Across the Sea
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Across the Sea
by Suzan Donamas
Patrick Varner had been at the college less than a week when a woman from Housing found him in the cafeteria and told him, in a voice meant to sound helpful, that there had been a reassignment.
He was halfway through a bowl of chili that tasted mostly of salt and canned tomatoes. He looked up at her, not understanding at first that she was speaking to him. People had been stopping him all week for one thing or another—orientation folders, ID cards, somebody wanting to know whether the seat across from him was taken—but this woman had a clipboard and a brisk expression, and when she said his name a second time he put down his spoon.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “A what?”
“A room reassignment. There was a clerical issue with your original placement. Nothing serious. We’ve moved you to Hall B, third floor.”
He stared at her. Hall B was one of the better residence halls, newer and closer to the center of campus. His current room was in a square brick building at the far end of things, where the aging central air made unexpected noises in the night, and the bathroom smelled faintly of bleach and old socks no matter how often the janitor came through.
“I just got unpacked,” he said.
“I know.” She gave him a sympathetic smile that managed not to slow her down at all. “But this is an upgrade.”
He almost laughed at the word. Upgrade. As if his life had a button somebody could press.
“Do I have a new roommate?”
“Yes. Gregorio DiPalma. Upperclassman. He’s already been informed.”
That meant nothing to Patrick, except that upperclassman sounded older, more settled, maybe less likely to leave wet towels on the floor or play drums with pencils at two in the morning, as his current roommate did whenever he was cramming for biology.
The woman tore a sheet off her clipboard and handed it to him. Room number. New key receipt. A phone number to call if he had questions, which probably meant a number that would go unanswered.
“You can move this afternoon,” she said. “Before six would be ideal.”
Then she was gone.
Patrick looked down at the paper and then at his chili, which had gone from hot to merely warm while the conversation happened. Around him, the cafeteria went on making its usual sounds: trays scraping, chairs bumping, voices rising and thinning in pockets. It all seemed to continue at a confident speed from which he felt slightly detached, as if the whole campus had already learned how to live here and he had not.
He had told himself, the first few days, that this would change. That everything felt strange at first. That once classes properly started, and he found a routine, the floating sensation would pass. He would know where to go without checking his map. He would stop feeling, every time he entered a classroom, as if someone might look up and ask why he was there.
It had not happened yet.
His scholarship letter was folded in the top drawer of his desk back in the dorm, though there was no reason for it to be there except that he had not wanted to leave it at home. The scholarship was the reason he was here at all. Without it there would have been no college, no residence hall, no cafeteria chili, no disorienting freedom of being in a place where no one knew anything about him except what was written on a file.
The job was part of it, too—hours he hadn’t started yet, but already felt waiting for him.
His father had said he ought to be proud. His mother had cried, softly and briefly, then smiled too brightly for the rest of the evening and talked about practical things: towels, shoes, where they might find a decent used blazer for presentations if one was ever needed. They had driven him up in a car that had once been respectable and now coughed when stopped too long at lights. On the way home, his mother had kissed his cheek and told him not to let the place change him. His father had said, from behind the wheel, “Let some of it change you. That’s what you go for.”
Patrick had nodded at both of them, because there was no way to answer either remark.
He finished the chili because it was there and because leaving food behind still felt like a kind of arrogance he had not earned. Then he carried his tray to the return window and went back across campus with the reassignment slip folded in his pocket.
The old dorm room looked worse when he came back to it, knowing he was leaving. His roommate was gone, thank God, probably in class or sprawled somewhere on the lawn pretending to study. Patrick stood in the middle of the narrow room and saw all at once how temporary his side of it was. A few books stacked by the bed. Shirts hanging carefully to keep them from wrinkling. The framed photo of his parents at a picnic table years ago, before things had tilted and then tilted further. A cheap desk lamp. Two drawers’ worth of clothes, most of them a little too old or a little too worn to match the images he had formed in his head of college life.
He began packing.
It went quickly because there was not much to pack. By three-thirty, he had his things in two cardboard boxes, a duffel, and one suitcase with a wheel that liked to swivel sideways. He made two trips from one dorm to the next, sweating by the second one, his arms aching with the dull, mean ache of carrying awkward weight by handles that cut into the hands.
Hall B had a lobby that smelled faintly of furniture polish and cool air. Someone had arranged a bowl of fake apples on a table near the mailboxes. There was carpet in the halls, not the industrial tile he was used to, and framed prints of sailboats and eucalyptus trees that suggested the administration had once hoped atmosphere could be installed like lighting.
Third floor. Room 312.
He stood outside the door for a moment, one box on the floor, the suitcase upright beside his leg. He was suddenly aware that there might be music on the other side, or laughter, or some look from his new roommate that would make the whole thing immediately awkward. He had always hated arriving after other people had already established themselves. It made him feel not merely late but unnecessary.
He knocked.
There was a pause, then the latch turned, and the door opened.
The first thing Patrick noticed was that the room was bright. The blinds were open and the afternoon light came in slant and warm, laying gold across the carpet. The second thing he noticed was the man standing in the doorway.
