Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

1.

Nick

     Duluth, Minnesota was not where I had intended to end up after four years at New Haven.

     I don’t think anyone really intended to end up in Duluth anymore—eighty years ago, maybe, but not now, even on an early summer day in 1982. Those last pink blossoms of springtime had yet to come down off Spirit Mountain but the activities of this lakeside town could convince any uninformed visitor that they’d stumbled straight into the height of an endless summer vacation. This was, at least, apparent from where I sat in the passenger seat of my own truck, gazing out over the seemingly endless water of Lake Superior. 

     As long as the viewer only looked at the mountain or the water, this looked like a fine place to live. But those that actually lived there would tell the truth: vacationers were the only ones thriving out here, and only for a week at a time.

     No one came to stay in Duluth. Even I didn’t intend to stay, but then again, I had nowhere else to go. My summer spree in New York had been a total failure and I supposed I ought to be more understanding when I returned to Saint Paul only for my father to banish me to this dwindling lakeside city to fend for myself.

     Initially I’d come here under the guise of opening up a branch of the family hardware business here in this dying town in an attempt to rejuvenate the local economy; unfortunately, by the time I arrived, two national chains had settled in, putting an end to my quest before it even began.

     Dad told me not to bother coming home, so I did what I could to make Duluth my home.

     Maintaining a home meant finding a job, and considering there weren’t exactly many finance institutions around this town hiring Yale graduates, I’d given in to family tradition and picked up a set of tools, and now, reluctantly, I fixed things for those who could afford not to fix them themselves.

     “So…what’s the name of the boat again?”

     I looked across the bench seat to my roommate, Chester, who sat with his bare, freckled legs pulled up to his chin even though he’d have to unfold to drive as soon as I got out of the truck. He was one of the few pleasant things I’d brought back from the big city—he’d been at the tail end of a divorce just as I was turning tail to run home, and seeing as neither of us had business in New York at that point, we’d come back to Minnesota together.

     “ Tuo— something,” I finally answered. I sounded annoyed even to myself, but then again, that tone hadn’t really left my voice since I’d come home from New York. A part of me wondered if that was part of why my father had soured as he had—he wasn’t used to seeing me with a backbone.

     I continued, “I don’t know. The guy who called me would only say it once. Got pissed when I asked him to repeat himself.” I sighed and reached out to gently shove one of Chester’s bare knees against the other. With a swish of too-short denim, they came back upright automatically. “Rich, older asshole. Are you sure I don’t need an assistant today?” I shoved his legs again. “He could be divorced.”

     Chester rolled his eyes and rested his head back against the driver’s side window. “You’re gonna be fine. Just fix the whatever-it-is, get rent, and come home. It’ll be cool.” He sighed and shifted upright to face the steering wheel again. “Besides, I have, like, actual work today.”

     “Uh-huh.”

     “And if you finish up before six, I’ll be able to pick you up before work.” Chester scowled at his reflection in the rearview. “I hate these stupid overnight shifts. No news happens in Duluth during the day , Nick. I’m gonna get stuck filming the same old, same old again. If I have to work on another feature about the old steel mill I’m putting myself out of commission, too.”

      I scoffed out something of a laugh. “Don’t say that.” I ran my hand over my hair and glanced at myself in the shattered side mirror. “I don’t know how long I’ll be, though. All I could get from the guy was that it was some sort of ‘emergency’.”

     We sat there in silence for a moment longer. A long brown Cadillac passed behind us in the wharf parking lot, its driver glaring at us for taking up the parking spot closest to the docks. He passed on with one spiteful honk.

     “Oh, that must be awful for him,” Chester mumbled, though I wasn’t sure if he meant the statement in regards to the driver or the poor rich man in the midst of an emergency. I supposed in the end it didn’t matter.

     “Hopefully I’ll be done before you go in tonight.” I put my ragged old ball cap on and opened the truck door. “Have fun filming another weather segment.”

     “I fell asleep filming yesterday evening’s report. The bar’s low.” 

     Chester started the truck again, or tried to. I waited until the old thing finally cranked before grabbing my toolbox from the truck bed and waving goodbye to Chester. 

     There were plenty of yachts in the harbor basin that day. Most of them were crawling with scantily clad women and an older man or two, all looking to show off something , even if they’d find it difficult to impress me after the total lack of glamor I’d witnessed in New York. I still hadn’t processed my newfound gargantuan distaste for the wealthy, nor why it had taken root after just a few months out East, but I did know that neither those women nor their bikinis could hold my interest for longer than it took to pass each boat.

     I didn’t want a girlfriend—didn’t want a wife or a family. I didn’t want Duluth, or this heavy toolbox. This isn’t what I wanted for myself—but then again, I could never bear to define what it was I did want out of life. I had learned long ago that life was simply not meant to satisfy me.

     “ Tuo…Tuo…lo… ” I muttered to myself, stalking along the shore-length deck in search of any boat with a similar name to the vague idea I carried with me. 

     Right at the exact moment I spotted the largest of all the yachts there at the very end of the dock, a gunshot went off. I jerked, almost dropping my toolbox in the process, and took a frantic look around just as the white body of a gull dropped like a stone into the water.

     Raucous laughter rang out over the bay. 

     “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

     Evidently, someone responded, for the man—the same man I’d spoken to on the phone—kept on.

     “One shot. Just one shot was all it took.”

     I didn’t hear a response that time, either, but seeing as no further shots rang out I thought it was safe to trudge the last several feet over the wood with my head down to where the Tuolomee sat like a cruise ship. It overtook any of the other yachts by at least twenty feet; it was the sort of sight that made me sick.

     Still, money was money, and Chester hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said to get rent and come home. He and I barely struggled along and that was with help from a third roommate: Jordan, another relic from my misplaced adventure in New York. She’d come to stay with me for a golf tournament, lost the tournament, and just never left. 

     She’d grown up wealthy. I wondered as I approached the Tuolomee if she’d ever lived like this.

     With the sun beating down on my ball cap I came to stand at the end of the gangplank. 

     Another shot rang out, followed by some cursing. The often-parodied archly subservient tone of a butler assured someone, a Mr. Cody, that he’d done very well. It made me shudder to imagine paying somebody to stroke my ego—or, as I saw when said butler crossed the deck to enter my line of sight, wear that much in this heat.

     The balding blonde butler stood there in a full robins-egg-blue suit, peering down over the bright copper railing of the Tuolomee at me with comically thick-lensed glasses and an expression that implied that I’d crawled out of the muck currently staining the brilliant white bow of the massive ship. I squinted back up at him, my face turned toward the sun with no benefit of my baseball cap at this glaring angle, and waited for him to address me. He never did.

     “Ah. Hello, sir,” I greeted after several seconds filled with gunfire and, quieter, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell coming muffled from somewhere inside the yacht. We got through the whole first verse before I cleared my throat and added, “I’m with—”

     “We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Carraway.” The butler left the railing without another word, giving me no time to respond.

     I gripped the handle of my toolbox a little tighter and crossed the gangplank.

     The butler had disappeared into the interior of the vessel by the time I got on deck, leaving me with no choice but to wander awkwardly toward where the presumable owner of the ship stood with some sort of rifle and his back toward me. 

     He was an absolute bear of a man even in his old age, somewhere over sixty but with the youthful remnants of someone who would’ve caused me a lot of trouble in college. He was currently focused on aiming his gun toward some innocent bird or another, but I could see that even without the weapon in his hands, this was a body capable of great and unstoppable force—and there next to him on the railing sat, unbeknownst to me, the corresponding immovable object.

     “Excuse me, sir,” I said before Mr. Cody could shoot. It was too late, however, as the man shot just a second after I spoke. I stumbled back a step with my ears ringing to the point where I was concerned that neither of the men before me were wearing hearing protection. 

     Mr. Cody cursed and the young blonde man next to him rolled his eyes toward the endless blue sky above as if to obscure the eye roll itself. Still, neither of the men acknowledged me. 

     I frowned at that. “I’m Nick Carraway, here with Carraway Carpentry.” When that got no response, I added with frustration, “I was told over the phone that there was an emergency…?”

     “Well,” rumbled Mr. Cody somewhere between my new tinnitus and the sounds of the waterfront. He’d turned toward the scantily clad blonde at his side to murmur to him, “Go. Handle it.” His hand crept up over the man’s bare, golden thigh.

     I looked away at that. Christ, what sort of position was he employed in?

     By the time I looked back again, the blonde had jumped down off the railing of the deck and now padded barefoot past me without a single word to let me know if I should follow or not. In the end, I decided to follow him, albeit with averted eyes. The man wore next to nothing—just what I would have sworn was a woman's hot pink bikini bottom in a size too small. 

     This gave me all too much of an opportunity to stare at the interior of the yacht as we stepped out of the sunshine and into the dim light of a gaudy den and piano room. Said piano sat untouched and glistening white in the corner, as though it were meant for decoration alone.

     “Can anyone play this thing?” I couldn’t help but ask. As we passed it, I reached out to run my fingertips along the glossy white of the last few ivory keys.

     Just as I went to press them down, the lid for the keys slammed down, almost capturing my fingers with it. The blonde man’s tan hand rested on the lid over where mine had just been—we were closer now than I had ever anticipated getting with a client, and now he stared up at me with blue eyes of impossible depth and inscrutable emotion. The only real clues to his age were the faint smudges of purple under his eyes and the faint divot of a worry line between his shapely brows.

     “Try not to touch anything,” he said in a much deeper, velvetier voice than I had anticipated. I supposed his diminutive stature and youthful appearance had thrown me off from the fact that, closer up, I could tell that he might’ve been closer to my age. But that couldn’t really have meant anything. If this guy was involved with the uber-rich in any way, who knew what kind of work he’d had done? He added as if in an afterthought, “You can’t afford to replace it.”

     “Sorry,” I finally muttered, casting my gaze away from the man again before I could absorb too much detail.

     That was the easiest way to avoid accidentally slipping further into unprofessionalism. I’d spent thirty years of my life avoiding situations just like this, and now that I was paid to be here, I wasn’t about to slip up.

     The blonde slipped away from me then, his hand drifting slowly through the air as he turned to continue down a narrow hall crowded in with fine works of art on each side. I stayed put, my eyes traveling back toward the man as if of their own accord, until he called back to me.

     “I hope you’re following, Mr. Carraway.”

     “Oh—sure, Mr…?”

     I didn’t get an answer. He’d disappeared around a corner some ways down the hall. I hefted my toolbox and maneuvered my way down the over-decorated hallway toward where “Tainted Love” trailed off into the constant jabber of radio advertisements for things and services I might have actually been able to afford after fixing whatever ‘emergency’ these people had.

     Unfortunately, when I entered the bedroom I still couldn’t see anything that might’ve been an emergency.

     The blonde had done the polite thing and waited for me just outside the doorway of yet another gaudy room—the master cabin. The bedroom alone was larger than my living room and kitchen put together and was heaped in cushions of all shapes and sizes and colors. I had to kick a few aside as we crossed the dim room, forcing the man to stop dead in his tracks and look back at me.

     I ignored him to gaze around at the expensive lack of taste, this bedroom being toned in various rose-pinks and searing violets with cushions strewn about in an artful attempt at disarray. I was abandoned again the moment it became clear I wasn’t paying attention so this unnamed man could drift over to the closet door. 

     “Ewing will keep an eye on you,” he said as he walked into the closet. The closet alone was larger than my bedroom, even considering the limited space onboard a boat. 

     I nodded at that, not knowing or caring who ‘Ewing’ might have been, though I supposed I understood Mr. Cody would want to keep an eye on me. He couldn’t tell me apart from another carpenter who might’ve snatched something from the jewelry box on the vanity on the corner. And as much as I understood that, it still didn’t sit right with me—just another drop of bitterness in the bottomless well within me.

     “The closet!” exclaimed the blonde. I jerked in shock and took a step into the closet to join him.

     It suddenly didn’t feel like such a large room after all.

     We stood there for a moment in silence, Mr. Cody’s whatever-he-was looking pointedly at a department-store-sized rack of perfectly folded shirts. I stared directly at them to prevent making note of the strange sort of stubble on this man’s forearms, as though he shaved them a few days ago and hadn’t since. 

     I wouldn’t make note of that. 

     I took a deep breath. “What about the closet, sir? I was told—”

     “What about it?” the blonde asked, turning his head to look up at me with a faint scowl. It looked out of place on him. “You’re asking ‘what about it’?”

     I stared down at him as frustration began to build within me. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact I am. I don’t see anything wrong with the closet, sir.”

     “Nothing wrong with the closet?” he repeated before gesturing sharply toward a stack of boxes pushed underneath where suit-coats hung at the back of the closet. “It’s running out of space, and—”

     “Wait,” I interjected. “Do you mean to tell me this is your emergency?

     “Of course.” He turned toward me, his shoulders thrown back as though in an effort to broaden them. It didn’t quite work. He continued, “What, old sport? Are you slow or something? The closet’s too small. There’s not enough room for these shirts. It’s impossible to keep organized, and—”

     I took my cap off and pushed my hair back off my forehead in shock. 

     “Whoever called me made it seem like the ship was sinking,” I informed him, struggling to keep my tone in check. I could feel my pulse in my temple already, so I took a deep breath to calm down before continuing, “Could I please just speak to the owner of this ship? Or whoever’s in charge?”

     Those eyes of his—those that I had momentarily had such trouble keeping my own away from—flashed with something toxic and too bright for their depth. Eyelashes fluttering, he looked up at the ceiling with a catty little huff.

     “I’m serious,” I assured him. “What are you, anyway? The cabana boy? I’d like to talk to the owner of the yacht.”

     The silence and the heat of the closet slowly began to press their way in on us the longer we stood there, and the longer we stood there, the more this stranger turned to face me and leaned in close.

     I took just a half-step backward as he snarled in a grave, haunting tone, “Now, look here. This—”

     “I’m looking.”

     That didn’t shake him. Not even a little. He straightened up in spite of barely brushing my chin at full height, then snapped, “This is an emergency, I’ll have you know.”

     “Looks like it.”

     “I am not the ‘cabana boy’—” Here he jabbed the tip of his finger into my sternum and paused, his eerily expressionless face still upturned toward me, as if waiting for me to butt in again. I didn’t. I’d made the mistake of studying his face a little too hard in the glittering half-light. And as if he knew, that curled lip of his began to smooth and curve up into a smile that in any other context would have had me on my knees.

     Here, now, I could see how whatever emotion had pushed him to smile simply wasn’t genuine. Though his mouth smiled, his eyes remained cold and vicious and trained on me with all the deadly focus of a predator—or prey, having sharpened its teeth in masquerade.

     The blonde stranger continued smiling up at me with nothing behind his unearthly blue gaze as he finished, “And it might be his boat, but it’s my closet.”

     That was about when things fell into place. The familiar touch out on the deck—the lack of apparent employment—the single bed in the bedroom. I had almost forgotten other people harbored my same little secret outside of myself and Chester.

     I didn’t know what to say, so I looked away as if studying the closet space I had to work with. With that, the blonde huffed again and turned from me. 

     From down the hall we’d traversed to get here, I heard Mr. Cody call, “Are you still busy in there, princess?”

     The air of the closet went entirely still again. 

     “Just explaining what I want,” this so-called ‘princess’ called back, and I could have sworn I heard a tremor somewhere in his voice. “He’s going to totally redo my closet for me. I think he said he’s the best carpenter in Duluth.”

     “No, I’m not—” I started before clamping my mouth down hard. So what if it wasn’t an emergency? Knowing these people I could charge four times my usual rate and they might not have blinked. I’d not only make rent but we could put that money toward a rainy day fund. As it stood, our ‘rainy day fund’ was a stack of planks I’d nail onto the roof with each successive rainstorm.

     “You’re not the best carpenter in Duluth?” he spat back at me, any hint of fear disappearing in an instant. “I could always call for someone who’s better equipped.”

     I didn’t have a response for that other than, “You’re not going to find someone better equipped.”

     “Good.” He stepped out past me to stalk his way across the room toward the door. “Now, Dan and I are going to the Boat Club for our fifteenth anniversary tonight at seven. I’ll expect my closet to be in proper enough order that I can dress myself appropriately—”

     “Seven tonight ?” I asked in astonishment. I stepped out of the closet and checked my watch. “Sir, this’ll take at the very minimum two days for me to—”

     “You have eight hours. Isn’t that enough of a day’s work for you people?”

     “ You people ?” I dropped my toolbox just outside the closet and stared at this man, this hardly-dressed little nightmare with perfect blonde hair and a smile that could strike fear into the heart of the devil. “Man, I don’t know where you get off—”

     He nodded once toward the bed as a response to my half-formed figure of speech, then called over his shoulder, “Ewing?”

     “Yes, Mr. Gatsby, sir,” said the butler as he rushed from around the corner and down the hall to stand in the doorway.

     This Mr. Gatsby smirked at me and said, “Keep an eye on this one, why don’t you, old sport? I’ve simply got too much to do…”

     “Of course, Mr. Gatsby, sir,” addressed the butler to Mr. Gatsby’s retreating rear.

     I watched the blonde saunter down the hall without a care in the world, because of course he probably didn’t have anything to care about. I couldn’t imagine what it would take to get someone like that to care about something other than themselves. It went beyond my pay grade, anyhow.

     The butler and I stood in tense silence for several minutes while I listened out for any sort of discussion the supposed owners of this yacht might’ve had about me. I couldn’t hear anything over the radio in the corner, blasting Hall and Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That”.

     “Well,” I began somewhere between repetitive verses. “I guess I better get started.”

     “I’d recommend it, sir.”

     As it turned out, I had more time than I anticipated. Even after making the shameful walk to the lumber section of the nearby chain hardware store to buy some local red oak I came back before one and got right to work, no sketch necessary, to build as functional a closet as you please. For as much as I’d fought against learning the family business, spending so much time around handsome carpenters in my youth had rubbed off in more than just the physical manner.

     Things worked out nicely enough as long as I was alone, and even with the butler there, hovering somewhere in the background, I was close enough to being alone that I found the same peaceful working environment I would if he weren’t there at all.

     This was something I could’ve actually enjoyed about carpentry. It certainly wasn’t where I thought I would end up after graduating from Yale and moving to New York but then again, nothing after New York had been anticipated. I supposed I ought to have taken what little pleasure I could get. 

     I did end up turning off the radio halfway through the day. Most of it was advertisements and I just couldn’t bear it after a while. I would rather be left alone to my thoughts than have to remember that my father no longer paid my bills.

     The silence—or dockside approximation of such—lasted until, of course, Mr. Gatsby decided to give up on lounging in the sunshine outside the open bedroom window by himself. I could see him from where I was working on a separate shelving unit to place inside the closet, lounging across a wide cushion at the very back of the boat with his golden body still so plainly exposed to the inescapable sun.

     He’d already called the butler back out to him several minutes ago and now I understood why: the telephone from the den had extended its wire along the length of the boat in order to reach where Mr. Gatsby lay, and now he placed a call to someone. I tried not to eavesdrop but between eavesdropping and whatever was on the radio, I’d take somebody else’s gossip any day.

     “You won’t believe what he said to me earlier.” A pause, with a disgusted noise at the back of his throat for punctuation. “He called me ‘princess’ again. I’m thirty-two! And a man.”

     “Coulda fooled me,” I muttered, notching the apex of two panels together with a scowl and trying not to cringe when I did the math on a fifteenth anniversary and thirty-two years of age.

     “It’s better than ‘cupcake’ or ‘dolly’ or whatever he feels like slinging toward me. It’s like he forgets I have a name.” A pause. A heavy sigh. “No. He hasn’t called me Jay in, goodness, over a year now, it feels like.” A groan. “No, not even in bed.”

     I could’ve done without the reminder of the nature of their relationship, considering I’d just settled down on the curve of the circular mattress in order to maneuver the wood better. After one brief shudder I decided it was just better to stand. 

     “And he’s all about our anniversary tonight, too. Being back in Duluth…I think he’s probably going to try…yes, well, you know. I can’t—I don’t…”

     Mr. Gatsby’s tone had changed so sharply that I caught myself looking over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of him, just to see why his whining had dropped so suddenly into something more tired, more mature. He was still lying there on his cushion with his back to me. Now that I could look at him, I could see the top of a heart-shaped tattoo peeking out from the top of his swimsuit bottom—right there on his left ass cheek. That wasn’t entirely what I might have expected.

     Of course, neither was his next venom-spit of, “Oh? Well, you fuck him, then.” He slammed the phone down on the receiver and began the frustrated roll to get up and off the cushion. I ripped my gaze away in an instant and got back to work.

     Perhaps I should have kept watching. Maybe if they’d noticed, the upcoming crisis could’ve been averted. Hindsight was 20/20.

     “Who was that?” I heard Mr. Cody ask as I brought the smaller shelving unit back onto the little canvas tarp I’d spread out on the floor.

     “Who do you think?” Mr. Gatsby snapped back, his voice having returned to that epitome of high-strung hatred. “My therapist, Dan. The one you pay for? Who else do you let me talk to anymore?”

     “And why do you think that is?”

     Something in the older man’s voice gave me something of a pause. He’d been gruff every time I’d heard his voice today, but there was something a little sharper there then, a razor edge to the gruffness he presented previously. If it were directed at me I might’ve crumpled just the way I had every time my father summoned up enough emotion to express his endless disappointment in me.

     Disappointment. I’d never get used to hearing it despite its frequency throughout my life, and that was no different here, with this near-stranger.

     When I heard Mr. Gatsby speak again, his voice had returned to that lower, more raw place, as though he were attempting and failing to restrain an emotion bigger than his body. He said just loud enough for me to catch, “Dan, it’s been nearly five years. When are we going to put it past us?”

     “You first,” Mr. Cody growled back. A moment of dreadful silence passed. I paused with my hammer against the wood, not willing to break up the quiet like glass. “You don’t seem very remorseful.”

     “I am. Oh, god, Dan. I regret her every day of my life.” I heard Mr. Gatsby’s voice break. I sat back on my heels and waited as he continued, “What more could I ever do to make it up to you?”

     “You could start by not dressing like such a wanton slut when we have company over.”

     “What?!” And there returned that high-class bitch . It was as though this man had a switch inside himself for who he needed to be in the moment, and he’d just flipped it. “You bought me this swimsuit, Dan. It’s hot, and I even told you I didn’t—”

     A slap rang out across the water, hard enough that it hurt me.

      If I were a better man, I would’ve gotten involved. It could’ve turned into a brawl, to be sure, but I knew better than that—Gatsby didn’t stand a chance against that man. And for just a second I allowed myself the smallest flash of grief for the untold years this man might’ve spent on this boat alone with Mr. Cody, experiencing god-knew-what, but then I recalled how he’d treated me and how little I could do to stop it and suddenly, it once again wasn’t my business.

     Still, even as I returned to building, I could hear the ensuing argument—or lack thereof.

     Dan Cody commanded, “What you’re going to do is go inside and put on something respectable.”

     Gatsby sniffled. “But—he’s—”

     “I’m not paying him to ogle you. Get inside and get dressed. All of this—” Judging by the following grunt of discomfort, he must’ve grabbed Gatsby, but I couldn’t be so obvious as to look at them again. “—is mine, remember? Unless you want to go wasting all the years we’ve spent together. Again.”

     “No, Dan. God.” Another faint sniffle. He growled, “Now, if you’d just let me go, I’ll go put something on.”

     Neither of them said anything else. I kept working for the next several seconds until Gatsby entered the bedroom again, this time rushing with his head down as if to avoid looking at me or being looked at. He disappeared into the closet while I knelt by my woodwork and watched. The door slammed shut.

     When he exited, the only part of his outfit that had changed was the addition of an extremely sheer, shimmering pink robe that draped down to his ankles. Not much in the way of covering up for company’s sake—not that I would allow myself to pay too much attention either way.

     Without looking anywhere but straight ahead, he brushed around my project and passed by me to get to the vanity in the corner. In my periphery I watched him shake something out of a golden box, lean over the vanity table, and take a deep whiff.

