Wicked Boy (73) (Patreon)

(warnings for referenced child abuse, referenced alcoholism, and a toxic friendship — but don’t worry, the next chapter is pleasant)

*

Lucas was my lily pad.

He had boxy ends to his fingers where his nail curved, blunt, sometimes dirty — like the archetypical teenage boy, usually somewhat filthy, always touching something.  The sheets, the pillowcase, his hair — tapping along my thigh when he spoke.  His movements were like that, young and reckless, lips wet as he chewed a pen cap between his teeth.

Lucas' oral fixation, his lucky number, his sunburnt nose.

I took it all in.  I noticed everything.

And it didn't mean anything.

His thumb on my inseam, the bounce of his fingers at the edge of my pocket.  It didn't matter how hot his room was, how humid our body heat made it, he always sat shoulder to shoulder with me, like he couldn't get close enough, and maybe it was like how babies bond with a parent.

Skin on skin.  Quality time.  Comfort.  Imprinting.  We knew each other for — for so long.  I just became so attached to him.  So dependent on another child, then another teen, and I ruined it all.

It wasn't intimacy.

It wasn't romance. And perhaps, maybe, it wasn't even attraction. It was a complicated greed, as it always has been, wanting to be loved in return.

"That's fucking wild."

I had my first kiss there in Lucas' house. In his room, it smelled like an open chip bag, lingering spray on deodorant, and the basket of wrinkled laundry near his door.  It was nothing special. I so desperately wanted it to be special.

But it was Lucas, and every detail, every aspect of him, was a ray of sunlight for me to soak up, to romanticize, a safe spot to laze about it and think of nothing.  And then I would go home, and I would think of Lucas instead of my father, instead of my mother because it was so much easier to accept and fester over his absence of affection than theirs.

But abruptly, our lips had touched — he'd said the wrong thing, revealed the worst, and now, I felt scooped out.  Gone.  Like I was watching myself say nothing that I really wanted to say.

You're nothing to be jealous of, after all.

Lucas threw his head back and laughed.  I watched him, his Adam's apple, how the sun peeled through his open curtains and rested just above his smile.  The rainfall from the night before glistened in poetic little beads against the blooms of daffodils in the hanging pot outside, the usually boisterous, overfilled Gotthardt house damped by early morning.

"Me? No way, "  Lucas talked in such a sharp way, then, wielding his sardonic tongue in paths that left the cut to the imagination.  Did he harm me with it?  Or did that subtle bit of sneer, the inferior spark of boyhood tenderness, did they fraternize in a way that protected me?  I wouldn't know.  I was used to being hurt, and maybe, the scarcity of hurt was good enough.  "... Your first kiss?  Me?"

Lucas whispered kiss, slithery and secret, unsweetened by adoration — half-mocking, but with a thrust of his elbow to say,

Oh, come on, I don't mean it.

Like pulling pigtails — Was this affection?  Was it contempt? I didn't know how to distinguish care from what I had been taught.

I don't think he knew, either.

"... C'mon.  That's — it doesn't count."  Lucas said at last.  He shrugged.  Sounded proud.  Looked at my lips, my chest — the absence of anything soft or round, and then sounded unsure.  "...You'll get your first real kiss."

I looked away.  Back at him. A heliotrope chasing the sun.

How much shade can a heliotrope tolerate before it withers?

I should've looked it up.

"Trust-fund girls must be aching for you to throw your Bambi eyes their way."  Lucas continued, indifferent, words the bitter flavor of citrus peels.  Unrequited affections.   Unrequited loves.   Things I filled my jar with.  "Practically slobbering.  Hell.  Throw them a bone."

He snaked an arm behind my neck, a large hand on my shoulder, squeezed.  Touch.  It didn't hurt, but it did, in a small — pit of a peach in the belly sort of way.  This was rejection. He was always touching, reaching, pulling — then pushing me away again.

But he touched me, and no one else did.

And it didn't bleed, or bruise, or scar.

Or at least, I thought.

"Bambi eyes."  I echoed.  My throat was dry.  My back ached.  The wound had dried.  The scabbing skin felt tight and itchy, wrong — like my father had finally split me.  I'd almost dribbled out of my human skin and revealed myself to be every creature he had ever compared me to.  "Girls.  Lucas, I don't think that — I don't like,"

"Well, I do."  Lucas cut in, quick, deliberate — a be-all, end-all.  A silent, we'll never talk about this again. He stuck the pen cap back between his teeth, bit and gnawed, long and hard, and then flicked it across the room.  "Don't make this something it's not.  Alright?  You were upset.  I was — I was,"

Just a creature that was bleeding and wet, too pitiful not to coddle.

"Okay,"  I said.  I didn't want to hear his explanation.  Didn't want to carry it with me.  "It doesn't count."

You're nothing to be jealous of, after all.

It scribbled itself upon me. It was a page turning, a chapter, a book shutting.  It was an ending too absolute to overlook.

But, I could remember what it was like to memorize the details of him, his home, his smell and his laughter, his touch, and his voice.  I could see kindness in every part of him that grew past it and past me.  Even if it was like cupping water between the palms, I held onto it.

Because Lucas is only the lily pad, inconsequential, and underneath his distraction, past the kiss, is the ache of the lash mark — the skin that pulled itself together with a tight, itchy scab, and healed misshapen and raised along my shoulder blade.

My pond.

My father, with his three knock warning, the crack of his dress shoes on the marble, and the way the hush of his socked feet was worse.