Gregorio DiPalma was taller than Patrick had expected, broad through the shoulders in a way that seemed less bulky than composed, as if his body had been arranged on purpose. He had dark hair, blue eyes so clear they almost looked artificial in the light, and a face that managed to be handsome without stiffness, helped perhaps by the quick smile that appeared as soon as he took in Patrick and the box at his feet.
“Varner?” he said.
“Yeah. Patrick.”
“Come in. I was wondering when they’d actually send you up.”
His voice was easy, amused without being mocking. He took one step back to clear the doorway, then bent without ceremony and lifted the box Patrick had set down.
“I can get it,” Patrick said automatically.
“I know you can.” Greg carried it inside anyway. “Doesn’t mean you should.”
The room really was better. Larger, for one thing. Not by much, but enough that the space around the beds and desks felt inhabitable rather than grudging. Greg’s side was already in order: clothes hung neatly, books stacked flat, a tennis racket in a pressed cover leaning in one corner, nothing strewn or abandoned. Patrick’s side, empty except for the mattress and desk, seemed to wait for him with an almost flattering neutrality.
“You got the better side,” Greg said. “Window catches less glare in the morning.”
Patrick laughed a little. “Did I?”
“I’m a generous man.”
He said it lightly, but there was enough of a smile afterward that Patrick could not tell whether it was a joke or the sort of thing some people said about themselves because it happened to be true.
Greg set down the box and offered his hand. Patrick shifted the smaller carton to his other arm and shook it.
Greg’s hand was cool and dry, his grip direct but not crushing. He wore a watch with a metal band that caught the light when he moved—a watch so sleek and expensive-looking that Patrick, who had spent his life around men who checked time on pharmacy clocks and microwaves, noticed it at once.
“Sorry about the shuffle,” Greg said. “Housing overbooks, underthinks, and panics. It’s practically a tradition.”
“You sound like you’ve been here a while.”
“Long enough.”
He was probably twenty-one, Patrick guessed. Maybe twenty-two. Not old, exactly, but old enough that the first-year confusion all over Patrick must have seemed visible from across the hall.
Greg glanced at the half-open suitcase, then at Patrick again. “You done carrying everything?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Sit down before you fall over. You look cooked.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re pink.”
Patrick lifted a hand to his face. “It’s hot.”
“It’s September. Everything here is hot.” Greg nodded toward the desk chair. “Sit.”
The strange thing was that Patrick did. Not because the instruction had force in it, exactly, but because Greg said it with the kind of lazy confidence that made refusing feel fussier than obeying.
Patrick sat. Greg went to the little refrigerator under his desk, opened it, and pulled out a bottle of water, which he tossed across the room with casual accuracy. Patrick caught it awkwardly against his chest.
“Thanks.”
“Welcome.”
Greg leaned one hip against his desk and watched him unscrew the cap. There was nothing uncomfortable in the attention, or not yet. If anything, Patrick had the odd sensation that Greg was pleased by his presence in the room already, as if some small inconvenience had unexpectedly turned out well.
“Where are you from?” Greg asked.
Patrick told him, a small town in eastern California, three hours’ drive from campus. A place no one really needed to know it existed.
Greg nodded as though fitting the answer into something. “Long way from here.”
“Not that long.”
“It is if you don’t know anyone.”
Patrick drank half the water in one go before answering. “I guess.”
“Scholarship?”
The question might have sounded rude from almost anyone else. From Greg it sounded like a fact he had merely stepped around rather than over.
“Yeah.”
“What for?”
“I made the honor roll eight times in a row. Some fund at the school pays my tuition and residence, but I have a campus job, too. Part of it. Long as I keep my grades up.”
Greg smiled again. “So I should keep the music low when you’re saving the world.”
“I’m not saving anything.” Patrick heard the dryness in his own voice and was surprised when Greg laughed as if he had said something genuinely funny.
“All right,” Greg said. “Then I’ll keep the music low while you don’t save it.”
That did something small and immediate to Patrick’s nerves. He had spent most of the week feeling either too quiet or too eager in conversation, as if every response he produced came out slightly wrong. Greg, on the other hand, made room for the joke and handed it back polished. It was a skill Patrick admired in people because he had never quite trusted his own use of it.
He looked around the room again, more slowly this time. “This is nice.”
“It’ll do.” Greg tilted his head toward the cardboard boxes. “You need help unpacking?”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Suit yourself.”
Patrick bent to unzip the suitcase, aware that Greg was still there, not hovering exactly but remaining in the conversation’s orbit instead of drifting back to whatever he had been doing before the knock. It was a relief, oddly enough. Patrick had dreaded the first five minutes with a new roommate more than the move itself: the scrambling introductions, the mutual sizing-up, the uncertainty of whether one should speak again after the first exchange. Greg made all of that seem unnecessary, either because he was kind or because he was too sure of his own ease to notice what would ordinarily be awkward.
Patrick unpacked in stages, setting books on the shelf, shirts in the dresser, the framed photo on the desk. Once, while he was hanging a decent white shirt he had brought in case college turned out to require looking better than he usually did, Greg said, “That color’s good on you.”
Patrick glanced back, shirt in hand. “White?”
Greg shrugged. “Clear colors. You don’t want anything muddy.”
There was no reason for the remark to matter. It was the sort of thing one person might say to another in a shared room, no stranger than commenting on weather. Still, Patrick found himself looking at the shirt differently before he hung it up, as if it had acquired a value he had not known it possessed.
