He gets me by the shoulders for that. And then, once he’s got me, he shakes me. He stamps his next words right into me, as though I really am the guy who doesn’t understand that the bomb is about to go off. I’m too interested in my little petty concerns to see what’s right in front of my face.
‘Everything was real,’ he says. ‘
Everything
.’
And my heart pounds, once he has. I don’t even know why, really. It just gets all giddy at the thought of him being this sincere and this passionate. I have to rein it in a bit, before it gallops out of control.
‘Are you sure?’ I ask, even though I don’t really want to. I don’t really want to ask the next bit either – but I know it’s a necessity. So I brace myself and let it out. ‘Maybe you just wanted to play at relationships with the sad, safe librarian, to see how it fitted. To see if you could do it.’
Though, once I have, all I feel is this weird flash of guilt. It’s giving him too little credit, and I know it. I know it before he explodes in a great cloud of outrage, and even try to apologise before he’s done so.
But naturally I get absolutely nowhere. It’s almost impossible to, when he’s being this maze of wild gestures and wilder words. He actually pounds his fist on the roof of my car, briefly, and there’s lots of pointing and squeezing of my head.
‘
Kit
. Will you just fucking stop with this?
Come on
, man. Do you really think you’re that uninteresting? That I just wanted anybody, so thought: Hey – she’ll do? I didn’t just want anybody, OK? I wanted someone who … who …’
‘Who
what
?’ I ask, but only because I’m so impatient for the answer. My mind is imagining a million things while he’s stuck in this big, breathless feedback loop, and I want to stop it before it gets any further. I don’t want it to fill in his answer before he delivers the real thing.
Because the real thing is, as I suspected, so very awesome.
‘Who makes me feel the way you do!’ he says, and I think my body actually jolts when he does so. ‘Who makes me feel like I’d go fucking crazy if I lost you! So yeah. I did whatever I thought it would take. Whatever I thought you needed – because I swear to God the second I saw you … I knew you needed something almost as badly as I do. I saw you that first night, with your shoulders all hunched and your eyes on the floor, and you know what? I wanted those shoulders to be back. To be straight. I wanted you to meet people’s eyes and not be afraid … I …’
He can’t seem to find his words between all the big, insane breaths – though I can understand, I really can. All the oxygen in the world has deserted me and made its way over to him. I feel like I’m going to pop or maybe implode, and my eyes are leaking again.
My whole body is leaking. I’m a shaking, perspiring, red-faced mess. If someone saw me, they’d probably think I was preparing to go in for the most life-changing exam of my life – which I suppose is true in one way.
I’ve got to work all of this emotional algebra out, and still emerge as someone sane on the other side. I’ve got to process what he’s saying to me, even though I don’t think I can. I think I’m going to fail, because, dear
God
, he’s still talking. He’s still saying this stuff.
‘There are so many girls I’ve just let slip through my fingers,’ he tells me, and I see them all in my head, leading back from him. Only they don’t look like Valkyries any more. They’re not seven feet tall with legs as long as the world. They’ve lost their substance, and faded down into nothing. ‘Because I didn’t care. But I cared with you. I cared so much that I would have done anything to keep you. Anything to make you think I’m a worthwhile guy.’
Suddenly I’m not just seeing the surface of this suggestion. I’m seeing everything he’s done and everything he’s said in a completely different light. And this light is
blinding
. It’s dizzying. I don’t even know how I manage to spell it all out for him, in brilliant, backwards clarity.
‘Like the awkward attempts at segueing into conversation?’
‘Oh, Jeeze. Were they really that awkward?’
‘And the need to randomly have pizza.’
‘I wanted to go for a four-course candlelit meal, but thought a Domino’s might be more convincing as something I would do.’
‘And the walks?’
‘Well, you know I love walks. And the hand-holding! The hand-holding was awesome.’
‘And the mind-blowing sex.’
‘Yeah, that was a real hardship,’ he says, and though he’s trying to be kind of light about it, though it’s kind of funny, really, when you think about it … I have to tell him now. I only half-thought it before, but it’s been growing in my mind since the paradigm shift.
