One morning, on a Thursday — late though, nearly lunchtime — Simon woke to the smell of cooking meat, the sizzling sounds of breakfast. He’d missed his morning class. Business Ethics, five times now, and he’d be lucky if the prof didn’t fail him. Marty was in the kitchen, standing over the stove. He was holding a big chunk of beef with a fork, and he laid it down carefully in the skillet, making the oil pop.
“What’s cooking?” Simon said.
“Supper.” Marty let the meat sit for just a few seconds, then he rotated it.
“Early for supper.” Simon watched the meat cook, his stomach clenching around the alcohol he’d put away last night before crashing: six beers and the four shots of Jose Cuervo he downed for Marty’s benefit. He hated tequila.
“We aren’t eating it now, dumbass.” Marty pulled the meat out of the skillet and set it on a pile of paper towels beside the sink. “I’m doing a roast. It won’t be ready until four or five.”
Simon went to the fridge and pulled out one of Marty’s bottled waters. He sipped, goosebumps making a trail between his shoulder blades. You know you’re hung over, he thought, when even water tastes like poison. “Maybe I’ll have an appetite by then.”
“Oh, you’ll eat it,” Marty said. “This is my mother’s roast.” He pulled ingredients out of a grocery bag on the counter: several spice containers and a package of bouillon cubes, red-skinned potatoes, a bag of baby carrots, one large white onion, and a bottle of red wine. “You’ve got nothing in this kitchen, man. I even had to buy a corkscrew.” He pulled that out of the bag, too, and waved it at Simon: a cheap one, the kind that looked like a pocketknife.
“I’m not much of a wine drinker,” Simon said.
“Thought you rich folks drank this shit every night.”
“Dad’s more of a beer man,” Simon told him.
“Well, you’re classy now,” Marty said.
Marty started rinsing the potatoes, peeling the onion. Simon had a crock pot, though he’d never once used it — his mother had bought it for him, along with a dozen other household items that had always been in his childhood home but seemed ridiculous in his apartment: a silverware tray; the fuzzy toilet scat cover and matching floor mat; coasters, designed to protect furniture much nicer than the crap sold by Jefferson Wells; a “While You Were Out” phone tablet. Marty piled ingredients into the crock pot, topping the mess off with half of the bottle of wine. “This is good stuff,” he said, taking a sip from the bottle. “Thought I’d splurge.” He offered the wine to Simon, who waved it off.
“Suit yourself,” Marty said. He turned the crock pot’s dial over to medium and set the lid on the top. “You’re gonna love me in about four or five hours, friend.”
Simon looked down at his water bottle. Shocked by that word, love, rising so suddenly and casually between them, he admitted the inevitable to himself: he already did.
The rest of the afternoon, they sat in the living room watching a movie on A&E, Superman, the smell of roast filling the apartment: rich, earthy. Love, Simon kept thinking, panicked, daring himself with the word the way he’d once climbed trees or taken spills on his skateboard. He knew that love came in all kinds of forms and degrees, even though he’d never been on the receiving end of much of it. His father loved him, he knew, in his way: a selfish sort of love, and limited — a love that asked for more than it could return. And his mother loved him, but she was a weak, ineffectual woman, and so her love, too, was weak and ineffectual.
He thought back to that day — almost seven years ago, now — when those football players had vandalized his car, branded it: fag. When you were alone — a loner — you could put a memory like that and all of the insecurities that went along with it somewhere safe, deep within yourself; and you could build walls around it; and you could pretend it didn’t exist, at least most of the time. Other people complicated that. Marty made it impossible. Simon didn’t know what he was — what loving Marty might make him — but he sat on the couch with him all afternoon, their arms just a foot or so away from touching, and his heart stuttered in his chest, and his face and neck burned. In the movie, Superman was flying around the earth in reverse, fast laps meant to make time spin back so that he could save Lois Lane. “Hey, there’s a party tonight,” Marty said. “At the Sig Ep house. Keg passes are five bucks. You interested?”
“You know I’m not into that shit.”
Marty sighed and shook his head, and Simon sensed his frustration — a frustration that Marty had managed to keep in check most of the three months they’d been hanging out but still let surface on occasion. “Let me tell you something, man. Something nobody else is gonna care enough to say to you. This ain’t a fucking life, what you’re doing. This is pathetic.”
“You’re here, too,” Simon said. He wondered, not for the first lime, why.
“That’s the problem.” Marty turned the TV off, shifting on the couch so that he was facing Simon. “It’s easy to sit around and drink, and I’ve been letting you drag me down with you. But that’s done. Let’s go, all right? What do you say? Besides, motherfucker, I’m making you dinner.”
“All right,” Simon said. He looked at Marty’s profile — the dark eyes and hair, skin the color of pie crust, the too-big, crooked nose. And he understood two things: that he wouldn’t be able to go on much longer being with Marty this way, pretending brotherhood when he wanted something more; that Marty almost surely, certainly, didn’t feel the same way in return. Simon paid the keg fee for them both at the door. He would have done it anyway — that was how he and Marty usually worked — but he felt especially obligated since Marty had made dinner and bought all of the ingredients, including the fourteen-dollar bottle of wine. And Marty hadn’t exaggerated: the roast was incredible. They’d both eaten long and well, until Simon’s stomach went from hung-over-sick to food-sick. He would associate that feeling — fullness bordering on illness — with Marty long after. But at the party, as they started to wander around the Sig Ep house, he only thought of his father, who complained about indigestion a couple of evenings a week. Best thing a man can do, he’d tell Simon, mouth smiling but not his eyes, is pour a beer on top of it.
Simon decided to do just that. He took a plastic cup from the guy manning the door — a pathetic thing, really, not much bigger than a Dixie cup — and got into the keg line, which was at least fifteen deep.
Marty handed him his cup. “Fill me up, would you, buddy? I’m going to go mingle a little.”
Simon wasn’t surprised. He nodded.
“Don’t run off.” Marty smiled — all those white, straight teeth, with one crooked eye tooth to make him approachable — and raised a finger. “This is the night everything changes for you, friend.”
Simon laughed and turned toward the keg. The line was moving. “Get out of here.”