Cut Both Ways (23 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“WHO?” I ASK.
I'm trying not to be shocked.

“You know her,” he says. “She's in the band.”

“Rubber-ducky girl?”

“Her name is Cora.” He laughs. “Used to be Andrew's girlfriend, way back.”

“The pussy-stupid guy?”

He laughs again. “Not anymore,” he says.

“So? What the hell? And what about the coffee-shop dude?” I don't even know what to ask first.

He shrugs. “Who knows. She was the one who asked me,” he says. “So we went. Saw a movie. Then we ate pie at this shithole place in Minneapolis.”

“Okay.”

“Then we went to her house and made out for a while. Her parents were home the whole time.”

“Really.”

“Yeah,” he says. “She didn't seem to give a shit, either. I told her I was gay a million times. But she didn't seem to care, or think it mattered. Was, like, stuffing my hand down her pants, and her parents were downstairs. Watching TV. It was kind of crazy.”

“Whoa.”

“Yeah. Fucking insane. I don't think Andrew's missing anything.”

“Dude, what are you doing with her, anyway? What the fuck?”

“I just wanted to see,” he says. “You have that one girl. I've never done that. Never even occurred to me. But I figured, she asked, and then she went for it, and then I thought, why not give it a chance.”

“So, did you like it?” I am so embarrassed to ask but I do because I'm tired of fucking waiting for him to get to the goddamn point.

“No,” he says. “But then again, I've never liked Cora. So that was working against it, probably.”

I wonder if he got hard with Cora. Even half hard? A quarter hard? Does it matter if you don't like the person? I can get hard just thinking about touching Brandy like he said he touched Cora. But then, I'm weird. There's something beyond wrong with me, beyond gay, beyond anything else. I'm addicted or something. To lying. I'm as bad as my dad. Selfish. Bad as my mom, too.

“What do you want to play next?” he asks. “Are we down to war? Slapjack?”

He's waiting me out again. Just like at Jack's party. If he's not waiting for me to do it, then I don't know what he's doing.

“I'm going to bed, man,” I say, like it's nothing.

“Okay,” he says.

I take a piss. Brush my teeth—my mouth is red and winey, like I've been drinking blood. When I go to my room, Angus is in the TV room, on the couch, his head lying back all the way to watch, flipping through the channels.

Whatever. This is so fucked up. I'm embarrassed at myself for wanting it. For being so sure of it on the ski lift.

I get in bed and feel like I'm going to be there a thousand years. But I do fall asleep, the TV in the background like some kind of hypnotizing static.

It's almost like the first time I was at his house. I wake up because Angus is beside me. “Will,” he whispers.

I've been dreaming sex stuff. Not with him, or with Brandy, either. Just me, feeling it, hard. Me, looking for it. In a way I've never been looking for it in my life: on purpose, walking around, stalking it like some kind of animal.

“Shove over a little,” he says.

And I do, I roll to the inside of the bed until I'm next to the wall. His breath is hot on my neck. I know why he's here and I'm hard and he knows it, because it's the second thing he touches, after he touches me right between my shoulder blades, his hand running up my back smooth and quick, pulling my shirt off. And then I roll over and I kiss him. I kiss him so hard; I suck on his tongue.

I say, into his mouth, “I want you to fuck me so bad.”
I can't believe I say it but it comes out and I'm kind of happy about it. One of us should be clear about this, for once.

He smiles, but keeps kissing me. His mouth is sloppy. Wet. Tastes like wine.

Then he says, “No.”

I'm quiet. I shouldn't have said that. It's something I would say to Brandy. I think he's going to leave for a minute, but then he's standing up, taking off his shirt, undoing his belt, dropping his jeans. Pushing down his boxer briefs. His dick is huge and hard, too; I can see it in the Christmas lights from the outside of the house blinking in through the window.

“You're not ready,” he says. “And it kind of hurts.”

I don't want to know how he knows this. He could have this whole other secret life—he probably has this whole other secret life. But there's no way I can be jealous.

“How do you know?”

