Care Less

My blood was already on the tip, a crimson tide washing over what was once white, bleak, innocuous. He would know now; he would have to know now, lest he always kept blood on the edges of his Polaroids. Stupid, goddamn stupid. Careless.

Letting the cool of my tongue extinguish the small flame of the cut, I stared at the photo, the plastic portrait of a plastic girl. Thick, glossy lips like Crayola crayons. Ombre nails that might as well be guitar chips. Looked like she reeked of l'Oreal. Obvious bottle blonde. Everything pretty about her probably came out of a bottle.

But Nikolai didn’t like fake, didn’t like plastic. Five minutes after we had purchased the cabin, he had run up to the cliff, letting spectral hands touch his naked neck and forearms as the gentle gale slithered by, inhaling the ancient salty spice of the ocean as it greeted him. Pulled from my disinterested saunter up close to his chest, even I could hear the sheer contentment flooding his every breath, his gentle respiratory beat complementing the excited thumping of his heart. How wonderfully alive he had felt then. Enough to make me think moving up here wasn’t so bad an idea after all.

She probably wouldn’t have though. Would’ve complained about the mosquitos and the sucky reception. Would’ve been unable to suppress sighs once the shampoo ran out, demanding another trip out to town in Nikolai’s old FJ that ran like a wooden roller coaster. Would’ve yelled at him to close the goddamn door for once when he went to chop wood so that the flies didn’t get in. She couldn’t have learned to love it, like I did, or, at least, learned to tolerate it because Nikolai loved it, like I did.

Is she why this is all happening? I thought as I remembered the box beside me and moved back to collecting my socks from the dresser. As my arm grazed over the edge of the drawer, I felt the flannel sleeve rush over the tender rosy flesh of my inner elbow, pouring gasoline over what had just previously been a lit matchstick. No, this damn dresser is why this is all happening. Supposedly.

Blue lines crawled up the girl’s smooth olive arms, too irregular and wavy to be surgical lines. Turning the photo over, the dim aura of the lantern let the blade sink in a little deeper, its edge as sharp as the crosses of the t’s and tails of the y’s.

“Ashley, beautiful Ashley. Even from today, I love and appreciate you in all my yesterdays and all my tomorrows. 10-14-2004”

It was scrawled in Nikolai’s spidery attempt at copperplate. He should have been a doctor. Not a traitor. Not a liar.

The date was five months before he handed me back my first math test junior year, the first of many to be met with that nonchalant flick backwards and that practiced wink. One could not help noticing that he a) looked like an idiot and b) almost looked kind of cute doing it. 

I wondered if Ashley had received the same wink. Maybe. Probably.

My arm itched as I heard a small metallic twang from outside. A quick scratch and scurry up to the screen window (“I’ll patch the hole tomorrow” he had been saying for the past three months) dulled the sudden spark in my throat as I thought of that black dented FJ rolling up the hill as it had done a thousand times before. The tracks remained, Nikolai’s love notes to the open road written in mud, but there was no car to renew them. 

Like the FJ on its road, I eased back down from the desk beside the window, the muscle memory still strong despite its recent disuse. How many times had I made the leap from the floor beside the dresser to the table beneath the window, I wondered. How many times had I relished in the thought of him coming home while praying he wouldn’t walk in to see me. What joy and pain the thought of his face was to me, those golden eagle eyes and soft rose-petal lips. 

Rolling my sleeve firmly back up, desperate not to relieve such physical pain at least, I set back once more to pulling my socks from the bin. Having pushed back as many thoughts of him as it took to clear the drawer, I moved onto the drawer just below it, sensing something so final about the way his remaining grey socks looked back at me from their sarcophagus, not quite ready to be alone with just each other.

By the time I finished clearing my stuff from the whole dresser, I collected three more photographs, all of Ashley, beautiful Ashley. Each one stole a lover’s praise from his soft lips and his gentle hands, pressing them onto her and her alone, each one exactly a day after the previous starting with the one in the sock drawer. Phrases like “eternal love” and “perfect body” floated around my ears like lazy flies as I thought of how many pictures he kept of me on his phone. Probably less than four. Two of them definitely were of us together, one at that ancient library and the other at the hip new ramen place in town, such a modern if sore thumb out here in the boondocks. It had been my first taste of udon noodles since we moved out of the city. Nikolai’s surprise. 

