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There they are, in his mother’s car, returning home. His eyes out the window, counting light poles and trying to discern a body between them, when she says:
There will be Other Boys, is the problem. After this one, Other Boys will come. Mouths full, plush, opening for you, inviting—enticing—the way they say your name, breathy. Asking for permission, as if you have power, there, wherever you are. Your bedroom, a gas station bathroom, corner of a bar, the back of a bus. And it is not your fault that you turn towards that love. But I am your mother, and so it is my duty to put myself between you and that terrible wrongness. We are just soft animals looking for shepherding. I am not your guide, but I can take the rest of your life from you in order to guard your place in heaven, Naim. This is what they told me. The fear will help you.
Naim’s forehead bumps against the glass as the tires crunch gravel.
But he knows fear now, and so it should be a much more difficult thing to walk into the gas station alone and steal three chocolate bars and a soda, and sneak around the back row of shelves, looking mighty suspicious. Perhaps to see if he will be stopped. The world deciding to intervene at the last moment. But no one asks him to open his bag, and no one stops him when he pops the window in the dirty bathroom, and no one sees him crawl out that window and onto the hot pavement. A scorch on his palm. Summer sweat licking his nape, slicking the short hair of his buzzed neckline. The grooves on the pavement press into his bare hands. A dog barks from a cranked-down car window.
All of these things are easy. Barely felt. Even leaving his mother behind, alone, as she waits for him. Waits, waits, waits. Naim? Naim—Naim? Naim! NAIM! He hears it every step. He must be imagining her voice as he runs the way he believes, for a moment, that he is imagining Ryan at that bus stop. Feels his fingers in the back of his throat, prodding the soft flesh, looking to hook-line-sink the full length of his arm into the very pit of him and hold tight. Already has.
Tell me that’s really you, Ryan’s voice is tired. Sure, Naim thinks. I can do that.
Because he doesn’t have to say it. A shoulder bumping into Ryan as a man presses by. A woman’s bag catching on Naim’s hip. The proof is in the other people, around them.
Maybe he really is a soft animal. His stomach allows Ryan’s fingers to push the flesh around when his grip tightens on his waist even when he is tense all over. Muscles rolling like they do when he has vomited all night.
Every bruise is a pulsepoint; Naim throbs, throbs, throbs.
*
Lovers need time apart, the magazine article says, in order to maintain a sense of independence and find fulfillment outside of their immediate, intimate relationships, this is crucial to keep the relationship strong in the long run! It’s a women’s magazine that Naim picked up after his shift at the gas station. This is his fourth job in six months. You try telling your boss that you weren’t the one who shattered every serving glass in inventory—the invisible guy on the security footage did all that. So that gets Naim here, fingers prying the magazine open as Ryan wanders around the tiny kitchen making butter noodles. Time apart is a luxury, he realizes. He sinks into their codependency with abandon. The front door handle clicks but doesn’t unlock. Naim’s head is the second to turn.
The first question upon coming home is always: what time did you walk out the door this morning? And the answer is down to the second. Both of them are always wearing watches. Because the one thing unchanging about the not-Ryan and not-Naim is that they're not really bound by the world, and they only have convenient answers, and none of them make much sense beyond trying to get you to let them in, let them close. Not-Ryan couldn't tell you the time if you smashed his head with a clock in. But he's a sweet enough talker that he was right by Naim's face before Naim even realized they'd changed topics. Love makes you stupid, they say. Stupid enough to get you killed, Naim thinks, if they keep it up.
One time, early on, Ryan couldn’t remember the time. It takes a while to make habits, and Naim, who has not gotten used to fear, yet, is two-centimeters deep into his arm with a pocket knife before they can both agree they’re real. The emergency visit patches Ryan up quickly. Slipped while cooking, he says, while Naim sits red-eyed at his side. Can nurses report them to the cops? What would they even say? We think this guy stabbed his friend (his boyfriend in a hush) and they’re both lying about it. Can the mirror Ryan pry his way into jail? Does he exist wherever Naim does?
