Page 25 of Let It Be Me

The curtain tugs open and the nurse from earlier appears. “How we doing, hon?”

“Great!” Lorenzo offers, giving her the A-OK sign and looking slightly deranged at it.

The nurse winks at me. “I’ll be back. Shouldn’t be too much longer before he’s feeling like himself again and we get you out of here.”

As I turn back to Lorenzo, my stomach feels like it’s grinding against itself with nerves. I expect to see him watching me, waiting for an answer, but he’s blinking drowsily at the wall. I wait, praying he won’t say anything else about “us,” only to finda strange sense of disappointment when he doesn’t. His mind seems to have moved on from that sentimental place.

When he closes his eyes, I do what I trained myself long ago not to do. Just for a minute, I take in how gorgeous he is.

Lorenzo was born for the label “tall, dark, and handsome.” Even in the midst of Shafer’s long Midwestern winters, his olive skin makes him look like he just came back from a week on the Mediterranean coast, and his dark eyes give his glossy black hair a run for its tousled money. My gaze settles on his mouth. Long ago I learned how to tamp down my jealousy over the girls Lorenzo dated, but I never figured out how to stop the flare of envy that arose when I saw him kiss them. His lips were the one part of him those girls had that I never did.

Well, maybe not the only part.

My eyes drift down to his body. Even under the thick, shapeless cotton of his hospital gown, it’s obvious he’s ripped. I look at his hand and quickly look away when I’m hit by the pulsing memory of that hand wrapped around his cock in the shower. Heat creeps over me from guilt and something else I don’t want to name.

I force my eyes back to the safety of his face. In sleep, Lorenzo has a baby-faced quality that disappears when he opens his eyes. It’s so hard not to stare. I let myself for a few seconds, lingering on the scar that slashes his right brow in half. The scar he got running to me. I turn my gaze toward the window. Enough. I can’t indulge this any longer.

I also can’t get his question out of my head.

When the nurse returns some thirty minutes later, Lorenzo is perked up and talking about food like our earlier conversation never happened.

“Here’s your eviction notice,” she says, handing me a packet of papers with Lorenzo’s aftercare instructions. She runsthrough them with me and then turns to Lorenzo. “Time to get dressed, handsome, you’re on your way home.”

I stand. “I’ll pull the car up.”

“He’s going to need a hand, honey.” The nurse holds up the plastic bag containing Lorenzo’s street clothes. “I’m sure he’d rather you than me.”

“Oh. No, see, I’m not his?—”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Lorenzo offers. He says this like he’s done it a thousand times, which he has.

The nurse looks between us, a sassy glint in her eyes. “That’s not your girlfriend?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then you’re a fool.” She chuckles.

If Lorenzo remembered what he’d said about us thirty minutes ago, it would be the perfect moment for him to toss me one of those secret knowing looks he’s so good at. I watch him as I reach for my bag, giving him an extra few seconds because I know his brain is processing at half speed. But he never looks at me. I pull the curtain aside and head for the parking lot, leaving the nurse to dress my patient.

NINE

ruby

That nightI lie down to sleep on the couch in Lorenzo’s bedroom, a spot as familiar as my own bed. He’s been out for a couple of hours by the time I pull the blanket over me. I double-check that my alarm is set to his med schedule and then, because I can’t resist, take one last look at him. He’s asleep in the soft glow of the night-light I plugged in to make giving him his medication in the middle of the night a little less disruptive.

I close my eyes and, like I switched on the TV, a vision of his bare back flashes in my head, the detailed memory of helping him out of his shirt tonight as he got ready for sleep. For all our closeness, I rarely get to touch the parts of his body that are usually covered in clothing, and helping him move slowly and carefully out of his shirt, watching his tattoos gradually reveal themselves across the smooth, muscled swaths of his back and chest, was excruciating. His skin was so warm under my fingertips.

It’s barely twelve hours since his ... confession? Proposal? Whatever it was, it seems so long ago. I want to forget about it, like I suspect he has. He was out of it, vulnerable and needy, and in that state it’s all too easy to mistake gratitude for love. But how do I make myself forget? How do I keep going like normalwhen the words I’ve waited my whole life to hear are the most devastating words I’ve ever heard?

If “love” can have a hundred different meanings, I’ve loved Lorenzo since the day we met. We were third graders, though Lorenzo looked more like a kindergartner, while I was the tallest kid in class. It was February but Lorenzo’s first day at our school after moving from a different town. I didn’t like the looks of him: quiet, shifty-eyed, following our kind, young teacher around like a lost puppy. But even more, I didn’t like the pack of bossy boys I found cornering him on the playground, just out of sight of the recess monitor.

Nobody liked me then, but everybody feared me because, as a child with no sense of self-preservation, I was liable to do anything, to hell with the consequences. Besides, my teacher that year loved me, a phenomenon I haven’t experienced since.

Most of the boys scattered when I came pounding up the blacktop and screeching at them to get away from the new kid, but Danny Melville, who forever smelled like oatmeal, must have been feeling bold, because he sneered at me and gave Lorenzo a deliberate push. Watching Lorenzo and his skinny limbs blow right over stirred something fierce in me. I knew how it felt to be helpless. I felt it every day when I got home from school, and even if no one else saw it, I felt it in the classroom. But third graders are a lot easier to fool than your own parents.

“Get the hell away from him!” I shouted, borrowing a phrase I’d heard on one of my grandfather’s TV shows. I’d been mulling that one over, waiting for the right time to try it out and uncertain if I’d even be able to pull it off. And it sounded so good out of my mouth. But though Danny’s eyes went wide, he just turned and squared his shoulders at me. I hadn’t expected that kind of audacity. I had no plan B. So I charged him headfirst. He went clattering to the ground, his eyes welled up, and then he was off, tattling. Lorenzo, still on the asphalt, looked up at mewith round eyes full not of fear or distaste, like I was used to, but of wonder. Gratitude. Like I was the only person in the world who could save him. In Lorenzo’s eyes, I was powerful. Instantly, I adored him.

It took five blissful years before that love turned to something more dangerous and another three before I actually recognized it for what it was. I didn’t just love Lorenzo; I wasinlove with him. For years, the adults in our lives had exchanged knowing looks about our friendship, warned us it was only a matter of time before everything changed. We thought that was disgusting in elementary school, embarrassing in middle school, and then, finally, painfully accurate—at least for me—in high school.

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