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Chapter 2: Safety
I heard the tap on my window a couple minutes later.
I had been lying on my back in the dark since I put my phone down, not sleeping, not doing anything. I got up and crossed to the window and slid it open and Patrick was on the narrow ledge of the porch roof below, the same way we used to do it when we were ten and twelve, respectively.
He grabbed the windowsill and pulled himself through in one easy movement and dropped onto my floor without a sound.
He had on a blue t-shirt and grey sweatpants and his hair was messy. He had clearly just gotten out of bed to come over here. I hadn't seen him up close in a while. Through the window he was always just a loose shape, a silhouette moving around his room, basically a background figure in my periphery. Sometimes he was just a light turning on and off in a window across from mine. Standing three feet away from me in my bedroom, for the first time in a long time, he was an actual person with an actual face, and it only hit me in that moment how little I had ever really looked at him. He had a good face. Strong jaw, dark eyes, a little tired.
"Hey," he said quietly.
"Hey," I whispered.
He looked around my room like he was surprised. Maybe he thought it would look more different than it used to at this point.
He sat down on the floor with his back against my bed, knees up. I sat on the bed above him, and we stayed like that for a moment in the dark, just the streetlight coming through the curtain. It was quiet, but not uncomfortable. He had seen my crying, and he knew what I needed, even if I didn’t.
I told him. Freshman year and the lollipop and years of watching him from a distance. The Tesla. The elective class. The driveway. His bedroom. When he said he loved me. And then how he ghosted me.
I held back tears, and Patrick listened without moving.
"And then he just laughed at me," I said. "With his friends. Like I was nothing."
"But I love him," I said. I heard it come out and hated saying it but I didn't take it back. "I know how that sounds."
"I know you do," Patrick said.
"He said it first."
"That part was for him," Patrick said. "Not for you."
I reacted internally, trying not to burst into tears. I looked at Patrick, and one tear got out before I stopped it.
"He's a jerk," Patrick said.
I laughed a little, despite the mood I was in. Patrick reached up from the floor and put his hand on my knee, just resting it there, and left it. I looked down at his hand and didn't move.
"You know him," I said. "Don't you."
"We've crossed paths." He was looking at the wall across from us. "He dated a girl I know, so we hung out a bit.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Let’s just say you’re not the first person he’s screwed over.”
I just nodded. It didn’t make me feel any better.
“Guys like that just find the person in the room who's most open, like, vulnerable. And they play games and manipulate. It's not about you. It's about them needing to know they can."
"Has that happened to you," I said.
He was quiet for a moment. "Yeah."
I slid off the bed and sat on the floor next to him, our backs against the bed frame, shoulders touching. He didn't move away. His hand went back to my knee.
"I'm bi," he said. "Or leaning toward gay, probably. I'm still somewhere in the middle of figuring it out. But the general direction has been pretty clear for a while."
“Oh,” I said. “I never knew.”
"And I've done the straight guy thing a couple times, where you let a guy experiment with you. Honestly, it’s the most common reaction for them, to just act like it never happened. What’s fucked up is that he led you on and all that. Caden is a special type of asshole.”
The whole world felt heavy. But at least it was starting to make some sense. There was a way things worked. Even if I didn’t have any control over it, I wasn’t the only person that something like this had happened to.
“And then Monday comes, and the guy will look right through you in the hall, and you're standing there wondering what you did wrong."
"What did you do wrong," I said.
"Nothing," he said. "That's the whole point. You didn't do anything wrong either. He's got something going on that he can't deal with, so he uses people."
He turned his head and looked at me. "That's his craziness. Not yours."
I felt my eyes fill again and I pressed the back of my wrist against them and held it there.
"You're perfect," he said quietly. "I just want you to know that. You've always been right there and I've watched you through that window for years and you've always been… just perfect."
He stopped.
"What," I said.
"Just. Exactly yourself. All the time. You don't act like someone else. You’re like, the only person I know who’s like that.”
His palm ascended to my sides. I lowered my hand to his hip and looked at him. He was looking back at me steadily, dark eyes calm in the low light.
“Your face looks… different,” I said.
“You’ve lived next to me for your entire life,” he said.
“And I’m only seeing it now,” I whispered, my face close enough for him to feel my words on his face.
He leaned forward and kissed my forehead. I squeezed his hip, feeling him. He let out a breath.
"What do you want to study?" I asked, smiling. “In college.”
He blinked once, a small gear shifting in his head as I changed the subject.
"Architecture," he said. "It gets interesting, supposedly."
"You like that stuff?"
"Yeah,” he said, his eyes lighting up a bit, “I like thinking about how a space makes a person feel. Like the actual physics of a room, the light and the proportions, and how that changes what happens inside you when you're in it."
He paused. "That probably sounds weird."
"It doesn't," I said. “Sounds more like psychology, though.”
He paused. "Take this room, for instance. The way the streetlight is coming through the curtain right now. That's not accidental. Someone designed that window to be exactly that height."
I looked at the curtain. I had never thought about that once in my entire life.
His hand was back on my knee. I reached down without thinking and put my hand over his, just covering it. He turned his palm up slowly and my fingers settled between his, and we stayed like that.
"What do you want," he said. "Like from your life. Not school, not career stuff. Just what do you actually want."
