“Once upon a time,” Asher said, “on the –
what is it? – the seventeenth day of the tenth month of the year, a young man
found himself in the happy circumstance of having arranged for himself a date. Now, this young man, being a big
ol’ queermo – “ I snorted, and his smile widened “ – had resorted to use of the
magical rite known as Grindr to find himself said date. He had also, for the
very first time, made himself a dating profile – magical, of course – that
didn’t mention the fact that he was in a wheelchair, because he was sick of not
getting any dates.
“It felt like giving up, but also like not
that dumb of a move. Also, I did use one
photo where you could see pretty much the whole situation, so.” I had been
wondering about that, and pulled my mouth to one side. Asher sighed, with heat,
and thrust his hand back through his hair before composing himself again.
“Lo,” he continued, with a desultory prophetic
gesture, “came the night of the date. The other guy had seemed cute and smart
and interestingly employed, and they had exchanged many a humorous missive via
the mystical Grindr. Our young man was way excited, got himself dressed up real
nice, but not nice enough to look like he was trying too hard, and headed out
early for the tavern they had agreed upon for their amorous encounter. This
meant he had many, many a minute to find a seat that would sort of but not
totally hide the wheelchair, and to freak out over how this guy was going to
react when he saw it, the arm, etc.”
Asher paused here. Somewhere along the way
he had stopped meeting my eyes. I gave him a little while, before deciding that
he might appreciate a push. “So?”
He sighed. “The other guy got there
exactly when the date was supposed to begin, which I thought was a good sign. Not
so good when he got close enough to see the wheelchair. I’ve gotten it before,
obviously, but I still hope I forget
what his face looked like. It’s just –“ He paused again. “We got like two
minutes in past ‘hey, it’s great to meet you in person, how are you doing
tonight’ before he said, ‘Look, sorry, this isn’t going to work’ and basically
left right then. I think he was staring at my hand the whole time, too.
“I don’t know if he never even really
looked at the one photo, or if he did and told himself that he could deal with
it when he came to it, and then couldn’t…”
Asher looked lost.
My gut was churning with a mixture of
anger, disgust, and, unexpectedly, fear – the fear that I guessed Asher had
felt all that time, waiting in the bar, and the fear that I felt myself, still,
anytime I was expected to really talk with anyone
I didn’t know. “That makes me sick,” I said, simply, to Asher. “I’m rrrrrr –
really sssss – sss – sorry.”
“Thanks,” he said, looking up at me. He
didn’t seem to notice how long it took me to get through three words. His face
was serious.
A single pedestrian walked by swiftly on
the other side of the street, the first one we’d seen in a while, a woman huddled
into a long coat. Asher watched her as he continued. “So I sat there and felt
shitty about myself, shitty about him, hoped no one had noticed but was pretty
sure that at least a couple people had because I could see so much pity in
their faces. God. I went back and forth for a while about whether I should just
get the hell out and never show my face there again, but ended up staying. I
pretty much never drink because I already don’t feel like I’m in control of my
body, but of course I had one drink just to make a point to myself and the
world. I made it last for like four hours, and the waitress was really nice to
me about it. I had a crossword with me, at least, so for a while I did that. Then
it was later than I’d ever been out by myself before, the place was about to
close. I headed out and like one block
later ran into the four shitheads you met.
“The insane thing is, I don’t even think
they were that drunk, they were just really shitty, dumb people. Or like, one
or two of them was super shitty, and the rest were dumb enough to go along with
it. The plan, apparently, was to steal my wheelchair for just a little bit, do a joyride up and down Charleton,
then plop me back in, pat me on the ass, and send me on my way. I’m still not
sure whether that’s better or worse than just straight-up deciding to mug a
crippled guy.
“And thaaaat’s the story of my terrible,
horrible, no good, very bad day. Up to the part where you came in.” He smiled
crookedly at me, then looked down. “I try really, really hard not to go in for
self-pity, but god. What can you say to
all of that?” He looked back up at me again. The look in his eyes was close to
anguish.
