The Kiss Principle (Hazardverse: Sidetracks)

13

I walked Igz around the house, fed her, burped her, and then somehow, I wasn’t angry anymore, just tired. We both fell asleep on the couch. The doorbell woke me, and I put Igz in her swing and paid the delivery guy and carried the food into the kitchen. I fished out Zé’s salad and a fork, and I found a bottle of water and the Tylenol, and I carried it to his room. I knocked.

His voice was rough when he said, “Come in.”

He was sitting up, but it was clear he’d been lying down until I’d knocked. His hair was standing up in back where it had dried against the pillow. His eyes were red, and I thought that he’d been crying, and then I thought how stupid a motherfucker I was because, of course it made me feel bad.

“Dinner,” I said. I shook the bottle of pills. “If Tylenol isn’t strong enough, my mom probably has—”

“No,” he said quickly. He tried for a smile. “Tylenol is fine. Thank you.”

I was still standing there in the doorway like an ass-muffin.

“Could I eat with you and Igz?” he asked.

I grunted and made my way back to the living room. I laid out the meal on the coffee table, set the table at an angle to the sofa so Zé would be able to sit down, and got myself a beer. When I went back to the living room, Zé was lurking in the hallway. Apparently he did have a tiny bit of brains, because he was using the cane.

“Sit on the fucking couch, jizz-for-brains,” I said. “What the fuck are you going to do? Be a creep over there and eat your dinner telepathically?”

“I was waiting for you to come out of the kitchen so I could do that scene from Willy Wonka . He’s walking on that cane and then he does that big surprise roll, and everyone is amazed.”

“This is because you didn’t have a big brother to bully the shit out of you.”

I don’t think I was supposed to see it, but a tiny smile darted across his mouth. Then his expression was carefully neutral again. He sat on the sofa. He kept his injured leg stretched out in front of him, and I was glad I’d angled the coffee table.

For a while, the only sounds were the television (CNN), the crinkle of plastic and foil as we went to work on our salads, the motor of Igz’s swing. I felt like I could hear everything. When he wiped his mouth with a napkin. When a piece of lettuce crunched between his teeth. When he shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable, the springs of the sofa protested. His thigh ended up pressed against mine. I thought I could smell his hair. I thought I could smell his skin. I thought I was going out of my fucking mind.

“I’m sorry,” he said and set his fork down. “Fernando, I am so, so sorry.”

There didn’t seem anything safe to say to that, so I grunted.

“Could we talk about this? Please?”

I turned the television up. They were talking about the president’s dog. Fascinating stuff.

“Okay,” Zé said and grabbed the remote and turned the TV off.

I looked at him. Slowly.

“I know you’re angry at me. You’re right to be angry at me.”

“Anger is about boundaries,” I said. “Isn’t that what you told me? Here’s my fucking boundary: you making the stupidest fucking decisions I can think of. You hurting yourself—”

“I didn’t hurt myself.”

“—instead of telling me what the fuck is going on!”

“I’m okay, Fernando. I am. I promise.”

“Because you were lucky!”

Zé took a deep breath. “I’m trying to tell you something. And it’s scary for me.”

I forked salad around in the plastic container. I stabbed the fork down. I looked him in the eye. “What?”

“Remember how I told you I dropped out of college because nothing caught my interest? Well, that wasn’t true. Not exactly.”

“So, you lied to me.”

“No, I—I left something out.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Fernando, please.” When I didn’t say anything, he went on. “I did some surfing. Professional. That’s why I came from Brazil. My whole family moved up here when I was twelve.”

“I’m sorry, what? You came to California to surf? Your whole family came?”

“Of course they came,” he said, and I couldn’t tell what that was supposed to mean, but then he said, “They wanted me to go pro. That was their dream. My dad’s dream; he loves to surf, and he was pretty good himself when he was younger.”

I had no idea what to say to that, and the quiet built slowly between us.

Zé broke it by saying, “Do you know what we did when we got here? I mean the very first thing.”

I shook my head.

“I made my parents take me to Surfrider—the beach, you know? We’d been here like, eight hours, and I made them drive me out to the beach. I had to see it. I had this idea—” He stopped himself. “Have you been there?”

“A couple of times.”

“That’s where it all happened. That’s where modern surfing was born. It felt like I was supposed to go there. And my parents would have done anything for me.” His eyes were in the past, and then they came back to me. “Anyway, I went pro when I was sixteen.”