When he turned back, Greg had already moved on.
“Couple of us are going out tonight,” he said. “Nothing major. Burger place off campus, maybe a club after if people aren’t dead. You should come.”
Patrick straightened too fast and bumped his head lightly on the closet frame. “Tonight?”
“Unless you’ve got plans.”
He did not. His plan, if it could be called that, had been to unpack, maybe read over the syllabus for Western Civ again, try not to feel miserable in the new room, maybe check out the library where he’d be working next week. The speed with which Greg’s invitation displaced that in his mind was almost embarrassing.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Greg watched him for a second. “You don’t have to audition for it. It’s burgers.”
Patrick laughed despite himself. “I didn’t think I was.”
“You had the look.”
“What look?”
“The one people get when they think there’s a wrong answer.”
Patrick capped the water bottle and set it on his desk. “Maybe I just got moved twice in one week.”
“Fair.” Greg pushed himself off the desk. “Come anyway. Worst case, the food’s decent and you leave early.”
There it was again: the removal of friction. Not persuasion exactly, only a smoothing away of whatever small resistance Patrick might have presented, until agreeing seemed not merely simpler but more reasonable.
“All right,” he said.
“Good.”
Greg said it as if the matter had been settled in the correct way.
They went out just after seven with two other students Patrick had not met before, both of whom greeted Greg first and Patrick second. Not rudely. Simply in the natural order of things. One was a tall girl with severe bangs and a laugh like a string of glass beads falling into a bowl. The other was a blond boy from somewhere inland who talked about intramural football as if it were an emerging religion.
Greg seemed to know everyone they passed in the lot outside the dorm, or if not know them then at least know how to nod to them in a way that got an answering grin or raised hand.
Patrick sat in the passenger seat of Greg’s car, a low dark thing much nicer than anything his father had ever owned. The interior smelled faintly of leather and something clean and expensive he could not name. When Greg started the engine, music rose softly from speakers so good it seemed less played than present in the air.
“You always drive?” Patrick asked.
“Usually. I hate other people’s timing.”
That made Patrick laugh again.
Greg glanced sideways at him as he pulled out. “See? You’re already having a better evening.”
The burger place had red vinyl booths and old signs on the walls arranged to look accidental. Greg paid before Patrick could really process the bill arriving. When Patrick protested, Greg waved it off.
“You just moved. Consider it a housewarming gift.”
“That’s not how housewarming works.”
“It is if I say it is.”
He said things like that often enough, Patrick realized over the next hour, that they began to seem not domineering so much as the byproduct of a life in which decisions generally yielded when he touched them. It was easy to imagine resenting that quality in someone else. In Greg it came softened by humor and by a kind of practical attentiveness that kept landing on Patrick in ways hard to object to. When Patrick dropped a fry in his lap, Greg passed him a napkin before he had to ask. When the booth air vent ran too cold, Greg slid across to the inside seat and said, “You’re half the size of anyone here. You take the warm side.”
The others laughed, and Patrick should have bristled perhaps, but Greg said it without malice, and what remained beneath the joke was the simple fact that he had noticed.
Later, at the club—nothing serious, just a place with a tiny dance floor and a comic on a low stage between sets—Greg bought Patrick a soda and leaned close enough to be heard over the noise.
“You dance?”
Patrick shook his head automatically, then corrected himself. “A little. Not really.”
Greg looked at him. “That means yes.”
“I took lessons when I was a kid.”
“For what?”
Patrick shrugged. “Mom thought it was good for posture.”
“And?”
“And I was eight.”
Greg grinned. “Still counts.”
Patrick might not have said even that much to anyone else. The story of his childhood existed in fragments he had learned to ration carefully: his mother on television twenty years ago when she was a child herself, bright-faced and precocious in reruns nobody watched on purpose anymore; the piano lessons she still gave in the living room to keep money moving through the house; the years before his father went away and the years after he came back to a town that remembered too much. None of it was secret, exactly. It just felt shabby in the open, like old upholstery with the fabric gone thin at the arms.
But Greg listened as if what Patrick said interested him simply because Patrick was the one saying it. That was new. It made Patrick talk more than he meant to.
By the time they drove back, the campus lights had gone soft around the edges and the air coming through the cracked window had cooled. Greg drove faster than Patrick was used to, not wildly but with a kind of easy certainty that made the curves in the road feel chosen rather than encountered. Patrick should have minded. Instead he sat with one hand curled around the door pull and felt, to his own surprise, exhilarated.
In the room, Greg tossed his keys into the tray on his desk and loosened the collar of his shirt.
“You did all right,” he said.
“At burgers?”
“At existing outside your own head for three hours.”
Patrick sat on the edge of his bed to untie his shoes. “You make it sound like a medical condition.”
Greg laughed, then was quiet for a moment.
“You’re easy company,” he said. “You just don’t know it yet.”
The remark was so direct, Patrick did not know what to do with it. He looked up, but Greg had already turned to pull a towel from the closet, as if the line meant no more than a comment on the weather.