Nobody had ever asked me that directly before. I sat with it for a moment.
"I just want to be a good person," I said. "And not feel like everything is about being fake and playing games.”
"You are," he said, with an emphasis. “And you will.”
"How do you know."
"Because you’re going places,” he said succinctly. “Compared to most people… You’re different.”
We sat quietly for a moment. Outside the neighborhood was completely still. The curtain moved slightly from the open window and the streetlight shifted across the floor. I felt better. I felt weirdly optimistic.
"Do you remember the telephone thing," I said.
He smiled wide, the first one I had seen from him that night. "The string broke and you cried."
"I did not cry."
"You were devastated."
"I was annoyed," I said. "And I totally forgot about that until just now."
He laughed quietly. I laughed too, and I felt it in my chest.
“Do you remember breakfast in bed?” he asked.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Vaguely… did I used to…”
“Yeah,” he interrupted. “You were really little, and I was like eight. So it was more of a gap back then. As soon as you were old enough to start throwing things far, you used to take bagels and toast and stuff in the mornings and bring them to your room to try and throw them into my room. I would just wake up to pieces of food flying into my window and landing on my bed.”
We actually started laughing together now.
“That’s hilarious,” I said, “I can’t believe my mom never tells that story.”
“She used to get pissed about it,” he said, “I bet she’d laugh now though. And then you’d yell ‘breakfast in bed’ at me out your window. I don’t even know where you got it from.”
“I feel like you owe me breakfast in bed now,” I said.
“I do,” he said with an exhale as our laughing calmed down. We were quiet for another minute.
"I can always see into your room," he said. "You used to do homework on the floor for some reason."
"The desk was uncomfortable."
"You did everything on the floor. You still do. I can see you even better when you're down there."
I looked at him. "You watch… everything?"
"When your light is on," he said simply. "I notice things."
I thought about all the nights I had sat on my floor with my lamp on, and never once thought about what he could see from his window. I always knew in a technical sense that if someone looked they would see me. I just never thought anyone would want to. That was the part that felt like a mindfuck, sitting on the floor next to him in the dark. It wasn’t that he could see me, but that he had looked. He had noticed things. For years, while I was adjusting my hallway routes to catch a glimpse of someone who would eventually laugh at me in front of his friends, Patrick had been ten feet away across a gap, watching my lamp and knowing what I looked like when I was okay and what I looked like when I wasn't.
"I've seen you too," I said. "Not on purpose. Just. Through the windows."
He nodded.
"I saw you cry once," I said. "Last year I think. You were just sitting on your bed."
He was quiet for a moment. "I think I know the time you’re talking about.”
I didn't ask. He would tell me or he wouldn't.
"Guy from a party," he said after a moment. "Same story, different details." He paused. "I got over it after a while."
"How long is a while."
"Longer than you want it to be," he said.
I leaned my head back against the bed. At some point his shoulder had come to rest against mine. I was aware of the full length of his arm against my arm, warm through the thin cotton of his t-shirt.
"Come here," he said quietly.
He shifted and I shifted with him. We moved from the floor up onto the bed. He lay down on his side facing me, and I lay down in front of him. He put his arm over me and I felt the full weight of it settle across my ribs.
I lay there and felt his chest against my back. His knees were behind my knees. His breath was warm at the back of my neck. I was aware of every point of contact as a distinct and separate thing and also as one single continuous warmth that went from my neck to my feet.
And then I felt him against me, through his shorts, at the small of my back. He had some blood flow beneath his waistband. He didn't move or adjust, or even acknowledge it, and I didn't either. I just felt it. It was a comfort. It was just Patrick, close and warm and real and there with me.
"Thank you for coming over," I said.
"Yeah," he whispered into my ear.
His voice was closer to sleep than it had been before. We had been talking for a long time.
"Patrick."
"Mm."
"I'm sorry I never actually knew you before."
He was quiet for a moment. His arm tightened slightly across my ribs, just once, and then relaxed.
"You know me now," he said.
I lay there in the dark and felt his breathing slow behind me, felt the rise and fall of his chest against my back find its rhythm, and I believe I actually stopped thinking about Caden for a while, and I stopped thinking about the hurt, which was somewhat soothed at this point, for now.
I fell asleep to the sound of his breathing and the curtain moving, looking out at Patrick’s empty window, and the gap between our two houses on the other side of the glass.
—[]—
In the morning he was gone, the window open, the way he had left it. The space behind me in the bed was still warm. I lay there on my side and looked at the curtain and the thin line of morning light coming through the gap and I didn't move for a while.
Across the narrow space between our houses, his window was open too.
I lay there and felt the whole previous night sitting in my chest at once, all of it, and it was heavy. It felt like I had been through a lot.
I sat up in bed, and felt something smack me right in the head immediately. I caught it by instinct, and it took me a moment to register anything. I was holding a paper bag with something not very heavy inside. My head didn’t hurt from it hitting me.
I looked to the side. Patrick was standing in his window, smirking at me.
I laughed, already knowing what was inside the bag. I poured the contents into my hand and watched two halves of a warm, toasted bagel fall out into my palm, pre-buttered.
“Breakfast in bed,” he shouted across the gap.
I smiled back, feeling better than I had in a week.