Okay, the surfer bit wasn’t exactly news. I mean, I saw how he dressed, and there wasn’t any way to misunderstand the look on his face when he’d been staring at that longboard. But professional—

“What does that mean, professional? You were making money.”

His lopsided grin surprised me. “Fernando, I was making a lot of money.”

I couldn’t help my laugh. “Okay, so—” Questions crowded forward in my mind. “I want to say why haven’t I heard of you, but I don’t know any professional surfers. If I look you up, what am I going to find?”

“God, please don’t look me up.”

Which meant, of course, I had to take out my phone right then. It didn’t take me long to find out about José Teixeira, professional surfer. The pictures were unmistakable: it was Zé, although in some of them, he was a kid, slender because he hadn’t added adult mass yet, which made him look gawky with that long frame of his. In others, he was a man—close to the one in front of me, but not quite the same. In some, the hair was longer. In others (yes, I lingered over the shirtless ones), he had more mass and definition. Zé had certainly put on weight while he’d been living with me, in a good way, but he was still much thinner than he’d been—I almost said at his prime .

“You look like such a hardass,” I said, angling my phone so he could see the photo. It was in black and white, and he wasn’t smiling. It was clear that the photographer had a good eye; the picture was stunning, capturing Zé with a wetsuit rolled down to his waist, the chiseled lines of his body raked by sunlight. A hint of his vee lines showed, or maybe it was my imagination. It was hard to tell. In the photos, that’s where the shadows lay deepest.

He groaned and tried to push the phone away.

My next question was hard to formulate. What I wanted to say was, Not one of these pictures looks like you, not the real you. Or maybe, Where’s the stone-cold badass who keeps popping up in my search result? Or even more clearly, You giggled for almost an hour after you put those octopus-leg socks on Igz, and I’m having a hard time imagining that’s the same guy in these pictures.

What came out wasn’t great: “You don’t act like a professional surfer.”

Instead of getting mad, though, I only got that slow smile.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, no,” he said. “Because I’m not.”

“That’s a fucking annoying thing to say.”

His grin spread, but then it faded. “I mean, I’m not anymore.” He put his salad on the coffee table and pushed back his hair. “I hurt my knee.”

“I figured that part out. Sorry; that was habit. What happened?”

“It’s stupid. God, it’s so stupid, sometimes I can’t even believe it. I was out with some friends one day. Just hanging. And I fell. It was a freak chance. I’ve fallen a million times. But this time, the board moved the wrong way at the wrong time, and my knee twisted, and pop. There goes my ACL.” He was silent for a moment. “There’s this part of me that thinks it would have been better if I’d done it during a competition, you know? If I’d been about to win, and I’d gambled, taken a risk, and that’s how it happened.”

“Sounds like that would have felt even shittier.”

“Maybe. It feels pretty shitty to have ruined my whole life because we were showing off for each other, messing around.”

Igz was fussing again, so I got her out of her swing and held her against my chest. Zé reached over to play with her hand, teasing her fingers with one of his. He wasn’t looking at me.

“But you had surgery,” I said. “And didn’t you have money saved, or—I don’t know.”

His mouth moved, but it wasn’t a smile. “I’ve had three surgeries, actually. And every time I get out on the water, pop. I had some money saved, but you wouldn’t believe how fast it goes, especially when—” He stopped, swallowed, and whatever he’d been about to say, he replaced with a shrug. “I had to give up my apartment. I sold my car and bought, well, that junker. I sold my boards.” He stopped. His throat moved when he swallowed. “I have zero skills because all I’ve done is surf since I was ten. I can’t even get a job teaching kids to surf because of my stupid knee. I didn’t graduate high school—my parents made me take the GED so I wouldn’t have to be in school.” He had nice hands, big hands with strong fingers, and he rubbed one of them gently over the down on Igz’s head. “It was like I had a disease. People I’d known for years, people who’d been my friends for years, they didn’t want anything to do with me. At the beginning, I tried. I heard about this beach party. It’s not like anyone invited me, but I heard anyway. I made my way down there on crutches. I—” He shook his head and closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, they were glossy. “I was so dumb. People pretended not to see me. If they saw me coming, they moved away. I guess a few of them took pity on me and tried to talk, but what do you talk about when the only thing in your life is surfing, and the guy standing in front of you is everybody’s horror story.”

“Zé, God. That’s fucking terrible.”

He shrugged. “I was angry about it for a long time. I think—I don’t think it helps, being angry. And if it had been me on the other side, I don’t know if I’d be any different.”

“Of course you would have. You’re the kindest person I know. Fuck those giant sacks of dogshit.”