     Well, that, at least, I remembered from college.

     I’d never partaken, of course, though it had been readily available even outside the party circuit, but I figured I shouldn’t have been shocked by its usage onboard the ship of a very wealthy man—or, rather, a pair of them, I supposed. A couple. They were a couple, as far as I could tell, for better or for worse.

     Gatsby sprayed his hair down with Aqua Net, and then he and I sat in silence for several seconds, peacefully ignoring each other until the blonde lurched up from his vanity seat and demanded hoarsely, “And what in god’s name is that ?”

     “What?” I asked, just a bit too quickly. As though I’d been waiting for him to speak. I supposed I had, in a way. “I’m building a revolving shelving unit for your closet. There’s a whole bunch of dead space behind those shirt shelves that I could use—”

     “That’s—” he interjected sharply, then waited for my voice to die out before he continued at a softer volume, “—not what I meant.”

     Mr. Gatsby stood and crossed the room to me again, this time with his head held high and the glaring red mark of a backhand glowing angrily on his cheek. He looked down on me with that now-familiar curl of his lip and all the haughty bitterness of what I could only assume was a lifetime of assuming he was worth more than anyone else. And for whatever reason, this didn’t trouble me as much as it had before. I consciously pushed the emotion, searching for that familiar cradle of discontent, and found myself unable to settle my thoughts and feelings into something wholly disjoined from this man and how he presented himself to the world. 

     I stared up at him for a moment before deciding to stand up. However, the moment I moved too fast, Gatsby stumbled back enough that I froze and sank back down onto one knee next to my woodworking without a second thought. 

     “It’s…um…” I began before clearing my throat. “It’s Minnesotan red oak. Harvested just—”

     Evidently this was the wrong answer.

     “Oak?” Gatsby snapped, taking a step back toward me. I shifted back farther away from him, toward the door, but he kept stepping closer as he spoke, forcing me to crawl backward past my half-built shelving unit. “Did you say you built my closet out of oak? ”

     I pulled myself upright against the bedroom door frame, saying, “...yes, I did.”

     “Oak? An oak closet?” he snapped, stepping toward me again. In spite of his size and his evidently shaken state he still managed to somehow pose something of a threat, given my instant spark of genuine fear when he stepped forward too fast. He kept on, “I shouldn’t be surprised. Really, nothing about you people should surprise me anymore—”

     “Sir, you’re going to have to stop with the ‘you people’ business,” I couldn’t help but say. “What’s wrong with oak, anyhow? It’s a perfectly respectable—”

     “Cedar!” Gatsby exclaimed, now reaching up to shove me back into the hallway. “Everyone knows closets are made of cedar! Everyone! Do you want moths in my closet? Do you want me to have to buy a whole new wardrobe next week for your negligence?” He stood before me, staring up with hard, cold eyes. “Cedar, Mr. Carraway. Everyone knows that closets are made of cedar. Everyone. ”

     His voice broke there at the end. It caught me off guard enough that I couldn’t quite take full offense to having been shoved by someone half a foot shorter than myself. 

     I took a deep breath. “Alright, fine. Cedar.”

     “That’s right.” Gatsby stared up at me, his jaw tight. 

     I looked back down at him for a moment in silence, uncomfortable with the lack of space between us, before saying, “Sure. Fine! I’ll just—scrap what I’m doing and start over again. It won’t be done before seven, though, and I’ll need you to cough up compensation for the wood I wasted and the cedar, which…well, that won’t be very much of an easy find in these parts, seeing as—”

     “You think it’s Dan’s job to pay for your ignorance?” Gatsby demanded, his thick eyebrows arched high in indignation. “Or mine to put up with you for a second longer than I already have? Keep talking, Mr. Carraway. I’m sure it will turn out well for you.”

     I opened my mouth, shut it, then opened it again to say, “If you wanted cedar, you should have told me you wanted cedar to begin with. I would think somebody like you wouldn’t have trouble asking for what he wants.”

     “Somebody like me?” he repeated. “Somebody like me?”

      “Yeah,” I shot back, faltering only slightly. 

     He stared up at me for a moment longer in silence before snarling, “You don’t know anything about me.”

     That seemed to have been the breaking point. He shoved past me, heading down the hallway as he spat over his shoulder, “We’re not paying for your complete lack of competence. I’ll just have to hire on a carpenter worth his salt and pay him to do the work you couldn’t.”

     “What—” I managed to get out before ducking back into the room to quickly grab my toolbox. I rushed out of the room and after Gatsby, continuing, “What do you mean by that?”

     “You’re fired!” he called back as he entered onto the deck. He took a sharp right and I understood exactly why when another gunshot echoed out from the left side of the ship from the den’s exit. I wouldn’t want to be around Mr. Cody with a gun either. But then again…

     I followed Gatsby out onto the deck with my toolbox in hand. 

     “That’s fine,” I said, squinting in the sunlight. I’d forgotten my hat back in the bedroom. The wind caught my hair and tossed it around as I continued, “Just pay me for the wood and the work I already did and I’ll be on my way.”

     “I’ve already told you!” Gatsby argued back, stalking his way around the side of the ship to return to where he’d lounged around on the phone earlier. “I’m not paying you a single red cent after that display. I’m not paying for a service that left me unsatisfied.”

     “Oh, oh! I’m sure dissatisfaction is new to you, Mr. Gatsby, but that’s what life is like for the rest of us here on Earth.” I followed the man to the cushion and hefted my toolbox up onto it so he couldn’t relax over it again. “You’re going to pay me what you owe me.”

     “I don’t owe you a damn thing,” he replied, but something in his tone had hollowed out. “Now, you’d better leave before this becomes a real issue.”

     I scoffed at that. “It’s been a real issue. I’ll leave when you pay me the six hundred dollars you owe me. Then I’ll go! I’m out of your bleached-blonde hair!”

     Gatsby stared up at me with such indignation that an innocent observer might’ve been convinced I’d insulted his mother and spat in his face. And instead of bothering to respond to me, he turned and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Captain Meyer! Start the engine!”

     The captain of the yacht, who I hadn’t even noticed smoking on the deck above ours, instantly saluted Gatsby in a lazy manner and disappeared inside. I watched him go, squinting at the unbearable sun, just as the yacht jerked to a sudden start.

     This didn’t stop me from pressing the matter. If we were meant to be trapped on this boat together I would gladly set my sympathy aside and make this man’s life a living hell until he coughed up what he owed me. I’d seen people like him and Mr. Cody get away with plenty worse in New York and it might’ve just irreparably soured my worldview.

     “That’s just fine by me,” I said, stepping toward Gatsby. Now it was his turn to back away, and he did so swiftly, rising from the little sliver of cushion where he’d been able to sit beside my toolbox only to back himself along the side of the yacht again. I resituated my toolbelt and kept on, “I’ll gladly stick around to teach you a lesson about paying your goddamn dues.”

     “Paying my—” he started, stumbling backward with his eyes on my belt. I thought I saw a few shades drop away from behind the warm tan of his face. “Paying my dues? What do you—”

     “What do you think I mean?” I retorted, still pressing him backward toward where I figured Mr. Cody might’ve been. It was a sorry thing to have to do, to push him toward the man who’d clearly done something awful to him, but I couldn’t just leave without getting paid, and certainly Mr. Cody would probably be the one writing the check. I couldn’t afford not to get paid for this job. I’d already used up most of the cash I had to buy oak for the closet, cash I’d needed for upcoming bills. 

     The yacht had already pushed off from the dock and now it carved a slow path away from land. If this argument went on for much longer I’d end up trapped onboard with these people. I tried not to let that bother me—especially when another gunshot went off.

     Gatsby glanced over his shoulder in the direction of where Mr. Cody stood firing his rifle at another flock of seagulls, then looked back at me with a vivid, obvious flash of panic.

     “Whatever you think you’re doing, Dan’ll stop you,” he assured me, his voice cracking upward.

     I drifted to a stop with a frown. “What I’m—” And then I pieced it together. How could he possibly have assumed I meant to hurt him? I was a stranger and sure, I might’ve had half a foot and fifty pounds on him, but with Mr. Cody hovering so obtrusively in the background, how could I ever have posed a threat?

     I scoffed. “No. I don’t want a fight, I just want my money.” I sat my toolbox down and leaned against the railing with my arms crossed. “And I’m going to wait here until—”

     Perhaps I’d underestimated this little scrap of nothing. As compact as he was, he caught me off guard with one mighty shove right to the side of my chest. I didn’t have time to catch myself before the sudden, forceful momentum tossed me overboard like a ragdoll.

     I hit the water with an admittedly pathetic yelp. By the time I broke the surface again, the yacht had sped several feet farther ahead, leaving me in the white, foamy aftermath.

     I swam forward as best I could and shouted up at the blonde, “Push me over all you want, you still owe me that money!”

     “I don’t owe you a thing!” Gatsby shouted back, gripping the rail as the wind tossed his cover-up in a thousand different directions. His hair stayed stiffly in place. “I don’t owe anybody anything!”

     He disappeared from view for long enough that I thought I’d been totally abandoned in the water—and then he appeared again, my toolbox in hand. 

     “No!” I yelled. “Not my tools!”

     It was too late. He shoved them off the deck and into the water, where the box hit and disappeared in the choppy blue waves. 

     I didn’t have a dime left to call Chester after I dragged my sorry self out of the water. In sopping wet clothes, without my tools or my hat, I trudged my way along the outskirts of town toward where our house sat ensconced in woods at the underdeveloped edge of the city. We had neighbors, sure, but we never saw them through the trees.

     I couldn’t quite process the outlandish hell of the day until I was faced with the usual hell of where we lived.

     The house sat at an angle at the base of one of Duluth’s many forested hills, one of the last pockets of land left untouched by those distant years of prosperity and the more recent years of desperate, frantic cash grabs in an attempt to keep the town alive. Just across the lonely stretch of highway that attached our long, forested drive to the rest of the world, a random parcel of forest had been cleared, a concrete base had been poured, and then it had been abandoned. 

     The scars of economic ruin were evident all over the city but were all the more offensive considering this house was where I had to sleep every night. Even now, exhausted as I was, I dreaded laying back in my bedroom with the paper-thin walls to wait out the dawn with rats nesting loudly in the ceiling overhead. 

     The lawn wasn’t so much of a lawn as it was a junkyard. We were constantly in the process of trying to get a second car, and oftentimes, given the total lack of cash flow in town, people would offer us junk cars in return for my services, hoping my carpentry skills would translate into something mechanical. 

     They did not. We had four cars, and only one of them, my rattling ‘68 Dodge, worked—and even that was tentative.

     I passed by said Dodge and the car graveyard through knee-high grass only to find Jordan standing in the front doorway, the cord of our telephone stretched to the absolute limit as she stared me down.

     “I’m going to have to call you back,” she said into the receiver as I pushed past her to get into the house. We walked together for her to put the phone back on the wall-cradle, then stood in silence for several seconds, our posture matching in an almost eerie sort of way. Both of us stood with our arms crossed and our eyes distantly trained just off to the side of each other rather than making eye contact.

     Finally, she said, “I figure it was a bust, then?”

     “Worse.” I reached up to resituate my hat only to remember I’d left it on the yacht. I cursed, then explained, “I lost almost all of my tools, and—”

     “If only you could call someone who owned a hardware store.”

     “I’m not calling my dad.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “That bitch threw everything overboard and get this—that emergency I had to leave breakfast for?”

     “Yeah?” said Jordan boredly as we drifted away from the telephone. We crossed through the ungodly mess of the house with practiced ease on the way to the kitchen. That, too, was filthy. None of us had the time to clean a thing, and even when we did, we didn’t have the energy. 

     I had enough energy to complain, though. “A closet. He wanted me to remodel his closet, Jordan. Can you believe that?”

     “I can. What I would give to have a closet again.”

     “And then—it gets worse.”

     “No way.” She rolled her eyes.

     “I was almost done with the whole thing when he comes in and demands that I rebuild the whole thing with cedar instead of oak.”

     Jordan frowned at that, though the untrained eye could be forgiven for not catching the shift from her usual bored expression to a genuine frown. She let her head fall to the side, her blonde bob shifting in time, and asked, “Why’d you build it out of oak to begin with? Closets are—”

     “Cedar! I know. I know that now.” I grabbed a beer from the fridge for myself and offered one to Jordan, who shook her head with a subtle gesture to the clock and the fact that it wasn’t even mid-afternoon yet. I ignored the jab and cracked open the can. “Look, I don’t know how you grew up, or how those people grew up, but here in Minnesota we have plenty of red oak and it’s a great wood to work with. It even went well with the color scheme of the whole yacht, Jordan. I thought that far ahead.”

     “Do you want a medal or a chest to pin it on?” Jordan replied, pushing herself up to sit on the counter. She crossed her ankles. “I think Chester’s got a few in his room if you’re really searching for validation.”

     “What?” whined Chester, stepping out of his room. It was just off the kitchen. “What can I say? I love a man in uniform…or out of a uniform…”

     I sat down hard at the kitchen table. “Yeah, well, I hope that extends to McDonald’s, because I’m about to give up on carpentry as a whole. I need something steady. I can’t keep doing this, especially if I don’t have tools.”

     “We’ll find you some tools,” Chester practically cooed, coming to stand behind me. He slipped his hands over my shoulders. “Don’t worry so much. You’ll wrinkle.”

     I threw back the rest of my beer and tossed the can into the open waste bin in the corner. “I think we’re past that, Chester.”

     “Is that why you grew the beard?” Jordan asked, nudging my shoulder with the tip of her sneaker. 

     I ignored her and looked back at Chester. “Do you think there’s any room for me at the station? I mean, Christ, Chester. I could just carry equipment from the van to the broadcast site. Anything.”

     Chester hummed and ran his fingers through my hair, pulling through a few knots as he went. “I don’t know, Nick. We’re barely scraping along as it is…”

     I looked up at him for a moment in silence before sighing and letting my head fall forward again. Chester kept up with his fingers through my hair. Jordan crossed her legs on the counter.

     Finally, Chester said, “Well, I mean…”

     “You mean?”

     “You definitely won’t get paid for it, but you could totally come to work with me tonight. Just…to make a good impression, maybe.” He brushed my hair into something of a style, which I never really bothered with anymore. I used to keep so well groomed. “And it’ll keep you from moping around here while Jordan’s trying to work.”

     “Hey,” I retorted as they both laughed. “Which one of us had to put up with gay Richie Rich today? I don’t want to—”

     “ Gay? ” Jordan and Chester exclaimed at the same time. 

     I went still as if that might save me from the rest of this conversation.

     Chester moved around me to practically crawl in my lap as he said, “You mean to tell me there was a fag aboard and you did not flag me down?”

     “Not your type,” I assured him dully as he shoved off me to go lean on the counter next to Jordan.

     “You don’t know that…” He wrapped his arms around our friend and tossed his nose in the air indignantly. “But no, no. I understand. I know who my real friends are.”

     “Don’t touch me,” muttered Jordan, fighting against the affection like a standoffish housecat.

     I considered going for another beer, then decided against it, saying, “Look, it wasn’t all that glamorous, trust me. It was…” I shut my mouth then, knowing if I continued, I’d slip right back into that sympathy I’d been able to set aside to make room for anger. 

     Unfortunately, Chester latched on like a pit bull. “It was what?”

     I stared across the crowded kitchen table at him. “I mean…a guy my age and a man in his mid-sixties. He…I don’t know. I overheard some things about a fifteenth anniversary but the guy said he was thirty-two, and I just…don’t like the math on that.”

     Chester pulled a face. “Jesus. No. I don’t either.”

     Jordan tossed a wadded-up paper towel at my head. “Makes you look like less of a creep.”

     “I thought you were older,” I muttered. “Besides, we were both in our twenties when we dated. It’s different.”

     “If that helps you sleep at night,” she retorted, but I could hear the faint thrum of laughter under her tone. Not many could pick up on that. 

     I rolled my eyes and finally went back for that second beer. “Whatever. It’s not my problem.” I cracked open the can. “What time are we leaving?”

     Chester didn’t respond for as long as it took me to drain half the can. Finally, he said, “Six.” He pushed off the counter and headed back toward his bedroom. “Take a bath in the meantime. You smell like Lake Superior.”

     “Will do.”

Chapter Text

2.

Jay

     “He called you what? ”

     “The cabana boy.” I clutched the phone to my ear, wincing as Dan shot down his third bird of the afternoon. I’d had to bring the telephone back inside to oversee the extra engine boy as he cleaned up the mess the carpenter left behind. With my eyes on him, I added, “I don’t even know what that means.”

     “Then why does it matter to you?” Robert asked, and I could hear him writing in the background. “If he’s just some nameless carpenter you found in the phone book, I mean.”

     I scowled even if he couldn’t see it and rolled over on the bed to lay on my stomach. The silk sheets were too hot against my bare skin but I would rather put up with that than go out on the deck with Dan again. 

     “You know, you’re not very understanding for a therapist.”

     “It’s not my job to be understanding, Jay. It’s my job to help you work through whatever it is that’s driving you away from happiness. Confidentially.”

     I rolled my eyes and twirled the phone cord around my finger. “Yes. I’m sure Dan approved you because of your confidentiality.”

     “That’s not why he hired me, Jay.”

     “Uh-huh.” I pulled the cord tighter around my finger until the digit turned white, then relaxed the tension.

     Robert said, “Tonight’s your anniversary, correct?”

     I shut my eyes for a moment, trying to stomach that, before taking a deep breath and replying, “Well, of course it is. I told you that already.” I could hear that hateful prickliness entering my voice again, as though I’d been possessed. I felt that way a lot recently. “Do you even listen to me when I speak or do you just wait your turn?”

     “I’m listening, Jay. I promise.”

     “Good. We pay you a lot just to listen.”

     “Dan does compensate me fairly, yes.”

     Dan did. Right. I would never get used to being put in my place—as a matter of fact, every time it happened, I could feel myself growing more and more unlike myself. Unless this vicious person was exactly who I was always meant to be. I supposed it didn’t matter, so long as I got what I wanted in the end.

     I sighed and stretched my legs out on the bed. “I don’t know why I called you. I’m fine, actually.”

     “This is your fourth call today,” replied Robert uncertainly. “What’s really on your mind?”

     I opened my mouth to try to explain just as a hand slapped down right on my derriere. As Dan laughed and crawled on the bed behind me, I muttered gravely into the phone, “I’ll call you back in a minute.” 

     As I slammed the phone down, Dan’s fingertips hooked on the hip-sides of my swimsuit and began an attempt to wiggle them down. I groaned and squirmed to roll onto my back.

     “What?” Dan asked, all his humor fading out. He glanced up at the engine boy still cleaning up the bedroom then snapped his fingers until the boy understood he’d been dismissed. Just as soon as the door shut behind him, Dan leaned down over top of me and pressed his mouth to mine.

     In the simplest sense of the word, I allowed it. Ten years ago I would have thrown my arms around his neck, wrapped my legs around him, rolled until I had leverage to have my way with him—now I simply allowed things to happen. I lay there stiff as a board while his hands wandered my arms. It took until he reached the returning hair of my forearms for him to finally pull back.

     “You’re not ready for tonight, are you.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. Dan’s voice rumbled close to my ear, and there with it came the unbearable scent of whiskey.

     I began to squirm again, knowing that if I really put up a fight he might just take it at face value for once and not treat it like a challenge. Even if he did back down, it would just be worse next time, but I might’ve been better prepared to handle it, further removed from the upsetting events of that day.

     “I’d get ready if you would just get off me,” I snapped back at him with more hurt than I intended. How could he so easily find every chink in my armor? I supposed it must’ve been easy for him, seeing as my ‘armor’ had dropped back down to this pathetic little swimsuit he’d bought me. He only ever saw a problem with it when he caught somebody else staring. 

     Dan’s fingertips worried the dry fabric of said swimsuit again, but not in an attempt to pull it down. The action served as more of a warning that he could pull it down if he wanted to. He murmured, “What’s the fuss, pumpkin? Hm?”

     His hand crept up over my stomach.

     “Are you really that excited to go out for our anniversary?” he continued. “That’s my boy. That’s the Jay I remember.” He pinched the tan skin of my side and it took everything in me not to slap at his arm. “That’s more like the boy I brought to Duluth fifteen years ago—”

     “I’m not the same,” I whispered, shaking my head. “I’m not. And you know that.”

     Dan let his head drop in disappointment, which was somehow worse than if he’d just reared back and hit me again. 

     “I thought that just for tonight, we could pretend.” 

     And the worst part was, through this all, I knew well enough that deep down, I still was indeed the scrawny, filthy teenager he’d taken on fifteen years ago. He could bring me right back down into that helpless, unrefined state with just the right combination of words. If his brain wasn’t so pickled with liquor and worn thin by age he might just have taken better advantage of that fact more often.

     As of right now, however, the assaults remained physical—and it was his fault if he wanted to damage the body he demanded I keep so utterly flawless. Bruises, I could handle. Repetition of the past, I could not.

     “Well,” I began softly, “let’s get ready to go, then.” I reached up to push his silver hair back, and his head lifted with it. I held his gaze for as long as I could before adding, “I’ll be ready.”

     “Damn right you’ll be ready.” Dan leaned in for one last kiss, still reeking of the liquor he’d had for lunch. He pulled back long enough to mumble, “But are you sure you want dinner, dolly? You’re—”

     And here again I began to squirm. “Get off me. Now!”

     Dan went silent, his face buried in my shoulder. I slipped out from underneath him after several more unbearable seconds of his heavy body on top of mine. I couldn’t imagine a time where that had ever made me feel safe.

     I stood off the side of our bed with my head raised high, all the while trying desperately to keep a tremor from entering my voice as I informed Dan, “I’m going to go take a bath, and then I’m going to get dressed, and then we’ll go to dinner.”

     “Good, good, princess. There’s that brain of yours.” He reached out and took my hand in his. Again, I couldn’t believe I had ever thought it endearing, how his hand fit in with mine. Seeing it now, it felt grotesque, especially with the ring shining on his finger while my hand remained conspicuously devoid of jewelry as a whole.

     “I’ll be ready in time,” I murmured before turning from him and disappearing into our en-suite. 

     Getting ready was a mechanical affair I used to enjoy wholeheartedly. Back when we’d first gotten together all it had meant was washing up and putting on clean clothes; things had complicated since then. Everything had, actually. 

     It always took several minutes to wash the hairspray out of my hair. I hadn’t used it for the first several years of knowing Dan, since through the seventies it had become more fashionable to let the hair hang as it may, but now that volume had come back into style I had fallen into a habit of shellacking my hair— naturally blonde, thank you—into that impossibly perfect coif Dan expected to see. It was as close to a pompadour as modern fashion would allow.

     Beyond that, bathing was the longest, most relaxing part of getting ready for anything these days. I drew up a hot tub of water with plenty of bubbles, then undressed and submerged myself up to the chin without looking at my body in the mirror.

     Soon the whole bathroom smelled like roses. Dan hated the scent—hated any type of fragrance, really. This was how I kept him out of the bathroom while I got ready.

     I stayed still for as long as I could in the bathtub but unfortunately I had more to do than soak. I scrubbed myself from head to foot in spite of not having set foot on dirt in over a week. Dan would expect every last inch of me to remain pristine, as he had for the past fifteen years.

     Fifteen years. Fifteen years. That phrase had floated around my head all day. 

     I don’t think either of us anticipated being with the other this long. As a matter of fact, after five years, his ex-wife and I had gotten fed up with his behavior once and for all. Unfortunately our exit strategy failed, leaving her in prison and me trapped, alone, with Dan. Dan got out of it with nothing but a minor heart attack to remember the incident by—and none the wiser for my involvement.

     Sometimes I did sit and think of how my life would’ve been different if he’d just died then. If Ella and I could have simply split our inheritance down the middle and gone our separate ways as planned. I probably would never have met Daisy, seeing as I never would have pursued a girl if I hadn’t been desperate to get out of my situation. 

     The wondering always puttered to a stop right there. All my dreams of the future had sort of been frozen in their infancy, simple and underdeveloped, and stunted as I myself had become.

