Xavier
The morning of his seventeenth birthday, the first thing Xavier felt was a body sliding up against him, and then a kiss on the cheek, and hot breath near his ear. “Eyes closed, mouth open,” Ivy said.
Then she fed him something. Xavier was smiling before he even swallowed.
She remembered.
He felt her get up off the bed. He opened his eyes. She was across the room, back to him, walking to the bathroom. The summer sun was coming through the window and her sheer curtains. She was naked and unselfconscious in a way he couldn’t imagine ever being. It didn’t feel safe to look at her. It didn’t feel safe because of what it did to him.
Don’t let this happen again, Xavier told himself. He couldn’t believe he was there. He thought about the night before, after all the stuff in the woods, Ivy convincing him to come stay over. She promised they wouldn’t get caught, as though that was the only thing to be concerned about.
“That’s maybe not the best idea . . . ,” Xavier had said.
“But the maybe-not-the-best ideas are the best ideas, aren’t they?” Ivy had smiled that smile that meant she knew there was no way Xavier could resist her.
And she had been right.
Xavier had texted his mom that he was staying at Sasha’s. His parents trusted him so much that it would never even occur to them that Xavier could lie. Which made him feel especially guilty when he did.
Xavier stared at Ivy’s back, then forced himself to look away. He reached for his jeans on the floor, took his phone out of the pocket, and for a moment Xavier was back in the real world. He saw the text from Sasha sent late the night before.
Sasha.
Xavier thought again about the great birthday time they’d been having. It was the first real fun Xavier had had in so long. And he thought of how for a moment it had seemed like . . . well, Xavier didn’t know exactly. It seemed like the air between them had shifted or something. Like things were inching in a strange direction. Xavier wasn’t even sure if he had been making it up or not. And then Ivy appeared.
But here, in Ivy’s room on the morning of his seventeenth birthday, he felt certain he’d imagined all that Sasha stuff. Which Xavier knew was a good thing, for a bunch of different reasons, not least of which was the fact that Sasha was his best friend on earth.
Now in the bright light of day, he felt weird that he’d left Sasha and gone off with Ivy. Not that Sasha would care about the being alone part—she liked to be alone—but because she might care about who he’d gone off with.
He found himself defending his decision to Sasha in his head. Defending Ivy. She wasn’t all good or all bad. She was human and complicated and confusing, like all of us. True, she made messes sometimes. But she never meant to and she always felt awful about it after. And Xavier didn’t quite understand her, but then again, could you ever really understand anyone? He didn’t understand Sasha, either. Sasha, who was always so strong. Who only ever did what was right. She was solid and secure and never needed anyone. But Xavier wasn’t like that.
And besides, Sasha hadn’t heard Ivy apologizing in the woods, and hadn’t seen the look on Ivy’s face this morning when she’d kissed him. Ivy had done some not-so-great stuff, but Xavier didn’t blame her, and maybe it was dumb and naive not to, but he just didn’t. Life messes us up in so many ways, messes all of us right the hell up. And when we fumble and bumble around, crashing into one another, stepping on toes and hearts, it’s not on purpose. Being a person is nearly impossible.
He heard the toilet flush and Ivy’s bare feet padding across the shiny wood floors. And then she was back in the room and Xavier forgot everything else. She stood by the door, watching him, one arm raised up against the frame, dark hair sticking straight up.
Xavier started to get out of bed. She sprang forward and then her hands were over his eyes and her mouth was against his ear again.
“Not yet,” she said.
* * *
For the next hour, Xavier was just a body. Lips. Hands. Skin. A beating heart. And when they were done, they were wrapped together in her sheets, and Xavier was full of all the chemicals, those love ones or the post-sex ones that are impossible to distinguish between. She grabbed her hairbrush, which she hardly ever used herself, and started pulling it through his hair with long, smooth strokes. She did this all the time when they were dating. “You’re like the doll I always wanted as a kid,” she had said once. Xavier took it as a compliment at first. He was the thing she’d always wanted. After they broke up, Xavier told Sasha the story and she had raised one eyebrow in that wary way she didn’t know she did. “It’s kind of fucked she said that to you,” Sasha said. “As though you are just a thing.” That’s not how she meant it, Xavier had wanted to tell her. He wanted Sasha to understand, but he was so tired back then, he could barely speak at all.
Now, that morning in Ivy’s bed, Xavier was trying not to think of anything at all as she brushed and brushed. But then Ivy’s phone vibrated, and she reached for it, and the corner of her mouth twitched up into a special kind of smirk. His stomach was immediately tight. Xavier knew that smirk. But Xavier also knew it was ridiculous to be jealous. He and Ivy weren’t actually together. They weren’t going to be. This was just for today.
But Xavier was wrong about the smirk and what it was, because she turned her phone toward him. On the screen was a guy’s Instagram account, locked. The guy was maybe a couple of years older than they were, though it was hard to say, because the picture was cropped so you could only really see half of him, half a handsome face, one muscular arm.
“Look,” she said. “An arm followed me.” She stuck her tongue through her teeth, then tossed her phone onto the nightstand. She slid close to him. A second later her phone buzzed again. This time, after she looked at it, she frowned and pulled away.
“My parents are on their way back.You have to go now.” Her tone was totally different then, all business. It was something he’d almost let himself forget about her, how quickly she flipped from one thing to another. “This was fun. It was good to see you.”
Xavier stood, gathered up his T-shirt, jeans, the one sock he wasn’t wearing. Adrenaline was coursing through him. This was fun. It was good to see you. Those were ending words—those were the words of this being done again. Of course, he told himself. That was the plan all along, one night and that’s it. He knew it was for the best, but in that moment it really, really did not feel that way.
Suddenly, Xavier was filled with dread at the idea of going home with this finished again, returning to the hard work of getting over her, made all the harder now that Xavier remembered so clearly what being with her was like. Because what is getting over someone if not a slow, excruciating forgetting? Ivy was very, very hard to forget.
He started getting dressed, putting his clothes on in reverse of the order Ivy had taken them off him—underwear, T-shirt, jeans. Xavier imagined himself in a video playing backward, the love Xavier poured out at her being funneled back into his chest, the taste of her lips leaving his, walking backward out of that room, shutting closed his heart.
He walked toward the door. He turned to wave.
“Wait,” Ivy said. “You forgot something.” She ran toward him, then jumped up, wrapped her legs around his waist. “This isn’t over,” she whispered. “I won’t fuck it up this time. I mean it.”