All I could do was hold my hands out wide
and shake my head. I hoped my face showed what I was feeling.
And then, on a wild impulse, I took a step
closer to him, and reached out to cup one of my hands against the side of his
face.
He closed his eyes, and leaned into the
pressure. I loved the warmth of his cheek. The tension around his eyes and
mouth eased, until his face looked peaceful. He had long lashes.
I don’t know how much later, he said, “I
think the bus is coming.” He opened his eyes again. I could hear it now, too,
the deep surge of the engine. It came into view around the nearest curve of
Fairway, sweeping its pale lights ahead of it.
I stepped back, let my hand drop. “Be
safe,” I said.
“I’ll call you,” he said. The bus pulled
to a stop alongside us.
***
It was almost 3:30 AM by the time I got
home; normally I never stayed up past 11. (I had been proud of myself for
agreeing to a pretty late-night date tonight; so much for that.) The
combination of the night’s events and the near-silent busride had left me in a
kind of drugged daze; I wondered if I would be able to fall asleep.
I pulled up my wheelchair facing the
bathroom mirror as I pulled off gloves, scarf, coat. Phone went between my legs
for temporary safekeeping. As I eased my bunched jacket sleeve off of my right
arm, I caught myself looking myself over in the mirror, in the half-light that
reached it from the hallway, trying to see with the eyes of the guy from Grindr
– his name had been James. A nice, steady name, I had thought. James’ eyes reported
not just that I had crippled legs and a crippled arm, which I, Asher,
considered factual, but that they were distorted, unwholesome, repellent. My
contracted arm was insectoid, mantis-like, or maybe like a plucked chicken
wing.
My heart was racing again, and my stomach
churned. With a twinge, my right arm contracted a bit, and the fingers of that
hand fluttered in and out. I always wished I could control them better. (Forget
about poker face; give me poker hands.)
Actually it was easier to be mad about
James than to think about the four guys in the alley, which was, on some level,
possibly why I was sitting and doing this. I sighed, broke eye contact with
mirror-Asher, pseudo-James, and rolled all the way into the bathroom, where I
splashed water on my face and neck and toweled it off.
In my bedroom, I plugged in my chair to
charge overnight, and then transferred to my bed before undressing. Lying back
against a couple pillows made it easier for me to get my jeans down over my
hips and butt in order to begin the process of extracting my stiff, bent legs. Finally,
I flung my clothes across the neighboring dresser. Then I eased myself up until
I could pull the comforter back and toss it over my legs, which fell to one
side. They would be sore in the morning, I knew, but I was feeling too off to
be responsible and tuck a pillow under them. I used my good arm to push myself
further down under the covers, gradually, and then reached out for my phone.
I flopped back against the pillows,
unlocked my phone. Roy’s contact info was still the first window open; on the
bus I hadn’t been able to do anything but sit and stare.
”Hi, Roy,” I whispered.
I let the phone drop to the side. I’d
forgotten to turn off the wall switch as I came in, but there was no way I was
doing anything about that now. So I stared up at the glaring ceiling light and
thought about Roy.
How the hell did three such insane things
happen in one night? Grindr date from hell, attempted-wheelchair-theft gang
(“what the fuck,” I whispered to myself), capped off by rescue from mysterious
silent stranger with some kind of vigilante complex, and also a convenient case
of the gays. Roy was so weird and improbable, in fact, that part of my brain
had been screaming at me during all of that time with him not to trust him, not to
like him. But I liked him. A lot. I hoped it wasn’t just because he obviously
had a thing for me, a thing so obvious that even someone with abjectly low
self-esteem where romance was concerned could perceive it.
If I didn’t trust him entirely, it was
because he was honestly a little scary. Not all the time, but when he wasn’t
actively being scary, he was still pretty weird.
I turned my head on the pillow, thinking
furiously. What did I really know about Roy?