Still, after the lights were out and the room had settled into the soft layered sounds of two people not yet used to sleeping in the same space, Patrick lay awake longer than he should have. He thought about the car, the burger bill, the club, the way Greg had introduced him to people as if there were no question Patrick belonged among them. He thought about the better room, the colder bottle of water, the easy assumption that, of course, he would come out, of course, he would have a decent time.
Nothing had happened, really. Not in any way he could have named. Yet he had the odd sense that the day had not simply ended differently than expected, but that some hidden current had taken hold of it halfway through and drawn him gently in another direction.
He told himself it was only relief. Relief at not having landed with a slob or a bore or someone who made him feel provincial and poor the way he had feared richer boys might. Relief at being noticed kindly. Relief at one evening in which he had not had to struggle to seem less lost than he felt.
That was explanation enough.
But when he turned his head slightly on the pillow, he could just make out Greg’s shape in the other bed, one arm flung over his eyes, breathing slow and even in the dark, and Patrick felt again the same small quickening he had known in the passenger seat of the car. Not desire, not anything so simple. Just the charged awareness of orbiting something bright.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
In the morning, Greg was already up, shaved and dressed in white tennis clothes so clean they looked like part of a different life. He tossed Patrick a banana from the top of the dresser.
“Eat that,” he said. “You look like you run on coffee and nerves.”
Patrick caught it, smiling before he meant to. “Good morning to you, too.”
Greg checked the time on his watch. “I’ll be back around noon. Don’t let the place ruin you before then.”
And then he was gone, leaving the room with the faint smell of soap and starch and whatever indefinable current seemed to move with him from place to place.
Patrick sat on the bed with the banana in one hand and looked around at the room that was, somehow, already beginning to feel less like a temporary assignment and more like the start of something he had not chosen but was not sorry to receive.
Across the Sea -2-
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His job was simple enough.
Across the Sea -2-
by Suzan Donamas
The library turned out to be cooler than the rest of campus and quieter in a way Patrick had expected to find restful, but did not. Sound carried oddly there. Not loudly, but clearly—heels on tile, the squeak of a book cart wheel that needed oil, the soft flat thump of returned books being dropped into bins at the circulation desk.
His job was simple enough. Three afternoons a week, plus Saturday mornings twice a month, he shelved returns, carried bins from one floor to another, sorted damaged jackets into a cart for repair, and did whatever else the student supervisor asked without looking too visibly put upon.
On paper, it was easy work.
In practice, it seemed designed to remind him how many books existed that he would never read, how many people passed through a place without ever really seeing it, and how quickly an hour could flatten itself into something shapeless.
He was on his third shift when April first spoke to him.
She was kneeling beside a cart of oversize art books, with a pencil stuck through her dark hair, her bangs clipped up out of the way in a way that made her look severe until she smiled. Then the whole effect broke apart.
“You’re doing those out of order,” she said.
Patrick glanced at the books in his hands. “Am I?”
“Not morally. Alphabetically.” She pointed. “Monet before Morisot.”
He looked down, saw that she was right, and laughed softly at himself. “That bad already?”
“You’ll recover.” She stood, brushing dust from the knees of her skirt. “You’re Patrick, right? New scholarship kid from Hall B?”
He blinked. “That sounds ominous.”
“It’s a small library. Everybody knows things.” She offered her hand. “April.”
He shook it. “You work here too?”
“Work is a strong word. I haunt it for money.”
She had a quick, dry way of talking that made him like her almost at once. She was a year or so older than he was, maybe twenty, with a narrow face and a pair of dark eyes that seemed always half amused by something she had not yet chosen to say aloud. She wore silver rings on three fingers and moved with the restless efficiency of someone who disliked being still unless there was a reason for it.
Over the next week, she became the easiest part of the job. She showed him which elevator got stuck on three, which supervisor liked students to ask questions and which one preferred them to disappear into competence, where the broken copier on the second floor could be persuaded into one more decent page if you hit the side panel with the heel of your hand. She ate pretzels out of a paper bag during break and passed them to him without asking whether he wanted any.
“You look too polite to survive here,” she said one afternoon when he hesitated before taking the bag. “That’s not a compliment.”
“I’m surviving.”
“Barely.”
He smiled. “Maybe I’m just quiet.”
“Same thing, first month.”
By then, Greg had already begun to occupy more of Patrick’s time than Patrick would have admitted if asked directly. Not classes, not exactly. Greg had classes too, though Patrick somehow rarely saw him doing much visible work for them. But there was tennis in the late afternoons, or trips off campus with people Greg knew, or dinner somewhere better than the cafeteria, or just standing in the room talking until whatever reading Patrick had meant to do lost its shape and urgency.
It happened so smoothly, he could not have pointed to the moment he started expecting it.
Greg had a way of making plans sound less like proposals than like the natural next movement in a day.
“You’re done at five, right?” he might say from the doorway, one shoulder against the frame.
“Five-thirty.”
“Fine. Be human by six.”
Or:
“You can’t eat in the cafeteria twice in one day and respect yourself. Come on.”
Or simply:
“I’m driving down to the beach. You should see something besides books.”
Patrick often did go. Not every time. Enough times.
Enough that on the mornings he did not hear Greg moving around the room or did not know what Greg had planned later, he felt a strange flattening in the day, as if some expected current had failed to arrive.
The beach trip was the first time he met April outside the library.