They have to be apart.
There’s no kind of living that would allow them to be tied together, all day ‘round. So they pry themselves from each other and get used to being scared. Really terrified, bone-deep scared. Lights on, always. They run the electric bill up, up, up. It just has to work, there’s no way around it.
*
Sometimes Naim dreams about yellow fields.
Yellow like the scleras of Ryan’s eyes when he’s going down on his knees, fingers curling into fists, mouth opening slow, slow, to house a scream he can’t let out because he’s choking, he’s on his side, on his back in the grass, on his back under Naim’s body, under Naim’s hands, a not-Naim, a really-Naim-this-time, the dust of an abandoned building around them, on a dark street, in a backyard, under the moving shadows of the laundry on a line, choking himself sick, yellow like all of that, the sickness, pus pressing his skin taut and up.
Snake among the long-grass straws. All kinds of snakes, everywhere. His mother saying something about animals, again, about being guided, about being a soft prey animal shepherded by fear and spliced belly-open and learning to be grateful for this. Naim stares at himself in the bathroom mirror and pushes both his thumbs to the sharp edges of his canines and then he imagines himself developing venom only the Real Ryan could survive. Not-Ryan always smiles when they come apart. He’s got square-tipped fingers that push in real hard against the skin of Naim’s throat or his stomach or wherever else is easiest to reach for the hurting that time.
One time, tangled up in bed, living every wet dream Naim’s ever had, bare-skinned and heaving and desperate, coming apart between the kisses, Naim took Ryan's hands to his throat and held them there with his eyes closed until he came, and when he opened them Ryan stared at him like a deer caught in headlights, pressed harder down but didn’t stop, and then they cried about it. And then it never came up again.
*
His mother gets his number, somehow. Maybe she called the cops. Naim’s not sure they should be allowed to give his info out, like, legally. Right? Because he’s an adult by now, by the legal definition, and in the sense he knows how to do taxes on his own and he can cook all his own meals and drive a car and lives with his boyfriend and surely he is grown and independent and free in the only sense he can be, now. But he hears her on the other end of the line—
Naim, please come home, I promise I wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt you, and you know this, but I understand it must be so terrifying, of course, but how can I help you when you’re not here, my darling, I mean, the church will look out for you, I spoke to all of them and Ryan can come, too, and his family’s looking to relocate, anyway, so it would really solve that issue all together, oh Naim, please just say something, at least let me
—and he forgets what she did to him, for a moment. She used to make him oatmeal when he was really sick. Tuck him into bed and wipe at his forehead and put jam in the center of the mush and milk sometimes, too, and when dad was around, still, he’d hear them chatting in low voices as he drifted away into sleepy sickness instead of feverpain, and she is his mother, and he does love her, he thinks. He can’t cut that part out. Sometimes Ryan cries about this, too. Like, what the hell are we supposed to do, Naim? Broke and lonely because you try making friends when you’re—they’re not hallucinations, we can’t call them that, they’re fucking real—sometimes followed by the spectre of your boyfriend and that thing wants you dead as much as he loves you.
All this to say: Naim calls her back. He just doesn’t speak to her. He listens to her as she asks, is that you Naim? Naim? Please, just say something. And he doesn’t because he loves her and one day he will die, and if it happens sooner rather than later, it might just be her fault. How can you get that through the phone?
*
“Just tell me the time, Naim. Please, just tell me the fucking time. I’m just asking for the time.”
And Naim’s got nothing but a shattered wristwatch and Ryan in front of him and behind him. Everywhere, brimming with I’M RIGHT FUCKING HERE and it’s so easy for him to hate and love Ryan at once these days, because no matter how hard they try, the spectres still look like them when they hurt each other. Naim can’t even get angry at Ryan for refusing to let him in: this is how they stay safe. He’d do the same thing. But it doesn’t stop him from banging on the door and screaming to be let inside and crying loud enough for the neighbors to report them, again, which they’ll do, Naim can already see the written notice slid under their door. He doesn’t stop crying until it’s midnight and Ryan creaks the door open enough and asks him questions until they’re both hoarse and too tired for this and Naim crawls in on his hands and knees through the door opening. Then they fall asleep in the hallway, tangled up in each other. It’ll happen again.
