Page 64 of The Librarians
Jonathan’s head snaps up. What? What did Ryan call him?
Ryan is again leaning back against the throw pillows, but this time, with his arms around one knee.
“It’s not that I didn’t hear what you said afterward, it’s that it didn’t matter.
Of course you were upset—we cracked your hetero facade.
And of course you would disappear from my life—I had already committed the original sin of unkindness and didn’t deserve a prize like you. ”
“A prize,” Jonathan says slowly.
“Back then I fixated on you because of a combination of my own shallowness and the cultural hegemony of Middle America. Now at least I see that your character has caught up to your physical appeal, that you are as good a person to know as you are to look at.”
Ryan smiles, not the brilliant, glamorous smiles Jonathan has come to expect but a smile so wistful it’s very nearly forlorn.
Jonathan’s heart pinches. “Wh-what are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying that I’ve been trying to stay away from you because I don’t deserve you any more than I did twenty years ago.
” Ryan is once again looking down, his index finger drawing figure eights on his knee.
“But my willpower might fail at some point. I might show up at your house one of these days and not leave. Then you will need to remember what I told you today, that everything I’ve ever felt for you and will ever feel for you is fucked-up, and my desire to settle down is always deeply suspect. ”
Silence. A pair of children laugh and chase each other past the lounger, their parents in hot pursuit. Beyond a screen of trees, kayakers glide by, orange streaks on the lake. The wind picks up, carrying with it the scent of water and fallen leaves.
Jonathan feels as if he’s floating above the lounger and being melted into it at the same time.
Maya Angelou said, When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time .
But what about when someone tells you who they are? What about when they decant all their self-loathing and defensiveness together, believing it to be the world’s most repellent mixture, not realizing that they’ve also poured in a gallon of hope and longing and fearful anticipation?
Ryan shoves his hands into the pockets of his varsity jacket. The next moment, he withdraws his left hand and frowns at a clementine in his palm, as if he has no idea how the fruit came to be on his person.
Sophomore year in high school, toward the end of football season, one day, after practice, Jonathan was waiting in front of the school to be picked up by his mom.
After a minute or two, Ryan sauntered into view.
Jonathan was instantly a tangle of nerves, trying not to look at Ryan and trying not to flee.
“Hey, you want one?” Ryan asked.
Jonathan glanced up. Ryan lobbed over something, his motion that of someone at a free throw.
Jonathan caught it, a clementine almost as tiny as a marble. “Thanks,” he mumbled.
“You were at all the JV basketball games last year,” said Ryan, peeling open his own clementine.
A sharp, citrusy tang filled the air. Jonathan breathed in deeply. “Yeah,” he mumbled again.
“Are you coming to the varsity games this year?”
“I don’t know.”
But of course he’d be there. To watch Ryan.
Ryan’s dad arrived then to pick up Ryan.
Ryan lifted his chin in Jonathan’s direction, a gesture of goodbye, then he was gone.
Later Jonathan found out that Ryan usually went home after practice with a senior on the basketball team who lived three doors down from his house.
But that day the senior was out and Jonathan got to see him for a few minutes.
He kept the clementine in his nightstand drawer for two days before he ate it. It tasted like his favorite orange juice, except fresher and tarter and a hundred times more delicious.
Ryan in the present day drops the clementine back into his pocket and exhales. He is waiting for Jonathan to say something.
“So…you just want me to tell you no?”
A net made of vinyl cords hangs from the steel frame of the lounger, forming a protective circumference. Ryan plunges his right hand into the net. “Yes.”
For the first time, Jonathan notices a strand of white in Ryan’s otherwise thick, black hair. Ryan can pass for twenty-nine any day, but time has tiptoed up to him too.
Jonathan hasn’t quarterbacked in almost twenty years. But in that moment, he reads the field and knows exactly what to do. “We don’t need to wait until your willpower fails another day,” he says. “Go ahead and tell me that you want us to get together. I can refuse you right away.”
Ryan’s hand tightens around the net. “I’m not sure I want to be refused right away.”
“You do, trust me. You didn’t bring everything up for me to react in six weeks. You wanted an answer today.”
Ryan gazes at Jonathan, as if he’s trying to commit every last detail of Jonathan’s appearance to memory. For the first time, in front of Jonathan, he looks openly apprehensive, openly vulnerable. “Okay, here goes. Jonathan, you want to spend the night at my place?”
Jonathan pulls him close by the lapels of his varsity jacket and kisses him softly, carefully.
Not only because they are in public, but because he wants to let Ryan know that even though they are fucked-up and failure hangs by a thread overhead, he will still approach their relationship with all the attentiveness and diligence of an archaeologist starting on a new dig.
Sure, there might be nothing worthwhile, everything ransacked by tomb raiders long ago.
Or there could be enough buried treasures to astonish the whole world.
Ryan breaks free, breathing hard. “What happened to refusing me right away?”
“What for?” says Jonathan, his heart pounding so hard he can barely hear himself. “So I can go home and think about you all night?”
They have been thinking about each other since they were fifteen. That’s long enough.
Ryan studies him. Does he see the years on Jonathan’s face—the beginning of crow’s feet, the incipient lines on his forehead? “You’re right,” he says solemnly. “Let’s not be wusses anymore.”
He places his hand against Jonathan’s beard. His thumb traces over Jonathan’s left brow, his ring finger behind Jonathan’s earlobe. “Let’s not waste any more time.”