Page 181 of Two Marlboros

“No, I was watching TV. Come on in,” I replied, after which I closed the door behind him. All that remained to fill the air was the subdued sound of the television, which was soon joined by the sound of Alan looking for something in his pants pocket. It took only a moment for him to pull out a pack of Marlboros and hand it to me.

“For you.”

I grabbed it and turned it over in my hands a couple of times, as if I had expected to find something other than an ordinary pack of cigarettes in it.

“Oh, thank you. Anything else you need to make up for?” I asked jokingly, and chuckled. He, however, did not flinch as much as I would have expected, so my laughter died within seconds. He kept his eyes down, and if he raised them it was only to chase some unseen thought around the room. His hands stuffed in his pants pockets, on the other hand, gave me the idea that he felt embarrassed, a feeling I had a hard time associating with him.

“I got you into trouble and you didn’t deserve it,” he said, and he met my gaze. “And in general, I haven’t always behaved well toward you. I know we’ve talked about this before, but I wanted to tell you in person, too. I’m sorry.”

The first impulse was to hug him, but I hesitated. He looked really tired, tense, and I stiffened a little myself because I didn’t expect him to come and apologize, certainly not at that hour. I nervously ran my fingers over the plastic wrapping of the package, emitting a sizzle every time it deformed. I strained to think back to the times when Alan had rattled me with his attitude, but all the anger, if any, was already a thing of the past.

“Don’t worry. Really, it’s okay.”

He let out a sigh and a smile, and it was at that moment that I threw my arms around his neck. His immediately closed over my body as if in an automatic gesture, one arm wrapping around my shoulders and the other at waist level. I rested my head in the hollow of his shoulder and his heartbeat skyrocketed, and so did mine; they both beat so loudly that it almost seemed as if one could hear the sound. After a few moments, Alan began to sway our bodies almost imperceptibly from left to right, right to left, in a motion that seemed to want to rock me. I was visited by a feeling I had not felt in years: a sense of security and peace, the assurance that I could even close my eyes in his arms for hours with the guarantee that I would be safe from all danger. Leaning against his shoulder on the couch, or lying with my head snuggled on his legs, I was certain that I would be able to fall asleep in no time.

Our bodies stopped swaying. Alan’s hand went slowly down my back until it found the edge of my pajama top, and his fingers snuck underneath, brushing against my skin. They went up my back and then down again, now also with his entire palm, more firmly, without the hesitation with which he had done it the first time, on the staircase outside the apartment. The fingers running over my skin caused me to shudder each time they changed direction, toward a portion of my back they had not yet explored, as if tracing the contours of a moment he had chosen to devote only to me, after months in which he had perhapsthought he would never do it again for anyone. I sank my face into his neck and breathed in the scent of his skin, which had a barely perceptible, light scent.

The arm that wrapped around my shoulders slid down to the height of the other, and his fingers traced first my side, and afterward went up to the flap of my pajama top, until both hands were on my back, which became half uncovered. Mine were still crossed behind the nape of his neck, and I would only have to lift them up for him to slip my shirt off completely, followed closely by my pants and underpants, which were getting tighter by the second due to an arousal that my tight pajamas would undoubtedly have made evident. The idea of making love to him shortened my breath, but I was completely breathless when I felt something hard against my thigh, proof that I was not the only one who wanted to sweep away the useless formality that was clothes.

“Would you like to stay?” I whispered, with a hint of excitement and emotion. He stopped his hands, and I thought I had dared too much, that he would take them off my back and walk away barely giving an explanation. Instead, they stayed where they were, perhaps just a little more tense.

“I’d love to, but I can’t,” he replied, and the fact that he had even contemplated the possibility of agreeing made me miss a beat. “I have to get back to work.”

I moved my head back just enough to look at him. “At this hour? On a Saturday?”

“Tell me about it.”

Sure enough, he was dealing with something big. I wondered if my statement had anything to do with it, but I didn’t ask. Nothing escaped Alan, however, either of my expressions or my unspoken thoughts.

“All I can tell you is that I promised to help you and that’s what I’m doing.”

I didn’t know whether to feel reassured or guilty about that sentence, but eventually that sense of reassurance that even just seeing him gave me prevailed once again. I had asked him to help me, and he was keeping his promise, even though he didn’t owe me anything after all, and I didn’t remember that many other people had done the same in the past.

He slipped both hands out from under my shirt, which returned to cover my back, and looked at the time on his wristwatch.

“Whatever, I’m going,” he only said, and our bodies parted. On my chest, where his body had been until a moment before, I felt cool. Meanwhile, my arousal was waning.

“Yes, maybe that’s better,” I replied, and let a mischievous smirk escape, which he returned with a complicit glance. “Thank you for everything. And good work.”

We said our goodbyes and I opened the door for him, then waved the hand with which I still held the pack of Marlboros. When I closed the door, I went back to look at it, and I couldn’t help but smile at that unexpected and tender gesture.

I went back to sprawling on the couch to watch TV and laid the packet, still wrapped in cellophane, right on my chest. The feeling of Alan’s hands on my body slowly disappeared, but what I had felt in those moments was far from gone. He had made me feel protected, perhaps even loved, and I wondered what would happen if Alan had accepted my invitation to stay. I longed to be alone with him more than anything else, I wanted to feel again that contact and those sensations that were making me smile like a dummy. I fell asleep wondering if I would ever meet someone else like him again, if I would find as much in California, but it was a question that remained unanswered.

What woke me up was the ringing of the phone. I rubbed my eyes and moaned; with my vision still a little blurry, I realized itwas fifteen minutes to one o’clock. Was it Alan again? I pulled myself up for the umpteenth time with a yawn as the ringtone rang in my ears, then headed for the phone and picked it up.

“Big brother...”

The blood froze in my veins. “...Jimmy?!”

At 01:14 there was an incredible silence. It was different from the silence you hear during dinner, the one that hovers in the air just because everyone is eating, and their mouths are full, or the one when you don’t have roommates and are ashamed to talk to yourself. The silence at 01:14 was ghostly, a sign of a city at rest, as if a huge organism had stood still, motionless for a few hours, almost a victim of a spell.

That was the kind of silence I had always been used to, which had surprised me at 01:14 as well as at many other hours of the night. Only there was nothing ghostly at that moment at all; rather, that organism was alive and pulsating, ready to explode, full of sap flowing through its veins, so powerful and charged with energy that it could do nothing but break the silence I was trying to find in that little room.

My brother’s two big eyes stared at me, without the blanket to protect him, as if he had grown up all at once. No words came out of that little being staring at me, who with a mute request asked what to do, there, alone, in the middle of the night. Bears and bunnies no longer offered him the comfort he needed, and so here I was in the flesh, alive and well in the middle of the night, sitting on his bed, quiet too.

If that had been a movie, surely there would have been thunder and lightning, and in the background the tapping of rain on the window, while every now and then a glimpse of light illuminated our faces. Yes, a sudden flash of lightning would have shown my brother all my fragility and me his plea for help. The ever-closer thunder would have drowned out our parents’screams, leaving us with the privilege of missing that word, that insult or even just the sound of a broken plate on the ground.

But no, there was no lightning, no thunder, no glimpses of light, no feelings to hide. Because the truth was that none of that was needed to make the situation more dramatic than it already was, none of that was needed to miss a few words to no longer grasp the meaning of the speeches coming from downstairs.

---