What do you have, Ashley, that I misplaced? What do you have that I never did?

Breasts? Hips? Vulva? Never once had he expressed interest in such things….It couldn’t be my fault for not noticing. It couldn’t be unless I let it be. 

With a well-practiced glance to the door, I lay back onto the cold wooden floor and waited for the memories and judgments to come, shoving the tiny green rug Nikolai’s aunt had given us out from under me to prevent its irksome itch. My hand almost went to the hidden crevice in the sock drawer again, the old, obsolete ritual becoming too familiar. 

I was Sherlock with his morphine, searching for all the ways this could not be my fault.

He never expressed determinate interest in any magazines with women on the covers. In fact, I was the only one who ever touched them. Then again, he only ever actually cared about National Geographic, thumbing through it despite my verbal derision across the sofa. Nerd. 

I was his second boyfriend. Before my predecessor, a middle school boyfriend at best, there had been no one else so he had told me. Perhaps Ashley had come before that, claimed her head start to his heart before I was ever assigned the seat behind him. His mother would never allow for that close of female contact though, conservative zealot. His aunt couldn’t exactly sneak him girls like she snuck him chocolate and Superman comics.

We shared everything down to our bathwater on occasion. Even without our phones, we always knew where the other was. No chance for him to rendezvous with her, no Ashley in our contacts to even message. His phone was always faceup, so habitually honest. He couldn’t even lie to me about finishing the last of the chocolate cake, that puerile smile rising like a sunset on the horizon of his mouth in involuntary self-sabotage.

“Jasper?” The voice hit me like sunlight peeking through blinds, its tone both alarmed and unsurprised.

My reverie shattered, I stirred quickly, collecting myself in a semi-improvised fluster, the exaggerated swing of my elbows masking my hands as they tucked the Polaroids into my pocket. In my haste, I accidentally knocked the box over, the material measures of my life spilling to the floor. 

“I-I-I thought you weren’t coming until….I’ve almost got everything….” I felt the words fall out of my mouth like stones, each one carving my warming cheeks on its way out.

The plastic pharmacy bag in his hand swayed slightly as he set it down on the bureau, those hawk eyes shifting over me vertically like a grater over cheese. “Sorry if I’m a bit early. I figured you would want to get in and out pretty quickly.”

After two years here? You just wanted me in and out. Done, forgotten. You might as well just ask a ghost to remove his interred corpse, the only evidence of his existence.

“Yeah, I did.” Did I look as stupid as I felt? “But then I got distracted.”

“I can see that.”

Only the floorboards squeaked in response as I remembered my arm, biting my lip as I shoved the sleeve back down in forced nonchalance. The friction with the fabric ignited several small fires as it rubbed the sore skin.

Desperate, I grabbed at straws. 

“Refill your inhaler?” I gestured to the bag.

“Indeed.” The controlled measure of his breath said more as it hit me. Even as I sat there preparing to move out, he was afraid to divulge more, afraid I’d soon abuse such information, afraid it would ignite that internal fire in me that had already consumed so much. Most importantly, he was afraid of the snow I would use to extinguish it, temporarily. 

“That’s….good” was all I could manage, guessing at whether such awkwardness only reinforced the guilt of my previous supine pose.

In graceful silence, he knelt beside me, retreating into the shadow cast by the dresser as he stretched out one long and muscled arm over me. For a moment, I was able to restrain myself from longing for its touch and the accompanying security, before utterly falling to pieces as I was unable to separate myself from the habitual desire. Just as this Ashley had, a fallen pair of socks beside me took his attention, seeing him easily plop it back into the box with the others. So, he had finally laid a brick in this growing wall between us, deliberately taking up the mortar to be done with me. 

As with all his other actions, this one sparked something in me, something hot and visceral, an acidic maelstrom beginning to whirl about my innards. I felt the rancor shoot up with the bile, an animalistic urge at vengeance resting near my canines, a rare desire for cruelty spiking.

“You never told me you were bi,” I spit, coolly joining him in replacing my clothes back in the box.

“Because I’m not.” The inferno behind my face only grew hotter as his speech remained perfunctory, his countenance unfazed beneath the shadowy veil of his baseball cap. 

