Page 31 of Diamond Ring
Alex taps him on the forehead just above his eyebrow. “You get this tic right here when you’re lying.” He doesn’t move the pad of his fingertip, rough with a callus. His hand is right in front of Jake’s mouth, and it’d be nothing to kiss him there, on the ridge of his knuckles, inconsequential. Except of course it wouldn’t be.
“Did you want to watch the rest of this?” Jake asks when Alex withdraws his hand. His laptop is bouncing with a screensaver like Alex paused the movie when he fell asleep.
Alex smiles. “What’s the main character’s name?”
Jake thinks for a second. “Absolutely no idea.”
“Me neither.”
Jake’s arm has stiffened with sleep. He should take something, though the pill bottles are all the way across the room, and he doesn’t want to spend a few hours of Alex’s visit groggy in case they don’t get to do this again for months.
“Your elbow hurt?” Alex asks.
“No.”
Jake gets another tap on his forehead for his trouble, and Alex’s insistence that he tell him which pills to retrieve, if the tap water is okay to drink, if Jake needs anything else.
“My doctors said that getting high might help with the pain.”
Alex laughs, then goes rummaging through Jake’s dresser to find his weed and rolling papers at Jake’s instruction. He gives the bag a sniff like a disapproving sommelier. “Sure, I guess.”
He insists on rolling a new joint, and a few extra when Jake confesses he’s been asking the friend he buys from to do it. He also insists on holding the door for Jake as they go from the kitchen to the back deck, and his thumb down on his lighter as Jake inhales then blows clouded smoke at the pale suburban night sky.
They sit for a while, passing the joint between them, Alex grousing that he can taste Jake’s cherry ChapStick without sounding particularly put out. Jake’s mom is in the kitchen; the sound of NPR drifts through the windows.
Alex casts an eye back to the house. “Your parents gonna think I’m a bad influence?”
Though it’s more the opposite, since Jake’s mom looked shaken when she got back from packing up his apartment—asking if he’d had a housekeeping service come and frowning when he said he’d cleaned up himself. Because he might have possibly, probably, overdone it. She also asked if Alex had been over in the weeks before Thanksgiving. Her frown deepened when Jake said he hadn’t.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Jake says, and Alex laughs and nudges his shoulder, careful of his brace, leaving Jake no choice but to nudge him right back.
After a while, Jake’s lungs start to protest: the smoke, the cold. He coughs enough to earn Alex’s hand between his shoulder blades. “I could”—Alex mimes blowing a stream of smoke toward Jake—“shotgun it.”
They shouldn’t. Because that would mean the tilt of Alex’s hand at his chin, the slow fall of his eyelashes, the press of his mouth like an imitation of a kiss. “Yeah.” Jake’s voice sounds hoarse, though he can blame it on the joint.
Alex inhales, holding smoke in his lungs, then tips his head toward Jake’s, and Jake isn’t sure if he should move closer, so he slackens his jaw, waits. He gets only the hover of Alex’s mouth, half an inch away, a current of smoke that he inhales. And nothing more.
Eventually they pull apart. “That work?” Alex asks.
Jake exhales, smoke mixing with the fog of his breath. “I’m good.” If his eyebrow twitches at that, Alex doesn’t say anything.
The party the next night doesn’t start until ten. Jake’s nervously ready an hour before that. Button-downs are easier for him to put on. He slides a shirt over his shoulders, gathering the energy necessary to do up the buttons. Alex intercedes with a “Can I?” His fingers are brief, businesslike, though he lingers over the cloth at Jake’s collarbone.
“You look like an intern,” Alex says when he’s done, when Jake’s arm is secure in its sling. “You want your necklace?”
Which has been sitting on Jake’s dresser, chain laid straight so it doesn’t tangle, the clasp impossible with his arm in a brace. Jake nods.
He has to duck so Alex can loop the chain around his neck. It’s cool against his skin, pendant concealed below his shirt collar. Alex secures the clasp, then runs a finger between the chain and the skin on Jake’s neck.
“That’s not caught on your hair or anything?” Alex’s breath is warm, fingers pleasantly rough.
Jake shakes his head. The familiar swoop in his belly when Alex is around transmutes into something shivering. “I’m good.”
An invasion of air as Alex steps back. He’s wearing a black sweater that looks designer or thrifted or both, jeans that show off the fact he’s a catcher. He looks hot, especially with the latent sparkle from the body wash. Jake has no idea what his friends will think of him, or what Jake will do if they say something shitty about how he looks or, worse, hit on him.
Jake shifts foot to foot, like he might calm himself on the mound. If they go to this party, there’s no way news of his injury won’t spread, as good as calling a press conference. Across the room, a couple of books have migrated to the wrong spot on the bookshelf. He goes over, rearranging them next to their subject-matter neighbors, spines outward.
“We don’t have to go to this if your arm is bothering you,” Alex says. “Or anything else.”
