m sorry I couldn’t be your exception.”
Kerouac says nothing, but I hear him breathing on the other end, almost as if he’s second-guessing his decision, not yet wanting to end the call.
So I hang up first.
Because … fuck him.
It takes a moment for me to catch my breath, to accept what just happened. When I finally come to, I add him to the long list of people who’ve left me, people who’ve decided for whatever reason that they want nothing to do with me.
My parents, a long list of foster families, a few friends here and there along the way, and now some faceless internet stranger I had no business fancying into the man of my dreams.
The tiniest fraction of my heart squeezes as it clings onto what might have been, refusing to accept that it’s over, that I meant nothing to Kerouac, and that everything he ever told me was probably a lie.
But the rest of me wants to move on, pretend like he never happened.