My anger flared at your dismissal. Was I not even worthy of an argument? “I believed you the first few times, Henri. Now I think it’s bullshit. Look, I’ve got to go. Stuff, etcetera.” I ended the call before I lost it completely.
When you told me during our next conversation that you wouldn’t make it back for Christmas, I stopped answering your calls altogether. It was too painful to hear your excuses. No more texting either. If you wanted to keep up with me, you could follow me on Insta.
Or come the fuck home.
In the spring, I learned I’d been accepted to the University of Miami, which felt like another step away from you. Dad said that if I wasn’t going to keep up with my extracurriculars, I needed to get a job. I found one at the Papa John’s near my school. I figured I could at least learn how to make a proper pizza dough. As it turned out, the dough came already prepared, but it was a paycheck, and it gave me less time to mope about you. Plus, several of my classmates worked there, including Carter Fitzpatrick, who was a nice distraction.
Since elementary school, Carter and I had been like two wolves circling each other with the occasional explosive encounter that was this weird mix of violence and affection. I never told you this, but during my freshman year he’d tried to come at me, so I laid him down in the middle of the hallway with an Aikido move. Later that week he grabbed me from behind while I was walking to the bus ramp and dragged me between two buildings at our school. I thought he was going to kick my ass, but he just sat on top of me, pinning me between his knees, so that I couldn’t move. It was similar to what he’d done to me in elementary school. We just stared at each other. I wasn’t even trying to seduce him, but maybe that was what happened, because after that, there were a few times when I’d turn my head and catch him looking away.
The manager of Papa Johns was sexist as fuck and put the girls on registers and the guys on the line. “The girls” somehow included me, either because I was gay or because I spoke in complete sentences. Whatever. It meant I got to flirt with the customers and make homophobes super uncomfortable.
It also meant I didn’t have to smell Carter sweating all over the sausage and pepperoni as he pulled pies out of the oven.
After the dinner rush, we were cut to a skeleton crew, which was usually Carter on the line, me on everything else, and one of the drivers on delivery. Carter got significantly nicer when he didn’t have an audience to impress, and on occasion, even possessed an intelligent thought.
And he wasn’t hard to look at. His baby fat had melted away over the years, and now he was toned and muscular from a regimented schedule of lifting weights and snorting protein powder. Well, he actually blended it into smoothies, but he was definitely an addict. The details of his workout rituals bored me endlessly, but I’d once made the mistake of complaining about my size, so Carter took it upon himself to be my personal trainer. According to him, I needed to cut out carbs and sugar and bulk up on protein in order to increase my “muscle visibility.”
Did human blood count?
My hunger was, at times, a throbbing ache that went nerve deep. It made me edgy, and it heightened my sense of smell. We were at PJ’s one night. It had been raining, which meant we were busier than usual, and the air conditioner was on the fritz, so it was just a swampy cloud of body odor and cheese with Carter’s scent the strongest among them. After the rush, when staff was being cut, I offered to go home because I needed to inhale a blood bag pronto, but Shayla had a finals study group, and Darien wanted to spend time with her college boyfriend before he had to go back to school.
So, I stayed. Carter was droning on about some party he went to and asking why I never came out. Our social circles only overlapped when one of my friends made the mistake of dating a jock.