Electro [hs]

Nine

Nine ♀ 

Well here it comes. Like my mom and the pamphlets and Ben and prom night and the questions. Charlie, I picture him saying. Charlie, do you have a dick? Do you have tits? Are you a dude? Are you a chick?  And I'll either stutter or stumble, It's not that simple or I'll light a match and burn this whole place to the ground.

Harry waits for the door to slam, for the music downstairs to become muffled like the hum of the cicadas and the distant drag of the ocean. He doesn't say anything and I feel the series of ellipses hanging in the air between us, dot-dot-dot, like three bullets on a table, ready to be loaded into a gun and shot at me one by one...dot-dot-dot

Taking a seat on the ledge Louis had been standing on, one long leg pulled up, the other hanging idly, he tips his head at me.

"Clench your right hand shut," he says.

Frowning, I hold up my right hand and slowly ball it into a fist. I get past the first joint easy, but the second has pain exploding all along my nerves. He's watching intently and I grit my teeth, fighting not to cry out in a high voice, a low pitched moan erupting from my throat instead.

"You've broken a knuckle, Charming."

"How can you tell?"

He lifts his own hand, smoothly clenching and unclenching his fingers a couple of times."Do you notice how I don't sound like a dying animal? Compare and contrast."

As I clench my wrist, caught somewhere between embarrassment and being secretly pleased with my war wound, Harry lies back on the ledge, all stretched out like a rangy cat in the heat and laughs lightly through his nostrils.I'm thankful when he closes his eyes because it means I can look and look to my hearts content.  "Probably because you can't make a fist to save your life. Aren't guys from Minnesota supposed to be viking people who do nothing but fight eachother at hockey games?"

"I can make a fist," I insist. I've been making fists since puberty hit me like a tidal wave, smashing my way through mirrors when I hated what they showed me, trying to reach some other, better side.

"Nope, no you can't."

"Try saying it's not a fist when it's coming at your face, dude," I mutter.

"Try saying it is when every bone in your hand breaks and you never jerk off right again."

"I suppose you're a doctor then," is all I can reply to that, timidly perching near him on the ledge because it feels weird just hovering over him to talk, because the booze is making me feel sluggy, sleepy and slow, because I'm hoping an ocean drift of wind will drift the smell of him close to me.

"CNA actually," he says,opening his eyes briefly to see this means nothing to me before adding,  "Stands for certified nursing assistant."

"R-Really?"

"Yeah. At a retirement home, thought I mentioned it."

"You didn't. Huh....that's kind of...not what I pictured."

"Oh yeah? What did you picture?"

Not that, basically, I think as I recall the version of him I've spent a week fantasizing about. The nameless boy with the legs and the smile and the scrape of a collarbone that I pictured grazing my teeth across, tasting sweat and skin. He'd been a rockstar, a barista in an alternative coffee shop or something dangerous like a drug dealer- the kind who spars verbally with the good girl next door before whisking her off into the sunset on the back of a motorcycle. Over the course of an evening, however, that shaky pencil image of an archetype is being filled in with the solid color of him and that's exactly what I didn't want from the very first time he talked to me.