I wish for even a moment we would stop running.

Strands of sunlight are slicing the walls in Evan’s bedroom. He snores next to me, one arm underneath my pillow, the other at his side from where I’d wriggled out beneath it. It’s quiet enough that I can hear my watch ticking, moving us past the points of hesitation and staggering away from last night, from my last moments preserved on the wrong side of womanhood.

I turn on my side, moving my arm under the pillow to meet his. When our fingers brush, he takes my hand and squeezes, still asleep. A jolt of affection shoots upwards from the pit of my stomach. Maybe this space could stay still for us.

But I can’t sleep. It’s one of those dawns where I can feel the internal pathways and movements that keep myself alive. I want to wake him and walk us back to the moments defining last night, but instead I lay stagnant with our hands intertwined. I’m frightened of what could come if I start our day. With the sun rising higher, I wait on him to set our pace.

Finally his alarm goes off, with which I shut my eyes, hoping I look peaceful, inviting. Evan stirs and reaches over me to shut it off. I hope the sheets are crumpled enough he can’t hear my heart pounding through them. I wait, I wait, until finally he leans down to kiss my cheek as he pulls back. I open my eyes then, feigning awakening.

He presses his lips to me, hand resting on my stomach. Somewhere between a peck he says “good morning,” his voice reverberating over the points of my body where he’d been before.

“Hi,” I greet my friend. We lay in silence for a while, a static quiet that stretches over the question of what we are, his lips occasionally pressing against my forehead. I think about my clothes scattered on the floor, the world outside his bedroom door. The world within we’d spent pressed together, inhaling each other’s moans and running our hands over every opportunity of sensation and flesh. Each interval in between he’d let out the reasons why he came to Los Angeles and what he’d run from. I had listened, I had held him, and he had thanked me for hearing him. I had thanked him in return, and he’d smiled, his dimples creasing up towards his gorgeous eyes, alive and calm. We had torn apart the seam barring intimacy behind his bedroom door. What will happen when we cross back through it?

“I’m gonna take a shower,” he says between kisses. I want to suggest I join him, but I refrain, afraid he’ll say no, and he doesn’t offer. He leaves me alone, and I burrow back under the blankets, feeling this milestone pass and letting its grace flood to my fingertips. I feel the larger space between my legs, and exhale in relief. I am twenty-three years old and eighteen at last.

He comes back and we dress, his hands landing less and less on me.

“Do you want coffee?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

“I don’t have cream or sugar.”

“That’s okay,” I lie.

He opens his door and I cross through it, inhaling the smell of stale carpet and coffee beans.

He can’t sit still while the coffee brews. His roommate is in the shower, and the sound of water running makes me sweat. I try to get closer to him, paying precise attention to what he’ll do, where his hands will land. But he can’t stop moving, making himself busy amongst the cupboards, always two steps away from me. My watch ticks.

“Coffee’s ready,” he says, just as I touch his arm, and I move away to watch him pour.

He hands me a cup.

“Thank you,” I say.

“It’s nothing,” he answers.

I take a sip. It tastes like hot water and gravel, but I smile at him from above the brim. He smiles back, careful his grin doesn’t reach too far into his dimples. He doesn’t need to. I already know.

He kisses me goodbye when I leave, but even with the electricity lingering on my lips and the rotten coffee grounds on my tongue, my heart has gone dull. Evan lives next to the 101, and I coil over the sound of tires crawling over pavement. Los Angeles was never the city for quick getaways.

Traffic opens up once I hit the 134, but despite the relief of watching my speedometer creep over eighty, despite the electricity that fades from the places he’d been before, I wish for even a moment we would stop running. I wish for a morning where he could have let me in, I wish that in the parts of our hearts we’d opened up to each other that he could have found a place to stay, that somehow in the intensity of his words and the pleasure of his tongue he had found a residency that could be as good for him as he was for me. I emerge from my car a larger person, and the cold wind of morning greets who I will forever be. I love how it feels, I love what it means, but I can’t help wishing for even a moment that I hadn’t spent the night alone.

#fiction #prose #romance #onenightstand #heartbreak #youth

I give credit to Children’s Hospital. They do try. There’re kites and elephants painted all over the waiting rooms, as if one has to do with the other. Monkeys and bunnies dance alongside them, their talk bubbles wishing for our health and happiness. I stare at them, kicking my foot up and down. You’ll get well soon, the elephant says.

My brother’s eyes slide over to my restless foot. “Good idea,” he says, and crosses his right leg to do the same.

I know he’s trying to make me laugh, so I do, but I keep my eyes on the elephant. Making light is how Matthew gets by, and sometimes I’m okay with that, but I can’t decide how I feel today. Matthew’s got a morbid sense of humor, the nurses always say.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d tell you that my parents aren’t breathing. They are. Their chests are barely expanding against their shirts. Dad’s eyes are following a smaller child playing with the painted trees on the walls. She presses her palms against the bark and squeals. Her parents ignore her. I think she’s the healthy sibling, the other child is thinner and hasn’t woken up. My mom is watching my older brother, making sure he’s alright. He’s fine. He’ll get well soon, the elephant says so.

