“STAY STILL,” JEFF SAYS.
We purchased aloe in the hotel lobby—for severe burns, the package said, and every touch is by turns soothing and excruciating. Crimson red circles my ankles and feet. I yank away from him, the pain too much to take.
“You’re impossible,” he says, standing up and stepping over to the wall of windows at the edge of our room, tossing the minty gel onto the mattress.
“I know. But it hurts,” I say, elongating the vowel in a mincing whine.
The sunburn didn’t really hurt, at least in the part of the day when I was still sober, but after the Uber ride home and getting Mindy to her room, I took off my shoes and socks and noticed the awful shade of red on the tops of both feet. The pain came in waves.
“You know what might help?” Jeff says, rooting through his backpack set on a plush green sofa by the wall of windows. This hotel is Dad’s go-to-place when he’s flying home from LAX because you can see downtown L.A. in the distance, the sparkling lights this late at night.
“Cody’s friend gave me this,” Jeff says, pulling a joint out of the front pocket. “I was going to save it for later, or maybe fly it back home but I bet it will help with the sunburn.”
He takes a seat on the mattress across from me. The room has two queen beds easily more comfortable than any of our beds at home and a 60-inch flat-screen on the near wall, the green felt lounger in the corner. The shades are open but I can only see the sky from where I’m lying, not the city, my feet stretched out in extreme pain.
“I thought you didn’t smoke anymore.”
“I don’t,” Jeff says, twirling the ends between his fingers. “But she gave it to me—that girl Laura—” He scratches at the back of his neck and laughs. “I think I’ve lost my tolerance.”
“Do you like her?”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I say, pushing up from the mattress, so that my legs drop off the side. “You want to smoke it?”
He nods and we head to the bathroom to avoid breaking hotel rules about smoking, turning on the fan and running the shower at high heat to create enough steam to mask the scent.
Jeff sits on the toilet—lid down—and I hop onto the counter next to the sink, crimson feet dangling off the edge.
“Umm…” He holds out the joint and indicates without speaking that he doesn’t have anything to light it with but I don’t either—neither of us smokes anymore. He offers to run to the lobby to where we bought the aloe but I decline.
“We don’t need to smoke,” I say. “This is cool just hanging.”
“But your feet,” he says.
“The aloe’s working, I think,” I say. “Thank you for forcing it on me.”
He smiles. The recessed lights in the ceiling highlight his tanned skin.
“Thanks for inviting me,” Jeff says. “I needed a vacation. More than I realized.”
“It was my dad’s idea,” I say.
“You mentioned that.”
“Yeah. I mean, we hadn’t talked or hung out in so long I didn’t—”
“Think of me.” He smiles again.
“Maybe.” I smile back. “But my dad laid on all this stuff about losing his closest friends when he was young and I—”
Jeff nods as the steam escapes from the shower stall, up to the ceiling tiles. I think to shut off the faucet now that we don’t need it anymore but I don’t want to move. This is nice, sitting here with Jeff.
“It sucks what happened to us,” he says, after a while. His eyes are a little dulled and his cheeks aren’t quite the same, the whiskers filling the space where his dimples used to be, the lines drawn sharper, less rounded. “What the fuck happened to us?” He laughs, like he’s just throwing it out there but I wonder if he thinks about it. As much as I think about it.
“Well, you did call me a ‘faggot’ and punch me in the face.”
I deadpan it as best as I can to put it out there without animosity, my teeth clenched and the pain in my feet slipping up my legs to my knees.
“I know, I know.” He drops his head to the floor. “That was unforgiveable.”
“No,” I say. “It wasn’t. I would have forgiven you.”
He looks up at me, his hair a tangled mess that he pulls back from his face. He left his hat in the other room.
I clutch the edge of the counter, my tongue pushing out from the side of my teeth, needing to speak. Mindy told me not to press.
“If you apologized back then. Or even talked me again. I kept texting.” The steam fills the room with a gauzy haze. “You never responded.”
“I know,” Jeff says. “It’s pretty hard to come back from calling your best friend the F word when he’s gay.”
The steady stream on the white brick walls of the shower get louder and the overhead fan is too weak to clear the vapor, the humidity choking me.