     There was no point in wondering what might have been, because right then, I was a thirty-two-year-old man, shaving my forearms because my lover of fifteen hardly endurable years demanded I do so rather than affront him with the fact that I was indeed getting older as he himself was. 

     My chest was next. My stomach followed. Nothing much more than peach fuzz grew on my back, so I was safe there.

     Anything below the waist, Dan could suffer through if he really wanted access. That was about where I drew the line in terms of beating my natural form into submission.

     The bath was suddenly intolerable. I rose from the flowery suds with all the tension of a man walking toward the electric chair and stepped out from the pink tile basin of the bathtub and onto the yes, pink —albeit in another shade—tile of the floor. Dan had discovered my fondness for the color years ago, back when he would’ve done anything to make me happy, and now it covered our whole living space and he used the bathroom down the hall.

     My hair. Next came my hair. 

     I settled down at the counter vanity among my plastic plants and their porcelain pots and grabbed one of the dozens of products Dan bought me, whichever was closest. I didn’t care about brands anymore. I used to, back when Dan took me shopping.

     It took less than a minute to push my hair into place, and longer to spray it so it would stay. 

     I didn’t even have to look in the mirror to get it right.

     In fact I sat with my back to the mirror, choosing instead to watch the pretty little pendulum clock on the wall as its gold pendulum swung back and forth as if to remind me I was wasting so many precious seconds of my life. Or, perhaps, that with every passing second I was dragged closer to some indefinite point in the future where all this golden misery may find resolve.

     Everything would be alright. It had to be.

     It was already eight. I had to hurry—though the yacht was still out in the lake rather than remaining too close to the docks. We’d have to coast over to the Boat Club for dinner. I rubbed myself down from stem to stern in moisturizer, draped a towel around my waist, and stepped out of the bathroom.

     The room was, of course, abandoned, but I could hear Ewing out in the hall just beyond the door and farther down the hall, the second shower shutting off in the spare bedroom. I heaved a sigh of relief at the fact that Dan had the decency to bathe if he meant for us to enjoy each other’s company tonight.

     I crossed the plush mauve carpeting toward the remains of my closet and almost made it to the door before my bare foot pressed down on the shocking chill of metal. I jerked back a step and stared down at the offending bit—a nail in my carpet.

     “Ewing!” I shouted for all I was worth.

     He practically burst the door down in his efforts to get to me on time, an apology already brewing in his magnified eyes. He lifted his hands to wring them as he asked timidly, “Y-yes, sir. What seems to be—”

     I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. “Are you not the butler here aboard the Tuolomee ?”

     He paused. “...yes, sir, I am.”

     “And what, exactly, is a butler’s role in a household?”

     Ewing cleared his throat, but his voice still came out as a rasp as he answered, “T-to manage the household, Mr. Gatsby, sir.”

     “And?” I opened my eyes and stared him down. 

     Ewing blinked. “And…oh, oh! And the staff of the household, yes.”

     “And that includes the men down in the engine bay, does it not?” I demanded, stepping closer. I watched him attempt to step back only to find the wall of the bedroom blocking his exit. 

     “Of…of course, sir,” he said.

     I nodded even before he’d finished speaking. “Yes, yes. Of course it does.” I turned away from him and marched back to the nail in the carpet, careful to keep an eye out between the mauve fibers for any other hazards. “So tell me why , Ewing, one of your charges thought it acceptable to leave this room without a thorough final inspection to ensure he hadn’t left any nails behind?”

     I plucked the nail from the carpet and thrust it up into the air so that he could see it. 

     “Do you see this, Ewing?” I demanded. “What is it?”

     He looked away like a fearful dog. “Why, it’s a nail, sir.”

     “A nail. Yes, it is. And fortunately, I had a tetanus shot just last year, but if you think I’m a bitch now , Ewing, imagine how I would react to a nail in the foot.”

     I threw it at him, because just like that, I had plucked the thought right out of his head and held it to the light just like that nail. I wasn’t stupid—behind the well-earned fear, I could see the growing frustration as a vein in his temple as he struggled under the weight of my behavior. He didn’t like me.

     I didn’t like myself either. I wasn’t the same boy I was when I stepped foot on this yacht for the first time fifteen years ago. It was more than age.

     I didn’t recognize myself at all. 

     “Do you think we pay for incompetence, Ewing?” It was just like with the carpenter, only worse, because I’d have to see this man again tomorrow. 

     “No, sir,” he said quietly. 

     “We don’t even pay for competence , Ewing. We pay for excellence. ”

     “Of course, Mr. Gatsby, sir. I’ll have the boys run through the carpet again by hand. If there’s another nail, they’ll find it.”

     I stared at Ewing while he stared at the floor. “Very well, then.” 

     With that, he knew he’d been dismissed, so as he left I strode into the chaos of my closet with my chin held just a fraction of an inch too high. I let it drop just as soon as I heard the bedroom door shut.

     My chin dropped almost to my chest at that point. I stood there in silence, staring dully at my scattered shirts without seeing anything. The carpenter must’ve been in the process of moving things around when I’d fired him. He must’ve touched every last one of these shirts, then, as he moved them away from where his shelves would have gone.

     I stared at the gaping hole in the closet for as long as it took to come back down to earth, then reached out to grab a handful of silk and cotton. Six or seven different shirts, all tossed into disarray just to end up clenched in my trembling fist—all of them among the first Dan had ever bought me, as a matter of fact; they’d been at the very back of the shelves for safekeeping. 

     I could remember every single one of these shirts and the day they’d been purchased. As I sank to the floor with the pull of the past, I clutched the bundle of miscellaneous styles and fabrics to my face, where I took a deep, deep inhale. I thought just for a moment that I might’ve been able to capture the faintest hint of the beautiful department store we’d gone to that day.

     God, what a precious and unknowing thing I had been then. Going shopping was such a luxury to me that I felt like I was in a movie even if Dan had been sort of testing me out, not shelling out for the really good clothes he ordered for me now—no time to wander around stores—that we were so set in stone. 

     There wasn’t anything in this world I wouldn’t have given to find myself back in a moment like that, seventeen and stupid, before I knew anything and thought I knew everything. Back when the future lay before me like an endless feast of wonders. 

     The plates had grown smaller and fewer over the years, the courses less varied and more streamlined. I’d never need to worry about where my next meal was coming from ever again but only if I’d be able to keep it down. 

     Dan expected me to remain the same size in everything as I had been at seventeen, at thirty-two. And I had succeeded. For the most part.

     As a matter of fact, I thought—it was our anniversary. Why not try to lean into those old days of blissful ignorance? Why not stroke whatever pitiful part of Dan’s pickled brain refused to admit that I could, would, and had possibly outgrown him?

     Dan had bought me a beautiful pink western shirt in silk with pearl buttons on that first shopping trip together. It still fit as much as it ever had.

     Of course it did. Of course it did. Several sizes too big, but it fit as well as it ever had.

     Pants were another matter. I pulled them on, pulled them up, and then—

     The button was so close. So impossibly close. I took myself in as much as I could and finally managed to get the button to catch—

     —right as I noticed a few new stitches inside the waistband.

     They hadn’t been there before. These were new pants, tailored to me just last year. These stitches most certainly had not been placed there by that tailor. A tailor, for sure, given the regularity and functionality, but they’d most certainly been taken in just what couldn’t have amounted to more than a half inch in the waist. 

     But it was enough. Enough that I was sure it was meant to place a seed of doubt in my mind—enough to appear as an attempt to convince me that I needed to work harder to keep myself small, and soft, and all the things I no longer was after so long with this man. I could subsist off coke and shave myself down all he wanted; it wouldn’t keep me seventeen and stupid.

     I cursed to myself and stalked out of the closet, my fly still flung wide open. 

     “Dan!” I shouted down the hall toward the spare bedroom. There came no answer, and so I kept on my furious march through the den and out onto the moonlit deck. 

     Dan wasn’t at the bow of the ship, where he usually was, forcing me to work a full circuit of the middle deck, searching for him in the silver light. This gave me plenty of time to work up a real rage at the thought of him manipulating my life behind my back. It was bad enough that he did it in front of my face. How bored of our life together could he possibly have been to put so much effort into making me feel horrible?

     Of course, Dan just so happened to be waiting for me on my cushioned seat at the aft of the middle deck. He lounged back against the pillows with a cigar glowing orange in the night, I saw him grin, his one gold tooth glinting on full display.

     As I approached, he leaned forward again with his arms outstretched. “Look at you, pumpkin. You just look so much—”

     “Did you alter my chinos, Dan?”

     He stared up at me, his arms still outstretched, before finally lowering them. “I might’ve had them taken in a bit.”

     “Why.” I crossed my arms. A rather strong wind had come up off Lake Superior to give me a chill.

     Dan sighed and flicked ashes off his cigar. Not looking at me, he admitted, “Motivation. You’ve got to have something to work toward, don’t you? That’s what Dr. Gilman told me you needed.” He took a puff. “Just keep at those jazzer-whatever videos you like so much. You’ll slim down.”

     I stared at him as all my rage burned like a silent fire, blocking out everything, including any chance at a coherent thought. Dan had crossed the line plenty over the years but we’d steadily pushed that line farther and farther out—tonight, I just couldn’t take it anymore.

     Dan sat his cigar down in the ashtray and patted the cushion next to him. “C’mon, princess. Settle down and maybe we can work the weight off together.”

     “I don’t—” I started, still not quite able to put together words. I shut my mouth down hard, my whole body shaking from the cold or the fury of fifteen wasted years. 

     Dan reached out and pressed his fingers into the tight lock of my crossed arms, and once he had that, I simply gave way. He yanked me down onto the cushion at his side and leaned down to kiss me. 

     And I just let it happen. All that rage in me, and it just stayed there. I couldn’t lash out at him the way I had at the carpenter, or at Ewing, and so that anger just stayed put like a stone where my heart used to be. I couldn’t squirm—couldn’t bother to fight. I just allowed it.

     “Did you put that shirt on just for me?” Dan mumbled, his hands wandering toward the pretty pearl buttons. One popped right off in his hand. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it, then? You were wearing this shirt the first time we were together. Do you remember?”

     “I try not to,” I mumbled monotonously before his mouth pressed against mine again. 

     Things proceeded from there.

     As it happened, as I lay back on the outdoor cushions with Dan’s knees bruising the inside of my thighs, all I could think about was that first time, and how I wished I could forget it. How I wished I could leave it all behind, start over again fresh, and put away this harsh, compliant little beast I had become, ravenous to put anyone beneath me so I didn’t feel like the lowest of the low. 

     The ship was moving. Dan was moving. I was stuck. 

     If there was one blessing about being with a man his age, it was that Dan didn’t last very long. Once the inevitable had begun it was over before we had even reached the docks of the Boat Club—or, at least, the boat hadn’t stopped moving so that we could dock. Evidently Dan must’ve given the command to keep the boat moving so long as we were…indisposed.

     “Now…that’s one way to shed a couple of pounds,” Dan proclaimed as he sat up, breathless. 

     I lay there, completely still, as I had for the past several minutes.

     Dan seemed to hesitate. “...good way to spend an anniversary, anyway. I think you earned dessert tonight.”

     I shut my eyes against the distant white pinpricks of the stars so far above. Not even the lights of this dying town could dim them; I had to hide from them myself.

     Dan’s hand wandered the tender expanse of my thigh. “What’s the matter, princess?”

     “I’m not…” I licked my lips. “...your princess.”

     Dan slapped my thigh lightly. “Well, fine then. Be that way.”

     He went to stand up, but I grabbed his wrist in a motion faster than I thought I was capable of after feeling so dead for the past several minutes.

     “No,” I said in that same dull, determined way. “You don’t…you don’t get it, do you, Dan?”

     He yanked his arm out of my grip and stood from the expansive cushion. “I don’t have to get anything, Jay.”

     “Yes!” I licked my dry lips again and forced myself upright, off the cushion and onto my elbows. “Yes. ‘Jay’. That’s—Dan, that’s my name . I’m not…I’m not a pumpkin, I’m not your princess. I’m a man. I’m an adult. And—”

     And Dan swung.

     I should have seen it coming, really, seeing as I’d risen up from my laid-back position to almost stand up from the cushion. Dan’s first reaction to any sort of argument these days was a hand against my cheek; this was different. His closed fist connected with my cheekbone with enough force to spin me hard against the railing of the ship’s aft end.

     I clung limply to the copper, my head spinning, as Dan spat behind me, “Just what the hell is your problem lately?”

     I stared out at the moonlight on the water, waiting for the pain to hit. It would, sooner or later. In the space between now and then I said, “You, Dan. God, it’s—”

     His hand covered the back of my skull in such an awfully familiar way. He grabbed a hold of my hair and snarled, “Why have you been so out of line lately? Is it Robert?”

     “No!” I exclaimed, still somehow more annoyed than afraid, but apparently this wasn’t the right answer, because Dan took it as an opportunity to yank my head back and slam it forward again into the copper bar of the railing. My vision went blurry after the second time he did it. My mouth tasted of copper as I slurred, “It’s not fucking Robert. N-now, j-jus’ stop—y’got what you wanted, din’ you?”

     “What’s gotten into you?” Dan demanded as if he couldn’t hear me. Again, my head went forward into the copper bar. I tried to reach back to grab his hand, to do anything to remove it from my hair, but I couldn’t quite communicate with my limbs enough to do so. Dan continued, “Was it the carpenter?”

     I couldn’t manage a full word if I tried. Blood ran down into my eyes. I couldn’t wipe it away.

     “I saw how he looked at you, Jay.”

     I didn’t hear anything else after that. Either I managed to tune out, or I’d shut down enough to stop processing whatever it was Dan had left to say. None of it mattered. Even if I could string a phrase together, nothing I could say could ever knock Dan off one of his tirades. I knew that by now. I couldn’t believe I’d even bothered to try.

     Distantly I became aware of him slapping at my cheeks sometime later, though not at the force he had previously. I wasn’t quite here, wasn’t quite there. Nothing made sense through this strange haze.

     The only thing that really reached me was the shocking chill of the water as I crashed into it—and then, nothing but blackness beyond.

Chapter Text

Nick

     As it turned out, no, I couldn’t just ‘make a good impression’ at the local news station and hope they’d hire me. Chester seemed to have forgotten that I couldn’t enter the station headquarters without a badge unless I was delivering something to the front desk, and putting up a whole ruse just to possibly get a job seemed like a bad idea.

     I ended up dropping Chester off and driving around for a while before remembering the price of gas. It would be cheaper just to go home and pick him up in the morning. 

     Jordan was on the phone again when I got home. She paid the phone bill, however, so I figured I couldn’t get mad at that, but I couldn’t help my passive curiosity as I ghosted past her through the living room to my room. 

     My room was off the back of the house. At one point, sometime before I’d ever set foot in Duluth, this room had been a back porch without a roof, but some enterprising former occupant had taken it upon themselves to enclose the porch with a roof, a half-wall most of the way around, and a fine screen to keep the gnats out. 

     The screen didn’t really do its job now that it was so beaten down and full of holes—those of course popped up in pairs as soon as I fixed one of them—and it had been sheer hell to keep the room and myself warm in the winter, but now that summer had begun its tentative press into the space between the mountain and the water, it was the best room in the house.

     Even if it shared a very thin wall with Chester. I assumed there had once been brick there but some disaster had occurred to force some carpenter even more an amateur than myself to fix the wall with nothing but plywood and spray foam sealant. It was a miracle the whole thing stayed together, and if it were more exposed to the elements, the wall would’ve gone down several seasons ago.

     Now the only issue was Chester’s headboard on the other side. With him gone at work, though, I was able to collapse in the safety of a quiet bed and listen to the cicadas while Jordan talked somewhere in the background. 

     I lay back with my arm folded over my face to keep the sunlight out of my eyes. Right here at sunset it came in at precisely the right angle to light up my room with the most vivid and unusual shades of pink and orange and gold—and if I looked precisely the wrong direction, blind me so that I couldn’t see a single painterly stroke of color across the shabby walls. 

     After the events of that day I didn’t care to see the brilliance of the natural world. All I wanted to do was to get some long-awaited rest. 

     Something would not let me. I lay there in the quiet for several minutes, the calming familiarity of Jordan’s murmur in the background, the call of birds in the trees just at the edge of the yard, the gentle shush of the wind pushing through the forest surrounding us—and none of it lulled me to sleep as it normally would.

     In the end I simply listened in to Jordan’s conversation, and I was glad I did.

     “No, I don’t think he’ll want to go. I mean, is he even invited?” A pause. “Okay, but you’re not hosting. His dad is. And—”

     I rolled out of bed and stepped down hard onto the creakiest board I could reach at the moment.

     Jordan paused. “I’ll call you back.”

     I shuffled miserably out of my bedroom and into the living room.m.

     With direct eye contact, she placed the phone back on the hook.

     “Who was that?” I asked.

     “What are you? My dad?”

     I leaned on the doorframe and stared her down from across the living room and kitchen. The crossover point between the two rooms rose up at a gentle but uncomfortable slope, leaving Jordan almost exactly my height, given where we both stood in our respective rooms.

     When I didn’t answer, Jordan crossed her tan arms and pressed further, “...a cop?”

     “No,” I said. “Just…curious.”

     “That’s not my problem.” Jordan lifted her face up toward the ceiling and took a breath so deep, that her shoulders hitched up and dropped down in the process. “If you wanted to listen in on phone conversations you really should invest in a second unit.”

     I scoffed at that. “Next you’ll want a second TV.”

     “Mm,” she hummed, “we barely have a first TV. I haven’t been able to turn it on all day.”

     “Is that what you do, Jordan?” I asked her as I crossed the living room to go kneel in front of the television. “Is that what you do all day? Watch soap operas?” 

     She was quiet for a moment while I fiddled fruitlessly with the knobs. “I mean, I would if it was working.”

     I rolled my eyes at that, but at least screwing around with the TV gave me something to do to pass the time besides drinking and ignoring the latest stack of dime-books I’d gotten from a going-out-of-business sale. The stack stood ominously in the corner, waist-high and full of stories I couldn’t bother investing myself in. 

     I kept working on the TV until it was functioning again, though by that time the clock on our mantle had hit three A.M.—though, glancing at my watch, it was really only 2:38. 

     I ended up falling asleep on the couch in the glow of the local broadcast’s overnight screen, not knowing that this wasn’t the last night I’d spend on the couch for some weeks to come.

     I woke up before the sun whether I liked it or not, showered, dressed, and got in the truck before the sunrise could really slice through the towering pines surrounding the house.

     Chester was essentially a zombie by the time I got him into the truck. When I asked him if anything interesting had happened overnight, all I got in reply was a low, rumbling snore from the passenger seat. I figured that was answer enough.

     Chester woke up well enough to stumble from the truck to his bedroom once we’d arrived back at the house, but I didn’t bother trying to make conversation. I knew better by now. No one in this house was really ‘built for’ shift work, and a twelve-hour shift of doing anything sounded like hell to me. 

     He collapsed in his bed without even shutting the door, so I shut it for him before settling back in on the couch with Jordan, who had a notebook open across her lap at such an angle that I couldn’t see whatever it was she wrote. It didn’t matter to me. The TV was working; I had the last of that six-pack cooling in our over-frosted fridge; I could count today as a buffer day for all the bullshit that had occurred yesterday. 

     Unfortunately, recovery didn’t exactly mean I forgot about everything that had happened. Even as I sat there, my mind traced over the same events, over and over again, digging them deeper and deeper into my memory. It bothered me how people like Dan Cody and Jay Gatsby could just get a day’s work out of me and then somehow wriggle their way out of paying me for it. 

     It was an uncomfortable position to be in—one I’d never found myself in before. I’d never felt as though I was at a disadvantage before.

     I didn’t like it. 

     Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jordan writing away. She was never very literary, or really creative in any sense, so this surprised me. I found myself leaning over on the couch during a commercial break in an attempt to catch a glimpse of whatever it was she was writing down with such concentration.

     I managed about two inches of distance from my initial position before she slammed her notebook shut and slipped it down between her knees. She turned and stared at me, her thin lips pressed into a line and fair brow furrowed.

     I cleared my throat and sank back into my corner of the couch. The commercial on TV for Anacin-3 tablets, which I really could have used most days, suddenly held my interest as though I were being paid to watch it.

     “You know,” Jordan said, her voice a low, dry murmur under the soundtrack of the over-enthusiastic advertisement, “we have really got to get you a hobby. Or something.”

     “A hobby?” I questioned, my eyes still trained forcefully on the screen. 

     “Or something.” Jordan pulled her feet up onto the couch and curled into her own corner. “A life of your own. You used to yell at me for being nosy.”

     “I never yelled at you,” I reminded her almost before she’d finished speaking. “I just…reminded you that it’s not polite to gossip.”

     “Uh-huh.”

     “That’s right.” I took a sip of my beer. “Besides, I have a life. I’m perfectly fine with it, too. It’s a good life. An honest life.”

     “You have a life,” Jordan repeated back.

     “I do.” I took another sip of my beer.

     I didn’t drink before I came to Duluth. Even in New York, even in college, even in high school, I had never been a drinker. Now I couldn’t even get drunk .

     Jordan snatched the can right out of my hand as though she could feel those familiar inklings of shame as they crept their way into my thoughts. I didn’t even fight it. She sat the half-full can on a stack of used envelopes on the end table.

     “An honest life?” she repeated back. “When was the last time you left the house for something other than a job, then—honestly?”

     “I just picked Chester up—”

     “—from work ,” Jordan finished before I could.

     I thought for a moment. “I bought beer from the Gas-Lite yesterday. And—”

     “And you’ll be back at the Gas-Lite tomorrow for more,” she interrupted. “Does the cashier know you by name yet or are you too embarrassed to introduce yourself?”

     I reached over her to grab my beer rather than dignify that with a response. Of course, as per usual, I underestimated Jordan’s unwillingness to be limited by what was considered polite or proper. She grabbed a hold of my arm and clutched it close to her body with the same threatening power of a boa constrictor. 

     I held still, staring at her the whole while with a growing scowl. She stared right back.

     Finally, I sighed and started wrangling my arm from her grasp with a muttered, “Whatever.”

     Jordan let go of my arm with a faint little smirk. 

     I sank back into my worn-out little corner of the couch with that scowl remaining, even if I knew I’d catch hell for it later whenever Jordan wanted to rag on me for being a ‘grumpy old man’ again. 

     With that, my focus shifted back toward the broadcast on television. The commercials—yet again for things I could no longer afford—faded to black before the WDIO-DT news station logo appeared on the screen. 

     I almost changed the channel. Nothing ever happened in Duluth anymore, and I was sure that if anything had , Chester would’ve pushed through his sleep deprivation in order to gush about it. Perhaps not to me but at the very least to Jordan, who was more interested in other people’s business but didn’t have the same privilege I did in terms of acquiring other people’s business against my will.

     Changing the channel required getting up, which I was not willing to do. Instead I sat through this morning’s weather broadcast, on the brink of falling asleep.

     “And that’ll do for the forecast,” proclaimed a perky blonde whose name I could never remember. She beamed out from our staticky screen like a real-life Barbie doll with about as much plastic as one could imagine a doll to have. “Folks, do I have breaking news for you! This is fresh from our evening broadcast team. Dave, take it away.”

     Dave, who I did recognize as being the man who usually introduced the segments Chester and the rest of the night team worked on overnight, appeared onscreen. He stood on one of the decks I must have walked on just yesterday with a bright look of shock and wonder on his face. With a grin he said, “Thanks for that, Kendra.”

     The woman’s name was Kendra, then. I forgot it again almost immediately.

     Dave continued, “We’ve got a little excitement here in St. Louis County. You will never believe what two fishermen pulled from the bay late last night.”

     “Fish?” Jordan asked dryly just as a photo flooded the screen. 

     It was a blonde man—a familiar blonde man—who looked like he’d been through hell. He stared down the lens with his face all bruised and stitched up with an expression somewhere between dazed and indignant. 

