You & Me

On Friday, Emmet and I were ready to go at 12:30 p.m. We waited on the stairs. My palms were clammy, and I kept rubbing them up and down my thighs.

Landon and I had barely texted all week. I’d wanted to, but every time I reached for my phone, something held me back. My fingers curled away, and I stared at my dark screen, and I waited. And waited.

Something inside me whispered that I’d fucked up somehow, somewhere. The way Tuesday night ended and how Landon seemed to tear away from me. How he’d shut down, pulled back. There seemed to be a wall between us where there had never been one before. Our puzzle felt broken.

The few times Landon texted, it was about innocuous things. The schedule for next week’s game. It was going to be a home game, and I wondered if he was going to come over for the weekend again while Bethany was in town. I didn’t ask. He sent me an article about that year’s food contest winners at the State Fair. What do you want to try? I’d texted. I’m a deep fried Oreo devotee,he’d said. But there’s a few other things that look good.

And that was that.

“Dad?” Emmet’s voice tore me back to the present. He’d turned on his step and was looking up at me, his eyes wide, his expression guarded. “Did you really come to all of my games?”

“Of course.”

Freshman year, when he was the starting linebacker for junior varsity, I sat in my truck and listened to the announcer’s voice belting out of the stadium. Sophomore year, after Riley died, and after he’d been brought up to varsity and then dropped back down, I’d stood on the planter outside the gate and tried to wrangle any glimpse of my son I could.

He wasn’t the junior varsity starter sophomore year, not until halfway through the season. It was game five when his name and number were read out as he took the field, and my chest went so tight I thought I would never be able to breathe again.

“Why weren’t you in the stands like Mom was?”

“I couldn’t get a ticket. I tried. Every game was sold out before the season began.”

He frowned. “But I gave two season tickets to her. We got them from the team for our families. Why didn’t you use yours?”

The world tilted, twisted, like I was tumbling down the stairs. “I never got a ticket from your mother. I never knew there was one for me.”

His gaze dropped, and he glared at the carpet on the step between us. He blinked, blinked again. I watched every twitch of his face and flinch of his muscles. His finger twirling in the hem of his T-shirt. When he was a toddler, he’d twirled his fingers in everything he could grab. Riley’s hair, his baby blankets, the ends of my shirts. He twirled his finger in a stranger’s hair once when I was holding him. She’d stepped forward and yelped. Emmet had wailed.

Maybe I should be wailing. Riley hadn’t wanted me. Not at our son’s games or by her side or in her life. I knew that. She’d had those divorce papers almost in her hand when she died. We hadn’t spoken a word to one another in weeks, hadn’t been together in months, hadn’t loved each other in years. We weren’t even roommates by the end. We were strangers.

But I didn’t know she’d resented me so much that she tried to push me not just out of her life, but out of our son’s life, too. What had slid inside of her and poisoned her so completely?

My eyes closed, and my fingers dug into the meat of my elbows. Don’t think about it.

An SUV pulled to a stop in front of our townhome. Emmet shot to his feet and jogged out to meet Bowen and Landon, and he was sitting in the front seat of Bowen’s car before I’d locked our front door.

Landon waited for me on the front step. “Hi.” He smiled.

My spine unclenched. My brain unknotted. Our puzzle pieces slid back together. “Hi.”

Bowen drove. Emmet streamed his music through the SUV’s Bluetooth and turned it up louder than he did at home. I would have thought music that loud meant Emmet didn’t want to talk, but he and Bowen were going a mile a minute, chatting about football and plays and stories from practice, incomprehensible jargon that went right over my head.

It was impossible to talk to Landon with all that noise unless I scooted closer. I shifted from the side to the middle seat and leaned in. “Good week?”

“Long week. I’ve been looking forward to today.”

“I have, too.”

When we arrived, Landon distracted me while he paid for all four tickets. I protested and tried to push cash into his hand and then into his pocket, but he wiggled away. “Buy me an Oreo and we’re even.”

Bowen and Emmet disappeared after we gave them both money, their two heads bobbing over the crowd in the direction of the midway.

Deep-fried grease and cane sugar saturated the air. Carnival rides squealed and clattered, the midway blinked and chimed, and barkers at the food booths shouted their specials. Smoked turkey legs, two for twenty. Funnel cakes, any way you like ’em. Deep-fried everything.