So he had, or had had, a serious speech
impediment. I couldn’t blame him if that had made him pretty weird. I often
thought (guiltily, because I had friends with cerebral palsy who were nonverbal
or close to it) that I was fucking glad that my CP hadn’t also affected my
speech because if there’s one thing that can make people assume real fast that
you’re retarded, it’s a serious speech impediment.
But it wasn’t just his near-silence, his
long pauses and looks where other people would feel compelled to express
themselves, or at least provide some harmless chatter. His silence had flavors. There was some kind of
intensity rolling off of him at all times, a kind of heat, and I didn’t know
how to parse it. That was scary.
And then there had been the fight in the
alleyway. Not just the fact that he chose to fight, instead of calling the
police, but the fact that he had been obviously restraining himself the whole time. I hadn’t noticed it at the time
– I was too busy trying to breathe and not surrender to the wall of panic that
wanted to press me flat, I had never
felt so vulnerable before, never never never – but moments of the fight had
suddenly returned to me with unnerving clarity as we headed down Charleton. The
moment when his still silhouette at the mouth of the alleyway suddenly broke
into a sprint, pounding down the alley toward us, the ease and brutal
efficiency with which he landed blows on the fleeing men, the way that he
hunched back into himself like an animal before he rushed to pin the last man,
the instigator, against the alley wall. After that, they were behind me, I was falling out of my chair – but I heard
some of the brief scuffle that ensued, the man’s whimpering breath, the dull
slaps that I realized much later were Roy hitting him with his own wallet. The
wallet that still rested in the inside pocket of my coat; I hadn’t wanted to touch
it, look at it again.
I guess I should have been flattered that this
stranger wanted that badly to fuck up the gang of four. But I was afraid that
his anger was… impersonal, that this was a freak incident that happened to tap
into a well of anger that went deep, was always there.
I wasn’t used to being close to anger, let
alone that much of it.
It didn’t help that he was huge. I was bad at guessing heights,
which was easy to blame on my vantage point, but he was definitely over six
foot, and built like a locomotive. A locomotive with huge hands. I am, of
necessity, a coward when it comes to anything physical, and – I didn’t know
where I was going with this, Roy hadn’t offered me the slightest hint of violence. But he looked like he was
designed to walk through brick walls.
I shook my head. Chewing everything over,
overanalyzing as I liked to, was a better alternative to lying in bed paralyzed
with fear, but it wasn’t helping me sleep. Did I even want to sleep? There was
something comforting about the idea of being awake to see the sun come up.
Thank god tomorrow was Saturday.
What else did I know about Roy? He was
pretty bad at not showing his feelings. I pressed my face further into my
pillow and smiled to myself. I wanted to think about the fun stuff now.
I had really liked the way he looked me
over, the first time he really looked at me. At first it had been neutral, methodical,
ready to assess the damage – not horrified, not full of pity. That neutrality
alone had been enough to help me start calming down. Okay, his look said, what
next? (See, said a voice in my brain now, not angry all the time.) And then,
as he looked at me for longer, something warmer broke through. He had a square
jaw, a mouth that he tended to hold tightly, eyes with tension lines at the
corners, straightish middling brown hair cut short – traits that all went along
with his quasi-military intensity. (Had he been in the military?) But somehow
they went soft as he looked me that
first time.
And I saw it happen again and again,
during that hour or however long we spent together. If we weren’t really
talking, or if we were talking about something that made him angry (like the
story of my shitty night), the tension would gather up again in his brows and the
set of his jaw. But if he really looked at me, it just… dissolved. He looked
soft. There was no other way to put it.
It made me feel really good. So did the
way he kept looking at me while trying to make it look like he wasn’t looking
at me, and not in the way I always
got from strangers. He just looked curious, and – like he was enjoying it. Like
he wanted more.
Also, I liked his voice, what little I had
heard of it. Deep, with a little bit of gravel to it, it seemed to emanate from
behind his sternum. It felt like a presence instead of a voice.