     Dave continued on-screen, “Now I will admit details are still fuzzy but it seems they managed to haul in a mystery man overnight. They fished him out of the water unconscious but my reports say he’s in somewhat more of a stable condition now—the only issue is that he has no clue who he is.”

     “I do,” I whispered to myself, leaning forward eagerly toward the screen.

     “What?” asked Jordan.

     “I do!” I jumped up. “That’s the guy who cheated me out of my money yesterday!”

     “Gay Richie Rich?” Jordan asked, looking at the screen skeptically. 

     “I mean…it sure looks like him,” I said, settling back down onto the couch with admitted discomfort. “I don’t know how the hell he got so beat up.”

     Though…I could guess. I wouldn’t let myself think about it. Unless…

     The photo had shifted to another full-body image of the man in a hospital gown, and what had seemed ‘petite’ to me yesterday now struck me as frail and undernourished. It might’ve just been the massive sheet of the hospital gown or the awful, washed-out colors of our television screen. I stared at the image for half a second too long before shoving any sympathy I might’ve garnered back down into the deepest pits of my heart where it belonged. Or, at least, I attempted to hide away. Jury would remain out over whether or not I succeeded.

     Dave kept on, “Now, now, we do have a video of when they managed to get him into a stable enough condition to speak. You—if your kids are up, you might want to shoo them out of the room.”

     I looked over at Jordan. “Well, you heard the man.”

     “Yeah, I did. Get out.” She twisted around on the couch to start lightly kicking the side of my thigh in an attempt to push me off the couch. I grabbed her feet and pushed them away, laughing before I could help myself. 

     I cast my gaze back toward the television screen as a familiar voice flooded the room. Sure enough, in spite of the injuries I could tell that it was most certainly the Mr. Gatsby I’d had the displeasure of meeting just yesterday.

     “Get that thing out of my face…” he groaned, reaching out toward the camera lens. The cameraman—it had to have been Chester, of course, seeing as this had been filmed last night—stumbled back.

     Annie, one of the night anchors that I did recognize, appeared on screen next to Gatsby’s hospital bed. She held a microphone out to him, asking, “Sir—sir, do you know your name?”

     Gatsby groaned again and tried to shove the microphone away, as well. He kept batting limply at it the whole while he spoke. “I thought I told you to get that thing out of my face!...of…of course I know my name. Don’t be stupid. It’s…um…”

     Annie kept the microphone out toward him. She waited patiently while Gatsby’s bruised face twisted from confusion to frustration.

     He huffed. “This is absurd. Of course I know my name. I just…I’m having some difficulties recalling it with all this… fuss and oh , don’t tell me you’re recording this. For what? Is this some sort of humiliation tactic?”

     “Ah…no, sir,” said Annie. “This is WDIO-DT, recording for tomorrow’s broadcast.”

     “Broadcast?” Gatsby muttered, pulling his blanket back up to his chin. “I’m going to be on television? Like this ?”

     Annie blinked and turned away, casting a bright smile at the camera. “Well, yes, but I’m sure you’re just glad to be alive, regardless of—”

     “I might not recall my name but I know I’d rather be dead than ugly,” Gatsby interrupted. “Shut the camera off. I want the film destroyed and—”

     And the broadcast went to black for a second before returning to the shot of Dave there on the harbor split in with Kendra in the newsroom.

     Kendra laughed. So did Dave.

     “What a charmer!” Kendra exclaimed. “Well, we hope that with this broadcast, his family or friends or—well, anyone who knows him will see him and come to solve the mystery of his identity. I’m being told he’s being held at St. Mary’s until someone comes to claim him.”

     I tuned out after that. I turned to Jordan and said, “That was him. He’s the one who cheated us out of our rent money.”

     “Yeah? So?” She crossed her arms. “You made it sound like he was under some pretty strict control.”

     “Yeah, he was,” I said, a plan forming in my mind even as I spoke. What I couldn’t admit out loud, however, was the true motivation lying in the shadow of said plan. I might’ve even given it away with that one agreement. “Which is why we need to hurry up there and get him before that old bastard does.”

     Jordan narrowed her eyes at me. “Since when is it our problem—”

     “Since we can make him work off what he owes us, Jordan.”

     Because that was most certainly the reason I wanted to snatch this man from his hospital bed. No, for certain, my sympathy for anyone above a certain tax bracket had died with the inanity and shallowness of the wealthy I’d left behind in New York, the same sort of people who sucked Duluth dry for nothing. Jay Gatsby was one of them.

     But he didn’t have to be. He was a blank slate at the moment. 

     Jordan stood up from the couch. “So your plan is to…what? Convince that psycho to build me a closet? Finally? Please?”

     “No, no, I don’t—even before whatever pushed him to end up in the bay, I wouldn’t trust that man with a hammer.” I stood and gestured around at our cluttered living room. It was practically unlivable if I forced myself to look at it as if with fresh eyes. “I mean…look at this house, Jordan. We need somebody who’s just here to take care of it. Think about it this way: at minimum wage, forty hours a week, it’ll only take him…what? A month or so to pay back the 600 bucks he owes us?”

     “And then what?” Jordan asked after a moment of silence. “After he’s done playing maid for a month, what then?”

     I shrugged carelessly. “Hell if I care. Maybe he’ll take a liking to the housewife life. If he doesn’t, we’ll just—I don’t know, dump him off in the harbor again. If he hated it so much, he won't come back.”

     Jordan scoffed and pushed her bangs up off her forehead. “Alright. Fine.”

     And before I could think too hard about it, before I could draw back from this reckless spark of immature wrath, I grabbed the keys to the truck and headed out the door, Jordan trailing behind.

     “I’m waiting in the truck,” was all Jordan said to me on the ride up, and even then, she only spoke once we were parked in front of the hospital. I figured that was well within her rights even if I would have rather she had spoken to distract me from my growing spiral of doubt.

     I couldn’t stop now, though. And I couldn’t fully commit to the idea that grabbing this man and taking him home was simply a means of getting even—especially when I walked directly past Mr. Dan Cody himself, leaving the hospital empty-handed.

     He didn’t recognize me even if I stumbled to a stop in the chilly hospital hallway in order to stare him down as he passed. The burly older man strode past me as though he were being pursued—and I supposed he must’ve thought he was: pursued by the threat of consequences.

      During the drive over, my mind had wandered somewhat from my quest for revenge. I’d put that at the forefront of my reasoning anytime one of my roommates questioned my actions, but really, as I caught a glimpse of the muscular ridge of that man’s shoulders even in his old age, I understood that the ‘pit’ I’d shoved all my sympathy into had a very soft place for Gatsby to land at the bottom. 

     I had to get him away from that man. That didn’t mean he’d get away from the consequences of his own behavior, however.

     The receptionist was more than willing to redirect me to the psych ward once I arrived. Apparently, given Gatsby’s behavior, they’d deemed it appropriate to place him there since his injuries were all apparently somewhat superficial in spite of their visual severity and the resulting amnesia. 

     Wearing my only remaining suit coat and my best work boots I walked into that psych ward as though I were meant to be there. The security guard and a doctor met me with matching grins.

     “We were beginning to think nobody would come and claim him,” proclaimed the security guard. He had a full plastic bag from the Gas-Lite in his hands. 

     “Oh, yeah, well, we were starting to worry he’d never come home!” I assured the guard and the doctor, who was still watching me with a hopeful smile. That should have concerned me more, but I wrote it off, too distracted by my own ruse.

     The security guard beamed at me and held the bag out. “Here are some personal effects you might recognize.”

     He passed me the bag and I began shifting through it. I didn’t recognize the girly pink western shirt or the designer silk briefs, but then again, I hadn’t exactly seen Mr. Gatsby wearing many clothes at all, and I hadn’t paid much attention to the vast collection in his closet. I could easily believe these clothes belonged to him. 

     “Yup, these are his alright. What he was wearing when we lost him, anyway,” I said as the men led me through the safety gate and toward the recreation room for the patients. 

     “And how exactly did you lose him, Mr…?” asked the doctor.

     “Carraway,” I supplied as we entered through a locked, windowed door into the recreation room. The story came to me easily. Stories always had. “He disappeared somewhere on the shore of the bay and we couldn’t find him. We were all a little too drunk after…after a night at Ranchero’s!”

     “Oh! My son loves that joint,” exclaimed the doctor with a nod and a bright expression. “Did you folks get a chance to check out that new mechanical bull they just put in?”

     I hadn’t been to Ranchero’s, the local Western-themed bar, in weeks. Most people in attendance didn’t know that it was a hot spot for sailors of a certain persuasion to hook up with the lonely men of the town. Chester most certainly did, and had made a habit of dragging me out there once a week since the new year, but I’d just been dropping him off there and going home as of late. I just wasn’t interested in what that life had to offer.

     So I had no clue about any mechanical bull there, but I nodded anyway. “Oh, no, yeah, for sure. Jay’s a real champ at riding.”

     The name flowed out so easily that I almost didn’t catch what I had just said. Neither of the men picked up on any accidental innuendo, however, sparing me the humiliation of having to explain myself.

     “That would explain those bruises on the insides of his legs, then,” said the doctor, flipping papers on the clipboard he’d been holding. “We could hazard a guess about the knocks to his forehead and his face, but that part of the body is awful hard to bruise without constant, forceful pressure. We thought maybe he’d held himself up on an old dock pole or something out in the water but the mechanical bull makes sense.”

     “Explains that western shirt, too,” said the guard with a drawn-out whistle. “Them folks down at Ranchero’s, they’re somethin’ else, I tell ya.”

     I couldn’t quite catch up to the conversation for just a second. Too many pieces were falling into place to form an awful, ugly picture of the night Gatsby must’ve endured with that Dan Cody—Dan Cody who’d just abandoned him moments ago. Possibly without even checking on him at all. It made me sick enough that I had to shut my eyes and center myself again.

     I was doing this for revenge. This was for revenge, nothing else. Gatsby deserved this for how he’d treated me on that yacht and I couldn’t assume the worst in regards to what had been done to him.

     “Now, Mr. Carraway, I assume being that you’re here, you must be his next of kin?” asked the doctor. “Are you family?”

     “No,” I declared before I could stop myself. Then, backtracking, I offered, “We’re…roommates. We’re roommates. Yeah.”

     “Hard times,” agreed the guard. “Easiest to shack up with somebody else, take the edge off. You know what I’m saying?”

     I looked at him from underneath my eyebrows. “...I suppose. But he doesn’t have any family.”

     The doctor wrote something down on his clipboard. “Well, as long as somebody’s here for him. He should be out any second, and—”

     And sure enough, the door to the recreation room swung open behind us at that very moment. A harried nurse shuffled her way in with Gatsby in tow, looking pained and annoyed with a gauze pad taped to the center of his forehead.

     I hadn’t acted outside of a few plays in college, but I would’ve demanded an Academy Award for the way I lit up at the sight of the man. 

     “Jay!” I exclaimed, crossing the room to go and greet him. I made it within ten feet before he struck his hand up with sudden, jarring force.

     “Stop!” he commanded sharply. He looked around me toward the doctor, watching him in offense for a second before asking, “And just who is this…unshaven beast meant to be?”

     “It’s good to see you too, roomie,” I joked, and it did get a few chuckles from the hospital staff around me. This somewhat put me at ease, but I looked around at them as if I were concerned. 

     The doctor sighed. “Ah, well, sir, your friend here has had an almost total loss of memory.”

     I feigned hurt as if it were my job. “I…I can’t believe he wouldn’t recognize me. We—well, Christ, after all we’ve been through…”

     I couldn’t make up exactly what that might’ve entailed on the spot, but then, I didn’t have to. 

     Gatsby scoffed and shoved past me. “I wouldn’t share a living arrangement with this sort of… whatever you are, if you paid me. I might not know my name but I know I have standards.”

     “Jay,” I said. “Your name is Jay Gatsby. Does that ring a bell?”

     For some reason, a shade of this most disturbed sort of confusion passed over the man’s face before he rushed to agree, “Well—sure it does. But that could mean anything. You could mean to harm me—you could’ve pushed me into the bay, for all we know, and now you’re here to finish me off!”

     “No, I’m—don’t be ridiculous, Jay,” I argued back. “If I wanted to kill you I would’ve done it years ago. We’re not getting rid of each other now. ”

     Both the available nurses in the room looked at each other with an expression that said they understood that sentiment very well. I couldn’t imagine what a horror this man had been to either of them. When I looked up even the doctor had that same uncomfortable tightness to his face. It told me everything I needed to know.

     Gatsby, however, picked up on none of that. He stared me down with two bruised eyes and spat, “That’s not a very good mark on your character, then, is it?” He shot his gaze over at the doctor. “Surely you won’t release me to this man, will you, old sport?”

     The strange little pragmatic marker floated in the air, untethered from meaning but rooted somewhere deep in this man’s forgotten memories. I wondered briefly where he picked it up from. The likely solution struck me as unpleasant. If this man could forget anything, I would hope it would end up being the man he’d been with on the yacht.

     The doctor took a deep breath in and sighed it out. “Alright, sure. I suppose we can’t just…release you without some sort of…proof.” Even as he said this, the staff available in the recreation room all seemed to hold their breath, waiting for me to pull a rabbit out of a hat. 

     I couldn’t. Not for a second, anyway, and in that second, Gatsby latched on to demand, “Why don’t I have any family, then? Why is it just you ?”

     Then the storytelling kicked back in. I took a sharp breath in between my teeth and kicked my heel against the tile floor. 

     “Well, I hate to break it to you like this, but…maybe it’ll help jog your memory.” I rubbed the back of my head. “They’re, uh…well, they’re all dead now, Jay.”

     Gatsby sat down hard in one of the flimsy hospital chairs and instantly winced. “Good god, why am I so sore?”

     “Mechanical bull,” the doctor, the guard, and I all answered in unison.

     Gatsby scowled across the room at me, then let the expression wilt as he raised his hand to his bandaged forehead. “All dead? Where?” He lifted his eyes back up toward me. “Where did I grow up?”

     “San Fran. Bay area, I think. You moved up here when they passed.”

     Gatsby nodded slowly, but I could see nothing in his blotchy expression to suggest he recalled any of this. Of course he wouldn’t. It was a pack of lies.

     The guard said, “Well, that’s good enough for me.”

     The doctor held up his pen. “I think that’s good, but…do you happen to have any physical evidence, Mr. Carraway? Just something I can actually put on record?”

     “Physical…evidence,” I said, patting my pockets as if I had anything on me that might prove I knew this man. “I mean, I don’t have anything on me, but…”

     And then it occurred to me.

     I asked, “I…I do know something that I guess not everybody would.”

     The hospital staff all looked at me. A few of the patients off in their corners did, too, and in the end, so did Gatsby.

     I cleared my throat, my face heating once again but fortunately hidden under the dark scruff of my beard. “He’s got a, uh…well, it’s a heart-shaped tattoo on his…” I glanced at the nurses, then leaned more toward the guard and the doctor to finish, “It’s on his left ass cheek. He lost a bet a couple years back.”

     “I would never have a tattoo,” spat Gatsby even as he walked around behind the staticky television on mute in the corner. “And for the record, I don’t need someone to look after me. You could have just released me on my own accord. I can take care of myself.” He paused. “I think.”

     While he lifted his hospital gown to check, the guard looked over at me with new suspicion. 

     “...‘roommates’, huh?” he asked dryly.

     I just avoided looking at him.

     Behind the television, Gatsby took a sharp intake of breath. He met my eyes between the crooked antennae of the television before averting his gaze harshly toward the floor. He’d seen the tattoo. 

     “We have a winner!” exclaimed the doctor. 

     Gatsby shuffled out from behind the television after several seconds of marked hesitation. From that point, the nurse practically filled out the release forms for me, and we were out the hospital doors in record time.

Chapter Text

JAY

     I said nothing as we left the hospital. 

     Really, I couldn’t think of a thing to say that wouldn’t absolutely shatter any sort of foundation I had at that moment—everything that came to mind was vile, even by my own measure, which was for whatever reason I could assume to have been rather lenient on what I thought was appropriate to say. 

     Nick was the first familiar sight I had seen since I woke up in that hospital bed, but even beyond that, these faint brushes of memory from the dim depths of my mind did nothing to persuade me that our relationship, whatever it had been, could have been pleasant. All I felt were these odd flashes of heat in my face—anger. It must have been anger.

     It took until Nick had the audacity to move me around a pothole in the parking lot like some sort of invalid before I finally broke and opened my mouth to speak. 

     “I can make it to the car by myself, thank you!” I ripped my arm out of his grip and he stood back a foot or so, his hands coming up in a frustrated show of surrender. 

     “Okay, okay,” he said, scowling behind that tangled mess of a beard. 

     I thought I could remember the feel of it under my fingers. The thought fled from my grasp almost immediately, however, leaving me confused as to whether it had been the return of a memory or the inception of a dream. Or a thought of another beard entirely. But whose?

     We came to a stop at the edge of where cars kept passing us by and honking briefly. Nick would raise his hand at a few of them, but we never moved. I glared up at him until the sunshine streaming around him became too much for my aching head, and then I looked down at where the chilly hand of the breeze crept in through a place on my shirt where a button had gone missing.

     “That’s a shame…” I murmured, sticking my own hand through the spot to feel my bare stomach underneath. It rumbled. I hadn’t been able to keep down the tasteless garbage they’d shoveled toward me in the hospital, but something within me, distant and intangible as the thought of a beard underneath my fingertips, told me I ought to avoid eating anyhow. I felt most comfortable now that I was really hungry. 

     “What is?” asked my so-called roommate, exasperated as he leaned on what I assumed to be our car.

     “Are all my clothes this out of date and shabby?” I replied, looking up at him once more only for a helpful cloud to come cover the sun. I kept my eyes on him, frowning ever so slightly. 

     “...right,” he said after a moment. “Your clothes…”

     “Yes.” I cleared my throat. “My clothes. Oh, don’t tell me I’m a nudist or something.”

     “No!” he exclaimed quickly enough to startle me somewhat. I took a step back as he spluttered, “No, god. No. Of course not. But they’re, um…they’re all dirty. I’ll stop on the way home to call Chester and have him wash them for you so you’ve got something to wear that isn’t….” He gestured at my water-stained outfit with evident disturbance.

     “Chester,” I repeated back to him. “And is that our…hired help?”

     For whatever reason it simply felt like the right thing to say. I wasn’t sure why. Again I had brushed up on some sort of familiarity within myself only for it to disappear an instant later. It didn’t help that Nick laughed at what I had said as though it were a joke.

     “Chester?” he asked. “No. But it’s funny you should say that.”

     I didn’t know what to make of that. I took a deep breath, looked at the car Nick was leaning on, and asked, “Is this my car, then?”

     “I don’t know,” he said smugly. “You said you could make it to the car all by yourself. I was letting you lead me.”

     I suddenly had the urge to stamp my foot, but I got the feeling it wouldn’t get me very far. As a matter of fact, I felt just the faintest tinge of fear at the idea. Surely Nick wasn’t really violent, was he? I’d seen the looks the doctor and guard had shared earlier, implying something more between us, but I’d already given in to the idea that I was stuck with this man. Even if he happened to be the reason I’d ended up in the water to begin with.

     The water. I could remember the water. Nothing before that, and nothing after until I woke up at the hospital. I felt a little sick at the reminder and almost, almost reached out to hold on to Nick, but I wouldn’t dare give him the satisfaction while he acted like this. I only wished I could’ve understood if this was out of character for him. I supposed I would just have to learn if it was.

     “Fine,” I finally spat. “Where is it, then?”

     Nick reached out to take me by the shoulders. Before I could protest, he’d turned me around slowly to face an absolute rolling junkyard sitting at the back of the parking lot. He lifted one hand off my shoulder to point at it. A young blonde woman with an over-teased bobbed cut and bangs that defied gravity sat in the passenger seat, peering back at us with a most well-practiced disinterest. I watched as she blew a bubble with her gum, and then I waited for the truck to fall apart with the resulting pop of the bubble.

     It stayed whole, unfortunately, leaving me sure that we’d have to drive it somewhere.

     “...that thing?” I finally asked. “We’re taking that thing home?”

     “Hey,” Nick admonished. “Be nice to Jordan. She’s had a rough year—she lost the big tournament and her boyfriend broke up with her.”

     I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at that. 

     We crossed the last of the parking lot to where the miserable excuse for a vehicle crouched in wait, and as we approached, I held out my hand expectantly toward Nick. 

     He stopped, staring at my open palm with growing confusion, before reaching out with the evident intent of taking my hand. I scoffed in disgust and yanked my hand back until he withdrew his, and then I held my hand out to him again.

     “The keys,” I explained. 

     For whatever reason, I felt the urge to drive. The doctor had told me that these sorts of urges would be common, although likely unexplainable until I hit upon whatever action or sight that would regain my memory for me. Until then, all I could do was what I felt led to do—and I supposed I must have been the driver before I hit my head.
    Until, of course, Nick swatted my hand away and opened up the driver-side door, saying, “Absolutely not. You’re not driving my truck.”

     “ Your truck. Right. All right. Got it.” I ran my hand over my hair and nodded tensely at Jordan through the open driver’s side window. She peered back at me down the perfect little line of her nose. I didn’t turn away from her as I asked Nick, “Do I have a car, then? I’m sure I ought to try to remember how to drive, and it ought to be easy considering I still remember how to walk and talk and—”

     “Of course you have a car,” Nick interrupted to assure me as he swung open the driver’s side door of the truck. It creaked and let down a rain of rust onto the asphalt. “If you can get it to run.”

     With that, he swatted at my hind end, the shock of which catapulted me forward onto the bench seat of the truck. With my face on fire I scrambled upright in the rather limited space of the middle seat. 

     Nick got in a moment later. Fortunately, Jordan and I were both thin, leaving us with just enough space not to become uncomfortable—for lack of space, anyway. I still felt entirely unsettled by this whole proposition of a life I couldn’t remember. It didn’t feel right, but then again, had anything ever? I wouldn’t know.

     And so without another word Nick started the truck up—no less than seven times before the miserable rustbucket finally cranked—and we were on our way in a puff of black smoke. 

     None of us said a word for the first half of that drive. I sat as straight as I could and tried to ignore the pressure of Nick’s thigh against mine and the ever-present aches of my body. I’d seen myself in the hospital only once, right before those miserable newscasters accosted me in my bed, and the sight hadn’t been pretty. I couldn’t imagine how much it had worsened since then. 

     We eventually rolled to a stop somewhere outside of the more populous area of town, at a run-down murder shack supposedly called the Gas-Lite, with two awful rusty pumps out front that I was sure would start a fire the very moment anyone asked them to pump gas.

     As we shuddered into a parking spot, Jordan asked, “And why are we here?”

     Her tone was pointed like a javelin aimed right at Nick’s throat, and he flinched accordingly.

     “They’ve got a payphone inside. I gotta call Chester,” he said. “Let him know to start Jay’s laundry.”

     “Jay’s laundry?” she asked, arching one fine brow.

     Nick didn’t hear her, or else he did and aimed purposefully not to respond. The truck door shut hard behind him as he strode over weeds and cracks in the pavement to enter the convenience store. 

     Jordan and I sat in silence for several seconds, staring at nothing and trying not to acknowledge each other until finally, out of nowhere, she stated, “I bet you five dollars he comes out with a six-pack.”

     I blinked. “I don’t have five dollars.”

     “Me neither.”

     I managed a little bit of a laugh at that, even as misgivings crept up regarding the basis of the bet to begin with. Jordan gave something of a sad sort of smile and tucked her fist against her cheek. She stared at me in silence for several seconds before turning to look out the window again. Her hair stayed in place.

     “Was…” I took a deep breath. “Was that a joke I would’ve understood…before?”

     It felt bitterly familiar, the threat of poverty, even as we joked about it. I guess this was my life. But still, something about the sensation of familiarity felt misplaced.

     Jordan kept her eyes out the window and stayed quiet long enough that I thought she didn’t mean to respond at all. Until, finally, she murmured, “I don’t know.”