I took a sock he was about to grab, sullenly childish. “You’re not even curious as to where I would get such an idea?”

He shrugged. “Does it even matter?”

“Does anything matter,” I searched for any other verbal dagger, “to you?”

Still without a look back, “Your arm. That matters to me.”

Instinctively, I glanced at it, only to find I had wrenched the sleeve back subconsciously to itch at the dozens of tiny holes that perforated the discolored skin.

“Your mom sign you back up for that facility in Malibu?” This time, he looked at me as he said it, worsening the underwater feeling as it sank lower in my stomach, my whole body suddenly deathly cold.

“No.” He paused, hand hovering above the box. “She said I could take care of it by myself this time.”

“Oh.” Not knowing what else to do, he went back to the socks. “When I called her last, she said….”

I suddenly wanted very much to hold his shoulders.

“Yeah, she does that sometimes. Still gave me the church’s number though. Told me to give Jesus a call at 909-645-”

“-9056,” we both chuckled as he finished the number. Outside, the setting sun betrayed its position, trailing its golden fingertips in through the blinds to pat both of our heads. It complemented the sharp cut of his jawline very nicely and I found myself with an ever increasing desire to tell him so. My signal to leave.

Getting up, I almost found it within me to make my escape to the door but it was too late. Hoping I had blinked back the fountains welling in my eyes, I spun back to him.

“Is this why we have to end things?” I blurted, letting the sunlight warm my arm’s tender ache.

He pulled in his knees, tucking in his chin. 

“I don’t know,” he said. The way the endless black wells of his pupils looked so defeated seemed to crush the glass my heart had become, yet something in them looked so familiar. Pulling the photos from my rear pocket, I immediately saw that same expression so well-reflected in Ashley’s ample, young face. Such a despair to them that seemed to prick and penetrate the viewer’s very soul, a window extending far past the facade that was her pained smile. Even stranger still was the new expression that befell Nikolai’s face as he saw the photos too. 

“Or is it her?” I said softly, yearning so hard for a “yes” that seemed so much easier now, so much more welcome. Please say “yes”, Nikolai, and please let me know that this sadness upon your face will not last forever, that someone as beautiful as her will come along and make it better now that I cannot.

“Wh-where did you find those?” Astonishment almost overtook the sadness on his face.

“In the dresser, when I was packing. I swear I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t snooping or using, and you won’t get in trouble because there’s none left in there and-”

“No, no, it’s okay, Jas,” he said, an arc of pearls breaking across his face as he used that old nickname. It held the familiar embrace of a well-worn baseball glove. 

“This Ashley, she’s coming to make things better, right?” The answer became as precious to me as oxygen. “She won’t screw this up like I did? She’ll be responsible and selfless and….” 

As the hitch cracked like a whip in my throat, I felt his strong, warm arms embrace me, the wings of an angel. Suddenly, all of the pain seemed to subside into a dull, languorous numbness, tinted with such a harmonious air of everything being okay.

“No, no, no,” he cooed, stroking the back of my head. “Ashley, she’s already come and gone. To tell you the truth, I don’t believe she ever really existed.”

“What?” I sat back and wiped my face.

He paused for a moment, looking at my hand before taking it. 

“Once I was approved for medical transition, my therapist recommended that I take a couple of photos of me pre-T for comparison, primarily to remind myself that as slowly as my body was changing, it was, in fact, changing. The notes on the back, well, were to remind me to not hate what used to be but to embrace it for it has led to: me being me.” 

“So, you’re….”

“Trans? Yes.” He looked out toward the hazy pinks of the horizon, just barely visible through the window beneath the cool indigo sky that was setting in. “I understand if this is confusing or if it hurts that I didn’t tell you; I just didn’t want to mess any-”

This time, I stopped him, clasping his hands tighter. “You wouldn’t have and you still haven’t. You never could.” With a small breath, I uttered the words that had been pulsing behind my teeth since he first said my name. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Jas,” he said. Everything else was expressed as our lips met in the light of the setting sun. 

As we pulled away from each other, the magnetism still pulsing in the hot summer air, Nikolai pulled out his phone. With a look back to my arm, I found I couldn’t care less about how it looked.

“A photo to document the first day of the rest of our lives,” he said with a smile, his thumb hovering over the red button, “the rest, we’ll take in Polaroids.”