The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(43)

“No,” I answered over the thickness in my throat. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No!” Then more softly, “No.”

Loud laughter billowed from the drink-mixing table. Jack glanced back at them. “Let’s…” He scratched the back of his neck. “Let’s talk. Not here.”

I followed him over the smallest deck and into the guesthouse. As he closed the door, muffling the drunken laughter outside, I looked around. It wasn’t much bigger than my dining room, but he had room for a double bed and a sofa at the foot of it that sat in front of a TV screen and several game consoles. Everything was tidy. His bed was made. (Mine wasn’t.) A shelf held a small green ceramic Buddha and a few other trinkets—an altar of sorts—and I recognized the meditation cushions from the Zen bookstore. Being here felt as if I’d opened a door on the side of Jack’s head that led into his brain.

Looking around, I noticed a door to a bathroom, next to which several odd portraits hung on the wall. They looked almost childish and were brightly colored. One of them was an alien woman. “Your work?” I asked.

He shook his head but didn’t say anything else, so I continued my surveying, passing by a desk with an expensive computer and stopping at his drafting table, where a built-in shelf on the wall above it held a small fish tank. Beneath the white glow of its hood lamp, a single intensely blue betta fish with lacy fins rippled through a miniature town of tiki huts sitting among a forest of live aquatic plants. A school of tiny gray fish was the betta’s only company.

“He looks a little like your tattoo,” I said.

“Mmm.”

Well. He was certainly in a black mood. Couldn’t say I blamed him. I wanted to ask him about everything—his sister, Sierra, what the girls outside were all gossiping about. But I didn’t know where to start.

My gaze slid over sketches pinned to an oversized corkboard. Alphabets. Dozens of them. All drawn by hand with pen and ink and markers, the occasional telltale pencil lines showing behind some of the letters. “You did these? They’re incredible.”

“Thanks.”

“Is this a page from your comic?” It looked like a storyboard, illustrated with what I assumed were Andy’s drawings and Jack’s lettering. The hero seemed to be some sort of martial arts expert slash mechanic. “What’s the story about?”

“I’m a virgin.”

I froze. “Excuse me?”

“What they were saying is true. I am.”

“Oh.” How in the world was I supposed to respond? High five? “So, blow jobs don’t count, then, I suppose?”

He closed his eyes. “That was one time and, no, I don’t think it counts.”

I disagreed, but then, I wasn’t a blow job expert.

He sighed heavily. “And, no, I haven’t really had a girlfriend. A couple of girls came and went before the incident.” The break-in? Or his sister being shipped off to Europe? I wanted to ask for details, but he kept talking. “There was one other girl. I guess we started seeing each other around Christmas. She’s the one I sort of mentioned to you in the park. Pretty early on, she found out about my family’s so-called dirty little secret, as Lala put it, and got freaked out.”

“And Sierra,” I reminded him.

“Sierra was a mistake.”

“Not to hear her talk about it,” I said, toying with a comic inking pen on his desk.

“I’m not saying it wasn’t fun—”

I glanced up at his face.

“Wrong word,” he muttered. “And it was the absolute wrong person.”

“Oh.” But what I meant was “good.”

After a long moment, he said, “It’s not like I’m saving myself or anything.”

“It’s not a Zen thing?”

“No. The only rule about sex is not to misuse it, which basically means that you shouldn’t do something that will harm yourself or someone else—like, literally, of course, but emotionally, too. It’s pretty broad, and you’re supposed to figure out what works for you. But that doesn’t mean … it’s not because—”

“Look, you don’t have to explain.”

“I just don’t want you to look at me like you did out there.”

“Like how?”

“Like you pitied me.”

I stared at his inked alphabets for a long moment, not knowing what to say. It’s not like I cared one way or the other about his experience or lack thereof, and he could’ve just lied and I never would’ve have guessed differently; he certainly seemed much more experienced than I was. But he didn’t lie. He told me the truth, and I had to think it took a lot of guts for him to admit it, which made me like him even more. It also made me want to be up-front in return. “I’m not, you know—a virgin, I mean. Is that weird for you?”

“How many?” he asked in a low voice.

“Four.”

“Four guys?”

“Four times! One guy. Well, one and one-half guys, if you count Lauren’s anti-prom party, but we didn’t actually, uh, you know, and”—I shook my head, secretly wishing lightning would strike me down—“it really wasn’t anything.” Definitely not a blow job, but I didn’t say that.