     I stared at her, at the back of her head, for a moment before pulling my knees up from their places on either side of the gear shift. The motion sent spasms all throughout my core—sore from the bull-riding I couldn’t remember?—but I tucked my chin up onto my knees anyway. Fetal position simply felt the safest, even if I had to remain upright and with my pants unbuttoned. They were much too tight when I buttoned them.

     Around the spiderweb crack in the windshield I could see Nick on the payphone inside the gas station. He seemed agitated, but perhaps this was simply yet another piece of the puzzle I was missing. Maybe he and this unseen Chester didn’t get along. I couldn’t imagine that worked very well in the case of a roommate relationship.

     What sort of hell did I live through every day, if I lived with this young girl, that strange Nick, and some unforeseen adversary named Chester?

     I supposed I would have to find out, and sooner rather than later, because Nick left the convenience store in a huff and stormed his way back into the truck, slamming the door as he settled back into the driver’s seat. With that, he threw the truck furiously into reverse and almost ran down a pedestrian getting us back onto the road.

     “You really ought to be more careful!” I admonished before I could help it. “I don’t care how upset you are—”

     “And he has the audacity to call me a lousy driver,” Jordan chimed in dryly. 

     I gestured pointedly toward her as I looked at Nick. “See? She has the privilege of recalling any prior offenses you might’ve made on the road. Are you entirely sure I wouldn’t fare better for us in the driver’s seat?”

     “Do you know the way home?” Nick asked, his jaw tight and knuckles white on the thin, ribbed circle of the steering wheel. 

     “You could tell me.” I held my knees tighter to my chest; something within me coiled tighter and tighter the longer the argument went on. “The doctor said I’d need your help to remember myself. So you should help me, shouldn’t you?”

     “Yeah, Nick,” said Jordan, smirking now at the edge of my periphery. “Shouldn’t you help him ?”

     He didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Or else he didn’t care to respond, because he didn’t say a thing for the rest of the ride back to—well, I suppose I ought to call it home. 

     Though the application of that word dissipated swiftly from my mind the moment I laid eyes on the place. We turned off the main road and rumbled along a wooded drive up to a clearing that fought a desperate, losing battle against the forest and hills surrounding. I peered out over the heaps of metal and wood and debris as though an explosion had gone off and waited in silence for either of my companions to say something, anything, to explain the state of the place, but neither of them looked shocked.

     The house itself might’ve been the worst of all. The porch sagged under the weight of an old washing machine filled to the brim with mechanical parts. I waited until Jordan had gotten out of the truck and crossed the front porch without issue before I dared crawl out of the truck and toward the steps myself.

     Nick did not wait for me at first. I picked my barefooted way carefully around the remains of beer cans and shattered bottles, over a minefield of gravel and shards of discarded metal, and through hip-high weeds to ascend two splintering wooden steps onto a front porch that really, really did not care to have my weight and Nick’s at the same time.

     He had paused on the porch, though. As Jordan brushed past us and into the mysterious depths of the house, Nick stood in the doorway and stared down at me with his arms crossed over his chest.

     “Now, look, Jay,” he said after a moment filled with nothing but birdsong. The birds got a few more chirps in before he continued, “We all mean the best for you. That much I can promise.”

     I scowled up at him and the wasp’s nest stuck against the roof of the porch, right above his head. I wished it would fall, and then I took that wish back.

     “I’m sure. That’s why you took so long to come and find me.”

     “It took so long because we were drunk, Jay,” said Nick, rolling his eyes as he turned away to enter the house. I waited just a moment before following him, ready to argue against that statement—until it occurred to me that I couldn’t argue what I didn’t know. Even if my instinct led me to believe that I didn’t drink, well, it was an easy explanation for how I’d ended up in the water to begin with, and I didn’t exactly have any other ideas. None that made this facet of my life bearable, anyhow.

     I sighed as we entered from the bright white light of the summer’s day and into the dim, dusty depths of our run-down little home in the hills. It looked as though the furniture had been arranged to form a maze. I wandered past chairs and shelving units until we exited on the other side, into a kitchen with remarkably few dishes in the sink given the state of everything else. There was an unfamiliar sort of mechanical humming in the distance and it visibly shook the canned goods on the shelf above the stove.

     I sneezed once at the dust before asking with great reluctance, “Is this…really…where we live? Or is it some awful—”

     “Yes, this is where we live,” Nick replied, fairly clearly exasperated. “You’ve lived here for, I don’t know, five years, give or take?”

     “...I wouldn’t live in these conditions.” I looked around at the endless clutter. “I simply wouldn’t. It’s not presentable. It’s disrespectful, even, to—”

     “Well, you did live in these conditions,” Nick insisted, “which is part of the problem. We can’t afford to quit our jobs to help you with yours, Jay. Do you still remember how to clean?”

     I stared up at him. “...this was my job? Cleaning?”

     “Yeah,” said Nick, just a little too quickly for my comfort. “You just stayed home. And didn’t leave. That’s—that’s why you got so drunk last night. You hadn’t been out in a while.”

     I continued staring at him, at the wrinkle in between his eyebrows, and wondered if that was true. It didn’t seem like it, but then again, I did believe it was important to keep one’s living space clean and tidy to prevent visitors from thinking I was—that we were—untidy people. 

     I supposed we must have been untidy people, then, as I turned to study the horrible clutter once more. I felt a sort of shame rise up my neck in the form of heat; it was such a blessing to have a house at all, and we’d disrespected our great fortune so much. It was especially worse if everyone else worked and it was my responsibility to keep all of this clean. How could I have let it slip so far? I couldn’t really know myself, but I didn’t think it in my character to allow such a mess to gather.

     Oh, well. I would just have to figure it out. But that didn’t excuse the way Nick spoke to me. I’d just left the hospital! He might’ve thought I had died in the water they’d fished me out of. How could he lose his patience so easily?

     I turned to confront him over that very thing only to find Nick buried in the wheezing refrigerator. As he pulled out a can of beer, I turned to look at Jordan, who with great determination turned away from my line of sight to instead study the surface of the messy kitchen table with great interest.

     No one said anything for several seconds. Finally, just as I went to ask where my things were, a door opened just off the side of the kitchen—a door I had assumed would’ve led to the laundry room or something of the sort. Instead, the limited view of the open door provided a look into an overly cramped bedroom paneled like most of the house in dark, unpainted wood, but covered for the most part in framed photographs, all displayed in perfect lines.

     The occupant of said room shifted again to take my focus. In the doorway stood a pale man with dark, natural red hair and his bare arms crossed over his chest. He leaned on the doorframe and stared at me for just a moment before looking up at Nick and asking, “Hey, um…can we talk for just a second? Just, like, literally one single second? Outside?”

     “...will it keep?” Nick asked after a moment of silence. “Because I’m sort of in the middle of something here.” As he spoke, Jordan quite suddenly snatched an envelope off the kitchen table and hurried to the base of a staircase that stretched unseen behind the wall of the living room. She disappeared up the staircase and left us alone in our strange sort of standoff.

     The unfamiliar redhead bit his bottom lip and peered at me in silence for a moment before shaking his head, eyes wide and unblinking as he looked across the kitchen at Nick. 

     At this, Nick huffed out a bit of a sigh and turned to head back through the front door. The redhead ghosted past me to follow him, leaving me all alone in the middle of a kitchen I was supposed to remember but didn’t.

     Things were somehow familiar, at least. Everything in the place brushed up on something within me, signaling that I should indeed have some sort of recollection of this place and everything in it, but nothing… recent came to mind. I’d been in a filthy, run-down kitchen like this before, but I just had the strangest feeling it was much longer ago than the last five years. 

     The doctor had said my memories might be confused, though. And that, in order to restore my memory, I ought to ‘walk down familiar paths’ and commit to what used to be my daily habits. 

     If only I could have recalled them.

Chapter Text

Nick

     “What the fuck is your damage?” Chester demanded the very second the door shut behind us. He glanced over his freckled shoulder to ensure no one was listening before dragging me further off to the side of the porch, where we wouldn’t be heard anyway. The cicadas in the trees could drown out just about everything. Chester added, “I go to sleep for a couple of hours and you bring home another roommate?”

     I crossed my arms over my chest and looked out over the yard rather than dare look over at Chester as I said, “Yeah. I guess so.”

     Chester scoffed and asked, “And does he have a job?”

     “...he’s gonna take care of the house,” I muttered, only to be completely overtaken by Chester’s interruption.

     “He’s gonna what ?” he demanded. 

     “I said, he’s going to take care—”

     “No, no, I heard you,” Chester said, “I was just giving you a chance to take it back. Are you kidding? We can’t afford to feed another person, Nick, and it’s not like we can pay him—”

     “We’re not paying him,” I hissed, grabbing a hold of his arm. “That’s the son of a bitch who cheated me out of my money on the yacht.” I let go of his arm, my hand flying off as I asked, “Don’t you recognize him from the broadcast you filmed last night? You were holding the camera, weren’t you?”

     Chester gave me a look then that was so saddled with misery that I almost dropped all my anger and hugged him. Almost. Chester pushed his red hair off his forehead with a heavy sigh through his nose and admitted softly, “No. That was Dottie.” Dottie was a coworker of Chester’s, approximately a hundred years old, and had no business holding the camera nor any other equipment on-site. 

     I frowned at him. “Why on earth would they put her in charge of the camera over you?”

     Chester scoffed mirthlessly. “I was on warehouse duty all night, moving around archival footage like it really matters where it sits to rot. Do you remember that guy I brought home from Ranchero’s a couple of weeks ago? Navy boy. Tall, brown hair…”

     “That could match just about anyone you bring home,” I reminded him. “Was it the one with the lisp?”

     “Yeah,” Chester said. “Him.” He wrapped his arms around himself. “Apparently, he was the son of the head of the station, back on leave for a couple of weeks. And he didn’t like how fast I moved on from him.”

     “Oh my god,” was all that I could think to say at first. Instantly that familiar dread crept into my core to eat away at any sort of hope I’d managed to foster today. “Did you get fired?”

     They could do that. A couple of states had passed laws against it, and there was some sort of ordinance held in some parts of Minnesota, but the threat of being fired for being a homosexual under the guise of quite literally any other made-up cause still hung heavy over all of us. And if Chester got fired, we were absolutely and totally without a doubt ruined from the foundation up. There weren’t enough places hiring for us to risk that sort of thing.

     Thankfully, Chester shook his head. “No, thank god. Though it was really fucking close, Nick. I don’t think I’ll be allowed on-scene again for a long while. It’s much… safer , or whatever, to keep me alone on warehouse duty. Since I’m such a threat, I guess.”

     He joked there, but I could hear an unfamiliar, defeated sort of hollowness to his tone that refused to leave me be. After a moment I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. It was about as close as I could get to comforting him without overstepping some sort of boundary. 

     “Well, I’m sorry they’re raising such hell for you,” I said, “but at least you still have the job.”

     “Right,” Chester agreed. He placed his hand over mine for a moment before letting it drop in a sudden sort of way, as if he’d remembered something. “But no, I wasn’t holding the camera for anything last night. I spent the entire night wheeling the heaviest reels of film you can imagine across a warehouse.”

     I took a deep breath and withdrew my hand to fix my suit-coat. I didn’t feel comfortable wearing it anymore, even if it had once been my usual attire.

     “Well…that’s Jay in there. Jay Gatsby. He’s the guy who cheated us out of our rent money,” I explained in a quiet voice as I leaned in so Chester would hear me. “Apparently he ended up in the water somehow and washed up with no memory of who he is or how he got there. And his…boyfriend, I guess, didn’t want to claim him, so I thought we could get our money’s worth out of him and have him work off his debt taking care of the house. And us. Wouldn’t it be nice to come home to a freshly cooked meal every night?”

     “One,” Chester began almost instantly, “can he even be trusted with the stove if he can’t remember his own name, and two: what do you think he’s gonna cook us dinner with? Last time I checked the pantry we had half a box of elbow macaroni and a can of tomato paste that’s almost definitely expired.”

     “Yeah, yeah…” I muttered, rubbing the back of my head. “Scratch dinner, then…”

     Chester took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. “And where is he going to sleep? We were already out of bedrooms by the time Jordan came along, Nick. Don’t you think he’s going to notice there are three beds and four of us?”

     I scowled, because no, I hadn’t thought of that , either. Still, it was easy enough to say, “I’ll just sleep on the couch. Say it’s for my back or something. He can have my bed.”

     “In your room, full of your stuff and none of his?” Chester asked, his freckled arms crossed over his thin chest. 

     “...yeah,” I said. I stood tall even against the desire to flinch away from his brutal illuminations of every fault in my harebrained scheme. “He just shares my stuff. That’s all.”

     “Including your clothes?” Chester demanded. “When you called and said to put on a load of laundry, I thought you meant for us. I even put everything away for everybody.”

     “Yeah, well, he can wear some of my clothes until we can get up to the Salvation Army, alright? Or whoever’s clothes. I don’t think he’ll care, given what I’ve seen him in already.”

     Chester shot me a more withering look than he’d ever given me before. Now was the time to flinch away from him.

     “Nick,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “ Nick …there is not a person in this house under six feet tall. Do you not think he’s going to notice that all his clothes are two sizes too big? There’s not a ‘small’ or ‘petite’ anything in this house, except for him, I guess.”

     “We’ll just tell him that’s his fashion sense,” I said even though I knew that was the worst lie I’d come up with yet. “That it’s—I don’t know, comfort over fashion. Or we can tell him he used to be a lot heavier and he’s just slimmed down. It’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out as we go and it’ll be fine. I don’t know why you’re so worried about it.”

     “Because this is weird! It’s weird, Nick. Really weird.” 

     “It’s…not.”

     “It is,” Chester insisted. “You kidnapped an amnesiac just to prove a point.” He paused, crossing his arms tightly once more over his chest, and added, “Unless you think he’s cute. Because you already told us he was gay, Nick, and if he’s wearing your clothes and sleeping in your room and you’re the one explaining his past to him—you know exactly what he’s going to end up thinking.”

     “I don’t care,” I said as firmly as I could. “I didn’t bring him home for that. He’s too rich for my tastes.”

     “Yeah fucking right,” he said, rolling his eyes before setting them on me in an inescapable sort of way. His anger flickered and dampened as he continued, “Nick…what does this mean for us?”

     “What do you mean?” I evaded almost before he’d gotten the question out.

     Chester frowned, watching my face in silence for several seconds before finally scoffing and asking, “Can I still get a pity fuck every so often, then? Whenever I come home empty-handed?”

     That was how it had been since we moved out here, of course. Neither of us would ever commit to anything, but if I happened to pick him up from Ranchero’s instead of letting him come home with whoever he got lucky with, then we might’ve gotten carried away together. After all, that was the only source of intimacy I could allow myself anymore, and Chester seemed to know he could always fall back on me if necessary.

     Until now, I guess.

     I watched the shadow of a cloud pass over his pale face before I looked away, out into the depths of the forest, and said, “Yeah. Of course. This doesn’t change that.”

     I could feel him looking at me. Finally, after a moment of cicada-screams and the faint hiss of a car passing on the main road, he said, “Fine. Good.” He glanced over his shoulder through the kitchen window, through the open blinds of which we could see Jordan and Gatsby poring over a penny saver for the local supermarket. Chester added softly, “He is cute, though…”

     “Shut up,” I muttered, pushing past him to enter the house once more. It seemed like every single board creaked under my feet as I walked, but perhaps that was for the best so that the pair in the kitchen could hear me coming.

     Gatsby jumped up from his seat as soon as I entered the kitchen. Jordan stayed put at the table.

     Gatsby said, “Don’t disappear on me like that.”

     “I was just on the porch,” I argued back noncommittally. “You’re going to have to get used to being alone, Jay. We all work.” I gestured to Jordan and Chester as I spoke. “You stay home and manage everything else. That’s how it’s always been. Right, guys?”

     Neither Jordan nor Chester said anything. Chester crossed the kitchen and opened a cabinet to find that we did still have a box of cereal. He poured himself a bowl—or, rather, half a bowl plus some final crumbs—then returned to the fridge. He opened it, then clapped his hand over his forehead.

     “How do we literally only have beer and one egg?” He slammed the fridge shut.

     Jordan sighed, her wan face tilted up toward the dim overhead light and arms crossed over her flat chest. “That’s what Jay and I were trying to fix when you two decided to join us.”

     “Right,” said Gatsby. He stood before me, still in the torn-up clothes he’d come home from the hospital wearing. “Now, I can’t do anything until I’m adequately dressed. Where is my closet?”

     “ Our closet is in that bedroom over there,” I said, pointing to the door to what was now no longer my bedroom. “We’ve only got so much storage space in this house, so we share.”

     “We share a closet?” Gatsby asked, an uncertain sort of disturbance crossing over his face. “...that…doesn’t seem right.”

     “Not only that,” I said, wrapping my arm around his shoulders in a rather sudden manner to direct him toward my bedroom, “but we share clothes, too. You’ve always preferred it that way.” And because I was feeling particularly un-creative, I added, “You never told me why.”

     Gatsby stared up at me, his brow furrowed over eyes I decidedly tried to avoid, but allowed me to pull him through the door to my room. I tried not to pay any mind to the state I had left it in. Gatsby could clean it up if it really bothered him. 

     We came to a stop in front of my closet, which didn’t have a door since I’d had to shove so much into it. The shelves and rack overflowed with really very little in the way of clothes and more books than I cared to mention. Books and papers and all sorts of junk, actually. I hadn’t noticed how much of a mess I’d become until everything was looked upon by the man I expected to tidy it all up.

     “...I…” was all Gatsby could get out at first, and I really couldn’t blame him. My face felt sunburnt as he continued, “I don’t know if that’s right, but…”

     “But nothing,” I said, pulling my Yale sweatshirt off the hanger. I hadn’t worn it since coming back west. “Here. And you can borrow some of Jordan’s—”

     “Borrow some of Jordan’s what ,” interrupted the woman herself from the doorway of the bedroom. Gatsby and I both looked up to find her leaning on the doorframe, her grey eyes narrowed suspiciously in our direction.

     “Pants,” I said after a moment. “He could cuff them. Chester and I are too—”

     “We’re going to the Salvation Army,” Jordan said with some finality. “We’re already going grocery shopping.”

     “Since when?” I demanded.

     “Since Jordan was about to throw away the sales paper and I stopped her,” Gatsby inserted. He frowned up at me. “She says you don’t coupon.”

     “What the fuck do you know about couponing?” I asked, momentarily forgetting the ruse. Because really, what could this (formerly) ultra-wealthy man know about couponing? I doubted he’d ever wondered where his next meal was going to come from, just whether or not to shave truffle over the filet mignon or not. 

     Sure enough, at my question, Gatsby seemed to draw a blank. He looked up at me, just the barest traces of confusion and panic crossing in layers over his face, before finally just shrugging and saying, “I don’t know. I supposed it was part of my life with you. It should be, anyhow. Milk is on sale for eighty-nine cents a gallon this week at Fitzgerald’s.”

     “So you… remember couponing?” I asked him suspiciously. 

     “Well…sort of,” he said. “It’s…rather frustrating, you see. I get so close to a memory, so close I can almost grasp it—but it’s just barely out of reach. That feeling you get when you forget a word and it’s right there on the tip of your tongue; imagine that , but for your entire life. It’s awful.”

     “Right,” I said. “If you’d like to sit around and clip coupons, be my guest, but…don’t let it get in the way of your other duties.”

     I had to keep him on track. If I listened to him too much, my sympathy might’ve overwhelmed me and become all too obvious to Jordan and Chester. No—I had to maintain that this was simply an exercise of revenge against the whole of the upper class, with Gatsby as the only tangible target in sight.

     Gatsby frowned at me and turned back to the closet. Before he could start arguing with me about the state of it, or whether or not he ought to be able to wear anything in it, I stepped away from him to lead Jordan out of the room, as if with the intent to let him dress.

     We were halfway across the living room before Jordan spoke up.

     “Nick…” she began, pulling her arm from my grasp. 

     “Don’t start,” I warned her. I could already feel a familiar sort of anxiety coursing through my veins—the sort of anxiety I thought I had left behind when I left my father’s house. It was the same sensation I’d always had whenever daring to err from his perception of me. Looking at the wrong people in magazines. Writing poetry. Any of it. I hadn’t felt this shameful sort of evasiveness in years, and it disturbed me to feel it now, when I was so willing to put up such a front concerning why I brought Gatsby home to begin with.

     But Jordan didn’t seem to want to dig into any chinks in my armor. Instead, she said, “No, no. I mean…he seems…awfully familiar to me. I don’t know why.”

     “Probably from one of your magazines,” I responded. It was the only thing I could think of. “He was on a yacht the size of a small cruise ship, so I bet he’s a big name to somebody. You probably saw him in People or something. If he wasn’t gay, he’d be on the cover.”

     “...if he’s famous enough to be in People , don’t you think people are going to come and find him? And arrest you for kidnapping?” Jordan countered. “No, I don’t think he’s from a magazine. I…I swear, I’ve seen him before. In person.”

     “At a tournament,” I suggested. “I don’t know, Jordan. Does it really matter?” I leaned in, lowering my voice as I added, “And if you do remember, keep it to yourself. I don’t want him actually remembering who he is and going back to—” I paused almost imperceptibly and finished, “...being a rich bitch.”

     Jordan scowled at me in silence, evidently searching my expression before finding nothing of whatever it was she meant to search for. Finally, she heaved a sigh and turned to go up the stairs to her tiny attic ‘bedroom’.

     “Whatever,” she said as she climbed the stairs.

     “Yeah. Whatever ,” I mocked, but she didn’t seem to hear me, as she disappeared into her room without another word.

     I stood there in the middle of our wreck of a living room by myself in bleak silence for several moments without moving. Of course, it wasn’t really silent. Every so often, Chester’s chair would creak in the kitchen, or I’d catch the faint thud of a footstep from above or from my room. 

     Finally, Jordan reappeared with a pair of jeans. “I don’t think these are going to fit him even if we cuff the legs.”

     “We’ll see about that,” I said as I took the pale blue jeans from her. The phone rang and Jordan went to answer it as I knocked on the bedroom door and said loudly, “I’ve got pants.”

     Gatsby said from inside the room, “Um…alright. You can—I mean, everything is covered , I suppose—”

     That was all I really needed in order to open the door and step inside without fear. Of course, I came to a shuddering stop when I caught sight of the man himself.

     My sweatshirt absolutely swallowed him whole. It was oversized on me, as was the style, but I hadn’t really thought about how it would hang halfway to Gatsby’s knees. He stood there, scowling at me with his arms crossed over the New Haven, CT stitched onto the front of the sweatshirt and his fists completely obscured by the length of the sleeves. His hair had been thrown into a golden state of disarray and it didn’t seem as though he had noticed yet.

     I must have stood there for too long without speaking, because he finally demanded, “What? What are you staring at?”

     I blinked and looked down at the jeans in my hands. “Uh, nothing. Here.” I held the jeans out to him. “We’ll have to cuff the legs, but…”

     “Thank you.” Gatsby took them and his fingertips grazed mine. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

     Stepping into the jeans was no problem for Gatsby, which really was a relief considering he could very well have received more brain damage than the obvious amnesia, but the trouble came when he pulled the pants up around his thighs. They wouldn’t go much further past where the sweatshirt already hung.

     The issue lay in the fact that while both Gatsby and Jordan were thin, Gatsby’s legs were much stronger than I had really paid attention to before, and so the waist of Jordan’s jeans didn’t actually fit past them. Jordan was just slender in every limb and it translated directly to her clothes.

     I stopped looking at Gatsby’s legs at that point. I’d caught one too many glimpses of the dark bruising there on the insides of his thighs and it was enough to send me spiraling, which I wouldn’t be able to handle at the moment. Instead, I took the jeans back from him and said, “That’s funny. These fit you a couple of months ago.”

     “...what do you mean?”

     “Oh, well, uh…” I began. “Your weight’s been on a constant fluctuation. Like…that sweatshirt always hung low on you, sure, but it used to fit you better otherwise.”

