Page 127 of String Boys

“Amazing,” Kelly mumbled. “Amazing. But God, I think I’m useless for the whole rest of the day. I’m all high now, floaty from that. How do you even function after sex like that?”

Seth took his mouth and didn’t bother to answer.

He was thinking that music put him under, just like submission did. He was thinking that sex always felt like the next step on the staircase to heaven.

If that was true, then they must have gotten to heaven while they were in Mendocino that year. So many things they had planned—more driving up the coast, hiking through the redwoods, trips to lighthouses.

They spent most of their time in that tiny hotel room, naked and wanting, panting and lunging, sated and wearing each other’s come on their skin.

They would return and spend the rest of the summer getting together every weekend, sometimes with the family, sometimes not. But always, always, they spent Saturday night at the very least in Seth’s apartment, getting so good at sex it was like they were training for a medal.

But they both knew what they were really training for.

Seth came home the three days before he left for Italy. He spent the time in the apartments, playing with Chloe mostly, but also keeping company with his dad, Kelly’s mom, Kelly’s sisters.

His family.

He must have said, “I’ll Skype every Saturday, I promise!” about fifteen hundred times.

The night before he left, he and Kelly spent all night in his room, talking about everything and nothing at all. Kelly and his father were taking him to the airport the next morning—he was flying out of Sacramento to LAX at 6:00 a.m.

At 3:00 a.m., Seth’s alarm went off, and he pulled Kelly closer, smelling his hair, his neck, the sweat that the warm August night had left on his body.

And Seth said the one fear he’d kept back since the trip to Italy had come up two years before. “You won’t forget about me, will you? Even if you… if you walk away, you won’t forget?”

Kelly shook his head. “You’re so dumb, sometimes. No. No, Seth. I will never forget you. And I will never walk away.”

Seth should have told him it was okay. Seth was going to be all the way across the world—Kelly had a right to live his life.

But he didn’t.

He couldn’t.

“Neither will I,” he whispered.

They dropped him off in the still darkness, with a child’s checklist for getting on the plane—including keeping track of the passport that Kelly had needed to help him acquire. He’d never been on a plane before.

As he stepped through the doors to the terminal, he looked back and saw his father holding on to Kelly like he was still a kid, both of them waving even though Seth should have been inside long before. Seth waved back madly and then turned away, wiping his face on his shoulder.

A year, right?

What was a year after two weeks of Mendocino and a lifetime of being in love?

Dancing Alone

“NO, YOUcan’t come in.” Kelly folded his arms in front of him and glared at his brother.

“Where’s Mom?” Matty looked like shit. His hair, always cut close in high school, had grown out, but it didn’t fall straight like Kelly’s and then curl—instead it stood up in a thousand cowlicks. His face was lined already, at twenty-three, and his beard was past the stubble stage and into full grown Astroturf. He was wearing cargo shorts in late November and a dress shirt with a thousand stains on it, including one that looked like vomit.

And he smelled like a brewery.

And vomit.

“Mom is at the movies,” Kelly said, proud of this, because he’d managed to shove Linda out and into Craig’s car again this month.

Apparently this habit had started during the summer. The girls were all old enough to babysit, and God, if anybody deserved a break it was Mom. And she seemed to enjoy Craig Arnold’s undemanding company, which Kelly didn’t mind at all.

More than once in the past months, she’d gone downstairs carrying his dinner and had ended up staying and watching TV.