Real Life(29)

“I mean, would you open things up if you had a partner?”

“I don’t know, Cole. I think that sort of thing depends.”

“I don’t. I think some people want it and some people don’t, and you can get to wanting it if something goes wrong. What the fuck went wrong?”

“You said you had talked about it maybe.”

“We did.”

“Did he say why he wanted it?”

“He said he was tired of waiting around for me on weekends and at nights and on holidays, that all I could think about was bacteria and drug discovery and my next paper. He said he wanted something too—more intimacy. We are fucking intimate.”

“That’s a lot,” Wallace says. “I mean, it’s a lot to take in.”

“Yeah, so he says, ‘I’d like to open things up. I’d like to discuss it with you.’ You know what he’s like, with that neutral voice. That shrink voice he got from his mother.”

“I didn’t know his mother was a shrink.”

“She isn’t. She’s a high school counselor. His dad’s the shrink.”

“Oh,” Wallace says. The ball comes faster, so he takes a step back from the net. Cole is striking the ball beautifully today, hard and flat. Wallace is having a hard time keeping up. His racquet flutters a little in his hand. He slides his grip up, flexes his fingers.

“It’s true. Things haven’t been great, or perfect, for a while. But I didn’t know it was this bad.” Cole shakes his head in disgust, slaps the ball into the bottom of the net.

“You know,” Wallace says, though he has no idea where he’s going with this, only that the look on Cole’s face makes his stomach hurt, “I think that it’s probably a good sign that he expressed, um, a want? A need? It’s probably good that he said something?”

“But the minute I said no, he turned around and hopped on a dating app? What’s the point of communicating if you don’t listen?”

“Yes, you are right, yes. But perhaps he did it because he didn’t feel heard?”

Cole looks up from the net, and his eyes are cold. His mouth is a grim line.

“So it’s my fault?”

“No, Cole, that’s not what I mean.”

“Because that would be a fucked-up thing to say, Wallace.”

Wallace tries to find some inner bead of calm, some granule of peace. He sighs. Sweat burns the edge of his vision.

“Cole, all I’m saying is that Vincent is a person too. And you aren’t the only one in your relationship with feelings.”

“I’m not ready to be on his side!”

“I am not asking you to be on his side, or to forgive him or whatever. I am only saying that maybe you’re still okay. Maybe all this means that you’re okay.” Wallace tries to smile through the tension in his jaw and his neck. If he can, then perhaps it is true that they are okay, that they will be okay. If he can smile, then he might believe it and then Cole might believe it. That’s all he wants, after all. That’s all that matters here, he realizes. Cole’s feelings.

“I don’t know.”

They go to the baseline, and Cole decides to drop in by sending the ball hard to the service line. It bounces up nice and high, and Wallace is able to send it back with good depth and spin. There’s a pleasant shape to the ball, an arc that puts it right in front of Cole’s service line. It’s easy to rally this way, putting just enough force into the shot to send it over the net, but not enough heat to do real harm. The best players in the world could do this for hours with no mistakes. Cole often sends a ball into the net or off to the side, and Wallace has to move quickly to save it, catching it in the air and sending it back nice and easy.

He is surprised that there is so much trouble in Vincent and Cole’s relationship. They have been together going on seven years now. When Wallace first met Cole, they had sat next to each other on a log at an introductory bonfire. The heat was on their thighs and their faces, and Cole was telling him how much he loved tennis. There was no mention of a boyfriend or even that Cole was gay, but there had been something in the way their eyes met, the way Cole reached over and put a hand on Wallace’s knee, the insistence of those fingers kneading the surface of his skin, that had caused Wallace to hope.

That whole first year was an elaborate flirtation. He and Cole went everywhere together. To dinner, to lunch, to play tennis. They spoke quietly in Cole’s van after they had been rained out, cold and soaked. There was a moment, the world a gray streak, when they looked at each other and found a possibility of something. Cole leaned toward him, across the center console, smelling like sweat and rain, his full lower lip plush and red, and Wallace tilted toward him out of instinct, two bodies in motion. But something stopped them. Some force rendered them still right before contact, and Wallace got out into the rain. He didn’t hear if Cole called after him, and maybe that was for the best.

Some months later, at the end of that first summer, at the start of second year, he was walking home from grocery shopping, his hands full of food, thinking of calling Cole and patching things up, when he saw a group of his friends walking in the opposite direction. He waved with his hands full, and they waved and came up to him. Cole and Emma and Yngve, and Vincent, who at the time was unknown to him.