I Have Lost My Way(25)



“See!” James said, jabbing me with his delicate finger. “That’s just it. You write people off without giving them a chance.”

“No,” I said. “I live in reality.”

James grunted and walked ahead of me. He abruptly stopped, which I thought meant he was ready to make up. He never could stay angry long. But he stooped down and picked something up. It was a fifty-dollar bill.

My first thought was that he’d done it on purpose, but I knew James did not have spare fifties lying around. And I could tell by the surprised smile on his face that he hadn’t dropped it. He’d found it.

“We should see if someone lost it,” I said.

“And let someone else take it?” He shook his head. “Aww, hell no.”

“It’s stealing,” I said.

“It ain’t stealing. It’s finding. Anyone might’ve dropped it, but we found it.”

“It’s still wrong.”

“Think of it as a gift from God.”

“You don’t believe in God,” I said.

“Nah, boo. You’re the one who don’t believe in God.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because you got no faith.”

I didn’t know what to do with that.

“Got any cash on you?” he asked.

I had twenty and some change. James started tapping away on his phone. “Between us we got almost ninety. There’s gotta be some cheap-ass hotel that rents rooms for that much.” He tapped some more on his phone, and then his face broke out into that wide-toothed smile. “Place near Penn Station, says it’s only ninety-three a night.”

“We don’t have ninety-three.”

“Close though. Come on.”

We walked to the hotel, the wind, gritty and mean, pushing back against us.

The hotel clerk told us the room was actually $125 a night, plus tax, but if we paid cash and left by the end of his shift and didn’t use the towels, we could have it for eighty.

We rode the elevator to the ninth floor. James was shaking when we unlocked the door, but he said it was on account of the cold, and the first thing he did was crank up the thermostat.

The room was ugly and dark, with a window that looked out onto an air shaft. When I imagined us being someplace together, it didn’t look like this. Or like the tropical waters in Fiji. It looked like my house, my bed.

That was my running-away fantasy. To be able to sleep like spoons in my bed at home, with James, not hiding. But that seemed so much further away than the Fijian bungalow.

We sat on opposite ends of the bed. We’d wanted this for so long, a place to be together, and now we had it and didn’t know what to do.

It wasn’t like we hadn’t had sex. In the hidden corners of Central Park, in the empty ladies’ lounge on the top floor of one of the city’s old, failing department stores, we had explored the hidden reaches of each other’s bodies. But those encounters were, by necessity, always fast and furtive: shirts yanked up, zippers yanked down, the important bits exposed but always both of us ready to make a break for it.

In truth, I was that way with James: always ready to make a break for it.

But here, in this room, with the thermostat cranked, we could take our time. Tentatively, we started to kiss, giggling nervously. We kicked off our shoes. We kissed some more, a little steadier, and peeled off our shirts. We went slow, even though it was agonizing, because for once, we could.

By taking our time, I saw things I’d never seen. A rigid scar on his left shoulder. The way the skin of his belly was a different color from the rest of him, more like my tone than his. His feet, the toes all the same length.

“My mom used to call them my ballerina feet,” he said when I commented on them.

“You never talk about your mom.”

“Nothing to say.”

“Did you love her?”

“What kind of question is that? Course I loved her.” He paused to bite his thumbnail. “And I know she loved me, but sometimes that ain’t enough.”

“You always tell me that love is all you need,” I said.

“Maybe I should start living in reality too,” he replied.

I got that bad feeling again.

“I love you,” I told him. “You know that, right?”

“But not enough to do something about it. Not enough to risk anything. I told my pops. I didn’t think about the consequences.”

“That’s not fair,” I replied. “You told your father before we met. And, I might remind you, he kicked you out.”

“‘I might remind you,’” he mimicked. “Like I could forget. And I told my pops knowing that one day I’d meet someone like you and when it happened I’d be ready.”

The heater ticked off. The room went cold. I knew what he meant, or what he thought he meant. He told his father to make a place for me. But all I heard in that someone like you was someone other than me.

“Nothin’s gonna change if you’re not willing to change it,” he said. “And if you aren’t, we’re gonna keep hiding out, paying off clerks for five hours in a hotel.”

“Four hours now,” I said. “And this was your idea.”

“Fine. You wanna fuck?” He unzipped his pants, tugged on mine.

Gayle Forman's Books