“I hope you didn’t eat lunch.” Landon rubbed his hands together. “It’s definitely time to sin with our stomachs.”

I laughed and followed him to the food. We gorged ourselves, buying nearly one of everything and sharing it between us. I got the spicy marinade turkey leg, and he got the sweet brown sugar rub, and we each ate half before trading. I drank homemade root beer, and he bought a lemonade, and then we huddled over a funnel cake half-covered in melted fudge and strawberries and half in Froot Loops and whipped cream. We kept spinning the plate, trading bites and flavors and snorting when one of us would jerk the plate before the other could grab a forkful.

We had to digest. I thought I was going to give birth to a food baby, and I moaned as Landon dragged me toward the gallery tents. “Just leave me behind,” I said, sagging against him. “I can’t go on.”

He wrapped his arm around my waist and pretended to shore me up, like we were comrades in arms crawling off the field of battle. “Don’t quit now.” His teasing eyes looked right into mine. “We still have all the fried desserts to eat.”

We took our time in the arts tent. Everything from intricately handmade dolls and quilted country clutter shared space with macaroni necklaces and finger paintings. There were sculptures and wood carvings as small as my fingertip to as large as my truck. Paintings, mostly of Texas landscapes: bluebonnet fields, big skies, wide-open ranges. Vintage city signs from Dallas and San Antonio. Waves crashing against the Gulf Coast. A space shuttle landing in front of the snapping Texas flag.

Last were the drawings. Black and whites and colored pencils crowded together, more landscapes and still lifes and Texas pride. Then there were the portraits. In the very best ones, the subjects looked like they were about to stand up off the page. A man playing the piano gazed into the darkness over his black and whites, smiling at something only he could see. A little boy, so much like Emmet it made my heart squeeze, laughed while looking upward.

“I can’t stop thinking about what you said on Tuesday.” Landon slid in beside me. “About how to capture someone fully in a drawing.” He pointed to the piano-playing man. “Whatever he’s looking at, he loves with all his heart. And the boy. Whoever drew him put all of his love on the page.”

I drew you. The words were a confession I kept under seal. A piece of Landon lived in my sketchbook now. What had I seen when I drew him? What had I put into that play of shadow and longing?

I guided him out of the arts and crafts tent and to the midway. We challenged each other to ring toss, duckie fishing, bottle knockdowns. I fished out the most ducks but lost all the games that required a single ounce of sports ability. He made a show of winding up like a baseball pitcher before throwing the beanbag at the stack of bottles and knocking them all down. He refused the stuffed animal prize, though, and asked the midway operator to give it to a kid who needed it.

Finally, the time came when we were ready for the deep-fried desserts. Landon scouted each dessert stand like he was a general inspecting his troops. He shook his head at three and then declared the fourth was The One. It had the widest offering of things they breaded and dumped in a deep fryer.

He ordered five deep-fried desserts: an Oreo, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a slice of pecan pie, a s’more, and a Cadbury Creme Egg. The kid taking his order, who was maybe Emmet’s age, looked Landon up and down before his gaze flicked to me. “For two?”

“Yes, please.” Landon tucked a ten into the tip jar as I paid.

All five deep-fried desserts were still sizzling when the kid passed the tray through the window. I took it and followed Landon to a picnic bench beneath a sprawling oak on the edge of a man-made lake. Big Tex, the five-story-tall electric cowboy mascot of the State Fair, waved at us from his neon perch nearby.

Landon looked like a kid about to be loosed in a candy store. He was rubbing his hands again. “What do you want to try first?”

“I have no idea.” I held out the deep-fried Oreo. “You’ve been waiting all day for this.”

“I’ve been waiting all year.”

He bit into it as I held it. His eyes rolled back at the first bite, and he moaned as he chewed. Crumbs and melted Oreo filling dripped down my hand. He tried to wipe the mess up with his fingers. “Sorry. It’s messy. Try it.”

I ate half of what was left. He watched me, waiting for my reaction. “Amazing. Worth the inevitable heart attack.”

“Right? If I had access to these more than one day a year, I’d be dead.”

I held out the final bite for him. His eyes darted to mine before he plucked the Oreo from my fingers and popped it into his mouth.

