And then he laughs again, just to cap it off.
‘Pushed me
where
? Into sexual ecstasy?’
‘No! Into … being weird and addicted and probably unwell.’
I point in the general direction of the place he just came from, but that only makes him laugh harder. He’s almost holding his belly by this point, and I swear he swipes away a tear.
‘Oh, I see. So you think I’ve been secretly coming here all this time to work through the terrible pain of bonking you into oblivion.’
I’ll admit, it sounds less logical when he puts it like that. Especially as he uses the word ‘bonking’, then chuckles after it and shakes his head over
mad British words
.
‘Maybe not … exactly.’
‘Kit, it’s not an addicts’ group. You went to it, right? You know it’s all about healing your feelings and being positive and all of that shit. I’m just trying to get in touch with my … you know. Inner self.’
‘Then how come you say “inner self” like it’s a flying banana-coloured unicorn that farts rainbows and sings in stereo?’
‘Maybe ’cause I’m not sure I have one.’
I can’t help hearing the slight change in tone when he says that last bit. It’s a little less
flying banana-coloured unicorns
, and a little more disturbing. So disturbing, in fact, that I feel I have to insist his inner self is present – despite barely knowing what it looks like. It could enjoy wearing striped pyjamas and dancing the fandango, for all I’ve been told.
But the thing is, I suppose … I know it’s there. It’s so big I couldn’t possibly miss it. Whenever I’m near him, I can feel the hulking shape of it rubbing against my body, like an animal seeking warmth. I can make out its shadow at the centre of him, subtle and mysterious but still completely visible.
‘You have one,’ I tell him, because I can see it right now. It shifts restlessly beneath his skin, when I unwittingly poke it with my next words. ‘Even if that one is a crazed sex addict.’
‘Oh, Christ, Kit. I’m not a sex addict. Is that how I seem? Like a sex addict?
‘Well … maybe. Sometimes.’
I’m thinking specifically of the times when he wakes me up in the middle of the night for the seventeenth time, with an erection like a constantly regenerating Duracell bunny. But of course I don’t say that. I fear it would only muddy the waters, just as they’re starting to clear. His expression is so open and honest, suddenly. I can actually see how that inner shadow matches up with his outer self, if I strain hard enough.
And to cap it off, one of the guys from the group gives him a sobbing hug, as he passes us on this little narrow and very wet street. ‘Thank you for helping me actualise myself,’ he says, which pretty much sums up what Dillon’s saying. It backs up what I remember, too, about the crystals and the healing hugs and all the other hippy-dippy stuff.
But it still doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. And I want the heart. I do. I don’t care if it’s black with despair and riddled with rot. I’d live inside the bits of him that are barely functioning, if I could. I’d spend the rest of my days trying to piece him back together, if he’d let me.
Which I suspect he won’t.
‘Honestly, Kit,’ he says. ‘I’m really not that fucked up.’
He even puts his hands in his pockets, and kind of shrugs – like
hey, I’m totally OK with the world and my place in it. I’m cool and laid-back, without a care in the world.
And it’s convincing too. I could probably go on for ever with him like this, in a fantasy land of fucking and fun.
If it were not for the other him just waiting for me behind his eyes.
‘Yeah? Then how come you can talk about meaningless sex with strangers but you can’t talk to me about … anything?’
There, I think. That’s got you.
But of course it hasn’t at all.
‘Because I made that up.’
I’ll admit, it’s not the answer I was expecting. It’s not even the answer that really goes with my main point, which is basically:
why do you avoid telling me anything real about yourself?
But it’s there now, and it has to be addressed.
And I address it thusly:
‘
What
?’
It’s very articulate of me, if I do so say myself. My brain wanted me to go with
ffffffffffftttttt
, but I refused to let it get the upper hand. I stick to my guns, and only allow actual words to escape.
‘I made that up. I don’t find it easier to talk about it with strangers because I adore meaningless sex. I find it easier to talk about it with strangers because I totally made those stories up. They didn’t mean anything.’
