Everything Between Us by Stephen Hoppa

Author:Stephen Hoppa [Hoppa, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-01-15T23:00:00+00:00

“him.”

This man would destroy me.

Chapter Ten

The Space Between His Words

He’d been acting weird ever since his disappearance—weird for him.

The night after he returned, he suggested we watch a movie. In the dark of my living room, nestled into his body under a blanket, I watched his eyes wander restlessly, looking anywhere except the action playing out on the screen. He seemed bored, but he didn’t say anything.

I think he was trying to be ‘normal’ for me, and that made me something heavy sit in my stomach. He was trying to show me that he could be tamed, contained, a house cat instead of a wild alley cat or a prowling lion.

If he was supposed to be comforting me, he should have paid more attention to what his hands were doing. I was pretty sure he didn’t even noticed the way his fingers pulled at the knit blanket covering us. He just destroyed things without even noticing. I stopped watching the movie completely as the string between his fingers grow longer and longer, the blanket smaller and smaller.

I kissed him just to get him to stop wrecking my stuff. I really thought we were going to fuck that night, when we stripped off our clothes and his eyes stared into mine, his huge body tensed and sweaty. I was perched on his lap, just inches above his throbbing hardness. Everything was screaming for me to sink down and pierce myself on him, but his eyes held me in place. Like they always did. The way he bucked his hips, barely grazing against me, told me everything about how badly he wanted it too. I collapsed into his slickened chest as I felt him splatter teasingly against me without ever giving himself to me. The fact that I knew he wanted it too made it even more torturous He was withholding more than just his body. He even kept his desire from me.

The next night he asked if I wanted to watch a movie again. He either thought that was the only thing ‘normal’ people did, or the only thing poor people did.

“Wasn’t your mom in movies?” I asked, tossing the remote back and forth in my hands.

His face flashed with something, then he scowled. “You have a family?”

“Duh, everyone has a family.”

“Not everyone.” He flopped onto the couch next to me.

“Uh, yeah, that’s how family works.”

“What about orphans?”

“This isn’t old-timey England. There’s no such thing as orphans anymore.”

“I think you’re thinking of orphanages.” He let out a long laugh. “There are still orphans. People still die.”

“What was that like?” I drew the conversation back sharply. “Losing your mom?”

He was silent.

After an eternity passed, I hit the power button on the remote. and a list of shitty sitcoms populated the menu. I clicked on one, and hoped the repetitive laugh track would bore him into talking.

“It was hard.”

My shoulders stiffened, but I turned to face him. I knew by then that I always looked at him when he spoke.

“... but also, like, when she had cancer, when we knew she was dying… We were all so close.

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