Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

Milton bumped me with his shoulder and I nearly dropped my phone.

“What are you all slappy about?”

I hesitated to tell him because Milton has made it really clear that he thinks what he refers to as my obsession with Will is pathetic. Well, misguided, anyway.

“Oh,” he said, looking at my phone. “Will?”

“He’s taking me shopping on Saturday.”

I could see Milton physically stop himself from making whatever comment occurred to him, so to thank him for not harshing my vibe, I told him that he could pick the movies for tonight, even though I knew he’d pick this nine-million-hour-long documentary series about a staircase or something that he’d gotten from the library and had been trying to get me to watch for the last two weeks.

“AND THIS filmmaker was there practically from the very beginning, so you see the direct aftermath of the wife’s death, and then it takes you through his whole trial and everything, and each episode is about a different bit of evidence. Oh man, it’s so intense—like, in the middle, there’s this one—well, okay, no, I won’t give it away. But it’s so good. Don’t look him up online, though, or you’ll get totally spoilered.”

Milton’s movie night pick turned out to be amazing—though at nearly eight hours long we’d stayed up almost all night finishing it—and I’d started telling Will about it right away. Partly because it had been fascinating, and partly in order to keep myself from saying all the things I really wanted to say to him.

Like that the second I’d seen him loping toward me, I’d felt the same way I had when he would walk into a room in Holiday: as if the background receded and he was this pulsing star at the center of things. And how just like then, my face heated up and my stomach went all wobbly.

Nope, definitely didn’t need to be saying anything like that. So. Describing an epic documentary about murder it was!

Will said the neighborhood we were in was Chelsea. Brick buildings towered above us, and here and there you could see the ghost of where another building must have rested. The shops all had window displays that looked like art, or like they were trying to look abandoned. He kept pointing things out in displays and asking if I liked them. At first I thought he meant for me, but it quickly became clear he was just curious about what I thought was aesthetically pleasing, because I could never afford any of the stuff he was looking at.

When I told him so, Will ran a finger along the worn neck of my T-shirt and shook his head, making a tsking sound.

“You know,” I told him, “Einstein said ‘Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.’”

Will snorted. “Yeah? Well, when you’re inventing theories of relativity I won’t say a word about how you dress like you passed out in a skate park in 1997 and just woke up. Until then, I’m happy both accepting that the universe is matter expanding into nothing and also that the combination of too many design elements in that universe looks like shit.”

I elbowed him playfully.

“So, was the guy found guilty?” Will asked.

I gaped at him. “Dude, that’s the entire point of the documentary. I’m not going to ruin it. You’re supposed to watch and, like, form your own opinion based on the evidence.”

“I don’t care about spoilers, man—a story’s either interesting or it isn’t. Besides, I assure you, I don’t have any problem forming my own opinion, even in a sea of conflicting ones.” He winked at me.

I certainly believed that.

“I can’t tell you. No way. If you wanna know, you can google it, but I’m not going to tell you the end. I am firmly in the no spoilers camp. It’s a lifestyle.”

The look Will gave me was one I liked to think he saved just for me. Like I didn’t say what he expected, but he was glad that I didn’t, and also irritated with himself for being glad. Will was really not the surprised type. He was more the absolutely-nothing-shocks-me type. In fact, it seemed vital to him that he’d thought of every possible eventuality. So the moments when I did something that bypassed whatever formulas he’d cooked up about how people acted or how the world worked were total wins. Granted, I still couldn’t predict what was going to strike him that way. At all. But it was a start.

The thing about walking with Will, I was realizing, was that everybody stared at him. Some people straight up checked him out, but others just… looked at him, like they had every right to. Like he was art, publicly displayed to be publicly appreciated.

At first I thought he was getting a kick out of it. But Will wore his beauty with a kind of scorn that made it even more potent, the way some people in New York seemed to wear expensive clothes with the air that they couldn’t care less if they ruined them. Like, yeah, splatter duck fat on this gazillion-dollar silk shirt, sure. Or, what’s that? Sit on the dirt in this designer dress and drink champagne? Let’s do it.