     Gatsby stared at me for a moment, frowning, before looking down at himself and asking, “...really?”

     “Well, sure,” I said. “You were close to two hundred pounds when we met and you’ve just bounced around ever since. Something with your, uh, metabolism, or something.”

     Evidently, this troubled Gatsby deeply, because he turned away from me and when he next spoke, his voice trembled as though he were about to cry. It took him several seconds to get even that far.

     “...are there any bottoms in this house that would fit me?” he asked.

     I stared at his back, and more specifically at where the golden hair at the nape of his neck tapered into the very beginnings of a soft little curl, before catching myself and saying, “I’ll be right back.”

     I left the bedroom again and headed straight for the kitchen, where Chester was miserably picking at his dry bowl of cereal. He stopped eating right as I came to a stop at his side.

     A momentary silence passed between us before he said, “No.”

     “Please? Jordan’s jeans don’t—”

     “No!” Chester insisted. “No one’s getting in my drawers without my consent, bitch.”

     “Try and stop me,” I said, which was possibly the most childish thing I had said in a very long time. I rushed past the table and into Chester’s bedroom, which was a tiny hellscape of shed clothes, posters of Rock Hudson, and about a thousand Polaroids wallpapering every spare inch of space.

     “Hey!” Chester shouted from the kitchen table. I heard his chair fly back against the counter. “Just because you’re in the fucking closet doesn’t mean you can raid mine!”

     I plucked a pair of red athletic shorts from his drawer just as he entered and tackled me.

     As we fired back through the very limited space to land on his bed, I couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer humor of the situation. Because it was insane, wasn’t it? Everything about this situation. Totally and completely insane to have brought home a stranger on a whim. Maybe it was, because Chester started laughing, too, where he had me pinned down to his bed.

     He tucked his face against my chest before sitting upright with a knee on either side of my waist. His voice was still taut with hardly withheld laughter as he demanded, “Give me my shorts, Nick.”

     I had them tucked safely under my body. “No. Gatsby needs them. Jordan’s pants don’t fit and—”

     “And you think mine are?” Chester shot back, laughing again as he began the struggle of pulling my arm out from under my torso. “A stiff wind could knock him over. My shorts—”

     “We can pull the drawstring tighter! It’s fine.” I told him, pushing the wad of fabric even further underneath me. It wasn’t entirely comfortable, especially with Chester on top of me, but I at least ought to have been familiar with that particular weight. “Gatsby’s in there and he’s not wearing any pants!”

     “And that’s a problem?” Chester asked. He sat back, still pinning my legs.

     “For right now, yeah,” I said. “Just until we can take him shopping at the charity store, okay? I just— Chester—”

      “What?” he asked, his hands resting conspicuously on the front of my shirt. “I’m not doing anything. But, like, fine , he can borrow a pair of my shorts, but not those.”

     He leaned over me again to start pulling at my arm once more, and I hadn’t paid attention to the impropriety of the situation or how close our faces were until someone cleared their throat in the doorway. 

     Chester rolled off me in an instant, leaving us both staring from the bed to where Gatsby stood in the doorway wearing nothing but my sweatshirt and his bandages. My face rapidly reached the approximate color of a ripe tomato while Chester casually leaned back on his side, propped up on his elbow as he gazed back at Gatsby.

     “Hiiii,” he said. “You can totally get in my shorts anytime you want.”

     Gatsby’s regality, in spite of maintaining itself in the face of his otherwise indecent appearance, flickered briefly at Chester’s words. He cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, old sport,” before holding his hand out toward me.

     And, dumb fuck that I was, I reached out from the bed and took his hand.

     He stood there for a moment in merciful silence before saying, “The shorts, Nick.”

     I jerked back from him and rushed with admittedly shaky hands to pass him Chester’s shorts. He looked down at them for a moment before clutching them to his chest the way a child would hold a teddy bear.

     He said, “Jordan and I have decided that we ought to go grocery shopping.”

     “You ought to do what? ” I demanded, jumping up from Chester’s bed. I worked my way around Gatsby without touching him in order to come face-to-face with Jordan, who was standing against the kitchen table in a perfect display of cool-girl nonchalance.

     “Yeah,” she said. “You said he takes care of the house, right? I gave him a twenty-dollar budget from my savings and I’m gonna let him go buck wild with the coupons. It’ll be great. Since this is what he normally does. Right, Nick?”

     I stared at her, trying so impossibly hard not to lose my remaining cool, before nodding. “Yeah. Fine. I’ll take you shopping.”

     “No,” Jordan said. “ We will go shopping after we drop you off here. ” She showed me a little note she’d scribbled down. “That call was from a house by the water. Their porch has rotted through and they’re willing to pay for materials and everything.”

     I took a deep breath in through my nose and out through my mouth.

     “Fine,” I said. “I don’t really trust you behind the wheel—”

     “I was gonna let Jay drive.”

     “No! Jordan, are you—”

     “I’m kidding,” she said. “It’ll be fine, Nick. Calm down. It’ll be fine.”

     “It’ll be fine,” I said, even though I didn’t really believe it. “It’ll be fine…”

Chapter Text

Jay

     Riding in the car with Miss Baker was an experience I wasn’t sure I would survive. I sat in the passenger seat of Nick’s truck with my heart and my stomach both in my throat as she hugged turn after turn—rolled through stop sign after stop sign—raced under yellow lights with nothing but a second to spare. 

     I found myself sandwiched in between Miss Baker and Nick for the ride to the job site. It shouldn’t have been anything out of the ordinary—I should have been used to this, right? This must’ve been an everyday occurrence. 

     So then why did I feel such a sudden spike of something when my leg, bare as it was, pressed against Nick’s?

     Nick offered no answer to my silent inquiry. As a matter of fact, he said nothing at all for the whole ride to his job site, and refused to look at anything but the view outside his window. He didn’t even say goodbye when we dropped him off at some ramshackle little cottage down by the water.

     Miss Baker and I said nothing for a few minutes after we left him there. The silence reeked of gasoline and stale cigarettes. This was, at least, somehow familiar.

     “S- so …” I finally began when traffic held us up. “How did… this …all come to be?”

     Miss Baker kept her eyes on the road ahead, at the very least, and tightened her knuckles white around the steering wheel as she responded, “How did what all come to be?”

     “Why are you living alone with three queer men?” I began plainly. It wasn’t the whole root of what I wanted to know, but it was a start. “You’re clearly a good bit younger than the rest of us. Nick told me some, but I’d rather hear it from you.”

     Miss Baker glanced at me sideways and slammed on the brakes at the same time. 

     “How do you know you’re gay if you don’t remember who you are?” she asked, and before I could answer, she answered my question instead. “I lost a golf tournament and so I didn’t have the money to get home. My fault for booking a one-way ticket out here, I guess, but…”

     “That’s absurd,” I said. I didn’t even bother answering her question seeing as I didn’t really have an answer to begin with, just a sort of…feeling…I got, I supposed. Still, I forged on, “Don’t you have any family or friends you could’ve called for help?”

     “I…I mean, I kind of did call a friend for help,” said Miss Baker after a moment’s pause. “I called…Nick.”

     Her voice went flat there at the end, grave and disgusted, and so I didn’t press the issue any further.

     Miss Baker swung the truck into the parking lot of a run-down, miserable little box of a store called Fitzgerald’s. I stared at it in all its unremarkable cinderblock glory in an attempt to tug it from the depths of my repressed memory but unfortunately not a single flicker of recollection came to alleviate the darkness. Even the dandelions bowed away from me, a stranger, come to trample their bare living.

     I gathered all of my clipped coupons and our shopping list into a perfect little stack and joined Miss Baker there on the gravel lot. She stood there for a moment, her willowy body hardly blocking the brilliant sun or the cutting wind, before striding off toward the entrance to the store and leaving me in the dust. I had to jog just to keep pace.

     The store’s cluttered interior remained just as forgotten as its run-down exterior. I paused at the head of the first aisle, peering down at the dull tiles and water-stained ceiling and the crooked rows of generic, sad products, trying desperately the whole while to conjure up some familiarity, but there was nothing. Nothing . Not a single suggestion that I had ever patronized this facility.

     At the very least I was able to find some dispensers on the wall with manufacturer’s coupons, thus alleviating our budget’s burden even further. 

     Miss Baker kept close to my side as I pushed the cart along. Whenever I looked up at her, she cut her eyes away from me as though I might have a genuine issue with her staring. I supposed I ought to have an issue with it; really, though, I was somehow used to this. All of it. The unknowing; the desperation; the lack of connection. I got the feeling I’d gone through my whole life as if with the intention to blindly walk an unfamiliar path, always looking back for something to hold on to.

     I must’ve had no choice before the accident, and I most certainly had no choice now—just to keep going. To keep pushing this shopping cart and looking up at Miss Baker and coming home to Nick.

     I tried to remember coming home to Nick. Coming home to anyone —just coming home at all.

     I couldn’t conjure that feeling if I tried. I must’ve forgotten it, or else I’d never learned it at all.

     “Miss Baker?” I asked as we stared at sweating jugs of milk in an under-powered cooler at the back of the store.

     She didn’t say anything. I turned to look up at her.

     “How do you know my last name?”

     I stared up at her, then blinked a few times and looked back at the milk. Condensation dripped down the textured plastic. The hum of the fluorescent lights and the dying cooler and the faint, tinny playback of some pop song or another flooded the silence between us until I was finally able to gather myself and speak.

     “Well, I suppose I just remembered it.”

     Miss Baker said nothing else. I dared not look back up at her to find whatever contempt may sour her delicate features. I didn’t want to see it.

     I simply cleared my throat and asked, “Do we use enough milk to justify a gallon? It would be the same price as the half if we use this coupon…”

     “...yeah. Fine,” she muttered after a moment. 

     I hefted the milk into the shopping cart and continued on my way.

     It was about when we reached the sliced bread section that the whispers began. At first it was just a mother and her young daughter—the little girl couldn’t have been more than ten, and at the sight of me, she raised her hand to point at me. She looked up at her mother and whispered loudly, “That’s the man from the news!”

     The mother swatted at her daughter’s hand and hissed some sort of chastise, of which I couldn’t hear much, but the whole affair was enough to warm my face and make me all too aware of the bandage on my forehead. I almost reached up to remove it, then decided that whatever was underneath it might’ve been worse. 

     It didn’t help that I looked like a ragamuffin. When Miss Baker and I—and yes, it had become infinitely more natural to call her as much, so I must’ve been onto something—crossed in front of the freezers in the frozen aisle and I saw my reflection, it was enough to make me wish I had simply stayed in the psych ward. Nick’s sweatshirt hung almost to my knees, obscuring my shorts to the point where I almost looked as though I’d gone without, and worst of all, my borrowed shoes were hideous.

     Neither I nor Miss Baker said much else for the rest of our shopping trip. I only spoke once we drifted to the checkout, and the frazzled young woman working the cash register spoke up first.

     “...’happened to you?” she asked, or something like that. She stared at me with eyes blown so wide I was certain they’d pop right out of her skull. She barely glanced down at each price tag while tallying up our total, and never once blinked.

     “Nothing,” I finally answered, even if my hand instinctively rose to touch my bandaged forehead. A part of me wished we’d picked up a less conspicuous bandage than the gauze and white tape. 

     That was the end of the conversation, even when I passed over all my coupons. I still came through with maximal savings at the end, as though it were second nature to me, as though I’d grown up starving and learned how to scrimp just to survive. Had I? I didn’t know. There came the ghost of exceptional discomfort to overwhelm me any time I tried to reach back that far.

     There wasn’t anyone else in the store, so I took my time to go over the receipt at the very end and found we’d been mistakenly owed back an extra dollar for a sale the cashier had neglected to honor, and so Miss Baker and I left the grocery store with a week’s worth of groceries for eleven dollars and ninety-two cents.

     Miss Baker and I loaded everything into the back of the truck. While I returned the cart, she tied a tarp down over everything—or, rather, she attempted to, and I was glad I looked back over the knots when she was done. They would have flown open in a minute had I not redone them into taut-line hitches.

     I stared down at the end of the rope in my hand, and the knot secured to the anchor points on the wall of the truck bed, and wondered how I knew how to tie that knot and how I knew what it was called. How did that factor into my life before the accident?

     That thought sat with me the whole drive home. It wasn’t until we pulled back up in front of the house that I realized we hadn’t gone to the Salvation Army after all.

     “Jordan,” I said, deliberately, as we got out to gather the groceries. I made quick work of the knots. “What about the Salvation Army?”

     “Do you want the milk to spoil?” she asked flatly as Chester walked out onto the front porch. Miss Baker continued, “I didn’t know how much money we’d have left over after grocery shopping. Once we put everything away, then we can go to the thrift store and pick you something out. We’re not letting you wear Nick’s clothes forever.”

     Chester grabbed a brown paper bag from the back of the truck, leaving me with nothing to carry as I stood between them against the open tailgate.

     “Wait, oh my god,” he said, the bag resting on his hip. “You were gonna go shopping without me? That’s homophobic.”

     “You think I’d trust you to dress him?” Jordan asked. “You’d put him in Daisy Dukes and Nick would have a heart attack.”

     “...Daisy?” I asked, but neither of them seemed to hear me. 

      Daisy. Daisy . Why did that feel so…extraordinary? So important ? The sensation had stunned me into being unable to chase it down and grasp it, but I was already used to that feeling. Still…there was something about that name…

     “You’re a girl ,” I heard Chester saying. “You don’t know men’s fashion.”

     “A girl doesn’t know fashion ?” Miss Baker fired back. “Are you naturally stupid or did you have to work at it?”

     I looked between them for a moment in silence before asking, “...do I know a Daisy?”

     Chester said something. I didn’t hear it. Miss Baker had quite suddenly gone still and as I watched, all that golden tan leached from her face. She stared down at me with the most perplexing look of shock for several seconds before finally thrusting the truck keys out toward Chester.

     “...what?” he asked. “My hands are full. Give them to—”

     Miss Baker thrust the keys into my hand and disappeared into the house like a ghost, pale white and terrified for no reason that I could understand. I stared down at the truck keys in my hand for several seconds in silence.

     “Um,” began Chester a moment later. When I looked up at him, he’d cast his gaze on the empty porch and the front door, still hanging open. “What the fuck?”

     “I don’t know,” I said. “But we ought to get those groceries inside.”

     “Right.” Chester turned and I followed him into the house, where he continued, “You know, this is a lot more than we can usually get. You really must’ve done good with those coupons.” He sat the bag down on the table next to where Miss Baker had placed hers. “Who knew you had it in you?”

     “I certainly didn’t,” I told him. I pulled groceries out of the bag and began loading them as much as I could without really knowing where a lot of things went. It was easy enough to shove the beer to the side in the refrigerator so I could put the milk in, but once I got to the cabinets, I was lost.

     Chester was at least kind enough to help me with where things went, but even for all his kindness, I still felt unsettled. I could hear Miss Baker up in her room, rustling paper around like nobody’s business. 

     She came back down just as I laid out the ingredients for our future supper, a rather unimpressive spaghetti with no meatballs seeing as ground beef wasn’t on sale until next week. Supper wouldn’t be for another few hours but I felt better, having it all laid out.

     “Have you remembered how not to act like a total spaz?” Chester asked from where he leaned against the counter. 

     Jordan pushed back the wisps of her blonde bangs and responded, “I have to make a phone call. Can you take him to get clothes?”

     “I mean…I can , but I have a date—”

     “How did you get a date while we were at the grocery store? Actually—no, nevermind, I don’t care. You can just pick Nick up and drop them both off here and then do whatever after you get his clothes,” Jordan said forcefully. “Just go! I—” She spared a glance toward me. “I need to make a call. Privately.”

     “Okay,” Chester said at length. “So the spaz thing is still in full effect. Got it.” He pushed off the counter and headed for the door. “C’mon, Jay. Back into the truck you go.”

     I looked at Miss Baker for a moment. “Are you alright?”

     She nodded with wide eyes and stepped over to the phone on the wall. “Yeah. Now, um… go. ”

     And so I went. With one last look of concern toward the unusually pale young woman, I left the kitchen behind and picked my way through the mess to go join Chester at the truck.

     “You still have the keys, right?” he asked. 

     I dug them out of my pocket and tried to pass them to him, but he wouldn’t uncross his arms.

     Chester continued, “You wanna try driving?”

     “Is that a good idea?” I asked him in spite of the thrill I felt just then. Yes, of course I wanted to drive—again? I must’ve driven before. Muscle memory would certainly take over, wouldn’t it?

     Either way, Chester was already climbing into the passenger seat.

     I stared down at the keys in my hands for a moment before rounding the truck to climb uneasily into the driver’s seat.

     “No, like, this is good for you,” he assured me as I buckled in. “To get back to doing things. You, um…you used to love driving, because, like…it was the only way you got out of the house.”

     I frowned at that and turned the key. The truck roared to life. We sat there, idling, for a moment before I asked him, “...really?”

     “Totally. Nick didn’t want you to leave the house too much.” He pulled his legs up underneath him. “Especially without supervision.”

     I frowned at that. “Now, that’s really unfair. I suppose I understand it now that I’ve been…injured as I have, but he was like that before, too?”

     “Oh, yeah, totally.” Chester nodded. “He’s a total psycho. So, like…maybe don’t give in to anything you think you feel for him. Right? Okay?”

     “Anything I feel for him?” I asked, studying the pedals at my feet and the shifter on the steering wheel. It was so unbelievably strange for my feet and hands to know what to do before my brain did, but even before Chester was able to respond, I’d disengaged the brake and shifted into a three-point turn to get out of the yard. We sat idling on the dirt for a moment longer while I turned to him to elaborate, “ Should I feel something for him to begin with?”

     “What? No!” Chester said with a strange sudden edge. He laughed a few times—these strange, uncomfortable scoffs that contained very little humor indeed. “Nah. No. Definitely not. You guys are, like, acquaintances at best. Just roomies. Don’t…don’t even, like…pay him any mind. Ever. In fact, give him the cold shoulder. He deserves it for letting you sit in the hospital all night.”

     “...alright,” I said, cutting my eyes back onto the road. Much to my relief, driving forward to the edge of the road came as naturally as walking. I must’ve driven plenty before the accident, and it came back to me just as any other natural thing. I merely wished my memories would catch up. 

     Chester broke off from his strange disbursement of advice long enough to give me directions to the thrift store, and fortunately, my ease in driving remained the whole way there. It was helped no doubt by the fact that there were so few cars on the road to begin with.

     Nothing of note occurred on the drive over, and as I parked the truck with ease in the parallel spots against the sidewalk, I turned to Chester to ask, “If Nick’s so…disagreeable, then why would I share so much with him? The clothes. The closet. The bed—”

     “No, no, no ,” Chester insisted. “You do not share a bed. He sleeps on the couch. Or out in the yard. Like a dog.”

     I turned the truck off and gave him a hard look. “I’m not letting him sleep outside. Even if he’s been rather…prickly toward me, that’s not a fate I think anyone deserves.”

     “What about camping?” Chester suggested as we got out of the truck.

     “Exactly.” I nodded at him and turned to peer through the sticker-coated door of the Salvation Army. There must’ve been a hundred—advertising, protesting. I could hardly see through them. “Have we ever gone camping?”

     “Not on your life.” Chester thrust his arm around my elbow. “C’mon. I’m sure that eight bucks and change is really burning a hole in your pocket.” He pulled me along toward the door, opened it, then amended, “ My pocket.”

     I scowled a bit at the reminder that I’d had to borrow clothes, and evidently had been for a while, but at least we were here to remedy that fact. The young woman at the checkout counter ignored us as we entered. I was relieved.

     Chester kept his arm in mine as we walked, forcing me to slow and accelerate at his will. Fortunately he mostly kept it slow, pushing through hanger after hanger, rack after rack of shabby clothes in search of something that might fit me. I stared at everything with equal and instinctive repugnance. 

     “This is dismal,” Chester commented at the end of our third long rack of hanging shirts.

     “It surely is,” I murmured, staring at a flannel half-soaked in dry, washed-out paint. It hadn’t washed out entirely, leaving most of the shirt still ghostly in appearance and uncomfortably stiff. “But it’s all we have and I’d really like to have some things of my own. I understand wearing the clothes I wore before the accident might help me regain my memory but not at the cost of being without options of my own.”

     It mattered to me. I wasn’t sure why, but it did—it mattered to me in this quiet, vulnerable way that curled up in a dark part of my recessed memories. I just wanted something of my own. Clothes. I wanted beautiful clothes—something pink, which Nick most certainly wouldn’t have for me to share in.

     A pang of hurt overtook me for a moment and I looked up at Chester. 

     “I think…I might’ve put up with…things not belonging to me, but wanted things of my own this whole time,” I admitted quietly. “That’s what I think, at least. What a sorry thing to have to wait until now to say it.”

     Chester frowned down at me for a moment before saying, strangely enough, “Yeah, actually, I can’t imagine you ever feeling like that.”

     He left it at that. I stood there with him wondering just what he meant by that. Why would it be so hard to believe that a man would want things of his own? This yearning for more within me felt more natural than anything else I’d experienced since waking up in the hospital. 

     In the end, I found one pair of jeans and a pair of tennis shoes that fit and, lo and behold, one white button-up with pink pinstriping that Chester would’ve had to pry out of my cold, dead hands if he wanted me to part with it. Even once he took a look at it and reminded me that buttons on the left meant it was a women’s shirt, I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t know much about myself but pink felt right .

     We came in just under our budget in the end. Chester entrusted me with the remaining ninety-two cents and left the Salvation Army with my bag full of treasures. I almost went to the passenger’s side but Chester waved me back toward the driver’s side.

     “Do you remember where Nick’s working?” he asked as we buckled in. “He’s probably done for the day by now.”

     “Yes, that I remember,” I replied, and we were off.

     By the time we made our way back to the little cottage on the water, I could almost convince myself that I had done this a thousand times. I’d shifted these gears and pushed these pedals and tore my way down these roads with all the familiarity of blood following my veins as it had all my life. 

     I could settle into a life like this. Really, I could. I didn’t see any reason not to.

     We pulled up in front of the cottage-in-repair to find Nick sitting and smoking on an old barrel in the yard with the porch repaired behind him. He rubbed his cigarette out on the barrel and crossed the dried-out yard with distress rapidly forming in his previously lax expression.

     He flung the driver’s side door open and stared at me in shock for several seconds before leaning around me to demand of Chester, “You let him drive?”

     “Yeah.” Chester unbuckled and opened the door. “Better than Jordan, anyway.”

     “Well, no shit— a dog would drive better than Jordan—but why on earth would you let him drive anyway—”

     “See?” Chester said to me with a little bit of a smirk as he got out of the truck. He didn’t say anything else, but I understood what he meant—this must’ve been the controlling nature he’d warned me about. 

     “See what? ” Nick demanded as Chester rounded the square nose of the truck. 

     “Nothing,” Chester told him. He bumped Nick out of the driver’s side door with his hip and continued, this time to me, “Scoot over, Jay. I’ll drop you guys off at the house and—”

     “Woah, woah, woah,” Nick interrupted even as I reluctantly unbuckled and moved back into the middle seat. “Hold on. Why do you need the truck? You’re off tonight.”

     Chester looked at him for a moment with that smirk of his growing ever more evident as he leaned on the side of the truck and crossed his arms. Finally, he told Nick, “I have a date.” He paused, and then spoke more quietly to add, “Jealous?”

     Nick didn’t say anything to that. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t quite look at Chester after that. He just turned and trudged miserably around the front of the truck to come and stow himself like luggage into the passenger seat. 

     He sat as much against the door as I  was sure he could, but the cab of the truck was still a very limited space and Chester had no such reservations about making himself smaller, which meant that Nick and I touched whether he liked it or not. My leg pressed up against his and he stared decisively out the window the whole ride home.

     Home. Home . It didn’t feel as much, but had anything ever? Here I found myself unable to retrace any familiar path within my mind.