Greg had said “a few people,” and that turned out to mean six, spread among two cars, coolers wedged between knees and towels hanging out of the back seat. April was there in sunglasses and a thin black shirt over her swimsuit, waving at Patrick from beside the passenger door of the second car.
“You know Greg DiPalma?” she said later, when the others were scattering toward the sand.
“He’s my roommate.”
“That sounds like something that happened to you, not something you chose.”
Patrick laughed. “Housing picked him, I guess.”
“Mm.”
She said it in a tone that did not commit to opinion.
The day was bright enough to hurt a little. Patrick had borrowed an old long-sleeved swim shirt from Greg because the one suit he owned was more suitable for a municipal pool than a California beach crowded with tan, expensive-looking students who seemed to have been born already knowing how to drape themselves on striped towels. Greg’s shirt fit close through the arms and torso, not tight exactly, but close enough that Patrick felt aware of himself in it in a way he usually preferred not to.
April looked him over, unsmiling.
“You have sunscreen on?”
“I’m wearing this.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
He admitted he had not.
She dug in her tote and produced a narrow tube with black lettering and a tiny red devil head above the number on the label.
“SPF 666,” Patrick pretended to read. “That…should be infernally effective.”
“It’s tinted,” she said. “So you don’t look like chalk paste. Hold still.”
He looked at the tube again. “That sounds fake.”
“It’s not fake. It’s camp. Different thing.”
“I can do it.”
“You can, but you won’t. Tilt your face up.”
There was no point arguing. April squeezed a little onto her fingers and smoothed it lightly across his nose and cheeks, then blended the rest at his temples with brisk competence. The stuff felt cool and faintly silky going on.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
He turned his head and caught a glimpse of himself in the dark glass of the parked car. He looked the same. Or nearly the same. Just less blotched by light, somehow. A little more finished.
“Well?” April asked.
“It’s sunscreen.”
“Exactly.”
Greg, coming back from the cooler with two bottles of water, took one look at Patrick and said, “That’s better.”
“See?” April said.
Patrick frowned at both of them. “I was fine before.”
“Sure,” Greg said easily. “Now you’re fine on purpose.”
He should have had an answer to that. Instead he took the water and followed them down toward the sand.
The beach itself was not one Greg liked to call crowded, though Patrick thought any place with that many umbrellas, children and radios counted. Greg had chosen a quieter stretch farther down where the people thinned out, and the parking lot was half hidden by low scrub and wind-bent trees. He played volleyball competently and competitively with some of the others, then swam far enough out to worry Patrick until he came back laughing, slick-haired and unbothered, water running down his shoulders in narrow lines.
“You swim?” Greg asked.
“A little.”
“That means yes.”
Patrick rolled his eyes. “You say that about everything.”
“Because you answer like a witness.”
But Greg did not push. That was part of what made him hard to resist. He noticed boundaries and somehow seemed more persuasive for not testing them directly. Instead, he left room around things until Patrick found himself stepping into it on his own.
On the drive back, salt drying faintly on his skin, Patrick felt happier than he could justify. Not wildly. Just eased. The day had cost him nothing. Greg had paid for sandwiches and parking and, when Patrick protested at the gas station where they stopped for drinks, had raised one eyebrow and said, “You can buy me lunch when you’re rich.”
That was the thing. Greg never made the money feel sharp. He made it feel like weather—simply part of the environment around him.
The next week, Patrick found a small shopping bag on his desk chair when he came back from the library.
Inside was a shirt the color of pale sea glass, soft and light in the hand, and a narrow box containing a watch with a silver-toned mesh band and a slim dark face.
He stared at both for a full minute before Greg looked up from where he sat cross-legged on his bed, reading.
“You saw the shirt at the beach,” Greg said. “Thought it’d suit you.”
Patrick picked up the watch instead. “This looks expensive.”
“It is.”
“You can’t just—”
“I can, actually.”
Patrick set it back in the box. “Greg.”
Greg closed the book over one finger to hold his place. “Try the shirt on.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“It’s the more interesting point.”
Patrick should have refused. He knew that even while he stood there with the shirt folded over his hands, the fabric smooth and cool against his palms. But refusing Greg always carried a faint sense of making a scene where none had existed before. Greg’s requests arrived in that narrow space where declining seemed not morally difficult, just socially clumsy.
“It’s too much,” Patrick said.
“For what?”
“For a shirt.”
Greg considered him. “All right. Keep the shirt and return the watch after you’ve tried it on.”
Patrick looked at him suspiciously. “That’s a trick.”
“Of course it is.”
And because Greg was smiling when he said it, Patrick laughed in spite of himself and turned toward the closet to change.
The shirt fit beautifully. There was no other word for it. Not flashy, not tight, just cut in a way that made his shoulders seem cleaner and his waist less lost in cloth. When he stepped back out, Greg’s gaze moved over him once, not lingering enough to embarrass, just measuring.
“Yeah,” Greg said.
“What?”
“That color. I was right.”
Patrick looked down at himself, then over at the watch box still open on the desk.
He did not put the watch on that night. He did two days later.
It was smaller than the kind of watch men in his family would have chosen, the case neat against his narrow wrist, the metal band sitting flat instead of sliding around loosely, the way cheaper watches always had when he tried them on in stores. He told himself that was the only reason it looked good. It fit. That and the fact that it matched everything.