“I’m not a particularly nice person. I’m trying to be better, I guess. I…I didn’t like who I was. Not for a long time. So, I’m trying not to be that person anymore.”

Some of his hair had fallen into his eyes, and I caught myself the moment before I reached up to brush it away. Instead, my voice gravelly, I asked, “What about your family?”

His hand fell away from Igz. He straightened her onesie, and then he sat back. He had one arm low across his belly, and a part of me recognized the instinctive defensiveness of the pose. But when he spoke, his voice had a reined-in quality, like he was holding it tight.

“You said I didn’t act like a professional surfer.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t know what I meant, I guess.”

“God, Fernando, of course you do.” But a smile opened on his face for a moment, and he touched my arm. “Did you know that people talk about surfing like it’s an addiction?” I didn’t say anything, and he spoke into my silence. “I don’t know if there’s any science behind it, but that’s how people talk about it. And it makes sense. It’s all about that rush. A great wave. A great sesh. It’s dopamine. It’s better than sex.” Then his mouth curved. “Better than any sex I’ve had in a long time, anyway. Part of it’s the uncertainty, wanting that big wave, but maybe the whole session is mediocre. It’s like gambling. You don’t know if you’re going to score big or bust or whatever you’re supposed to say. And, as with any addiction, you build up a tolerance to the thing that gets you high. The best waves don’t hit the same way. You’ve got this itch you can’t quite scratch.”

He was silent for so long that I didn’t recognize my own voice when I said, “What are you trying to tell me?”

Something flickered on Zé’s face. But all he said was “That there’s this toxic culture in surfing, and the higher you get, the worse it becomes. Even at a casual session, people are always talking trash, making fun of each other, trying to tear each other down. Most people have this picture of surfing like it’s a bunch of long-haired beach bums chilling like they’re in a beach commercial, but the reality—at least, my reality—was that it was a lot of middle-school bullshit. I know professional surfing isn’t on the same level as other sports. I know it doesn’t get the same attention as the Super Bowl. Nobody’s wearing jerseys with our names on them. But when you’re doing it, when you’re living in that tiny bubble, you’re a big fish in a small pond, and it feels like every eye in the world is on you. You have to play the part. You have to look the part. You have to be a surfer.” He played with Igz’s foot, and something softened in his face. “You can’t play the xylophone with a baby.”

Then I understood. “You weren’t out.”

He shook his head.

“At all?” I asked.

“Nope. I wanted endorsements. I wanted to be a star. I wanted all of it. And I don’t know how much you know about surfing culture, but there is so much toxic masculinity, so much homophobia. It’s kind of crazy, you know? And it’s not what anyone thinks about when they imagine surfing.” He released Igz’s foot and flexed his fingers like they ached. “So, I played the part.”

I gave him a look.

He burst out laughing. “Yes, Fernando. To answer your question—”

“I didn’t say anything.”

His smile flowered again. “—I did manage to hook up with guys occasionally. But it was always a huge risk, and I always hated myself after. I hated myself all the time, actually, if I’m being honest. I was killing myself. And I didn’t know how to stop.” He cleared his throat. “So, I try to be grateful about it. My ACL, I mean. Because I’d still be there, still be drinking poison every day, if I hadn’t had that accident. After that, I had to face some hard truths. My friends weren’t my friends. All the things I’d thought I wanted in life were bullshit. And I’d been living a lie. That was a lot to process.”

“What about your family?”

“My loving, devoted family, who gave up everything so I could pursue my dream—and who were happy to help themselves to my money—weren’t happy when the surfing was gone, when the money dried up, and when they found out I was gay. They’re super Catholic, and not the tolerant kind, and you want to talk about toxic masculinity—my dad and brothers practically invented it. Never mind that they’d been living on my winnings for years. Never mind that they hadn’t done jack to ‘manage’ my career. I wasn’t valuable to them anymore, so they left me. Literally, Fernando. In a hospital room. I had to get an Uber back to my apartment when I was discharged.”

“Fuck that. But, I mean, you had to have known that’s how they were going to react when you came out to them, right?”

“I didn’t come out to them,” Zé said, and a hint of color rose in his cheeks. “They walked in on me getting jerked off by a patient tech.”

The laugh exploded out of me. It startled Igz, and she began to cry, but even as I soothed her, I couldn’t stop laughing. Zé made a face, but he was smiling, and his cheeks were redder than ever.

“God, talk about trauma,” I said when I’d finally recovered.