I watch my brother’s foot. He’s stopped paying attention to it and picked up his GameBoy. I want to ask him if he’s said goodbye to his toes, to his heel, to his ankle. I don’t.

Hang in there, says the monkey. I’m fine.

“How much longer?” I ask Mom.

“It’s a hospital,” she replies. There are stones in her voice and they weigh down her words. I reach into her purse without asking and pull out a Sharpie and a piece of paper.

“Here,” I say to Matthew, “let’s draw.”

Matthew picks up the Sharpie but leaves the paper. He goes for his right leg with a smirk.

“Cut…” Matthew drags his words as he writes, “Here.”

He marks an ‘X’ below his knee.

Somebunny loves you, says the bunny.

_

The Oncology wing has a little gift shop to the right of the check-in center. Mom used to buy me a gift every time I’d come to visit, a small bear or a chocolate bar, but then we kept coming here and she stopped. She lets me wander on my own, which I like because it makes me feel old. I count doors of the inpatient wing and smile at the kids tugging their IV poles like a stuffed animal behind them. I sit in the parents lounge and read magazines about celebrities, pretending to find it interesting, like my mom does. I get a Crunch bar from the vending machine with my own allowance, and I only sometimes ask Mom first. Someone painted bees over the vending machines that say “bee happy.” I am.

I like sitting in Matthew’s room when it’s just the two of us. Other people in there might mean doctors, or nurses, or needles. The chemo makes him vomit sometimes but I don’t mind catching it in the bowl. Then we watch TV or play video games or he asks what happened at school so I can tell him. His IV beeps every forty seconds, and a nurse comes in every ten minutes, or sooner if he pushes a button.

“Someone at school today asked me if you looked sick,” I say, and Matthew scoffs.

“What kind of question is that?”

I shrug. “People.”

“Tell them I’ve grown another ear, and it’s started talking.”

“That would be a mouth.”

“No, it looks like an ear.”

“Where would it be?”

“The leg stump, for sure. Prosthetics are gonna be a nightmare.”

We laugh. It colors the room, it lets in light.

“You don’t look sick,” I say, “you don’t look any different.”

“Nice try. No hair, no leg, literal tubes coming out of my chest. Even my eyelashes fell out.”

“But you look good.” I mean it, I wanted to say. You’re fine. Get well soon.

Matthew smiled. “I’d look better with a talking ear.”

_

Mom says the phantom pain is only bad for the first couple months, that once his brain understands it doesn’t have to manage his right leg anymore it’ll stop sending signals to it. Until then, the sensation rips my brother open like claws cutting down a cloth. Some days he says he feels like his ankle is being twisted around and his hands grasp at an empty space below his knee, trying to remind his brain of what isn’t there anymore. Other days it’s a pinch of the heel or a twinge of the toes. It’ll pass, Mom says, over and over. Hang in there.

I start living with other families from school so my parents can spend more time at the hospital. I roll a red suitcase to class and make up schedules with my friends of who wants to claim me for a week. Parents pass me off to each other with my red suitcase, a crumpled note of my mom’s instructions, and a tight smile. Somebunny loves me, I think.

When I do get to go to the hospital, Matthew and I play air hockey in the game room. It’s not the same as before, because he has to lean on the table to keep his balance. I beat him more often now.

“Am I getting better or are you getting worse?” I shoot the puck across the table and Matthew deflects it.

“I’m getting worse,” he wobbles a bit and leans forward.

“Only at air hockey.”

“Well, you do literally have a leg up on me.”

We giggle. I glimpse the catheter tubes that hang by his shirt collar. His crutches and IV pole make him look like he’s made of metal. He’ll get well soon.

_

Four months later and Matthew hasn’t stopped screaming.

“I’m sorry,” he says before I can push his bedroom door open. “I keep waking you up, I’m so sorry.”

“I get it,” I say, coming inside. I feel his head and push a thermometer at his mouth. “Here.”

“No,” he moves his head away. “I don’t want to go back to the hospital.”

I watch the skin above his ears, splotchy and bare. He looks tired.

“I know.”

"I'm fine. I'll be fine." His breathing picks up. He thinks I don’t notice, but I do.

I hand him the thermometer. “Well, hey. If you go there, you’ll get well soon. The elephant says so.”

A smile stitches itself through Matthew’s lips. “Can’t disappoint an elephant. She’d never forget.”

That’s true, but the saying hasn’t told me if elephants are always right. Matthew dangles the thermometer from his lips. Hang in there. I’m fine. He's fine. Somebunny loves us. I see his eyes draw their water, but then he remembers I'm there and he stops, he smiles, he shrugs. He's got a fever. I wake up our parents. They think I don't notice them moving faster, but I do. Bee happy. We’re children. We’re not.