We moaned our way through the pecan pie, tried and discarded the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and made a mess out of sharing the deep-fried s’more. It went everywhere, worse than the Oreo filling. Melted marshmallow dripped down my fingers, down to Landon’s fingers, and circled both our wrists. We were trying to eat our halves before they disintegrated, and we had to lunge forward, lick the melted marshmallow and chocolate almost out of our joined hands. I laughed as Landon tried to chase the last of his around his wrist, and his nose ended up smearing in a blob of melted chocolate on the back of my hand.

Last was the Cadbury Creme Egg. We looked at each other. We were both as messy as five-year-olds, with sticky fingers and chocolate-coated lips. “When I start this, it’s going to fall apart,” he said.

“We’ll have to be quick.”

We both leaned in, heads together over the table. Eyes locked.

Landon bit into the Creme Egg. Melted chocolate escaped over the batter and ran down his fingers. His eyes went wide. Chocolate dripped down his chin. He held the egg up to my lips. “Hurry!”

I sucked it all into my mouth. My lips closed around his thumb and fingers, and for a moment, a second, his fingers were in my mouth and I was sucking on his skin.

He flushed a brilliant bright red, louder than the neon lights sparkling behind us.

I had to remind myself how to chew, how to swallow. How to breathe.

“That was good,” I said once I could speak again. “Might be my favorite.”

The sun set while we devoured the desserts, and if I thought I was full before, it was nothing compared to now, with five different types of fried foods tumbling inside of me. I couldn’t look at the rides or the spinning lights on the midway. We walked instead, taking it all in.

Everything I saw I wanted to sketch: kids chasing each other around the midway, lovers holding hands beneath the fun house mirrors, Landon beneath the neon glow and the fading twilight.

We watched the giant Texas Ferris Wheel go around and around, the big star in the center winking off and on. Red and blue danced across Landon’s cheeks. He laughed as he watched a little kid swirl a plastic light-up sword furiously in front of him and another kid dance with a teddy bear almost the same size as her.

Another moment to draw: Landon laughing.

“I haven’t been to this in years,” I said. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“I’m glad you came. Bowen always tries to pull me onto rides to make me hurl. Especially after my desserts.” He laughed. “He and Emmet are probably hugging a trash can somewhere after thirty rides of those spinning teacups.” He checked his phone. “Speaking of, we need to head to the front gates to meet up with our boys.”

Bowen and Emmet were already there. They looked like they’d gone through a tumble cycle in the dryer. Their hair stuck up in every direction, and their shirts were stained with ketchup and chocolate sauce and layered in crumbs. They must have had buckets of sugar, because they were still vibrating when we walked up.

Bowen had a stuffed teddy bear under one arm, and Emmet wore a plastic crown on his head and swung an inflatable hammer. “Guess who the newest strongman of the fair is?” Emmet struck a pose like he was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The drive home was quieter, the sugar finally melting out of the boys. Emmet’s music stayed at a reasonable level, enough to where Landon and I could talk in the back seat. We faced each other, both our elbows flung over the back of the seat. We tucked our legs beneath us, and our knees slid into one another whenever Bowen made a turn.

I spotted Bowen eyeing his father in the rearview mirror at a stoplight.

Halfway back to Last Waters, Emmet asked if he and Bowen could camp out at the lake on Saturday night. I looked at Landon. Landon looked at me. “Sure,” I told Emmet.

We went to Landon’s house by unspoken agreement. Emmet had probably been there a hundred times before, but I never had. I knew Landon lived in the nicest part of Last Waters, and I’d seen enough on the edges of the photos he texted me to know his house was far nicer than mine.

It was gorgeous. An updated Craftsman-style, flowing with the historic district and into the woodlands around his cul-de-sac of homes. Inside, hand-scraped wood floors connected the foyer to an open living room, kitchen, and dining room, and, down a short hallway, to Landon’s bedroom and what looked like an office. The walls were paneled with wainscoting and painted white, with built-in bookshelves surrounding a flat-screen TV. The back wall was almost entirely made of glass. Through it, I saw Landon’s lush backyard, patio, and pool. Framed pictures of Bowen and Landon were arranged gallery-style on the walls.

His kitchen looked like a set from a magazine. White cabinets soared to the tall ceilings, and glittering granite cradled a chef’s range in the middle of a kitchen island so huge, it was a continent. There was even a vase of yellow roses on the counter. His house was like stepping into a Southern Living magazine. The whole place was bright and airy and open, exactly like Landon.