But I’m less successful after he’s delivered that little doozy.
‘Ffffffffffffffftttttttt,’ I say. I think I’m attempting
fucking terrible
, though I could be wrong. There’s nothing actually terrible or fucktastic about what he’s just said, so who knows, really? I could just as easily be trying to tell him that he’s the craziest, most spectacular person I’ve ever met, on so many, many levels.
Like this one:
‘Yeah, I’ve never actually had a threesome.’
I’m so speechless that I sort of stand there with my mouth open, for a second. He made it up. One of the main instigators of this wild journey of sexual excess and he just pulled it out of his ass, for reasons that are not going to remain unexplained for much longer.
‘Why would you say that, then?’
He shrugs again, but this one is even more magnificent than his last offering. It actually says whole sentences to me about his state of mind. It’s full of that wryness he’s always got all over him, that laughter he’s always aiming in his own direction.
Only much more bittersweet now.
Oh, it’s so bittersweet when he gives me his answer.
‘Because you liked hearing it,’ he says, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Of course he’d want to give me what he thinks I want, at the expense of himself. Of
course
he would. That makes perfect sense, in a universe where everything is completely different from this one in every way possible.
I almost want to glance around, in case the trees in the park beside us are suddenly reaching their roots towards the sky. Any second now the pavements are going to start losing their solidity, until we find ourselves sunk into them up to the knee.
Not that he’d notice if it did. He seems to have no clue that my idea of how life should be is slowing imploding, a piece at a time.
‘You did like it, didn’t you?’ he asks, as though that’s perfectly normal. It’s absolutely reasonable for him to wonder and worry, even though no one else has ever bothered before. Mostly they just act as though I’m enjoying something even when I’m clearly not, and hope for the best.
So really I have to reassure him on that score. It takes me even further away from the point I was trying to make, but there’s simply no avoiding it.
‘Of course I did, but –’
‘But what?’
‘But now I feel like I know even less about you. Which was really not the aim of this.’
‘You do know me, Kit.’
‘Really? Because I think you just told me that you made up your entire sexual history because you thought I might like it. And although that’s rather nice of you, it’s not really what’s missing from our time together.’
‘And what
is
missing?’ he asks, only he does it so desperately I don’t know what to think for a second. He actually almost grabs me; the way the hero might grab the guy who knows how to defuse the bomb, at the end of a movie. Goddamn it, man, I think. You’ve got to tell me which wire to cut, before we’re all blown to smithereens!
Even though the answer is obvious.
‘
You
,’ I say, without a single second to consider. ‘
You’re
missing.’
He looks somewhat taken aback for a moment – as though he’s really never considered that idea before.
And then he gets a grip.
‘I’m not completely missing. I’ve told you things,’ he says, which is perfectly true. He told me about his first time, for example, and he’s occasionally nudged me down some dark alleyways that he obviously enjoyed.
Only those tiny moments of revelation are not really the problem any more.
This is.
‘Yeah … but none of them actually happened.’
He throws up his hands, then, but he’s kind of laughing while he does it. And it makes me realise that I do know him in some respects. I know him in the here and now, in the little things he does and says. I know him as someone who so easily turns difficult things around and makes them easy.
I just don’t understand why I didn’t think of that, when I was so busy worrying about how to ask him this. I should have remembered his lopsided grin and his laid-back manner … his way of relaxing me even when I don’t think it’s possible.
‘Some of the things happened,’ he tells me. ‘I
do
love pizza.’
And I love
him
for saying that. Some of the tension drains out of the conversation the second he does it. Now we’re no longer facing a minor nuclear explosion because I don’t know what wire to cut. We’re just standing here, on this street, actually getting to know each other.
‘And if I’m being honest … I
have
been with a lot of women,’ he says, which should probably tense every muscle in my body. But of course it doesn’t. It’s something about him that I can hold onto – it’s part of the foundation I’ve built him on.
And then he goes and detonates that foundation all over again.