     Had anything ever felt like home?

     I stared down at Nick’s leg where it pressed against mine, and at the balled-up fist resting there on his thigh, and thought— maybe this didn’t feel like home yet, but one day, perhaps it would.

     That strange desire for somewhere to belong was at least familiar to me, and it followed me as Nick and I climbed out of the truck with my bag of clothes in tow. 

     I could’ve gone straight inside, but instead I hovered at Nick’s side as he shut the passenger door and spoke through the rolled-down window to ask Chester, “What are your plans tonight, anyway?”

     “Nunya.”

     Nick scowled. “Actually, it is , seeing as this is my goddamn truck. Those people I just did work for—they’ve got a cousin or an uncle or something down the road that needs some work done on a staircase and I need that money to replace all the tools I lost when—”

     He glanced down at me then with such reproach that I almost felt the need to apologize. I didn’t, though. I didn’t think I had anything to apologize for if he couldn’t be bothered to let me in on whatever it was I might’ve done wrong.

     Still, as he continued talking, I sat my bag down and dug around in my pockets.

     “So I’ll need the truck by eight-thirty tomorrow,” Nick continued insistently. “Why can’t I just drop you off?”

     “Because he has nowhere to host,” Chester shot back, “and our house is a little too crowded for closeted bitches who’ll still give me the time of day.”

     As my hands closed around the coins in my pocket, I went still as if to avoid the worst of the tension in the air. It made me feel a little sick. 

     Chester finally broke the silence. He continued softly, “I’m just going to drive us down to some spot on the beach away from everybody else. It’ll be fine. Unless I need your permission or something.”

     “Per— no ,” Nick spat, taking a half step back. He shook his head. “No. God, no .” He pushed his hair off his forehead then shifted to stand with his hands in fists at his hips. “Just…be back before I need to leave tomorrow. Please.”

     “Yeah, yeah. I know.” Chester’s words came out cavalier at first before drifting back down into something more tender as he added, “I will.”

     Nick watched him for a moment. “And be safe.”

     Chester groaned. “Sure, Dad, I’ll be—”

     “Oh, shut up,” Nick shot right back, this time with some humor. I couldn’t help my unexpected chill of relief. 

     Nick stepped back from the truck and Chester drove off with half a goodbye thrown back on the wind. Nick and I stood there together for a while without talking and simply watched the taillights recede beyond the turn in the tree-covered drive, where all the remaining twilight found itself swallowed whole. We waited until the truck had turned into the main road and disappeared before I finally withdrew my fist from my pocket.

     I held it wordlessly out to Nick. He stared down at my fist, already sticky from the humidity, before asking, “What?”

     He reached for my hand—not for the first time, either. What was that all about, then?

     Just as his hand met mine, I let my fist open to drop the ninety-two cents in change into his palm.

     “Here,” I murmured. My hand remained open, face-down against his palm. It was softer than I would’ve thought. 

     “What’s this?” he asked without removing his hand to even see what I’d given him.

     The twilight hummed around us, full of life. A cool breeze cut through the ragged little clearing and pushed up underneath the broad overhang of my borrowed sweatshirt. 

     “The change leftover after getting a week’s worth of clothes and groceries. I got us twenty-nine dollars worth of groceries for just under twelve dollars and much of the rest went to the Salvation Army. This is what’s left.” I withdrew my hand to let the coins shine in his palm. 

     “...how in hell did you manage that?” he asked as I turned to head for the porch. I had dinner to start, after all.

     From the front steps I responded, “Well…if this life is what I’m used to living, then I suppose I simply remembered how to survive.”

     And that was that. I left Nick there in the front yard, evidently and mysteriously disturbed by my ability to budget, and set about trying to make supper as though I had done it a thousand times, like any other thing that was expected of me. I would just have to figure it out as I went.

     I got the feeling I was used to that.

Chapter Text

      I sat at my kitchen table in a frustrated sort of daze for a while after Chester left. This whole situation—as much as it was my fault—left a bad taste in my mouth: Gatsby driving my truck with no license and evident brain trauma; Chester having a ‘date’ with another out-of-towner; Jordan sitting across the table from me and staring without saying a word. 

     All she did was sit and stare at me, actually, with her arms crossed over her chest in such a manner that she almost reminded me of a mummy behind glass in a museum I’d been to back when I used to care about things like that. She might not have even blinked once the whole time I sat there stewing. I might have been startled if she had .

     Gatsby had his back to us as he cooked supper and only occasionally made his presence known at all by clanking a spoon against the pot or ticking a burner on or off. I could hardly hear it over the radio playing in the corner but still, even through my daze, I was so inexorably aware of him. Just as soon as he poured the spaghetti into the strainer—after speaking for the first time since we’d settled in just to ask where said strainer was kept before moving on with his work in stoic, charged silence—Jordan jumped to her feet and demanded,

     “Let me talk to you on the front porch.”

     I looked at her for a moment before taking a long draw from my beer. It wasn’t really cold anymore, but I’d drink it anyway. It made me sick to think that I’d drink it anyway , but I was too tired to bother beating myself up over it any more than I had already. What would be the point? I wasn’t going to change, and I begged no forgiveness from anyone anymore. 

     So then why did shame creep up on me, hot and rolling like a storm?

     Jordan stood up from the table. This shook me from my reverie long enough to place the context back where it belonged when she hissed, “ Now. ”

     I rolled my eyes at that but did eventually get up and follow her out onto the front porch with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, which was none at all. I supposed it was better than staying in the kitchen, all too acutely aware of the fruitful results of my Rube Goldberg machine of lies and revenge. 

     Jordan began to speak again just as soon as the door shut.

     “I know him.”

     “What do you mean?” I asked.

     Jordan stared up at me, her wan mouth pressed into a thin, curving line and her arms wrapped around her upper body as if to hold her together. A bruise yellowed on her elbow. All I could do was stare at that mottled patch of skin as she next spoke and confirmed my fears.

     “Jay,” she said. “Gatsby. I know him.”

     I just barely managed to force out, “Well, yeah, he’s in the kitchen.”

     Jordan punched my arm hard and as I reeled back with a curse, she kept on, “No, I mean, like— I met him before. ”

     I rubbed my arm with a scowl. 

     “Met him before?” I finally asked. “Like…at a tournament? His… whatever didn’t strike me as a golfer but—”

     “I played in the women’s league, dumbass,” Jordan spat.

     “Yeah, and he didn’t strike me as somebody who likes women , either, so—”

     Jordan gave me such a hard, desperate look then that I instantly shut up. The words cut off halfway out of my mouth and I simply went silent. 

     It took a while for her to be able to speak again, and when she did, an unfamiliar note of vulnerability crept somewhere behind any dry carelessness she worked to show the world. 

     “He and Daisy used to date.”

     I went still.

     Daisy. Daisy. My cousin Daisy, who’d shown me last summer just how boring and privileged the ultra-wealthy were. I’d spent three months playing her confidant only to find out that she had absolutely nothing to say, or nothing worth listening to, and was as distant from me in humanity as an alien. Her husband was the same. Christ, all of them were. Revulsion seized me at the memory of too many dinners interrupted by Tom’s mistress on the phone or thrown asunder by a stray barb in Daisy’s sweet, dark murmur. 

     I guessed I could imagine, in theory, Gatsby and Daisy getting along. I just had trouble understanding how that could even happen.

     “Back in Louisville,” Jordan elaborated. “Years ago. God, I was, what? Sixteen?”

     I did the math on that before asking, “Five years ago? Jesus, Jordan, how can you even be sure he’s the same guy if—”

     Almost as if she had been expecting that exact question, Jordan plucked a photograph from her back pocket and thrust it out in my direction.

     “Halloween, nineteen-seventy-fuckin’-seven,” she spat. 

     I stared down at the image in her hand almost without seeing it for several seconds. Finally, almost of their own accord, my hands rose to take the photo from her so that I had no choice but to study it better.

     Sure enough, that was Gatsby there, grinning in the center of the photograph in a cheesy top hat and monocle. He had his arm over Daisy’s shoulder and Daisy, no more than eighteen at the time, wasn’t even looking at the camera but up at Gatsby instead.

     Lovesick. She looked absolutely, unutterably lovesick. 

     I felt a little sick myself, though love had nothing to do with it.

     “...that’s…” I began as my hand rose to pinch the bride of my nose. I could already feel a migraine coming on. “...strange. It’s weird.”

     “No shit.” Jordan sighed.

     “But he’s been with that old bastard of his for fifteen years. How did he have time to—”

     Jordan’s hand landed on my arm and cut off all my words. When I looked back up at her, she peered around me into the open door, toward which I could now hear footsteps coming from inside the house.

     I looked back just as Gatsby, clutching a wooden spoon and bearing an expression devoid of emotion, came to a stop at my elbow. He stared between me and Jordan for a moment in silence before speaking up.

     “What’s that?”

     I shoved the photo in my pocket as fast as I could. 

     “Just a bill,” I muttered, stalking past him to get back into the house and away from all this disruption. “Don’t worry about it.”

     Gatsby grabbed onto my sleeve like a wayward child so I couldn’t get away from him.

     “Wait— wait. ”

     Goddamn it, I waited. I came to a stop in the living room with Gatsby’s hand still on my sleeve and stared back at him. Jordan shoved her way past us to get up the stairs. I waited until I’d heard her door shut before trying to speak, but I only had time to heave a weary sigh before Gatsby spoke up instead.

     “Well, she’s going to have to come back down. Supper’s ready.” He looked up at the door to Jordan’s makeshift bedroom before returning his intense gaze back to me. “Two things. That’s the first.”

     I waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, I shook my head and asked, “And?”

     He blinked and jerked his hand back from my sleeve. “O-oh. Well…look here. I swear I really didn’t do anything I shouldn’t have…as far as I know. And I don’t know, to be fair, seeing as I’ve lost most of my memory , need I remind you—so the fault really lay with whoever’s decision it was to have me cook supper, but—”

     “Oh, jesus christ,” I spat. “Spare me— whatever this is. What happened? Did you break something? You know I— we— can’t afford to fix everything around here. ”

     As I spoke, I could see Gatsby flinching more and more—retreating into himself inch by inch and shrinking down toward some central point of security. I had to stop. I had to take a step back.

     Gatsby didn’t say anything. This gave me all too much room to admit, softly:

     “I can’t fix anything.”

     That was Gatsby in that photograph. Gatsby, full of joy, full of life, full of humanity , and so fully separate from the bruised, scrawny former rich bitch standing here with his shoulders curled inward and eyes screwed shut. He was waiting. I didn’t want to think about what he was waiting for, or why he’d expect it from me, but it was all too apparent for me to ignore when I raised my hand to put it on his shoulder and he turned to offer his cheek.

     I put my hand down. Put it all the way down into my pocket, past the photograph of Gatsby and Daisy to where a fistful of change now rattled, and held on to a few coins to keep myself tethered.

     “We’ll worry about it in the morning,” I said softly. “I’ll…go get Jordan. Go on and plate up.”

     Gatsby turned on his heel and marched toward the kitchen like a soldier returning from war with his head bowed and back bent. I watched him go with a bitter taste in my mouth before turning to take the stairs in double time.

     Dinner wasn’t some extraordinary affair, but the spaghetti was more than edible, even if Jordan ate half a bite before disappearing upstairs again. Feeling sorry still for the heavy moment in the living room and Jordan’s seeming lack of appreciation, I commended Gatsby for the meal as he was cleaning up.

     “Oh, it’s just the recipe from the back of the noodle box,” he said with a shrug.

     I watched him deposit our small stack of dishes into the sink, then asked, “There are recipes on the box?”

     He looked at me over his shoulder. 

     “...well, yes.” He stepped over to the trash can in the corner and fished out the empty box of spaghetti noodles, then held it out to me so I could see the cooking instructions and the “easy spaghetti” recipe on the back. “It’s just jarred sauce and noodles, old sport. I didn’t even season it like it says.”

     I looked at the box for a minute longer before settling back into my chair, assuring him hesitantly, “...I didn’t even notice.”

     “I just used a good sauce instead of plain tomato. It was on sale for seventy-five percent off because it expired next week,” he told me as he shoved the box back into the trash. As he crossed back over to the sink he added, “And I would have had meatballs if…” He stopped by the sink and looked pointedly at the oven. “... that was functioning.”

     “The oven?” I asked. I got up from my chair and went to kneel in front of the oven. I opened the creaky metal door and asked, “Did you try turning it on?”

     My question was met with nothing but silence. I looked back over my shoulder to where Gatsby stood with a withering expression and his hands on his hips.

     “ Yes , I turned it on,” he spat right as it hit me that I should have assumed as much.

     “Yeah, sorry,” I said, looking back into the oven as he came to hover beside me. “...and then what happened?”

     “Nothing,” he said. 

     I sighed and let my head fall for a second before looking back up at him again to say, “‘Nothing’ as in ‘nothing at all’ or ‘nothing’ as in ‘nothing you’re willing to tell me?’”

     Gatsby scowled and crossed his arms. “I mean nothing . No click, no heat. And judging by the cobwebs I had to clear out of it before I even tried to preheat it, I’d say it’s been broken for a while.” He leaned down closer to me. “That’s why it’s gone unused, isn’t it? So I didn’t break it.”

     “...yeah,” I muttered, once again turning away from the man. “You, uh, don’t tend to cook much in the oven. Just…stove stuff.”

     “‘Stove stuff.’ Right,” Gatsby said. He stepped away to go begin his work on the dishes, and I couldn’t help my relief.

     It was short-lived, however. I had only just taken out the rack in the oven when Gatsby whirled back around to face me. He didn’t say anything, just gestured sharply to the faucet, which he had turned on at the handle. No water came from the faucet. This, at least, I was aware of.

     “Just use the sprayer. It works just fine,” I grumbled before grabbing a spare screwdriver from the junk drawer to begin pulling the oven apart from the inside out.

     I heard him spray a few times in quick spurts, the sound altering as water crossed over metal or glass, before catching him muttering, “A suggestion to waste water from the man who can’t afford the water bill…”

     I made the difficult decision to simply ignore that comment and move on. It was easier just to keep my head in the oven with a flashlight in between my teeth and a screwdriver in my hand. After all these years I finally understood why my father, who had all the other makings of a literary man, chose to instead spend all his time out in his woodshop or at the hardware store instead of challenging his brain with thought or conflict.

     I worked for half an hour, fiddling with various parts in the ancient machine until I felt the unnervingly identifiable sensation of a sneaker on the ass of my jeans.

     “Hey, Sylvia,” sighed Chester from behind me. He dropped his shoe to allow me to crawl out of the oven.

     “...Sylvia?”

     “Plath.” He leaned back on the table with conspicuous effort not to let his behind rest against the edge of it. “Y’know? Like…with the oven?”

     I did know. I just didn’t care to let him know I’d read The Bell Jar in college, discovered the fate of its author, and had been so rattled I didn’t leave my dorm for half a week. While I remained stubbornly unaffected by the perspectives forced upon me by strangers, when I chose to involve myself in someone else’s world, I always found myself shaken, though never for very long.

     “Nevermind,” Chester finally said with a dramatic roll of his deep-green eyes. “I forgot you don’t like women.”

     I huffed and glared up at him from my place on the floor in front of the oven.

     “Shouldn’t you be in the back of my truck right now or something? You’re home awfully early.”

     “In the back? Uh—” Chester repeated, a little bit of fear creeping over his face before almost instantly washing away. He scoffed out a laugh. “Nick, I know you know what a quickie is.”

     “Oh, dear god,” I interrupted, covering my face. “Shut up. I don’t need to know.”

     “You asked,” chimed Gatsby from the sink.

     I turned to glare at him even if he couldn’t see it. Since he couldn’t see it, though, my frustration died out quickly and I turned back to Chester, who bore as vile a smirk as I’d ever seen him with.

     “I could’ve taken my time,” he assured me, “but I’m just too good.”

     “Sure.”

     “And I didn’t really like him after all. So.” He shrugged. “Brought the truck back early. You’re welcome.” He reached into his pocket and dug out the keys, which he tossed into the open oven with a command of, “Fetch.”

     I rolled my eyes at that and did indeed crawl back into the oven to fetch the keys. By the time I crawled back out, Chester was gone and his bedroom door was shut.

     The next several days continued in much the same manner. I worked, though not enough. Jordan got called on a whole two days for her on-call job at the local minigolf place. Chester went to work at the news station and came home more and more beat down every single day, to a point where I just stopped asking how his shift had gone. It was never good, though he had at least gone on another ‘date’ with that last guy he’d seen.

     And Gatsby—well, Gatsby seemed to do his best. His stitches came out and the bruises faded, and despite having a laundry machine out in the shed, he hadn’t done a single load and thus became more and more open to borrowing my clothes as the days trickled on. 

     I couldn’t say I minded it. As much as I hated to admit it to myself, there was some small part of me that had very quietly craved someone to share my life with. Trouble was finding someone I could stand to be around constantly. I’d just been drained by any attempt I’d ever made at a relationship, or worse, like with Jordan, the connection had never been deep enough to either drain me or consider it lasting. 

     Against every expectation, it wasn’t like that with Gatsby. My work was still unsteady even after I replaced my tools, so I spent quite a bit of time poring over the Classifieds with very little in the way of luck. I just kept lowering my standards until I had a few numbers to call, scribbled in haste onto a notepad.

     “Any luck?” asked Gatsby from my side.

     I jerked so hard that my chair came back an inch from the kitchen table. 

     “Don’t do that,” I admonished in a hushed way. I rushed to flip my notepad over before Gatsby could see the numbers I’d written down. These weren’t exactly jobs I wished to take, but if I could do some work at night, when I wasn’t really sleeping anyway, it could make up for the lack of work in the daytime.

     “Sorry.” Gatsby wrapped his arms around himself. He looked halfway foolish in my own oversized t-shirt from Coney Island—halfway foolish, and halfway…well, I didn’t want to admit what else I thought about the look. My face warmed at the mere notion.

     I scratched the back of my head and sighed, “It’s fine. I’m still looking.”

     “Oh, well…” Gatsby hummed as he drifted back over to the sink to finish the dishes from dinner. 

     I looked over my phone numbers, miserable, and stood to call the first one with our wall phone before realizing Gatsby would overhear. I did not want to hear what he’d have to say about a job in scrubbing garbage scows or manure shoveling, but unfortunately given the financial straits of Duluth at the time, this was all that was available. 

     Just as I went to grab my coat, however, Gatsby called me back into the kitchen.

     “Nick…” he began, clutching the sink sprayer. “It’s not working.”

     I held my hands out to the sides in a gesture of helplessness, saying, “I’m not a plumber. Use the sink in the bathroom.”

     I had to get going before it got too late or all the positions got filled up, so I hurried to the door from there. Of course, Gatsby followed me out of the kitchen with more to say.

     “Wait, Nick. Where are you going?” he asked, clinging to the wide doorway into the kitchen. He stared at me with what I perceived as a valiant effort to maintain some semblance of uncaring.

     I paused with my hand on the doorknob and looked back at his diminutive form, silhouetted by the yellow light of the kitchen. His hand curled around the split wood of the doorframe and that haughtiness sort of faded from his expression the longer I stayed silent.

     Finally, I admitted truthfully, “The Gas-Lite.” There was a payphone there that I could use. 

     “You’re not…buying more beer, are you?” 

     And any semblance of softness that might’ve been fostered within me was instantly choked out.

     “And how is that any of your goddamn business?” I spat with an uncomfortable flash of heat rising to my face. Shame. It was shame, plain and simple, but I couldn’t bear to face it head-on. I was never able to do that.

     Gatsby took the step down from the kitchen and came around to stand next to me, his face somewhat more pale and drawn than it had been on the yacht all those days ago. He kept his eyes downturned as he spoke in an unfamiliarly soft manner.

     “Because your beer budget is also our grocery budget?” he said. “Because—”

     “Yeah, and I make this money so I can spend it how I want.” And this, at least, felt righteous. I’d never had money of my own until last summer, working at the bonds office, but even then it had been constantly monitored by my father. Now I earned it and nobody needed to keep an eye on my funds but me. I didn’t like that Gatsby had taken it upon himself to take a jab at what I spent my money on.

     It was at this point that Gatsby took a few sluggish steps back toward the kitchen, muttering, “You’re right, old sport. You’re right. You’re right…”

     “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I am.”

     With that I flung open the door and stormed out into the night. And I tried not to look back. I really, really did. But I did , and there stood Gatsby on the front porch, looking more rightfully upset than I thought I had ever seen him. Gone was that rich-bitch air of entitlement and in the blue night I could see nothing but an old-set terror struggling right against the surface of his disposition.

     A crack formed in my resolve but I kept on, flinging the driver’s door of the truck open and crawling into the seat with a scowl. I had only just inserted the key into the ignition, however, when I noticed for the first time a torn square of foil on the passenger side floorboard. 

     A condom wrapper.

     I blinked a few times, unable to make sense of what I was seeing, before snatching the damned thing up with a shaking hand and firing out of the truck, back through the waist-high grass in the yard, and up the porch steps where Gatsby still waited in fear.

     “ Chester!” I called out. “Get the fuck out here.”

     I had already made it to his bedroom door by the time he had the decency to crawl out of bed and open it up.

     “What?” he asked boredly, but even for that boredom I could practically watch an indignant sort of concern rise to his expression. It reached its peak when I came to a stop in front of him and held the condom wrapper up in between us.

     “What is this?” I demanded.

     He scowled and said, “...a condom wrapper? You literally begged me to be safe , so what’s your problem now?”

     I shoved it into his hand, this unfamiliar rage bubbling within me as I spat, “Could you at least have the fucking decency to do it in the truck bed instead of on the bench seat? I mean, jesus christ, Chester, we all have to use the Dodge! Did you at least get rid of the condom itself or am I gonna find it tucked up under the driver’s seat?” I paused, knowing I shouldn’t say it, before adding, “Can you not fucking help yourself?”

     The look of utter contempt on Chester’s face then nearly silenced all that pointless anger in me. And yet his contempt resolved itself into a familiar sly smirk—and now I had to wonder if he’d ever masked his true feelings like this before.

     “Oh my god, you are jealous.”

     “Oh, fuck off,” I shot back, though without any real venom. I turned from Chester and stalked past Gatsby to leave the house again. I needed to call these numbers, and I needed to clear my head. The drive to the Gas-Lite would help with that. 

     It didn’t clear away the anger in Chester’s face or the fear in Gatsby’s as well as I would have hoped. Both hovered in my mind as if to punish me for my poor behavior—and I guessed I deserved it.

     Ever since last summer, ever since my father all but disowned me, I’d had such a god-awful hair trigger for all sorts of emotions I’d been able to keep at bay my whole life previously. I’d never had a problem with anger or guilt or keeping my desires at bay. But as I rolled up into the parking lot of the Gas-Lite, every emotion of mine felt out of control. 

     Everything buzzed around my brain like a wasp’s nest. This was why I had begun to drink after coming out to Duluth. I was never a drinker before but I couldn’t handle living like this—out of control like this. Out of the stifling support system I’d left behind in St. Paul.

     I paused at the door of the convenience store.

     My wallet. My wallet. I didn’t have my god-forsaken wallet. Nor could I afford another six-pack even if I had brought my wallet to begin with.

     With great reluctance and more than a little shame, I turned on my heel and trudged down to the payphone out front. I stuck my hand down into my pocket to grab the note with phone numbers written down and instead came up with the photograph of Gatsby, still in my pocket from where I’d pulled these jeans out of the hamper just this morning.

     I looked down at it in the flickering exterior lights of the convenience store and the very last glimmer of blue twilight surrounding. 

     He looked happy. Happier than I could ever imagine a person like him being. How did he even know Daisy? How did he end up in Louisville? How’d he see her if that monster Dan Cody was around? I couldn’t imagine he’d ever let Gatsby out of his sight if it wasn’t of his own accord, like when he’d abandoned him in the hospital.

     I couldn’t answer any of these questions without Daisy. Jordan could probably tell me some of it, sure, but she could also sensationalize and misremember and—Daisy, while a liar and bore nowadays, looked just as happy and carefree as Gatsby in this photograph.

