The One Month Boyfriend (Wildwood Society)

He doesn’t answer, just looks at me and takes a sip of tea. I wince, because I’m sure it’s still too hot, but he doesn’t react. I let the moment stretch out until I’m sure he’s not going to respond.

“What do you usually do now?” I ask next, wrapping one hand around my mug, the ceramic so hot it almost burns. My stomach twists. My heart pounds.

Silas relaxes, leans one hip against the counter, looks at me with an expression I can’t read.

“Usually I watch movies all night because I can never sleep afterward,” he says, and I nod.

“What movies?” I ask.

* * *

The answer,turns out, is slasher movies, the gorier and lower-budget the better. We watch something called Castle Freak, and then something else called Invisible Maniac. After the first, Silas goes into the kitchen and comes back with ice cream, cheez-its, and a jar of peanut butter. After the second he gets us glasses of water.

“You ever seen Attack of the Killer Tomatoes?” he asks around midnight.

We’ve both got our feet on the coffee table, an entire couch cushion separating us.

“Maybe?” I say. I push my glasses up and consider the picture on the screen: an enormous tomato with teeth and… tentacles? “I watched a lot of kaiju movies with my dad when I was a kid.”

“I don’t think this one counts as that, but I could be wrong,” he says. “I forget what makes the tomatoes kill.”

It’s definitely not a kaiju flick but it’s very fun, or at least the first half is because I wake up to the end credits rolling, the room dark, and Silas staring at the screen like he’s not seeing anything. There’s a blanket over my lap. I didn’t put it there.

After a moment, he turns to face me. My glasses are still on, so I straighten them, staring back, lost for words because I don’t have a precedent for this situation. It feels oddly like I’m in college, the only time in your life when falling asleep on a couch during a movie with a virtual stranger seems normal and expected and not like things have taken a weird turn you didn’t anticipate.

“Did they stop the tomatoes?” I ask.

“Yeah. Humanity prevailed,” he says. The light from the TV flickers over his face, grayscale in the dark: freckles invisible, eyes slate, the hair flopped over his forehead barely brown. His nose is swollen and there are deep bruises under his eyes, semi-circles black in the darkness. I keep my hands to myself.

“Do you have a concussion?”

“Nah,” he says. “Didn’t hit me that hard.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know what they feel like.”

I don’t answer, but I pull my legs onto the couch, fold them under me until I’m on my knees, facing him. Silas watches, his head on the back of the couch, the lines of his neck long and shadowed as they point to the divot between his collarbones.

He doesn’t move as I lean forward, one hand on the cushion between us, the other on the back of the couch, awkward and slightly off-balance. I stare into his eyes, feeling like I’m stuck in a dream, like nothing that happens tonight will count in the morning.

I get closer than I should. Silas doesn’t flinch, doesn’t so much as blink as I study him up close, checking for—I’m not sure. That his pupils are the same size, wide and black in the dark. That his eyes are moving together. That I can be this close without him drawing away, closing off, pulling back.

That I could kiss him.

The thought bubbles up from the depths of my mind like air bubbles escaping an ancient wreck. Something that ought to have sunk that hasn’t. It’s not the time or the place. It’s not within the rules we agreed to, the rules I demanded, the rules I wrote down, the rules we went over with a fine-toothed comb standing in the fluorescent lights of my office.

But I could kiss him, and he might not mind. He kissed me after Sweet Caroline, after all. He kissed the hell out of me after Sweet Caroline, with tongue and teeth and something that felt a little like desire if I don’t think about it too much, but that kiss was a kiss clearly within the guidelines: in front of people—in front of Evan—an ulterior motive at hand.

I’m still staring into his eyes. He’s still staring back, his face open and bruised. I swallow hard and trace my finger across a black semi-circle, the thin skin soft under my fingertip. His lips part. I know what I want, temptation hammering through me, and I know not to do it.

I half expect something with sharp teeth and a long tail to swim across the surface. I half expect to fall in and drown. But it’s just the two of us, in the dark, staring at each other.

“I think you’re okay,” I finally say, pulling my hand away. As if I’m qualified to make that call.

“I told you.”

“I had to check.”