Naim knows fear. He goes to bed rotten with it, and even Ryan’s arms around him makes him wonder, every night, if the finger tracing up from his groin to his navel to the tender center of his chest is going to prick him, the nail becoming a blade. If it will reach deep inside of him, gorging him out, looking for the part of him that desires, that makes not-Ryan come back, and back, and back. Maybe it wants that part of him so badly because it is the only reason he exists. Maybe to make sure it’s safe, so that not-Ryan will never go away.
At least Naim knows, when Ryan shows up with his nose broken and blood smeared down his shirt and chin and his beautiful mouth, that Ryan loves him. He even loves him when Ryan approaches him, some months later, brandishing a swiss knife, begging for the time again. And Naim doesn’t know; he can’t fucking remember what time he left the gas station, so he can at least guess. Why isn’t Ryan using the lighter? There’s a whole drawer full of them. Are they all out, already? Running through their stash of fire sparks like they’re candy bits.
The swiss blade’s corkscrew twists around, around. Naim imagines himself gored at Ryan’s hand for the hundredth time. It’s almost like french kissing, how intimate it is.
*
IN TODAY’S ARTICLE ON RELATIONSHIPS—NEVER LET THINGS GET STALE! And for your love horoscope:
You know everything you ever will know about love by twenty-one, because you have: stabbed your boyfriend, fled from your mother’s comfort, survived an exorcism, shot your boyfriend, skipped towns six times, doused your bed on fire after pretending to get married in your rental unit then called the fire department and explained the gas stove just caught the spark somehow yes maybe one of us was smoking a cig in there whatever helps the excuse in this case no sir we’re just roommates not students no yes we work do we have family around well sir
*
Naim calls him Baby, one time. Hey, hey, Ryan, baby, we’re okay, we’re going to be okay. And Ryan stares up at him from the floor, nose broken, blood smeared over cheek chin jaw. He’s stupid handsome, Naim thinks, biting his lip so it hurts worse than his busted knuckles.
*
He imagines a greying Ryan. Blond hair silvered and with a scruffed beard. Aged into his body, palms calloused from practiced grip. His shoulders never relax. Do they learn how to? He practices calm breathing until the door lock jams, asks, What time’s it, and Ryan answers the right thing, this time, and Naim, well—he waits for when the time comes for the last, right answer. There will be a final time they get it wrong. He knows this with the certainty his mom said there will be other boys, even though Naim is sure that this is his last love. This is the one he’s chosen and that chose him back. There are only so many men in the world who will take you three-inch-knife deep and not blame you, and maybe even love you harder after. So it is a selfish love. It is the one good thing to come from this. It could even be sweet, he thinks, from the right angle.
It could’ve even been safe. It could’ve been, if he hadn’t—
*
So there he is, again: not in his mother’s car, but the beat-up dark-blue Holden Barina. Eyes out the window, counting how many times they’ve passed not-Ryan by, wondering how long he’ll show for, this time.
Get off at a gas station again. Steal a few chocolate bars and feel bad about it later. Look up at the security cameras anchored to the corner, but turned away from him, and remember their position because that’s what happens now, when he enters rooms. He learns where he should crawl to be seen. Caught on tape. He just doesn’t want his mom to think Ryan killed him, if he dies. When. Doesn’t want her to think he killed himself, either. Maybe no one would watch the tapes to be sure, but they’d have to, right? The cops. They’d scan the photo and see him on the floor, bloodied up. Never call Ryan's name when he’s alone, that too. That’d be doing him a real disservice.
Just think it, that you love him. Keep that a better secret this time. Fail at it, because it bleeds through you. Live with it, anyway.