Greg noticed immediately and said only, “Better.”
Patrick told himself he was keeping it temporarily.
At the library, April spotted it before lunch.
“Well,” she said, returning a stack of journals to the cart between them. “That came from him.”
Patrick looked down at his wrist. “How do you know?”
“Because no scholarship boy buys himself a watch that nice in week three.”
He smiled despite himself. “Maybe I found it.”
“Then whoever lost it is rich and annoyed.”
She reached over and lifted his wrist lightly to inspect the band, then let go. “It’s good, though. Fits you.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Mm.” She slid a journal into place. “That’s how he operates.”
Patrick glanced at her. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing sinister.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Greg just has tastes. He sees something, he decides what goes with it.”
The remark should have bothered him more than it did. Instead, he found himself thinking about the shirt folded in his drawer, the bottle of water on move-in day, the beach, the watch lying cool and weightless against the pulse in his wrist. Greg did have tastes. Everyone knew that. The difference was that, for some reason, Greg kept applying them to Patrick.
That same afternoon, April handed him a tiny tube while they were in the staff restroom washing dust off their hands before the supervisor came through for rounds.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Lip gloss.”
He stared at her.
“With SPF,” she added. “Before you act like I’ve proposed surgery.”
“My lips are fine.”
“They were peeling yesterday.”
“I was at the beach.”
“Exactly.” She leaned in toward the mirror and used her ring finger to smudge eyeliner that had migrated half a millimeter below where she wanted it. “Sunburned lips hurt. Here.”
He took the tube because refusing things in the moment always seemed to require more energy than accepting them. The gloss was almost colorless, just a faint sheen.
April watched him in the mirror. “Put some on.”
“I’m not—”
“You are if you don’t want to look like dried fruit next week.”
He applied it carefully, barely touching the surface. It felt strange for about three seconds, then not strange at all.
“There,” April said. “See? No tragedy.”
He looked at himself. The effect was so slight he could hardly call it an effect. Just a little less roughness at the mouth. A little more definition.
“It’s not really visible,” he said.
“That’s generally the point of things done right.”
Later, when Greg came by the library to pick him up, he waited near the front desk with one hand in his pocket and his tennis racket slung over his shoulder, drawing glances from two freshmen at the periodicals table without seeming to notice. When Patrick came down the stairs from second floor, Greg looked at him for a second, then smiled faintly.
“You’re taking better care of yourself,” he said.
Patrick’s hand went at once to his mouth. “It’s just sun stuff.”
“Sure,” Greg said.
But he kept that same faint look the whole walk to the car, as if something had confirmed itself.
The first crack in Patrick’s routine came on a Thursday.
He was due at the library at two. At one-thirty, Greg came into the room flushed from tennis and said, “Change your shirt. We’re driving up the coast.”
Patrick looked up from the notes he was not really absorbing. “I have work.”
“Call in.”
“I can’t call in because you want to drive somewhere.”
Greg pulled his racket cover off and set it in the corner with the others. “I want to show you something.”
“I have work.”
Greg was quiet for a moment, toweling the back of his neck. Then he said, without irritation, “You’ve made every shift so far.”
“That’s because it’s my job.”
“And one missed afternoon means what? They burn your scholarship in the quad?”
Patrick almost smiled. “You make everything sound stupid when other people care about it.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“No?”
Greg looked at him, and for a second, Patrick thought he had finally pushed too far, that something hard might appear under the ease. Instead, Greg tossed the towel onto his bed and came a few steps closer.
“I’m saying,” he said, “that you’re allowed to enjoy your life without asking permission from every obligation attached to it.”
There was no mockery in his tone at all now. That made it more difficult.
Patrick looked back down at his notebook. The library shift rose before him in his mind exactly as it always was: dust, shelves, carts with one bad wheel, fluorescent quiet. Then Greg’s car, the coast and some unnamed destination Greg had already decided would please him.
He hated how quickly the comparison formed.
“I can’t keep doing that,” he said, though he had not done it once yet.
Greg leaned one shoulder against the end of Patrick’s desk. “Then don’t keep doing it. Do it today.”
Patrick laughed once under his breath, unwillingly. “That’s the same thing in a nicer coat.”
“Exactly.”
It should not have worked. It almost didn’t.
Then Greg said, very mildly, “You can say no if you want.”
And that was the final turn of the screw, because Patrick heard in it not a challenge but an allowance, a generosity that made refusal feel ungrateful.
He called the library from the hall phone and said he had a stomach bug. April answered. He recognized the pause before she said, “Right,” and told him to feel better.
The coast road was beautiful. Of course it was. Greg drove with the windows down and the sea on their left in flashes of silver and hammered blue between low bluffs and stands of trees. They stopped at a roadside place with expensive coffee and no visible prices. Greg bought two iced drinks and handed Patrick one through the open driver’s side window. By sunset, they were standing above a stretch of darkening beach with nobody on it but gulls, the air gone cool enough that Patrick had to fold his arms.
“This is what I missed work for?” he asked.
Greg stood beside him, close enough that Patrick could feel his warmth through both their shirts without touching. “Do you regret it?”
Patrick looked out at the water. The answer arrived too fast.