Until finally it’s at this stage. This bursting, impossible, glorious stage.
‘You’re so stupid,’ I tell him, because he is, he is. Didn’t he realise? Didn’t he get it? ‘You should have known: it wouldn’t have taken anything at all.’
He falls silent then. Spookily silent, if I’m being honest – though I guess that makes sense. He’s just been stripped down to the bone – right down to the real and honest him – and then I just went and said something like that. I’d be shocked if he’d just said it to me. Or at the very least I’d be wondering why I made such an immense effort.
He’s probably thinking, I could have clicked my fingers. He’s probably seeing me in the light he should have done, right from the start: as someone who’d be happy with anything. God, why did he think I needed more than anything?
It’s so ridiculous I almost ask.
Before he drops in a little clue.
‘You say that but …’ he says, and I get this funny, tingling feeling. This
nervous
, funny, tingling feeling. There’s one thing he hasn’t fully explained yet, and I think he’s on the verge of maybe telling me all about it.
I just have to keep cool and convince him.
I just have to make sure he understands.
‘But what?’
‘But maybe you wouldn’t feel the same way, if you knew everything about me.’
‘Is
that
why you won’t talk to me about you? About what you want? About what you feel?’
He shakes his head in an impatient sort of way.
‘My whole life has been about me, OK? I just wanted it to be about
you
.’
‘And how would I know that? You won’t say,’ I tell him, and then, oh, then, it really clicks. I actually pause mid-rant about his lack of sharing, and go over all the times he’s changed the subject or started talking about something I’ve done or am doing or maybe might do sometime in the future.
‘Oh, my God. You really
did
cut off before I could hear your terrible truth, right? You didn’t zone out at all. You never zone out. You just avoid telling me some … big secret.’
He answers with silence again, but this one is worse. This one is really potent – full to bursting with all the things he could possibly have to conceal. He’s secretly an alien, my mind whispers, which would in normal circumstances warrant a swift kick to the back of my mind’s head.
But in these ones … in these ones, I have to wonder. I’m actually quite staggered to find that a man like him exists, so the extra-terrestrial thing hardly seems that farfetched. Maybe this is like
Starman
, and he’s the dead husband that I’ve never actually had. He’s my soulmate from outside the galaxy, here to teach me how to feel love and be wanted.
All of which he’s succeeded at admirably.
Despite his obvious issues.
‘Yeah, you know – I don’t think this is just about giving me what you think I want. I think this is about hiding yourself away,’ I say, and I know I’m right before he confirms.
‘Can you blame me?’ he asks, which is even stupider than all of the alien stuff I dreamt up. He hasn’t even told me what it is yet, for fuck’s sake.
‘For being a fucking idiot. Sure I can.’
‘It’s not idiocy to worry what someone will think of you when you tell them something important about yourself. Something that worries you in the dead of fucking night,’ he says, and I’m just about to kick his ass for really believing that, when he delivers the kicker: ‘You do it all the time.’
Well. He’s got me there. I worry about it so much, it’s a wonder I manage to walk around and say words and function in any way at all. I can’t even pretend I’m worthy of keeping the high ground here … so I don’t. I’d rather be on the same level as him anyway.
In fact, it’s a step
up
for me to be on the same level as him. I feel as though he’s held out his hand from the top of some high holy hill, and I can finally take it, and stand up there beside his exalted self.
‘So I guess we’re two halves of the same whole then,’ I say, and only realise the full glory of that concept once the words are out. I’ve just somehow voiced an idea I joked about in my head five minutes previously – an idea that’s just so crazy and improbable I had to attach an alien to it.
But it holds, once I’ve blurted it out. It shines like a beacon in the otherwise shambolic darkness of my life:
He really
is
my soulmate.
And my soulmate does not have to be quiet about a single thing. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if he killed his own grandmother with a shovel. I’m not bothered if he’s escaped from Broadmoor, and his real name is Reginald.
I have a
soulmate
.
‘Only I’ve told you everything about me,’ I say. ‘So now …’
‘I can’t do the same.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m scared, OK? I’m scared you’ll run for the fucking hills.’