     I still remembered her number. I could call her right now. Reconnect her with Gatsby, and then he’d not only no longer be my problem but Dan Cody would never be able to come back for him if he ever missed his pretty little punching bag.

     I could just wash my hands of all of this. Forget about the money Gatsby owed me, because really, Dan Cody owed me that money, didn’t he? I’d be willing to bet Gatsby had never laid a hand on a single cent of it.

     I struck my hand down into my pocket once again, knowing there was change there with the lint at the bottom, and paused with a dime in between my fingers, remembering when Gatsby had handed it dutifully back to me. 

     A selfish bitch would’ve kept it.

     I pulled that dime out of my pocket. Deposited it into the pay phone. Cradled the phone handle onto my shoulder and dialed a number.

     The dial tone chirred for a few minutes before someone finally picked up.

      “Duluth Manure and Fertilizer, how may I direct your call?”

      “Hi, yeah. I saw your ad in the paper about a night job opening…”

Chapter Text

     Two weeks. 

      Two weeks.

     Two god-awful, miserable weeks had passed since I’d been gathered from the hospital and dropped like some unwieldy burden into a life I wasn’t sure I had ever enjoyed living. Two weeks, yes, and my stitches had come out, and the bruises on my thighs were all but gone—after much poking and prodding alone in our one shared bathroom—but my mind, and memories of this life I supposedly led, were only sharpened through sheer force of determination, not by some miraculous ‘snap of the fingers’ the doctor had described to me.

     No, suffice it to say I stood in the kitchen day by day and found myself slowly, silently suffocated under the weight of seemingly misplaced expectations. Because for all the ease I felt in having things expected of me, and confidence in my capability, I still could not quite escape the notion that something about this was all so terribly wrong.

      I thought I had discovered the source of the uncertainty sometime after midnight on day fourteen of my fraught return to domestic life. 

     As it happened, I had spent those past several nights in much the same manner as I spent this particular night—flat on my back on a sinking queen-size mattress and staring up at the cracked, miserable ceiling in total rejection of the bliss of sleep. 

     Something was wrong. Something was just so very wrong, and I was uncomfortable, and like with everything else in my memory, the root cause of the issue remained just a hair’s breadth from my reach, no matter how hard I pushed my aching mind out in every direction, seeking any basis of substance from which to chart my course through the rest of my life. Or just tonight. I could start by making it through tonight, and getting to sleep seemed like the easiest path forward.

     If only things were that simple.

     Had I always been such an insomniac? Or was it just the brain damage?

     Either way, the ceiling had no answers, and it hadn’t many nights prior. Chester and Nick were both out for the night, it seemed, and I could hear Jordan’s cassette player leaking down through the gappy boards between us like water from an overflowing bathtub.

      There —

     A bathtub.

     I jolted upright in bed and stared sightlessly down at the cigarette-burnt blanket, desperation fluttering up through my lungs as I fought to grab onto whatever brief glimpse of a memory the notion of a bathtub had provided. And I almost caught it! It was so unbearably close to the outstretched edges of my conscious mind. Pink—pink and…and miserable . Pink…

     I couldn’t quite piece together if my misery came from memory or lack thereof. I did know, however, that the bathtub in this house was not pink. 

     I wouldn’t even bother to wonder where my brain conjured the faintest glimpse of a pink bathtub, nor its significance to my past. I was too tired at this hour, and the roar of the cicadas and the silence smothering velvet between them drowned out most attempts at deep thought. 

     My intention had been to lie back down and suffer through til morning, but instead I rose from the bed and cast my legs over the edge to feel the rough wood below my bare feet. Nick had told me that this room had once been a back porch, and the rough, weather-beaten planks beneath my feet struck me as evidence enough to prove that as the truth.

     At least that much seemed true. I couldn’t tell about much else—like where Nick went every night. He swore again and again that he was merely going out, usually with Chester, but seeing as the two of them didn’t seem to be on the best of terms, I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it. Then again, lacking any context, I had very little with which to make sense of anything anymore. 

     All I had was what Nick told me, and whatever faith I had in myself to surmise anything further beyond that. Such as this room having been the porch, or that he was lying about something massive —and I would have been willing to bet that it had something to do with why I was so uncomfortable sleeping alone in a room clearly meant for two.

     The front door opened and shut. I waited in silence until I was sure it was Nick, and Nick alone—which was a little peculiar—then pushed myself quietly out of the bed to go peer out at him through the cracked bedroom door.

     The house was mostly dark, save for the dim yellow light of the open refrigerator leaking out through the kitchen doorway. Then the refrigerator shut, plunging everything back into dusty moonlight before Nick appeared on the threshold between the kitchen and living room, beer in hand.

     I tried to stumble back through the doorway just for a plank to creak right under my foot. 

     Nick looked over. I stared back at him in the darkness for several seconds of silence before opening my mouth to ask him something—but nothing ever came out. The humming quiet of the night reigned over the space between us until I shut my mouth and Nick turned to go collapse on the couch, where he’d been sleeping since I…came home.

     I remained there in the bedroom doorway until I could move again, and by that time, Nick was already snoring.

     The next morning passed as all mornings had for the past few weeks. Chester dragged himself out of his bedroom and actually paused to stand next to me at the counter for a few moments in silence before sighing and hobbling back across the kitchen to his room, where he shut and locked the door and stayed put until breakfast was ready.

     Nick dragged himself off the couch and into the living room just as soon as his plate of scrambled eggs (the only sort I had figured out how to cook) and canned hash hit the table. He didn’t say a word, either, not even to thank me or greet Chester as the man pulled his chair out and settled onto the cushion with a huff.

     Seeing as Jordan didn’t seem to want to join us, I scraped the last of whatever remained in the frying pans onto my plate and sat down to pick at it until I felt I had satisfied… someone with my lack of an appetite.

     I wasn’t sure just who I meant to impress. Neither Chester nor Nick seemed to pay any attention to how I took care of myself, so long as the house was clean and meals were prepared. 

     I couldn’t exactly place why that felt so unnatural, but then again, most everything did. I spent my days glancing over my shoulder for just about every single thing I did. All of it felt wrong. Like I was doing it wrong, I mean. Somehow all the clothes I wore were wrong and no matter how I brushed my hair it was wrong and no matter what volume I spoke at, it was too loud, too sudden in the unquiet stillness of the house. I flinched at the sound of my own heart beating. That, too, felt like something of an inconvenience.

      To whom?

     After a while, I couldn’t bear the silence or my own thoughts any longer, so I spoke up to ask, “Well?”

     “No,” Nick said before the word had even left my mouth. “We don’t have a well. We’re on the city’s water lines.”

     Chester shot him a look. Nick just smirked at him, and Chester simply rolled his eyes.

     I sighed and pushed my runny eggs around on my plate. “I meant…did you boys have fun last night?”

     Chester’s fork hit his plate with enough force that I nearly dove under the table. I didn’t let it get that far, however, even if I did tense to a point of pain and scrunch down in my chair to an extent I really should have been more suspicious about. It was one loud sound . What could I possibly have been so afraid of?

     I didn’t think I’d ever get an answer for that. No one here seemed particularly violent, nor had anyone made any real attempt to intimidate me—beyond Nick’s feeble tries any time I questioned anything.

     Chester finally asked Nick, “I don’t know, Nick? Did we have fun?”

     “I figured you did,” Nick shot back, “given the limp and all.”

     “Oh, my god. ” Chester jolted up out of his chair. “Whatever.”

     He slammed his chair under the table and yet again I hunkered down into my chair before I could even help myself, so totally consumed for a moment by this overwhelming sickness deep in the core of my being.

     What was that? And why was I so afraid?

     Why did my eyes begin to sting?

     I didn’t have time to think about it, nor did I want to, when all was said and done. If there were things in my past better left forgotten, then so be it. 

     Chester stormed his way back into his bedroom and slammed the door shut, leaving me and Nick to sit there alone at the table in silence while I unfolded myself in the chair and he finished his breakfast like nothing had happened. Every so often I would glance up to study his face—the worry line between his brow, the gentle downturn of his mouth, the uneven line of his beard, as if he’d never had one before, and had never been told how to take care of it. 

     I really thought I could remember the feel of it underneath my fingertips.

      Why?

     Still, for all my studying, I couldn’t quite piece together any understanding of why I felt that way, nor could I gain any insight into the emotion present there in Nick’s expression. The more I tried to learn, the less I understood. I got the feeling that was a common sensation for me. 

     “Nick…” I began as he rose with his empty plate in hand.

     He said nothing, just placed his plate in the sink and turned rather quickly, as if to flee the kitchen. However, my chair was right there against the sink, so I had enough time to reach out and curl my hand around his bare forearm to keep him there. 

     Nick stared down at my hand with great offense before ripping his arm from my grip. He did stay there, though, and finally snapped, “What?”

     I stared up at him until he met my eyes, and then I looked away. 

     “If you’ve always slept out on the couch, then why don’t I like sleeping alone?” I demanded—though I suppose that could hardly be the right descriptor, given that I couldn’t raise my voice above a polite murmur. Even that took the summation of all the courage I felt I had.

     “Hell if I know.” Nick turned away from me to leave, but didn’t make it that far in the end. He stayed put there against the counter with his back to me and his head lowered just to say, “...I’m…I’m sorry.”

     I stared up at him, even if he couldn’t see it, and admitted quietly, “I just…have to wonder why things are the way they are. I feel like I’m missing something obvious and it’s very, very frustrating. What am I missing, Nick?”

      Is it you?

      He scoffed out a weak attempt at a laugh and shrugged. “Your memories, maybe? I can’t help you with that.”

     It was at this point that Nick stepped away from me, hurrying now toward the kitchen doorway as if with the intention of breaking into a sprint at the slightest provocation.

     “ Can’t or won’t ?” I asked, but he was already around the corner.

     The front door opened and slammed shut, shaking the whole house with its force. I watched the surface of my orange juice ripple for the span of a few seconds before rising with a worn sigh to place my dish in the sink.

     The faucet itself was, of course, unusable. I’d tried to take a look in the cabinet underneath the sink, to see if something could be done with the pipes, but a rather large spider had taken up residence and Nick had already denied that he knew anything whatsoever about plumbing, so I was left with the little spray hose with which to wash all the dishes. When it worked, which wasn’t a guarantee. It didn’t even seem to be the sort of sprayer one would imagine coming with a kitchen sink. It was a garden hose with a nozzle.

     With an unintentional scowl, I grabbed the hose and made an attempt to get to work against the rapidly remounting pile of dishes. 

     Naturally, with one squeeze of the handle, all my plans came apart—namely because the hose produced no water at all. 

     I stared down at the hose in disbelief for a moment before squeezing it again. Once more, nothing. I tossed the heavy metal handle into the emptier side of the sink and turned both of the faucet knobs, thinking perhaps it had somehow reversed itself, only to rip the hot-water knob off in my frustration.

     I dashed the damned thing into the sink and absolutely stomped my way out of the kitchen, through the living room, to the front porch, from which I called, “ Nick.”

      And he heard me. He had the hood of the truck up, and half his body was submerged in the vast engine bay, but I could tell that he’d heard me because his frantic hands came to rest on the cold block of the engine and he let out an audible curse.

     “Yeah?” he finally threw back over his shoulder before standing upright with his hands across the front of the Dodge to hold his body up. “Kinda busy.”

     I scowled and picked my way on tender feet down the splintering steps and through the waist-high browning grass to come stand next to him on what remained of a gravel driveway. I peered down into the greasy engine bay and asked, “What’s it doing?”

     “Not starting.”

     “Hm. Shame. Come fix the kitchen sink.”

     Nick didn’t respond at first. I stood at his side with my arms crossed over my chest—over his Loring Park Festival 1970 teeshirt that I had no choice but to wear since I couldn’t figure out that god-forsaken machine out in the shed—and peered up at Nick while I waited for him to get his thoughts together and speak to me.

     Nick pushed his hair, shaggy as it was now, off his forehead. This left a massive grease smear across the skin. I stared up at it as he reminded me, “I told you. Use the bathroom sink.”

     “You mean the sink I have to unclog every morning? That sink? You believe a sink that can’t handle soap will do just fine with food ? Is that what you think, Nick?” I looked away from him to peer down into the engine bay of the truck. “And your timing belt’s rotted through. Now, come take a look at the sink.”

     “...how do you know that?” he asked without going to take a look at the sink.

      I scoffed. “Because I can see it rotted through? Right there.” I pointed to the side of the engine, where the belt had dry rotted and now hung limp. “Can’t fix that until the automotive store opens up. So come fix the sink.”

     “How did you know that was the timing belt?” Nick pressed again. He’d leaned down to speak to me, too—leaned in as if to take up my entire field of view.

     I pressed my lips together and looked up at him for a moment, chasing down wild rabbits of memories buried deep in the shadowed majority of my mind. Of course, none of them remained within my grasp.

     All I could really manage was a shrug and, “I like cars. Don’t I?”

     Nick stared at me, then shook his head. “That doesn’t even…How? You didn’t even…You were on a…I mean…” He blinked a few times. “Yeah. I guess. Never…never really explained how you…learned about cars, though.”

    “Well…I don’t know,” I muttered after a moment. It was quick work to cover my uncertainty, however, as I asserted, “You would know more than I do. Though it’s really quite concerning how little you seem to know about me.”

     Nick huffed about that and rubbed his face again before muttering, “I know plenty about you.”

     “Like what?” I demanded.

     He frowned at me. “Like…” 

     “Like…?”

     “Like…” It was at this point that Nick snorted a bit with laughter. “Like that your parents were dirt farmers.”

     He shut the truck’s hood and turned to head back into the house. I let him get three full steps before grabbing back onto his sleeve and trailing behind him like a petulant child, asking with ever-simmering fury, “ Dirt farmers?”

      “Couldn’t grow much else.” Nick said this without looking at me, but I could see the lift of his cheek as he ripped his sleeve from my hands and took the stairs in double-time to get away from me. He was smirking! Absolutely smirking.

     I chased after him and grabbed onto his sleeve again, demanding once more, “And just where did they ‘farm dirt,’ then? Do you know that much?”

     He laughed again, more than a little too amused, as we entered the kitchen. “Well, sure I do.”

     “Where?”

     “Bumfuck, North Dakota.”

     I didn’t even think about it. I just started swatting at his arm, not with genuine intent to harm but with serious intent to make my fury known. And about two seconds into this, my good sense caught up to me and I froze, thinking I had crossed some hideous line, and instinct had me flinch away from Nick before I could even really catch what I was doing.

     But Nick was laughing. Quiet, although genuine, laughter left him as he knelt down to open up the cabinet under the kitchen sink. I watched him fearlessly brush away the cobwebs with his bare hands and thought briefly about a spider biting the smugness out of him, and then I stormed my way behind his kneeling form to go lift myself up to sit on the kitchen counter next to the sink.

     “You know, you’re not as funny as you think you are.”

     “Mhm,” he hummed. “I used to be.”

     A little flash of excitement cut through my low-simmering anger like a light. I peered down at him and prodded gently, “And then what, old sport?”

     I thought that if I learned more about Nick, I might learn more about myself. 

     “None of your business.”

     I kicked him lightly on the shoulder, undeterred despite my earlier tension. I’d fight back against it wherever I could. I didn’t really want to know why I spent most of my days waiting for someone to explode with anger. Nick was easily frustrated, sure, but he’d never…

     …best not to consider it. 

     I asked, “But it is, isn’t it? Since we’ve known each other so long, I should probably remember when you were…funny.”

     “Uh huh.” He stood up to go fetch some sort of wrench from his toolbag at the end of the counter, then returned with the whole toolbag in tow. Without warning, he dropped it right on my lap.

     All the wind left me with a huff. Still, I clutched the bag in my lap without letting any of the various tools within spill out to the floor below.

     “Why am I holding this, again?” I asked.

     “In case I need something.” Nick knelt back down in front of the cabinet and started fiddling around inside it, out of my line of sight. “Those are all carpentry tools, and they’re the cheap kind, but…I mean, how hard can plumbing possibly be, right?”

     I heard a heavy metal clunk , and then Nick cursed faintly. 

     “Difficult…” I suggested, which earned me an extended hard look from where Nick remained on the floor. I couldn’t help smiling down at him. It might’ve been a little bit catty—who really cared?

     It took until Nick was halfway in the cabinet again to realize I’d really meant the smile.

     I’d put it away by the time Nick asked for something. 

     “Duct tape,” he requested, holding his hand up toward me without withdrawing from the depths of the cabinet.

     I stared at his outstretched hand for a minimum of three full heartbeats before hesitantly drawing my eyes away to poke through the tool bag until I found a roll of dull silver tape. I pulled it from the tool bag and pressed it into Nick’s waiting hand. Our fingers brushed. It meant nothing.

     My face went a bit warm after that and I let Nick fuss with the roll in the cabinet until he finally had to sit back on his feet, revealing the roll now mangled in his hands. He’d tried to pull the tape from the roll and rip it off but instead just folded the tape into itself about four different ways.

     I sighed and held my hand out to him.

     Nick sat with the roll of duct tape in his lap and stared at my hand as if he could have any clue how I’d sat and watched his mere seconds ago. And then, finally, he reached up—not with the tape, but with an empty hand, to slip his into mine as he had in Chester’s room my first week here.

     Our hands remained intertwined for a moment before I murmured, “The tape, Nick.”

     “You want us to tape our hands together?”

     I stared at him blankly until he started laughing, and then I was laughing, too. I didn’t even recognize the sound coming from somewhere deep within me, as unfamiliar as the darkest shades of my memory.

     “I’ve gotta stop doing that,” he said after a minute. He withdrew his hand even as my own reflexively gripped it just a bit tighter, then passed the roll of duct tape into my hand instead.

     I pulled the folded end of the tape taut. “...not necessarily.” Then I brought the edge of the tape up to my teeth and ripped, ignoring the sensation of Nick watching me as I spat the useless end of the tape to the side and pulled out a length of better, unstuck tape. “How much?”

     Nick cleared his throat. “...Eight, nine inches.”

     I looked up from the tape to meet his eyes, then brought the tape back up to my teeth to tear off the required length.

     “Cut—” Nick started, then amended quickly, “I mean—we have scissors, you know.”

     “And nobody thought to remind me where they were,” I retorted softly as I offered the length of tape to him. 

     “Oh.” Nick took the tape, taking great effort to pull it from the opposite end of where I held the strip. “They’re just in that cup on top of the…fridge. Sorry. I…probably put them up there before coming to get you so you wouldn’t go cutting anything while concussed.”

     “Mhm.” I narrowed my eyes as Nick buried himself in the cabinet again. I kicked his shoulder again, once, twice—gentle little nudges to keep myself in his attention at all times. I wasn’t entirely sure where this desire or skill came from—at what point could I have ever been so desperate as to refine a skill in attention-seeking?

     Nick worked for a moment more before crawling back out of the cabinet to rise and stand in front of the sink—although, he really stood a bit off-set from the sink itself. Directly in front of me, as a matter of fact. 

     “Alright,” he said. “Let’s see if that worked.”

     I nodded and reached out to turn the one remaining handle for the faucet. Of course, nothing came out. I really didn’t expect it to at this point, but I sort of liked having Nick hover so solidly before me. It was familiar even if I still felt some instinctive, or remembered, unease. I couldn’t imagine why. 

     Nick scoffed. “That’s never worked, Jay. I meant—”

     He reached into the sink to grab the spray hose where I had flung it down earlier. And I supposed all thought must have gone out the window in Nick’s case, because he immediately lifted it, pointed toward me, and said, “I meant this. ”

     He squeezed the handle and a blast of icy cold water hit me straight to the chest.

     In his shock, he held down the sprayer handle for a good few seconds, dousing me fully in frigid water as I sat there, open-mouthed and blinking in utter disbelief. And even once he’d loosened his grip, he held the sprayer upright in my direction with his eyes trained on where my shirt— his shirt, on my body—had become thoroughly doused in water.

     And right as Nick started apologizing, I snatched the hose from his hands.

     There was a pause of one full second that passed in ten times its natural expanse before I squeezed the trigger and hit Nick with a stream of water, right against his stomach. 

     Nick yelped at the chill and just as I began to laugh, he recovered and started fighting me for the sprayer, but I twisted in my place on the counter and fought valiantly to keep the thing from his grasp—but, as it was, Nick had the upper hand.

     A hand, actually, lower than anticipated: right there on the edge of the counter, pressed up against the side of my thigh with enough pressure to pull my focus downward. He had just enough time to yank the hose up to its fullest length to hold it above my head.

     “Hey—hey!” I protested breathlessly, unable to keep the laughter from spilling over again as I shifted frantically on the counter in a half-failed attempt to grab the hose back from him. Nick kept it gleefully above my head even as I hooked my legs around him for leverage—brought one hand down on his shoulder to push myself up higher—

     —and suddenly we were chest-to-sopping-chest with just the tool bag between us. My hand drifted over Nick’s where he held the hose above my head and I lowered my gaze from my prize long enough to realize that given my newfound proximity, we were face-to-face.

     Nick’s dark eyes flickered down from the hose and his smile faded, though not with the absence of joy, but rather the focus of it. I watched his eyes drop just a little lower.

     I could feel his heart against my chest, pounding in time with mine.

     I never even thought to question it. I just leaned in.

     At precisely that moment, Chester’s bedroom door shut right across the kitchen.

     “Oh. Um—” he started just as Nick jolted back away from me. Unfortunately, my legs had wound around his waist by that point, so when he jumped back like that, I fell back and almost slipped into the sink. The tool bag slipped right off my lap and to the floor, where half its contents and a good puddle of water spilled out from its open top end.

     “What?” Nick rushed to ask Chester as he practically sprinted away from me. “What? What’s up?”

     I remained in an awkward position on the counter until I was sure I could gather myself. By the time I’d gotten upright, Chester still hadn’t torn his eyes from me. I cut my eyes away from him as heat came to chase away any of my chill. Shame. It must’ve been shame.

      Why?

     “Um…” Chester began again. “I just…wanted to warn you, the truck was kind of fucked by the time I got home. Something’s wrong with it.”

     “Oh,” I said. “So the two of you didn’t come home together, then? What happened there?” I had thought as much, but it was certainly interesting to get confirmation.

     “Uh—” began Chester.

     “We already fixed the truck!” Nick plowed right on through. “I mean—it’s not fixed, but we know what’s wrong with it. Jay figured it out.”

     “Cool.” Chester ran his hand over his hair. “Yeah, I had an, uh…interested party back at Ranchero’s, so I dropped Nick off at home late last night. Right?”

     “Right,” said Nick. He wouldn’t quite look at me. “Um…yeah.” He gestured over toward the sink. “...sink’s fixed, so you should be able to get those dishes done while I walk up to the automotive store for that…belt. Thing.”

     I stared at Nick, sitting there on the counter in my freezing wet clothes, and finally just nodded. 

     “Right.” I sniffled a little and dropped myself down off the counter. “Go and do that, then. I’ll…be here.”

      “Good.” Nick turned from me just as I took one step closer, and then he was gone from the kitchen and out the front door almost before I could really register it. This left me alone with Chester, who looked me up and down in my sopping wet clothes for a moment.

     Finally, he asked, “...do you actually know how to use the washing machine?”

     “...not at all,” I admitted. In fact, that machine seemed to have come alive and attempted to eat me the last time I tried to use it.

     “And does Nick have anything else left in his closet for you to steal?”

     “Not much.”

     Chester gave me an unexpectedly soft look. “Well, c’mon.” He stepped past me toward the bathroom. I followed him and reached the door just as he stepped out with an armful from the hamper. “Sorry. I probably should have shown you.”

     “That’s…fine,” I said, drifting to a stop to watch out the front window as Nick crossed the front yard. I hesitated there and watched until he’d disappeared into the trees that separated us from the main road. I didn’t know how far away the automotive store was on foot. 

     For whatever reason, I hoped it wasn’t far.