The most current iteration can be found here:
http://www.writingforums.com/short-s...ml#post1130368
I was an earthquake, shifting from foot to foot on the cold doorstep, the flowers trembling in my hands. My body was being rent in two as I waited for the door to open, half of me lurching away, and the other pressing forward. In between the two, I was balancing over the horribly widening gap. I hadn’t felt this nervous since my date on homecoming, a disastrous night when my date’s father had come barging into the gym, yelling and swinging a bag of pot he had found in her backpack. When she went home, or rather was dragged home, I spent the rest of the night trying to gather up the courage to ask someone else to dance. It turned out I had used it all up when I asked her out. I finished the night by standing against the wall, watching the disco ball’s lights dance across my body.
Yet, there I was, standing stupidly in my short-sleeves and sandals at the end of September, like I was trying to will the summer not to end.
The door finally opened, and I stared mindlessly at the father with nothing to say. He returned my look blearily. If his eyes were tired from grief, insomnia, drinking or some combination of the three, I could not guess. Whatever the answer was, I instantly respected him again.
He looked stunned to see me. Then I remembered, no one asked me to come here.
“August? I wasn’t,” he paused, trying to find the little human civility he had left, “I wasn’t expecting you. But come… come in! Noah’ll be so surprised to see you.”
He liked surprises so much, even though I didn't, that I hoped he would be.
I nodded, and stepped into the house. Things were piled everywhere, and dishes were left out. The familiar cleanliness I had grown up with was gone, and I felt my body shake again as I mounted the stairs to truly go into the unknown.
I wanted to knock, although I never had in my entire life, but I stopped myself. Instead, I slowly pushed the door open, cautiously peering in through the crack. Noah was in bed, leaning on his shoulder, and facing the window. In his hands was an open book, but he wasn’t reading. He was drifting off on the lake of sunlight that filled his bed.
“Noah.” My mouth was so dry that it fought against moving until the pressure to speak broke the words open.
He didn’t turn. “Who is it?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“I’m sick to death of surprises.”
Was I supposed to laugh? I did anyway. I always did when I was uneasy.
“It’s August.” My mouth moved like broken rocks, clunking against each other clumsily as they labored to form words.
Noah rolled over flat, his lean white body sprawled across the blue plaid of the bed, and looked up at me with his serious, purplish eyes. They were the only color left in him.
“Hey,” was all he said.
“Hey,” I replied.
“Are those for me?”
Startled, a glanced at my hand, which was still awkwardly holding the flowers I had bought at the convenience store. “Yes.”
“How appropriate, they’re half-wilted.”
I shouldn’t have laughed, but I did anyway.
“You were always very good at getting to the heart of matters, weren’t you?” he teased, lazily raising his arm in a silent demand for the bouquet. I was just one horrible accident. Nothing I did was on purpose, and I hoped he remembered that.
Today, too, was an accident. No one asked me to come, and I didn’t come because I felt I had to. Somewhere in the middle, I misunderstood something.
I sat on his bed, and wondered for a brief moment if I could really to do this.
“Did my dad call you?”
“Yeah.” He called while he was driving home from the hospital, and he had to pull over to cry while he spoke to me in long awkward pauses. Then I added, “but he didn’t ask me to come.”
Noah smiled, turned his side towards me and curled up around me like an ocean does a peninsula. He was still holding the flowers. In my head, I heard him say “You can’t have good surprises without bad ones. I could do without the bad ones, but if I have to sacrifice the good ones too to get rid of the bad, well… I just wouldn’t do that.” How careless and unimportant that was when he said it. How I laughed at his innocence, that day on the swing set when he said he had a surprise, and confessed. That day was hot as hell, and I remember wishing that it was autumn already
Noah sighed, and put the flowers aside. “I’m glad he called you. Love can be awfully surprising, don’t you think? I say I’m gay, and he doesn’t have anything to say to me. I say I have cancer, and he still doesn’t have anything to say me. Which is better? I still don’t know.”
“He’s just scared.”
“Yeah.” He reached out and toyed with one of the dying leaves. It crackled under his fingers.
It was quiet, and underneath us I could hear his father moving around in the kitchen. I imagined he was making kool-aid, the way he used to in the summer.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked. He lay there, breathing. It was as if his body was just taking in more water. Suddenly, breathing seemed pointless to me. We were both drowning. And in the encircling dark of it all, I could see his pale body, but not his eyes.
“Life,” he sighed again. That was twice now. His father used to always call him a breath of fresh air, but now it was slowly escaping his body. I wanted to catch the bubbles and force them back in his mouth. “It’s really complicated, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” It was too complicated, and I didn’t have the right to make it more so. I stopped scraping the bottom of the barrel for the last of my courage that hid in the small nooks and crannies of the wood.
“August?”
“Yeah?”
“If my dad didn’t ask you to come, then…” He was doing it again; teasing me. “Why did you?”
I didn’t plan it, I just did it. I buckled, leaned over and tried to breathe for him. The kiss was brief, but it was warm, and comforting, like sitting on the sandy lakeshore in summer sun.His warmth had melted my thoughts which veined like rivers through the dense, stalwart mountains of my senses. Through it all, I did not even know if he kissed me back.
Without looking at him, I straightened up in the silence. Next to me was the soft rustling as he rose and swelled closer to me. With his arms around me, I was an island.
“Fucking surprises,” he mumbled.
