Release(26)

“I’m not.”

They’d carried on, but looking back and knowing more, Adam couldn’t imagine the experience had been all that interesting for Philip, as Adam had mostly just lain there, half in shocked inexperience, half trying not to let it finish at every desperate second.

Then Philip had whispered a request in his ear. “Can I…” was all he got out, as if too embarrassed to say the verb.

“I’ve never done that either.”

“That’s okay then–”

“But yeah. Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

Philip had looked him in the eye. “I’ll go slow,” he said, and put on a condom.

He went slow. It didn’t help.

“I can stop any time,” Philip said.

“Can you just … not move for a second?”

“Of course. It always hurts like this first time.”

“Then why do people do it?” Adam managed to say.

“Because wait for it. Just wait.”

Adam waited. The initial pain subsided. It grew tolerable. Then it grew completely remarkable. Physically, sure, but mentally, too. They were face to face still, and Adam could see the ferocious concentration Philip was putting himself through, wondered if he was thinking the same thing as Adam. I am having sex. I’m having actual sex with an actual man.

I am having sex.

I am having sex.

He said embarrassing sex things. He said them probably quite loudly. But Philip did, too. And when they were done, and they were still together, still connected, before they even started cleaning up, Philip had kissed him again, holding his lips and tongue for a long, long moment, then saying, “I wish we’d done this sooner.”

Because it turned out Philip, like Enzo, like Angela for that matter, was about to move away. They’d never got together again. They’d texted a few times, but mostly it was Philip wishing him well and saying goodbye in various ways, as he took off for a senior year in Omaha. Adam was disappointed, of course, but also smart enough to know it might never have happened if Philip hadn’t been going. Would he have risked it? Would he have said nothing at all, leaving Adam quite clueless?

But it had happened. Twenty-seven days after Angela. And he’d called her at three o’clock that morning, sitting on the edge of the bathtub in Philip’s house, feeling tired, sore, spent, and different, different, different.

“Oh, my God,” Angela had sleepily whispered.

“I know,” he’d whispered back.

“Oh, my God.”

“I know.”

“Are you okay?”

“My parents are going to murder me and I don’t even care. That’s how okay I am.”

“I have so many questions.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Like … so many.”

His parents didn’t quite murder him, but he’d been grounded for the next month and made to clean the church every single Wednesday of that summer. And Angela had asked many, many, many, many questions, most of them eye-wateringly anatomical.

“I didn’t ask this much about Kurt.”

“Well, you totally could.”

“You’re not taking my hint here.”

“Oh, you love me, and you know it.”

And he did. Love her. With all his aching heart.





The faun finds her kneeling by the body of a large woman. He thinks his way into the woman’s chest and finds a heart still beating – albeit in a flawed, laborious way that can surely not be long for this world.

“Wake up, Mom,” he hears his Queen say. “It’s your Katie.”

He has already erased the memories of those he’s passed: the neighbours of this house; the man who’d been driving by, ready to throw a newspaper over the short fence; the two little girls with dirty faces who had stopped their own argument – about something called “mango candy lip dazzle” – and stared at him as he approached, neither of them screaming, not just yet. He held his hands over their eyes, and returned them to their dazzle.

And now here is his Queen, kneeling over her mother, when it is the Queen who is the Mother, the Mother of them all–

He sees her look around at the house beyond the darkened doorway where the woman fainted. “I know this place.”

She stands, leaving the woman behind, entering the house. The faun steps over the large woman, searching her mind, finding the right things to erase. He ducks under the lintel of the door – he is far too tall to be comfortable inside any dwelling these creatures make for themselves – and he follows the Queen in a crouch. The house smells not of death, like the cabin did, but of grief, a cold and heavy scent that slows him down, even in the short entryway.

The house is quiet. No one else is at home, though the unconscious woman is not the only one who resides here. He can smell an older man and two other younger women who were here this morning, their scents lingering like ghosts walking up and down these rooms.

The spirit’s smell has components of these, as they have components of hers. The physical ties of families.

But he stops as he smells that the grief here works two ways. They feel the grief of her loss. But her grief is here as well. There was loss before her loss. There was emptiness, which is the same as loss.