“You have no idea,” Zé said. He was blushing even harder, but his voice was dry. “At this point, I might as well become a monk.”

“Come on, you didn’t get out there and hump everything with a dick?”

“Good Lord, Fernando.”

“What?” I laughed again. “You deserve some action.”

“Nobody under thirty calls it action. And no, I didn’t.” He didn’t meet my gaze as he said, “I went through a rough patch, actually. I kind of hit rock bottom. The second surgery. The third. The money going up in smoke. I had to sell my condo, my boards, anything I could. And then, you know how I was living.” His shoulders curved in. “And now I’m here. So, I wanted you to know. That’s why it’s so important for me to do stuff on my own. Because for a long time, I didn’t. I believed other people would take care of me. I believed other people would make sure I was okay. And that wasn’t true, and I’m not going to make that mistake again. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It’s embarrassing, and it’s a part of my life I want to forget, but you deserve to know.”

I bounced Igz and thought about what to say. I settled on: “I’m still pissed.”

He rubbed his eyes.

“What? I am. You lied to me. And you scared me. And honestly, Zé, did you think I would fire you for using your cane? I mean, I get it, you didn’t know me that first day. But once you’d spent some time with me—am I such a piece of shit that you thought I’d throw you out?”

“No.” His voice was soft, and he studied a seam in the upholstery, rubbing his thumb along the stitching. “I don’t like using the cane. I’m twenty-five, Fer, not an old man. And I like you. And I wanted you to—” He gave another of those helpless shrugs.

Wanted you to what?

I said, “You’re using that goddamn cane from now on. And if I find you not using it, there is going to be some serious shit going down. When Kennedi says you can start easing up on it—”

“Fernando, I don’t want your friend—”

“Don’t argue with me. I’m still mad at you.” I waited until he’d subsided and said, “When Kennedi says so, you can start weaning yourself off it. Until then, you’re going to use it. Understood?”

He gave a miserable nod.

“And whatever Kennedi tells you for PT, you’re going to do. Understood?”

He opened his mouth.

“I swear to Christ, Zé, if the next word out of your mouth isn’t yes, I’m going to lose my shit. I don’t want to hear about how much it costs. I don’t want to hear about you being independent. This is about you getting better. If it makes you happier, we’ll call it a loan, and you can pay me back.”

He opened his mouth again.

“Think long and hard,” I told him.

That familiar struggle played in his face again. And then it was gone, his expression soft and tired, and he said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now eat your damn salad.”

That slow smile spread across his face again, but he didn’t say anything. He picked up his salad, and I picked up mine—well, I had to balance it on my lap because of Igz—and we ate. I turned the TV on. Neither of us said anything, but that was okay; the silence was comfortable, especially once I turned the TV to a Dodgers game. When we’d finished, I let Zé hold Igz while I cleaned up (meaning, I threw away the trash).

When I got back to the living room, he was trying to get up from the sofa while holding Igz.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

His laugh straddled outraged and bewildered. “I’m putting her to bed—”

“Sit down, dumbass. Jesus Christ. This is why you can’t get a man. You realize that, right? Because you are a giant fuckknob.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he protested as I took Igz from him.

“It means sit the fuck down. Do I have to make a sign?”

He sat down, and I put Igz to bed.

When I got back, he was sprawled on the sofa and taking up way too much room, which meant I had to fight and jostle for my own space. We ended up pressed together, with Zé still managing to take up most of the sofa, but it wasn’t all that bad. He was warm, and he smelled nice—not the coconut wax and earthiness of whatever he liked to use, but him, Zé. I watched the Dodgers game. Or I did a decent impression of watching it.

The problem was that he fell asleep almost immediately, and his head drooped onto my shoulder, and his breathing was soft in my ear. No wonder, I thought. A long day, pushing himself on his knee as we walked around Laguna Beach. Then the emotional exhaustion of his fear, of telling me the worst things that had happened in his life, of the grief and pain he must still be carrying, even if he didn’t let them show. No wonder, I thought again. No wonder he seems like a kid sometimes. Because he was never allowed to be one. Never allowed to be himself. And now here he was, and he was goofy and silly and loved babies and sometimes got a raging case of the giggles, after all those days of being Butch Cassidy on a surfboard. And that position had to be uncomfortable, so I got my arm around him and helped him shift until we were better aligned, his head on my chest.

I should have known it would happen. I should have fucking known. I started to get hard.

