A week before he told me he'd probably fuck other people over the summer, I almost said I loved him — more accurately, I loved his room.
We were lying in Mateo's bed, the twin-sized one all the dorms had. He had covered it with blankets in place of sheets ("I can keep them cleaner than sheets," he told me), which I never slept naked on ("because I'm cold," I told him). On the wall beside us, on the wall our feet, and behind us, there were faces plastered on the wall: Donald Glover, ASAP Rocky, and all the pretty people in movie posters, all the variations of Uma Thurman, Jamie Foxx, and Winona Ryder. He had whispered one night, a confession, that he'd rather be dead than not be famous.
When he came to my room for the first and only time, he scanned my walls, floors, windows before telling me my room felt empty. I told him I didn't put anything up because I was poised to be sent home again, a bag half-packed, ready for something to interrupt the first semester I was back on campus. Mateo shrugged. I could tell he wanted to put something on my walls so instead we went to his place, where airbrushed, still faces filled the room. Sometimes I could feel them watching us.
But tonight I looked at Mateo instead, because he couldn't stop smiling. I thought maybe it had been because we had just slow danced on the floor that creaked a little bit. The room was hooked up to an Alexa setup that he always had music coming through, as the university nicely footed the utilities bill. Usually Mateo queued up the music but tonight, I chose the oldies, Barbara Lewis and Smokey Robinson while we tripped on each other's toes.
Or maybe Mateo couldn't stop smiling because of the laced Nerds Rope I had watched him swallow whole. He had offered me a piece while we sat on his futon, shoved in the corner of the room. At the beginning of the semester, that futon had been comfortable, but now it leaned, one of the legs broken, propped up by unread textbooks. He had tilted his hand out, offering a strip to me. I turned it down because Nerds are nasty and it was already 3 a.m. He shrugged and ate the rest of it.
I smiled back at him in bed. It was hard to see Mateo's face — or anything in that room — because he never had the overhead lights on. He instead had LED strips lining his room, which he also kept on a low setting. The harshness of fluorescent lights hurt his head, Mateo told me when I asked him to come study with me at the library once. They changed colors, too, hooked up to his Alexa setup. A deep red was the color he put on for when we had sex ("black boys don't just look good in blue," Mateo told me), green and blue when he was doing anything else. I wonder if the colors of cherries, poppies, fire trucks inadvertently turn him on a little — or if the red is just the stoplight in his brain telling him finally to stop, pay attention to the girl on his futon, turn off the movie ("you've Pavloved yourself," I told him). When I first entered this dim lighting, I felt vaguely as if I had been lured into a cave, all heat and darkness.
But my eyes had adjusted to these lights and I could see just enough to tell that he was smiling. Mateo's face was normally smooth, sullen, but now the skin around his eyes was creased and the sides of mouth twitched in what I had learned to recognize as emotion. I kissed the corner of his mouth and he put his arm around me. 4 a.m. was our favorite time of the night because normally by this time, I was too tired to flinch like I do sometimes when men touch me and he was too tired to remember that we had both told said the arrangement was fuck, don't get attached. We could touch without pretenses.
His cat Nala, the lion of this cave, curled up at our feet. The cat had always been possessive of him, wedging himself between us when we watched movies on the futon, every once in a while batting my hand away if it dangled off the side. But now after a semester of ("what are we doing?" I asked him, "having fun," he told me) having fun, Nala was possessive of me, too, and put his head near my toes. He, along with the heater that broke every two months and filled the room with fever heat, kept me turning all night as I searched for the nonexistent cool side of the pillow.
"What are you smiling about?" I asked him. I knew what I had wanted to hear, that he couldn't stop smiling because he loved me.
"I haven't been this happy in a long time." Close but not close enough. I swallowed my I love you and brought my head to the crook of his shoulder. He told Alexa to play the soft patter of rain, his signal that it was time to sleep. Mateo always fell asleep quickly, turning away gradually from me as his apnea-riddled chest stuttered the effort to just keep himself breathing. The first few nights we spent together I didn't sleep at all, watching his chest rise and fall, sometimes caught in between life and death as it stilled. Mateo joked, asked me a few times to finish his screenplay if he didn't wake up one night before I told him that's not funny.
But now I didn't get sleep anymore because I was listening for his breath. I sat and thought about how happy I was, if it was the happiest I had been in a long time.