I realized that the cheek I was lying
against was the cheek he had held his hand against. His hand had been chilled,
so it had sent an extra thrill through me. I thought about the largeness and
firmness of that hand, its comfortingly rough texture, the simple shock of contact, of presence (that word again). I
didn’t know if anyone had ever touched me that way before. I’d gotten as far as
kissing a few guys before, thank god, a little bit of messing around, but it
had all been really shy, kind of stilted. Nothing with that immediacy of
emotion. The naked expression of tenderness.
I flung my arm over my eyes, overwhelmed.
Then I reached out for my phone, flipped open Roy’s contact info again. I hit
the “text” button, and propped the phone in the crook of my bad arm so I’d have something to type against.
“Hi,” I typed. “This is Asher. I got home
safely, and I hope you did too. Thank you again for everything.” I hit send, and then typed, “Would you like to
get coffee on Sunday?”
I hovered my thumb over send. Was Sunday too soon? Would it come off as desperate? Damn the torpedoes, I thought, deliriously. I hit send.
I hovered my thumb over send. Was Sunday too soon? Would it come off as desperate? Damn the torpedoes, I thought, deliriously. I hit send.
Really perfect - plot, characters, moodswings, everything. I enjoyed it VERY, very much! I hope,you will continue this story soon.
ReplyDeleteEvery Wednesday until I run out of plot! :) Or even longer than that, considering how much I enjoy plotless relationship writing...
DeleteThanks so much, Anon, this comment made me so happy.
This is just soooo good! Seriously, your writing is amazing and you push all my dev-buttons at once :) I can't say who is hotter, Asher or Ray, I'm in love with both of them. I'd like the two of them, please, with a cherry on top :D
ReplyDeleteI loved having Asher's POV, too. He's so sweet... They'll be one hell of a couple, the angry wolf and the lonely cutie. Tell me you plan like one million chapters?
Omg Lovis, I can't stop laughing (happily) at your comment... http://i.cubeupload.com/DaEIF5.jpg
DeleteAhh, just saw this! Omg, sooo cute ;P Haha, thanks, you made my day!!
DeleteWonderful story. I like having both POV's. Thanks for posting.
ReplyDeleteThis is my first time trying a multi-POV story - I've been having fun deciding what to conceal and what to reveal with POV choices!
DeleteYou have great writing talents -- so glad you are sharing them with us. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThank you for being such an appreciative reader, Pepper.
DeleteWhat a nuce, long chapter. I cant waot for more!
ReplyDeleteThe six chapters I've written after this one are all about the same length, too, I'm happy to say!
Delete"His silence had flavors" love that line and so many more. Great characters. Want to take both home with me
ReplyDeleteAhahaha, thank you, blueskye. I'm tickled that Roy seems to be hitting people's dev-button too - hadn't been sure if it would work out that way!
DeleteLove the story so far! So glad to get Asher’s POV too ;)
ReplyDeleteThank you, Annabelle! In subsequent chapters I've actually found it hard to move away from Asher's POV - gotta work to keep letting Roy have his say!
DeleteI'm back for a third read of the whole thing, and I see that although I tried to comment on my first run through, I think Blogger ate my comment. Oh well :D. This is beautiful. I love how you include little details about Asher's eyes and his smile, his self-deprecating humour, and of course his hand, arm and legs too (poker hands was a lovely touch). I really love him. My heart went out to him when he was telling Roy his tale, and then when Roy stuttered those three words, and Asher just accepted it... yeah. I like this story a lot.
ReplyDeleteI'm in danger of rambling now. Thank you for sharing it, and I can't wait to see them getting closer together and getting to know each other better. You have a real way with words.
Rose, your comment made my heart so happy! It's a new and so-wonderful thing for me to get to watch my characters come to life in other people's minds. Thank you for reading, and for your appreciative reflections.
Delete