Page 89 of The Evening Wolves

John-Henry’s mouth was so dry he was amazed he could say anything, and even more amazed when the words sounded normal. “You might as well try it.”

Emery gave the door a push, and it swung open, silent on its hinges. His smile was lopsided, and the thought came again: He’s terrified. But he tugged on John-Henry’s hand and led him into the locker room.

They’d updated the place since John-Henry and Emery had been in school, but locker rooms didn’t change all that much. A handful of lights made pockets in the dark. The tile was different, but the walls were still painted cinderblock, and always—always—there was a leaky showerhead. It dripped now, a soft plonk in the distance. And in spite of a hint of bleach in the air, locker rooms apparently never smelled any better either: the mustiness of sweat and damp and gym shoes that never dried out. When they came around the curtain wall, a basketball rack was blocking the path, and its casters squeaked when Emery rolled it out of the way. In the mirrors above the sinks, their reflections were restless in the gloom, and it gave the sense that other people were here. Because, of course, there were. Because they were still here, even after all those years.

He broke the stillness and almost felt bad for doing so. “Ree.”

But Emery shushed him. He looked around, orienting himself in the semidarkness, and then he steered John by the shoulders until he stood in the opening to the showers. He moved to stand near one of the metal benches. When he spoke, the tile caught his voice and bounced it, and John-Henry shivered.

“How’s that?”

John-Henry didn’t trust his voice, so he nodded.

Plonk. Plink. Even his breathing seemed to echo off the tile.

“We’ve never talked about that day, have we? Not really.”

John-Henry shook his head. More seemed to be expected, though, so he whispered, “No.”

In the dark, Emery’s nod was more of a suggestion of movement than anything. “No, I didn’t think so.”

Something was building inside John-Henry—something that needed a release. Pressure building until it was a discomfort that bordered on pain. He wanted to touch his chest, fingers just below his breastbone, as though pressing there might make it better. But he couldn’t move his arm. He couldn’t do anything but stare at Emery, at the familiar shape of head and shoulders and hips, the way he stood, the hint, when he turned in profile, of scarecrow eyes.

“I wanted you so badly,” Emery said. “I wanted you. I wanted to be you, too, I think. Happy, liked, at ease wherever you were. But mostly I wanted you. And I hated that I couldn’t stop wanting you—that no matter what happened, it never went away.”

No matter what I did, John-Henry amended. No matter what I did to you.

“We have a ‘Gift of the Magi’ situation, then,” John-Henry said. “Because I wanted to be you.”

Emery’s soft exhalation sounded amused. “And that. I never expected you to be funny—not just clowning around, the way I saw you with your friends, but genuinely funny. I knew you were smart, but I didn’t know you could make me laugh. Although I should have suspected you’d be drawn to something as mawkishly sentimental as an O. Henry story.”

The tone, as much as the words themselves, broke the terrible solemnity of the moment, and whatever had been building inside John-Henry subsided. He laughed. “I’m serious, you know. About wanting to be you.”

“Scrawny? Lonely?” That unexpected playfulness rose again in Emery’s voice, and something thrilled inside John-Henry, like a golden wire stretched between them, that they were here, that they could be here, in this place, doing this—talking, joking, being. “Was it the frosted tips?”

Laughter burst from John-Henry again, and he was surprised, in the wake of the emotion, to find himself battling tears. He shook his head and gathered himself. “You were always…you.” The first words were thick, but once he got his momentum, they cleared up. “You always knew who you were. You always knew what you wanted. You never let anyone or anything stop you. Do you know how attractive that was? Is, I guess. To be so totally, unswervingly committed to yourself, to your core, to what you know is true and right? God, Ree. I didn’t know I was in love with you; I’m not going to say that. But I couldn’t stay away from you. All I was doing was hiding, and there you were, bold and—and unbowed, I guess, although that sounds so old fashioned. Unafraid.”

Emery shook his head, more a sound than a movement in the dark. “I was always afraid.”

Machinery rumbled far off in the building. That pressure began to rise again in John-Henry’s chest. He could hear his own breathing begin to accelerate.

“Do you have any idea how many hours I spent thinking about that kiss?” Emery asked.

The smile must have been lost in the dark, but John-Henry could feel the expression on his face, the cockeyed cut of it. “Not to be crass, but do you have any idea how many times I jerked off to it?”

His words startled a laugh out of Emery, and for a moment, amber gleamed again in the gloom. “That too,” Emery said, and he sounded a little rueful. “I came up with every possible explanation. That it was a trap. That it was a test. That it was a joke. That it was, in some perverse way, some ultimate cruelty you had dreamed up.”

“Not every possible explanation, then.”

Emery was quiet for a long time before he said, “No.”

Inside John-Henry, that sense of pressure increased until it felt like a knife, something sharp twisting just under his ribcage. “I didn’t understand it for the longest time, why I was attracted to you. Maybe not until we were together.”

“After it was too late, you might say.”

“Something like that.” The sound of every tiny movement echoed back from the tile. “I told myself it was because you were attracted to me. I told myself it was vanity. That I liked knowing I turned you on. Proof of my own hotness, stroking my ego, a kind of jerk-off satisfaction that didn’t matter if you were a guy or a girl.”

“Based on certain revelations this evening, that sounds true to form for teenage John.”

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