We were lying in Mateo's bed, the twin-sized one all the dorms had. He had covered it with blankets in place of sheets ("I can keep them cleaner than sheets," he told me), which I never slept naked on ("because I'm cold," I told him). On the wall beside us, on the wall our feet, and behind us, there were faces plastered on the wall: Donald Glover, ASAP Rocky, and all the pretty people in movie posters, all the variations of Uma Thurman, Jamie Foxx, and Winona Ryder. He had whispered one night, a confession, that he'd rather be dead than not be famous.
When he came to my room for the first and only time, he scanned my walls, floors, windows before telling me my room felt empty. I told him I didn't put anything up because I was poised to be sent home again, a bag half-packed, ready for something to interrupt the first semester I was back on campus. Mateo shrugged. I could tell he wanted to put something on my walls so instead we went to his place, where airbrushed, still faces filled the room. Sometimes I could feel them watching us.
But tonight I looked at Mateo instead, because he couldn't stop smiling. I thought maybe it had been because we had just slow danced on the floor that creaked a little bit. The room was hooked up to an Alexa setup that he always had music coming through, as the university nicely footed the utilities bill. Usually Mateo queued up the music but tonight, I chose the oldies, Barbara Lewis and Smokey Robinson while we tripped on each other's toes.
Or maybe Mateo couldn't stop smiling because of the laced Nerds Rope I had watched him swallow whole. He had offered me a piece while we sat on his futon, shoved in the corner of the room. At the beginning of the semester, that futon had been comfortable, but now it leaned, one of the legs broken, propped up by unread textbooks. He had tilted his hand out, offering a strip to me. I turned it down because Nerds are nasty and it was already 3 a.m. He shrugged and ate the rest of it.
I smiled back at him in bed. It was hard to see Mateo's face — or anything in that room — because he never had the overhead lights on. He instead had LED strips lining his room, which he also kept on a low setting. The harshness of fluorescent lights hurt his head, Mateo told me when I asked him to come study with me at the library once. They changed colors, too, hooked up to his Alexa setup. A deep red was the color he put on for when we had sex ("black boys don't just look good in blue," Mateo told me), green and blue when he was doing anything else. I wonder if the colors of cherries, poppies, fire trucks inadvertently turn him on a little — or if the red is just the stoplight in his brain telling him finally to stop, pay attention to the girl on his futon, turn off the movie ("you've Pavloved yourself," I told him). When I first entered this dim lighting, I felt vaguely as if I had been lured into a cave, all heat and darkness.
But my eyes had adjusted to these lights and I could see just enough to tell that he was smiling. Mateo's face was normally smooth, sullen, but now the skin around his eyes was creased and the sides of mouth twitched in what I had learned to recognize as emotion. I kissed the corner of his mouth and he put his arm around me. 4 a.m. was our favorite time of the night because normally by this time, I was too tired to flinch like I do sometimes when men touch me and he was too tired to remember that we had both told said the arrangement was fuck, don't get attached. We could touch without pretenses.
His cat Nala, the lion of this cave, curled up at our feet. The cat had always been possessive of him, wedging himself between us when we watched movies on the futon, every once in a while batting my hand away if it dangled off the side. But now after a semester of ("what are we doing?" I asked him, "having fun," he told me) having fun, Nala was possessive of me, too, and put his head near my toes. He, along with the heater that broke every two months and filled the room with fever heat, kept me turning all night as I searched for the nonexistent cool side of the pillow.
"What are you smiling about?" I asked him. I knew what I had wanted to hear, that he couldn't stop smiling because he loved me.
"I haven't been this happy in a long time." Close but not close enough. I swallowed my I love you and brought my head to the crook of his shoulder. He told Alexa to play the soft patter of rain, his signal that it was time to sleep. Mateo always fell asleep quickly, turning away gradually from me as his apnea-riddled chest stuttered the effort to just keep himself breathing. The first few nights we spent together I didn't sleep at all, watching his chest rise and fall, sometimes caught in between life and death as it stilled. Mateo joked, asked me a few times to finish his screenplay if he didn't wake up one night before I told him that's not funny.
But now I didn't get sleep anymore because I was listening for his breath. I sat and thought about how happy I was, if it was the happiest I had been in a long time.