Page 36 of Two Marlboros

He widened his eyes. It was fun to tease him like that, if only because of the grimaces he made.

“I believe I have something to do...!” he exclaimed.

As he moved his feet, I grabbed him by the arm. Another touch, again. It didn’t bother me. There was no real malice in what he was doing, no desire to make fun of anyone. So, perhaps because of that, I willingly accepted any contact between us. Because he didn’t think I could try, he didn’t think about looking for hidden meanings in innocent gestures, and that was because heknew. He was not judging me or trying to. It was liberating.

“Where are you running to? It’s not like I’m done.”

“Please don’t kill me!”

And he staged a melodramatic cry.

“No, I’m not going to kill you. I could report you for spreading false information about me, though.”

I watched him take on every shade from pink to white. He was petrified. He made me laugh again. A lively, hearty laugh.

“Nathan. Just kidding.”

He quickly returned to normal coloring.

“Oh. Okay. Where were we?”

“Ah, yes. Forget it.”

I tossed the long-finished plastic glass of tea and looked at the time: my shift had been over for at least thirty minutes. I began to walk toward the exit and made my mind up: wallet and keys in the inside pocket of my jacket, cell phone in my pants pocket, and my head on my shoulders to bring my mind back to the investigation. The last one turned out to be little more than an intention, because Nathan grabbed onto my jacket and began to shriek.

“You can’t abandon me like this, come on! It’s just for one night! Then I’ll get him off my back for good!”

I stopped and turned so hard that he almost ran into me.

“What were you thinking telling him I’m your boyfriend? You’re crazy and I’m certainly not going to lend myself to this stupid pretense.”

Nathan clung on again. “It was the first thing that came to my mind! Come on, please, it’s just a party!”

Someone interjected between us. “Party?”

It was Ashton. As he came between us, I felt the bond between Nathan and me suddenly break. That incredible complicity was supplanted by the presence of my colleague, who immediately exchanged a look with him. In that instant, I felt like I was light years away from the relationship of those two, who were certainly stranger than Nathan and I were. I felt left out, again; and if the first time I had found that fact merely rude, now I felt a tingling in my stomach, an annoyance that found no other way to manifest itself.

I had been cast aside, forgotten in one second; and everything we had shared in those few moments in my office seemed to have already vanished, flown away, an instant of something resembling happiness, which I had grasped for a moment and already no longer held between my fingers.

“Yes, party! Alan doesn’t want to accompany me.”

In those words, in the way he had structured the sentence and in the tone in which he had spoken it I felt the full weight of the bond that had formed between them almost instantly, a bond that I would never achieve, perhaps with anyone on this Earth.

“Why don’t you want to go there? It would be good for you.”

Nathan looked at me with an amused smirk, the same one I had given him a few minutes earlier, but at that moment it bothered me because it almost seemed as if he had already forgotten what he had discovered. I felt like I could no longer discern that part of him. Maybe it had never existed. Maybe I had dreamed it all.

“Come on, please!”

“Come on, Alan, don’t be like this all the time.”

“Don’t make me give you the eyes, come on!”

“Accept, for once!”

I burst out.

“Enough! I said ‘forget it,’ and I thought I was pretty clear. What part of ‘forget it’ don’t you understand? Huh?”

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