I can’t even describe how painful it is to hear someone like him – someone so powerful and masculine and cool – say something like that. He sounds so raw about it, too. As though it really, really matters to him, and even worse …
I think he truly believes it too.
‘You really think I would?’
‘I –’
‘You think I’m so fickle?’
‘Not fickle, Kit. Just … worthy of more. More than my mess.’
Oh, he’s making me angry now. He’s making me a lot of other things too: swoony, totally in love with him, ready to lay down my life for him, etc. But chief among these things is anger, right at this moment in time.
‘Wow. Do you have any idea what it would take to make me think you weren’t worthy of me?’
‘I can guess.’
I don’t think he can. I don’t think I can guess what I’m going to say before I say it. I thought I had all of this stuff locked down, but apparently not. It wants out, while we’re in the middle of this conversation of unspeakable gooshiness.
‘Nothing. There is nothing you could say to make me think that. Nothing you could say to make me walk away. I’ve wanted to ask you a thousand times why you stopped in the middle of the conversation that day, and held myself back a thousand times – but it’s not because I was afraid to hear what you’d say. It’s because I was afraid you wouldn’t want to go to that relationship-y place with me. It’s because I was afraid you’d think I wasn’t important enough to tell.’
I feel as though I’ve run up a mountain, once I’ve gotten the words out. My heart is pounding right out of my body, and the rest of me is all up and down. None of me knows what’s going on, but I can’t really hold that against it. I’m simply not used to big gushy pronouncements like that.
And I’m certainly not used to ruefulness once I’ve done it. I can hardly bear to look at him but, when I do, that’s what’s on his face: rue. Which has the benefit of being a good deal better than all the things I was expecting: disgust, horror, a dust-shaped Dillon where he once was.
Though I guess I should know by now that none of that is going to happen. We’re in this now, I think. We’re really in it together.
‘Oh, you’ve got me there, huh. See, how can I not tell you now? You’ve promised me relationship-y places and feeling like you’re important …’
‘It wasn’t meant as a trap.’
‘I know.’
‘I want you to trust me.’
‘I do,’ he says, but I can hear his voice wavering just a little. And he tries to change the subject a second later: ‘Do
you
trust
me
? Do you trust that I want to be with you and do the relationship-y things and am not just a crazed sex maniac?’
I’ve got to admit, he’s masterful at making people swerve left, when they want to go right. I almost fall for it, in fact. I nearly start talking about all the ways in which he fills me with joy and security, before I realise what he’s doing.
‘Yeah, I think so. But really, it doesn’t matter if I do or not,’ I say, then, before he can protest: ‘Because now, everything’s going to be all about
you
.’
We drive to his place in silence after that. Though of course it’s obvious why. He’s lost all of his armour and every one of his weapons of mass distraction. He can’t ask me about my feelings or thoughts or what I did in school when I was twelve, because I’ll know why he’s doing it. And even if I didn’t know why he was doing it, that time has passed. He’s full to the brim with information on me.
It’s his turn now.
It’s his turn … even if I still don’t quite know how to make it his turn. Of course, I can ask him about obvious things – I find out that he does, in fact, hail from Boston. He has two brothers and a sister, he gets on well with his family, he misses them, etc. He likes dogs more than cats; comedies more than action movies.
But all of that stuff is easy.
It’s far harder to say to someone:
so what’s the horrible secret you’re hiding?
Even if it now burns between us like a bonfire. It’s there when he tries to laugh, and his laugh comes out all hollow and weird. It’s there when I squeeze his hand, as we walk up the steps to his apartment, and behind every question I ask that isn’t the right one. And, most of all, it’s there when we wind up on his kitchen floor, tearing frantically at each other’s clothes so that we won’t have to go there just yet.
Though that’s a little unfair of me to say, I think. Because I know that I desperately want to go there. And as for Dillon, well … I’m pretty sure he does too. It’s just that we’ve spent the last hour or so baring our souls in the middle of a street, and once we’re finished with round one we’re both a little …