“Because I love you, Will,” he says, and gets back in the bed with me. And then, even though this doesn't answer the question, I don't care how he knows what he knows. All I know is I have his dick in my hand, and then in my mouth and then it's both of us doing that, back and forth. There's no more waiting around. No more television, no more card games, no more boxed wine. I could laugh out loud I'm so happy to be here, on the other side of all that wondering and waiting.

But I don't laugh out loud. We have to be quiet, I tell him. He understands. And we are: so quiet. I see his face in the light from the window. A big mess of us sucking and rubbing and rolling
over onto each other. I have done things like this, in this same bed, with Brandy, but they are so different. The things Brandy can do are different. The things Angus can do are different. Both different. Both good.

My whole body's tense and open and shivering and I'm nervous, too, for some reason, but at the same time, I'm happy. So happy.

Because I love you, Will.

I come so hard I don't even know where I am for a while.

When I finally open my eyes, he's not in the bed. I freak a little: he's gone? Did I dream it? But then he's there, again, a blur against the Christmas lights from the window, where the sky is lightening, just by a shade though. I'm lying on my back, stark naked, looking up at him as he wipes me down with a towel from the bathroom. I'm nervous, imagining him naked, in the house. My sisters could have seen him.

“Are they still asleep?” I ask.

“Must be,” he says. His hair is curly and shaggy, a lot longer; it looks like he's gotten taller. Bigger somehow.

I feel fucking amazing.

I should not feel this good.

Then he bends over and kisses me. Soft, then rough. Tongues. Stubble against stubble. I want him to get back into bed with me and fall asleep. I want it so hard that it almost hurts me. I wonder if he can tell, if he can feel it coming off me, how much I want him to stay.

I'm embarrassed of how much I want to have them both,
Brandy and Angus, forever, separately, but forever, always. I can't stop it, can't stand it: the way I have to tuck that inside myself so no one sees how much I want. How much I always, always want.

But then he pulls back and wipes himself off with the towel before dropping it on the floor and finding his clothes again. I roll on my stomach as he puts his clothes back on. And then he's gone. Back on the couch to sleep. Where Kinney and Taylor find him first thing in the morning, like some kind of living Christmas present, and we're all having pancakes together, pretending everything is normal.

He stays over the second night, too. It's not weird, given the history of us hanging out and how it's been; a text to his mom and she's fine with it. I can't tell him not to. And Taylor and Kinney love it, I swear, because it's like having their new parents, except neither of us ever get that mad at them.

He goes home to change clothes after breakfast, brings back the same box of wine that we swiped from my mom, slips it into the fridge.

“What'd you do that for?” I ask, my eye on the TV room where Kinney and Taylor are glued to the TV in their pajamas.

“I kind of finished it off last night after you went to bed.” He grins.

“Where did you get it?” I nod toward the new box. He's wrapping the old one in a plastic bag and tying it up. He'll probably stuff it at the bottom of the trash, which gets picked up tomorrow morning. We've been doing this sneaking-around shit
for a long time, me and Angus. We could write a book on how to get away with shit.

“Must have been on sale,” he says. “We had a bunch of it left over from Christmas.”

I think about what my dad said about where my mom lives, how everything's the same, how you could drive up to the wrong house if you were drunk and not realize it wasn't yours until you got into bed.

Brandy texts me again; she also called while Angus stepped out, but I didn't pick up. She wants me to call her but I can't make myself do that. She's upset (
are u mad at me? are we breaking up?
)
so I need to come up with an explanation. Because she'll probably have called Time to Eat by now. And I'm not the kind of idiot who forgets to charge his phone.

I text her quick that I got stuck watching my sisters. Text her that I'm sorry I didn't reply. Say that Kinney got sick, which is a lie, but I know it'll make her feel better. I don't want her to feel shitty.

She texts back immediately, saying that sucks and that she's been stuck at home all weekend, the snow's been terrible and there aren't any plows on the roads and she's so bored. I tell her I can call her later, after my mom gets home. I hope that's okay.