And of course, because it was consistent with everything else in my life, it was about the most excruciating boner of my life. It happened slowly, my dick fattening, lengthening, even though I was screaming at it to stop. The baseball on TV didn’t help. Running sales pitches in my head didn’t help. Zé’s breath whispered against my neck, and my dick kept going. Worse, the way it was trapped by my jeans meant that it didn’t have anywhere to go, and the discomfort added to the intensity of the experience.

I don’t know how long I lasted. Then I gave up. I lifted my hips, adjusted myself, and settled back onto the sofa. Zé moved with me, his head rocking as I jostled him. And then his breathing changed.

Maybe, I thought.

But I didn’t know maybe what .

Maybe.

Maybe he’ll go back to sleep.

His breathing was slow and even. The Dodgers went to commercial. Car insurance. They were driving around all over the place, which I guess was supposed to show you—

Zé raised his head and kissed me on my neck. It was barely more than pressing his mouth there. Even the movement of his head was tiny. His breathing continued soft and slow. Then his hand came up to cup the side of my face. Rough hands, I thought. A man’s hand. He was still nestled against me. He kissed my neck again. And then, slowly, he sat back and looked at me. He was still cradling my cheek.

“Zé,” I whispered.

That windswept hair had fallen in his eyes, but he didn’t brush it away. He didn’t do anything.

“You’re having a hard day.” I cleared my throat. “You’re hurting, and you’re vulnerable, and you’re not thinking about this.”

“I am thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about this since the day I met you.”

TV voices filled the empty air between us.

“I can’t,” I finally said.

He leaned forward. He drew me toward him with that hand still cupping my cheek. He was strong, but at that point, I couldn’t have fought him if I’d wanted to. His mouth brushed me, and then his lips parted, and he kissed me.

My first jumble of thoughts was impressions: the scrape of stubble, the softness of his lips, the taste of his mouth. And then comparisons: he was so much bigger than any girl I’d been with; in those relationships, I’d been the bigger one, and it felt strange to have that reversed. The calluses on his hand. Even how he tasted. But even as my brain was processing all of that, my body was responding. My mouth relaxed, and I kissed him back.

It didn’t last long. It lasted forever.

When he broke the kiss, he pulled back. His eyes were that deep, endless brown, and they left me no place to run as he said, “I want you to hear me when I tell you I want this. I want you. You’re kind, and you’re funny, and you’re smart, and I am so attracted to you that the last four weeks have been killing me.” That slow smile spread across his face, and he touched the corner of my mouth with this thumb. “If you don’t feel the same, that’s okay. But I think you do. I hope you do.”

It took a long time for him to get himself upright, and all I could do was sit there, as useful as a box of dicks. He gave me a final, considering look, and then he took a limping step toward the hallway.

“Zé,” I said, and my voice cracked like I was thirteen years old. I swallowed. “Your cane.”

That made him laugh. He grabbed it, and he made his way down the hall. The door clicked shut.

The Dodgers won.

I turned off the TV.

I made my way around the house, shutting off the lights. I caught a glimpse of myself in the window over the sink. Again, in the glass of the sliding doors out to the deck. Where I had seen him all those weeks ago, the broad span of his back, the definition his body, that intense resolve as he made his way through the poses. I stood in the dark in the kitchen, alone with my ghosts.

When I got to my room, I shut the door behind me and stood there. I knew what would happen. I’d climb into bed. I’d try to fall asleep. I’d find a video, as close as I could come to the real thing, and I’d rub one out. And tomorrow. And the next night. And then, maybe not anymore, because I remembered how it had been before Zé came. The stress. The weed. The feeling that everything in my life was winding me up like clockwork, and I was too numb to get hard, too numb for anything. Because they need me, I thought. I love you, I told Zé inside my head, but they need me.

It wasn’t Zé who answered me though.

You’re going to be here forever. That voice sounded like mine. You’re going to be here forever, doing this forever, taking care of Mom forever, bailing Chuy out forever. It’s never going to get better. You’re never going to get away. I could see it: the endless days stretching out into the future. The impossible days. A whole life of impossible days.

Before I could think about what I was doing, I stepped out into the hall. I walked the short distance to Zé’s door. I stopped.

And that was as far as I could go. My face was hot. My legs were shaking. I was, a part me realized in a high-altitude observation, about to cry.

Selfish, I thought. This is selfish, and it’s not fair to him. I’ll go back to my room, and—

The door opened. Zé stood there. His eyes were red, his face puffy, and it was like an out-of-body experience, to understand in an instant that he’d been crying. Everything else ashed away in my mind. He opened his mouth, but I didn’t give him a chance.

I stepped forward and kissed him.