‘But the thing is … I guess … I don’t
want
to be with a lot of women any more. I’m not some sex addict trying to sort myself out. I don’t get a high from fucking everything that walks. I get a high from wanting someone as much as I want you. From actually thinking that for once … for once in my life someone actually cares enough to cry because they think they’ve messed me up.’
It’s true. I did. But when he says all of that amazing stuff in a big fountain of incredible awesome-sauce, I don’t immediately recognise it as me he’s talking about. He says things like ‘want’ and
‘you’ and I imagine some other woman. Some other, Valkyrie-like goddess of unspeakable power and beauty. Seven feet tall with breasts akin to casaba melons, legs that could wrap once around the world …
He can’t mean me.
Only I think he kind of does.
‘Do you have any idea how hard it’s been for me to find anything even remotely like that? I’m quite aware of what I am, Kit. I know how people look at me. I’m the guy you see in some bar, being loud and obnoxious. I’m the jock at your college, throwing a basketball onto your desk as you’re trying to study. I know I am. But I want more than that now. I’m too old to be playing games any more.’
His last sentence pulls me up short, but it’s a good thing it does. For a while there I was in real danger of falling down a rabbit hole of his words. I’ve flushed from hot to cold about thirty times since he started saying all of this, and I only level out when I can focus on one thing. One small thing, that’s not about me being fabulous.
‘See, I don’t even know that much. How old
are
you, exactly?’ I ask, because quite frankly I’m now wondering if he’s secretly one hundred and twelve. He’s probably an android from the future, sent to destroy the sensible centres of my brain.
‘I’m thirty-two,’ he says, which is in the ballpark of my mental guessing. He looks thirty-two and mostly acts like he’s thirty-two … he just doesn’t sound like he really believes he
is
thirty-two. He sounds like he believes he’s five hundred and nine – and this weariness continues into his next words. ‘I’ve had thirty-two years of feeling … disposable. And I don’t want to be disposable any more.’
Lord, what a thing to say. I think I actually clutch at myself, to hear it. I mean, even if I don’t really know him – even if I haven’t gotten to some mystical core of him – he does realise how he comes across, right? So affable. So easy to share things with. I only realised he’d barely said a word about himself after he’d pried my every fantasy out of me.
And that’s a good thing in one way. But such a sad thing in another.
Does he really think he means so little?
‘God, honey, you’re not disposable,’ I tell him, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him carry on believing something like that. I don’t think my heart would allow it, even if the rest of me was totally cool with him feeling this way. My heart is trying to reach through my chest and hug him, and I am in full support of this initiative. ‘You’ve got to know that you’re not just some jock. Are you crazy? All the things you’ve done for me … all the things you’ve made me feel …’
I shake my head, boggled by the sheer volume of them. And by this sense I’m getting of why he might have been so keen on giving them to me. In fact, it’s more than a sense at this point. It’s a dawning horror.
‘Is this why you’ve been so focused on me? Because you think I might
dispose
of you otherwise?’
It sounds absolutely crazy, once I’ve said it out loud – to the point where I almost take it back. No man is that weird and awesome and terrifying. He just has communication problems, that’s all. He hasn’t been trying to give me everything I want so that I’ll stick around.
‘Not exactly.’
See?
‘But almost kind of.’
Oh, my God.
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘I’m a little bit serious.’
I think he may be more than a little bit serious. He’s smiling, but the smiling isn’t exactly reaching his eyes – much to my alarm.
‘But … but
why
? Why? I mean … have you
seen
me?’
‘Of course I’ve seen you.’
‘And you still think I’m worth this monumental effort? You must be mad. I’m genuinely afraid that you’re completely insane.’ I pause, considering. And I swear, it’s only a
half
-fake reflection on the gravity of this situation. ‘I should call an ambulance.’
‘Kit –’
‘You’ve constructed an elaborate fantasy world based around a person who regularly goes to work wearing odd shoes. Something has to be done.’
‘
Kit
–’
‘I’m not even sure what’s real any more.’