“No.”
Greg nodded as if something had been settled. “That’s what I thought.”
On Saturday morning, Patrick found himself twenty minutes late to the library and oddly resentful of having to be there at all. April did not mention Thursday. She only handed him a reshelving list and, after a while, said, “So. Stomach bug.”
Patrick flushed. “I know.”
“Do you?”
He pushed a row of paperbacks into place a little harder than necessary. “It was one shift.”
“Sure.”
He looked over at her. “Why do you say things like that?”
April set down the stack in her arms. “Because you look like somebody drifting downstream while insisting he’s standing still.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Then she softened a little and nudged his shoulder with the back of her hand.
“He’s fun,” she said. “I get it. I’m not even saying don’t. Just maybe look where you’re going.”
Patrick wanted to answer lightly. Instead, what came out was, “I don’t think I’ve ever been this interested in anyone else’s life before.”
April’s eyebrows lifted. “His life? Or him?”
Patrick opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
“It’s not like that.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
She studied him for a second. “Then what is it like?”
He looked down at the call number labels under his fingers. It took him longer to answer than he liked.
“I like being around him,” he said finally. “That’s all.”
April waited.
Patrick shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve never really been that interested in… any of it.”
“In sex?” she asked, not unkindly.
He gave a small, embarrassed shrug.
April nodded as if filing the information somewhere she would not misuse it.
“Well,” she said, picking up the stack again, “that probably makes him even more dangerous.”
Patrick laughed despite himself. “Why?”
“Because then he’s not competing with desire. He’s competing with gravity.”
That night, Greg came back from somewhere with a paper bag from a health food store and set two bottles on Patrick’s desk.
“What’s this?” Patrick asked.
“Vitamin D,” Greg said. “And a plant-based mood thing. Everybody’s low on D. Take one of each in the morning.”
Patrick picked up one bottle and turned it in his hand. The label was full of leaves and words like natural and clean and balance.
“You just carry this around for people?”
“You say that like I’m selling it out of a van.”
“Are you?”
Greg smiled. “Take the vitamins, Patrick.”
And because the request came wrapped in that familiar amused patience, because Greg made care sound like common sense and common sense sound faintly affectionate, Patrick set the bottles back on the desk and nodded.
“All right.”
Greg gave him a look that was almost approving.
By then, Patrick had begun to notice that almost everything he wore or used in the visible part of his life had been touched, in one way or another, by Greg’s attention.
The shirt in his drawer. The watch on his wrist. The lip gloss in his pocket. The bottle of tinted sunscreen sitting beside his textbooks where April had told him to keep it. The beach, the coast road, the skipped shift, the quiet ease with which one thing seemed always to lead to another.
None of it, taken separately, amounted to much.
Together, it amounted to a direction.
And though he still could not have said where it led, he had already begun, in ways small enough to ignore, to follow.
Across the Sea -3-
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Across the Sea -3-
by Suzan Donamas
The boat out to Catalina was smaller than Patrick expected.
Not small enough to be alarming, just small enough that the water felt present in a way it hadn’t the first time. Then, there had been more people, more noise, more sense of being carried along as part of something ordinary. This time it was quieter. Fewer passengers. More space between them.
Greg stood easily near the rail, one hand resting on it, looking out toward the open water as if he had done this often enough that the crossing required no attention at all.
Patrick sat for a while, then stood, then sat again. The motion of the boat wasn’t rough, but it was insistent, a steady rise and fall that made it hard to forget where they were.
“First time it feels different,” Greg said without turning.
Patrick glanced over. “What does?”
“The island. Second time you go, you notice it more.”
“I noticed it the first time.”
Greg smiled slightly. “You noticed the parts you were shown.”
That should have meant something more than it did. Patrick let it pass.
The harbor at Avalon appeared the same as before—bright, contained, full of color and movement—but they didn’t stay. Greg led him off the boat, through the familiar cluster of shops and people, and then past it, toward a waiting car Patrick hadn’t seen arrive. Cars weren’t as common on the island as back on the mainland, and many people got around town by walking or using golf carts. Getting a car to Avalon and keeping it there was expensive. There were few roads and not many places to go.
“Where are we going?” Patrick asked, echoing his thoughts.
“Other side.”
“Of the island?”
“Of everything.”
Greg said it lightly, but there was something in the way he didn’t explain further that made Patrick stop asking.
The road climbed quickly, winding upward through dry hills and stands of scrub, the harbor falling away behind them. At one turn Greg slowed the car and pointed.
“Bison,” he said.
Patrick looked. A small group stood in the distance, massive, hairy and still, their shapes almost unreal against the pale grass.
“They’re just… here?” Patrick said.
“They’ve been here longer than either of us has been alive. Left here after a movie shoot more than half a century ago.”
Greg accelerated again, leaving them behind.
Higher up, the air changed. Thinner, cooler. They passed the small airport—just a strip of runway laid along the top of the island, the sky open in every direction.
“It feels like you’re above everything,” Patrick said.
Greg glanced at him. “You are.”
Far in the distance, a green and gray shoreline must be the mainland. Then they were descending again, the road narrowing, the trees thinning, until at last the land opened out toward the Pacific side.
