All We Can Do Is Wait(59)

“Don’t tell me what Kyle thought,” Jason spat back, surprising his sister. His eyes were watery but angry, and he had the beginnings of a mean sneer on his face. “You don’t know a fucking thing about what Kyle thought.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Jason?” Alexa cried. “He was my friend, my friend, remember?”

“You didn’t know anything about him!” Jason roared back, people in the waiting room turning to look at these two screaming kids. “That’s the most pathetic part! You think you and Kyle had some great thing, some great friend affair last summer. But you didn’t even know who he was. Or who he was with most of the time . . .”

What was Jason saying? What did he mean, who Kyle was with? Then, looking at her brother, trembling and teary (when was the last time she saw Jason cry?), it suddenly hit her, like an electric shock, her world inverting, the past warping. And then her brother confirmed what she’d just realized.

“He was with me, Alexa,” Jason yelped, his voice croaking. “He was with me! Kyle loved me, he was mine. Not yours. So don’t tell me what he thought, or what he said, or who he was. Because you have no idea. You had no idea. Kyle was mine. He loved me. And I loved him. And it’s my fault that he’s gone.”





Chapter Fifteen


    Jason



THE FIRST TIME Kyle left a voice mail for Jason, the day after their first kiss, Jason was surprised, but overjoyed. He listened to it over and over again. There was nothing remarkable about it, just Kyle’s voice rambling about some customer at work, then followed by a little pause, a sigh, and then Kyle saying, “I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to you, I guess.”

The next time they saw each other, their first time alone together, carefully orchestrated around Alexa’s work schedule, Jason made fun of Kyle for the voice mail.

“I mean, who leaves voice mails? It’s 2016.”

“I leave voice mails. Don’t you want to hear my beautiful voice?”

Jason blushed. They were sitting far down the beach from Jason’s house, watching the afternoon dog walkers throw tennis balls into the ocean, black labs and golden retrievers bounding after them.

“Of course I want to hear your voice. It’s just funny! I dunno.”

“Well, I’m not gonna stop. Voice mails are my thing.”

“I thought moving to New York was your thing. I thought theater was your thing.”

“I can have multiple things.”

Jason laughed, a juvenile, embarrassing, knee-jerk response to the word “thing.” Kyle seemed to catch what Jason was laughing about and raised an eyebrow.

“Only one thing on your mind, huh . . .”

Jason blushed again. This was flirting, huh? Here Jason was, on a beach, with a boy, and they were flirting. He watched a cocker spaniel go running into the water and he wanted to chase after it, to tell it the good news. But he also wanted to stay right where he was.

“Well, fine then. Leave me voice mails. I promise I’ll get around to listening to them eventually.”

Kyle nodded his head. “Good,” he said. “Good.” He turned to Jason, looked him in the eye. “You wanna kiss again?”

Jason nodded, and they did.

Kyle did indeed keep leaving voice mails. One from a party in Provincetown that Jason had been scared to go to. He left another while driving home to Bourne to see his mom. Another from the freezer at work, whispering. Another from his car just after sneaking out of Jason’s bedroom, a particularly sexy message that Jason listened to a lot on nights when he and Kyle couldn’t be together.

It was a little tradition they established over their short time together, half joking, half sincere. Jason relished getting them, and sometimes thought about leaving one for Kyle, but felt weird about it, like he wouldn’t know what to say, that he wouldn’t be cute and clever like Kyle was. So it remained one-sided, like so much in Jason’s life, people giving him stuff and Jason just gobbling it down and giving nothing in return.

So it was fitting, then, in some tragic way, that the last time Kyle ever spoke to Jason was over voice mail. That Sunday night, the night he died. They hadn’t spoken for two days—unprecedented since they’d first kissed—and with the summer over, essentially, the next day, Jason had fallen into a consuming gloom, convinced that he and Kyle were done forever, that they’d never be together again.

Jason’s parents were off to the end-of-summer dinner-dance at the club, and Alexa was at work. There was a big party that some of the Grey’s employees, the twins, Dave and Courtney, were having, and earlier Kyle had tried to persuade Jason to come. But Jason said he wanted the two of them to spend the night alone together.

“We’ll have the place to ourselves . . . a whole house! With, like, beds,” Jason said, trying to sound coy and enticing.

But Kyle kicked at Jason from the other side of the backseat of his car, where they’d just hooked up, as they often did. “What’s wrong with this?” he said, gesturing to the barely functioning car. “Come onnn. It’ll be fun. I want to end the summer with a bang!”

“But we could!” Jason joked.

Kyle rolled his eyes, leaned across the car, and kissed Jason, softly. “Pleeeease.”

Jason said he’d think about it. But then it was Kyle’s birthday, real or made-up, and the disaster in Provincetown happened, and the fight, and all of a sudden it was Sunday and there were no plans either way.