Bowen and Emmet disappeared upstairs. Landon pulled out a bottle of carménère. “Care for a glass?”

“Absolutely.”

We sank into barstools and set the bottle between us. Video game sounds drifted downstairs, along with our boys’ laughs. Joy filled me, from the tips of my toes to the ends of my hair. My son was happy. I was happy. I was with Landon, and all was right with the world.

Our conversation bounced along as it always did, as effortless as breathing. This time, I told him about the galleries my dad took me to when I was still allowing him to be seen with me—before I turned sixteen—and the junior art exhibits I’d entered at my parents’ insistence. I’d placed first or second every time I entered, but I didn’t know how to deal with the praise heaped on my shoulders when I won. I had talent but no drive. Raw skill but no direction. I had dreams, but I didn’t know how to get through a day without fucking something up. How could I have managed a burgeoning art career when I couldn’t tell whether I was coming or going?

Landon soaked up everything I said like I was handing him nuggets of gold instead of silly stories of my past.

“I was wondering,” I asked, “if you ever went to the art walk downtown?” Once a month, Old Town threw a street party on Saturday night. Local galleries brought out their exhibits, and live bands played while the shops and restaurants stayed open after dark. I’d been once and loved it.

“I’ve been.” He squinted, counting off the weekends in his head. “The next one is… tomorrow?”

I nodded. “Do you want to go?”

“I’d love to. You’re going to have to explain the art to me. Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

“I can do that.”

We were trading off teaching apparently, cooking and wine for art and… Well, I didn’t know what else I could offer Landon. Hopefully there was something.

By 11:00 p.m., I was yawning every other word. Landon washed our glasses in the sink, and then we trooped upstairs to check on our boys.

There were three stick-on air fresheners on Bowen’s door, I noticed.

They’d passed out while playing Super Smash Bros. The loading screen looped on Bowen’s TV, and Bowen was facedown on his bed, controller abandoned beside him. Emmet had fallen asleep on Bowen’s bean bag chair, arms crossed, plastic crown still perched at an angle over his forehead. We covered them with blankets and turned off the lights and the TV.

“Why don’t you stay?” Landon asked when we slipped back downstairs. “Em’s asleep. You can sleep in the guest room.”

“I thought crashers always got the couch.”

“That’s open, too.” He ran his hand over the back of his saddle leather couch. If I sank into it, it would probably wrap its arms around me and cuddle me into the cushions. “I do also have a bed if you want it. I can make breakfast in the morning before we send the boys out to the lake.”

I didn’t need much convincing. I already wanted to stay. I never wanted to leave when I was with Landon. “Can I borrow something to sleep in?”

“Of course.” He led me to his bedroom and bathroom, which was a world apart from mine. His bed was huge, all ornate wood and leather, with the matching bedroom set. There was a fireplace built into one of the walls, and as I got closer, I realized it was two-way. The other side opened to Landon’s bathroom above a roman tub. His counters were granite, the sinks raised bowls of swirled glass. One sink and counter combination was bare. The other was covered in bottles, with a toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant. Landon’s sink.

He went to his bedroom and came back with a pair of boxers and a T-shirt, then pulled out a toothbrush still in its packaging and a travel-size tube of toothpaste.

He left me to change and get ready, and while I brushed my teeth, I peeked at the bottles on his countertop. Sunscreen. Eye cream. Night lotion with retinol. Day lotion and hyaluronic acid. Vitamin C in liquid form. Vitamin C for your face? I took a picture with my phone so I could read all the labels later. I didn’t have anything like this. Maybe I should look into it.

What I’d thought was an office was a guest room. A host of fluffy pillows crowded the headboard, and the whole bed looked like a cloud. Landon was pulling back the sheets when I walked in. He had changed, too, into the same shorts and T-shirt he’d slept in at my house.

He hovered in the doorway. “Sleep in and wake up whenever you want. I’ll make breakfast.”

“I am already looking forward to it.” I was looking forward to finally getting a good night’s sleep, too. I’d barely slept all week. I plopped down on the edge of the bed. Fuck, his mattress felt like a dream. He’d clearly spent more than $399 on a curbside special. I pitched to my side. My face sank so deep into the pillow I couldn’t see Landon anymore. I waved in his direction. “Night.”

He laughed. “Good night, Luke. Sleep well.” The door shut. I hauled my feet into bed, slid beneath the covers, and was out.