Angus comes up behind me, where I'm sitting at the table, staring at my phone, and he reaches around my chest and squeezes, then says, soft into my ear, “What do you want to do today, then?”

I don't think it's fair that something like that would make me get hard so fast and it almost makes me angry, him doing that.
But he moves back, before I can push him away, and goes into the TV room, laughing, asking the girls what they want to do today?

“We can do anything you want,” he says to them. But I feel like he's saying it to me, too.

We go snowboarding. My mom left some spare cash, so I take that for me and Angus's lift tickets; Kinney and Taylor have season passes. It's not as sunny today, but just as warm, and I'm sore from yesterday, but I don't care.

Today, we all go out together. My sisters tease me for being slower, for wiping out. For having Angus rebuckle my boot for me like a dummy. They seem to think this is the best thing ever, like their brother has a brother kind of now, too. A brother would have been nice. One thing about being the only kid my parents had? It's pretty easy to guess that there was a reason for only having one, and that reason is you. You're the standard they didn't want to duplicate. You're why they shut off the tap.

We're out on the hill for almost the whole day. When the sun goes down, we eat hamburgers and french fries in the chalet. Angus buys it all and brings it to us on a tray. Angus never thinks about money; he hasn't worked since summer but somehow his wallet's full.

Kinney and Taylor eat like starving animals and suck down pop (orange, because there's no Sprite) and I start feeling worried they won't go to sleep tonight. I wonder if we've worn them out enough. Because there's nothing else to do with them, and while I'm fiddling with the radio, the forecast says we might get up to a foot of additional snow. And that's just tonight.

“Do you think we'll get a snow day?” Kinney asks.

“You don't have school tomorrow,” I remind her.

“I know, but couldn't they just write a rain check on that? We could get the next day off?”

Angus laughs. I tell her that's not how it works.

“It should, though,” she says.

“No fair to get a blizzard day when there's already no school,” Taylor echoes. Then yawns.

We pass Target and I tell Angus to stop, but he doesn't get it. “What for?”

“Oh, you know,” I say. “If you need anything?”

He looks at me like I'm crazy. Like he doesn't understand the code I'm talking in.

“We should go look at toys!” Taylor says.

“We've got to get home,” Angus says. “This weather's shit.”

“Swearing!” Kinney yells. “Angus, I'm telling your mom.”

I laugh. Kinney is fascist about swearing.

“Please don't tell her,” he says. “She'll get so mad.”

“Will she take your snowboard away? Ground you?” Kinney asks.

“Probably,” he says, glancing at me. I swear, I get all freaked out, him just looking at me like that. All secret and sneaky.

“Then I won't tell her,” Kinney promises. “Because when my mom and dad get back? I'm going to tell them that we all need to go snowboarding every weekend like this weekend because it was so fun and Angus is the best babysitter we've ever had.”

“Hey!” I say, getting fake offended. “What about me?”

“
I
like you, Will,” Taylor says, trying to make me feel better.

“Angus is nicer, though,” Kinney says.

“And you're already our brother,” Taylor adds, a rare moment of aligning with Kinney's bitchiness. “We're
used
to you.”

Angus makes the turn toward my house and he glances at me, smirking again.

This time, bedtime is a little harder, like I figured it'd be. Kinney argues that they should sleep in her room and Taylor doesn't want to and I make them take a shower, which turns out to be a disaster, even though I think it'll relax them and be faster than a bath. But it's a disaster because Kinney's secretly still afraid to have water go over her face and that's why they still take dumb baths even though they're eight years old. After seeing my sisters swoop all over the hills today on their boards like pros, it fucking kills me that they take baths, with floaty toys and shit like that.

Once they holler down that they're finally in their pajamas, I come upstairs and they bitch because they want Angus to put them to bed but I'm a firm bastard on that score. Angus will just make them hyper and now they're all ragged and yelling and assholey from being tired. So I put them in Kinney's bed and turn on the pinwheel lamp and shut off the light but I don't leave. I sit on the floor by the bed and tell them a story, in the slowest, calmest voice I can, about a time-traveling orphan girl.