There were fewer buildings here. Fewer signs of anything arranged for visitors. The ocean stretched out without interruption, darker and more constant than the sheltered water Patrick remembered. Greg new where they were going though. They passed several campgrounds, then turned off on a tiny track toward the ocean.
The cabin sat back from the edge of a low cliff, yards above the water. It looked simple but clean, the kind of place that felt temporary even when it wasn’t.
Inside, it was cool and quiet. Two rooms, a small kitchen, a view that filled the window. An immense ocean, blue, gray and green stretching out to where it met the sky, more blue with white clouds.
Patrick set his bag down and stood there for a moment, looking out. “This isn’t like the other side,” he said. Avalon seemed like a real city compared to this isolation.
“No,” Greg said. “This is different.”
Patrick turned. “Why here?”
Greg took a few steps into the room, set his keys on the small table, and looked at him with that same easy attention that had drawn Patrick in from the first day.
“It’s quieter,” he said. “You can hear yourself think.”
Patrick almost laughed. “I can do that anywhere.”
Greg didn’t answer. He only watched him for a second longer, then said, “We’ll go out in a bit. There’s a place for dinner. Two Harbors, the town, is small but there are hotels, shops, beaches.”
“Why is it called Two Harbors,” Patrick asked.
“Because there are. One on the Pacific side, and one on the channel side. The island narrows here and the harbors are less than a mile apart.”
Patrick laughed. “I want to see.”
“You will,” Greg promised. “But first, dinner.”
Patrick had changed before they left, into the sea-glass shirt Greg had given him, the watch cool against his wrist, the faint sheen of the lip gloss still present though he had applied it hours before.
He caught his reflection once in the cabin window before they stepped out.
He still looked like himself.
That was the strange part.
Just… arranged.
Dinner turned out to be exactly what Patrick had imagined when Greg first mentioned the trip: a small, expensive restaurant with a view of the water and the Pacific harbor dotted with white sails. Everything, the sea, the sky, the boats, the tables in the restaurant had the kind of lighting that made everything look deliberately chosen and placed.
The restaurant was quiet, only a few tables occupied. The sound of the ocean seemed to come through the windows, the walls, maybe the floor. just audible beneath the low conversation and the soft clink of glass.
Greg ordered for both of them without asking, and Patrick didn’t object. The menu leaned toward seafood and expensive steaks, and the prices intimidated him.
“You trust me,” Greg said, not as a question.
Patrick tilted his head. “You haven’t been wrong yet.”
Greg smiled.
They ate. They talked. Nothing unusual. Nothing that would have seemed, from the outside, like anything more than two people having dinner.
Later, walking back along the path toward the cabin outside of the town, the ocean a steady presence in the almost dark, they paused on the path above the beach to watch the sunset. To the west, a fiery globe that seemed to have cloudy wings set slowly. Yellow to orange to red, then seeming to pause for a moment. Had there been a brief flash of green before the last edge of the sun disappeared?
Greg began walking again, and Patrick followed him without thinking. Neither spoke for a long minute as they approached the cabin.
“You know why I brought you here,” Greg said, finally.
Patrick felt the answer before he formed it.
“Not just for the view,” he said.
“No.”
They walked a few more steps.
Greg’s voice, when he spoke again, was as calm as it had always been.
“I want something from you.”
Patrick stopped.
Not sharply. Just enough that the movement broke.
Greg turned back toward him.
“What?” Patrick asked.
Greg considered him for a moment, as if measuring how much needed to be said.
“Something simple,” he said. “While we’re here.”
Patrick felt something tighten and loosen at the same time.
“What kind of simple?”
Greg’s gaze didn’t waver.
“I want you to dress for me,” he said.
Patrick let out a breath that might have been a laugh.
“That’s already happening.”
Greg shook his head slightly. “More specifically.”
Patrick looked at him.
And for the first time, the direction he had been moving in—slowly, almost invisibly—came into focus all at once.
“Like a girl,” Patrick said.
Greg didn’t react to the words themselves. Only to the fact that Patrick had said them.
“Yes.”
The ocean moved steadily in the dark beside them.
Patrick looked away, out toward it, then back again.
“And that’s it?” he asked.
Greg’s expression didn’t change.
“For the weekend,” he said.
Patrick nodded once.
“Right.”
They stood there for a moment.
Greg took a step closer, not touching him, just closing the distance slightly.
“I’ll make it worth your time,” he added.
Patrick almost smiled at that.
“That’s not really the question.”
“No,” Greg said. “It isn’t.”
Silence settled between them, not uncomfortable, just full.
Patrick let out a slow breath.
Then, lightly—too lightly, maybe—he said:
“So what happens after that?”
Greg didn’t answer.
Patrick tilted his head again, studying him.
“What’s next?” he went on. “Weekend trips, then you take me home to meet the family?”
There was a hint of humor in it. Enough to keep it from being a direct challenge.
Greg’s mouth curved, just slightly.
“You’d make a good impression,” he said.
Patrick felt something shift, settle.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
He looked at Greg for another second, as if he might say something else, something clearer.
He didn’t.
Instead, he nodded once, almost to himself.
Then he turned back toward the cabin.
Behind him, Greg followed.
The ocean went on moving in the dark, steady and indifferent, as if nothing had changed at all.