“But I would have forgiven you. I was reaching out back then because I didn’t want to lose you as a friend,” I say and maybe it’s the sunburn or the exhaustion or the fact that I can’t actually see his face through the haze but I don’t hold back, like I normally do. “I thought we could still be more than friends, Jeff. I still wanted to. You know that.”
“Yeah, right,” he says. “Don’t humor me.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He stands up and steps across the tiled floor for the shower.
“What are you talking about, Jeff?”
“Just that you’re not innocent in all of this, Cy. You’re as much responsible for the end of our friendship as me.”
“How?”
“Oh come on, Cy, don’t play dumb.”
“I’m not,” I say. I’m not. I let go of the counter I’ve been clutching and feel my fingers forming fists. “What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Jeff opens and closes the shower door in quick repetition. The steam floats in a plume above my head.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, jumping off the counter on my sunburned feet. Maybe I haven’t forgiven him yet.
“You don’t know anything you might have done before the whole punching incident—and it was a glancing blow, not a hard punch—” He shakes his head and turns back to the shower. “But I’m not defending that. I can’t defend that. And I said I was sorry. But you should be too.”
“Sorry for what?”
The steam is spreading water down my skin. I don’t know what’s happening.
“Two words, Cyrus. Two words.” He spins from the shower to face me. “Court. Knee.”
“Courtney?”
“Yeah, your boyfriend. Ring a bell?”
“Boyfriend? We went out for like a week,” I say, noticing the mirror to register my reaction but it’s clouded in the billowing mist. “And that was after you punched me.”
Jeff steps back into the shower and the spray wets his face.
“Forget it.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about but if he thinks me dating Courtney after he punched me in the face and cut off all contact is me breaking up the friendship, I—
“Please,” I say.
He turns around again. Close to me. The water rolls down his cheeks.
“Cy, when I saw you that Christmas, after I got sent away to that Christian prison and I thought you hadn’t waited for me—I didn’t know you had written me and I sure as fuck didn’t think you’d waited for me because when I came home that Christmas and turned on my phone for the first time in months, what do you think I saw at the top of my Insta feed?” He breathes out before he speaks. “You kissing Courtney.”
I blink. I think I blink. I don’t speak.
“So yeah. I get how you ‘waited’ for me,” he says with the air quotes, “and you had a plan to help me run away and all. But as soon as I was gone you sure as hell didn’t wait for me.”
Sharane caught us kissing and ended up posting the picture by accident with a bunch of photos from the party. She took it down as soon as she realized. I guess it was too late.
“It wasn’t what it looked like,” I say. “We were not dating at the time. I just met him that night.”
“That doesn’t make it any better.”
Jeff steps past me, over to the sink, running his fingers through the water.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kissed him but I hadn’t heard from you since you came back and—” I hesitate, waiting for him to turn. He doesn’t turn. I can’t see his face in the stream-shrouded glass. “I thought you hated me, the way I wrote all those letters and you never responded.”
“I never got your letters, Cy. You know that. Don’t you know what it was like—to go from a normal life hanging with you and our band and a concert you convinced me to go to that I never should have gone to and all of a sudden I’m in freaking religious classes with counseling half the damn day and the other half is hard freaking labor with no Internet at all, all because I went to a Joyce Manor concert and you kissed me in the backseat—”
“I know,” he says. “I know. But then Mindy hit a dog and I got sent away.”
“Jeff.”
I reach out for his shoulder but he shakes free and I see his face. Crying.
“I had to freaking fake it, Cy.” The snot is bubbling from his nose, the heat from the shower pouring moisture down our faces. “Pretend I loved Jesus and accept him as my Lord and Savior, just to survive, you know. And after a while I accepted it, it was easier that way. But it fucks you up, you know.” He rubs his eyes with the palm of his hand and backs toward the shower again. “Makes you doubt everything you’ve ever known. And I hated myself, Cy. I really hated myself. And I guess I took it out on you.”
I listen because I need to listen, as he leans into the shower again, turning the faucet off. I stand by the sink and wait. The silence is deafening.
“I’m sorry I called you the F word, Cy, that crossed a line and I can’t take it back. But it killed me, seeing you kissing that kid. After everything.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry, Jeff.”
“It’s too late,” Jeff says, the tears and the sweat mixing together on his face. “I couldn’t take any more pain.”