Page 67 of Double Dared
“You don’t have a balcony,” he said. “That one row of tiles doesn’t count.”
I laughed. “Follow me.”
“Walk this way,” he said in Igor’s voice fromYoung Frankenstein, making me laugh hard enough to nearly drop the tray.
We went up a flight of stairs to the rooftop, where I’d strung the Edison bulbs in six directions from above a small table and two chairs, the city lights glimmering all in front of us, the distant sound of traffic and voices and life never-ending, but here, a quiet haven just for us.
“You did this?” he asked. “Why am I even surprised? Of course you did.”
“It took half an hour,” I said nonchalantly.
Taylor shot me a look that called me a liar. “Those are brand-new,” he said, pointing at the warm-glowing bulbs. “And those, too.” Chairs. Table. Yeah, maybe I’d gone a bit far for an hour of sitting together. Then again, maybe an hour with Taylor wasn’t something I could measure and compare to anything else. It was worth a lot more than a morning of shopping and setting things up.
He stood in front of me after I’d placed the tray on the table. “Harrison,” he said softly. “I missed you.”
I lost myself in his eyes, in their honesty and openness, in the way he could say a thing like this and make it mean so many incredible things. “I missed you, too,” I said, trying to look as honest and open as he did. But was omission not a form of deception? Still, it was an omission born out of necessity. I wasn’t going to blunder the best month of my recent life for words that could be lost in the wind.
I slipped a hand into my pocket and pulled out a small gift. It dangled from my index finger. “This is for you,” I said, my voice suddenly gruff. “I figured you should have your own. You’re here often enough.”
Taylor looked at the set of keys to my building and the apartment, eyes wide with surprise, lips stretching into a gleeful smile. “If you can’t keep me away, might as well let me in.”
I laughed with him and put the keys in his hand. “I want you here, whenever you feel like it. So. Just stroll in when you’re around.”I’m always glad to see you, I meant to say, but Taylor leaned in and pressed his lipsagainst mine, cutting off the rest of what I would have said.
When he pulled back from me, he tucked the keys into his pocket and scratched the back of his head, his bicep tensing. “Now I feel silly about the gift I got you.”
“You got me a gift?” I asked.
“Don’t be so surprised. It reminds me I never got you anything,” he said. He reached into the other pocket of his sweatpants and took out a small, rectangular shape, made of plastic and with a white cover and a cute typeface in black. “This took a bit of work. I had to hunt down a guy who still had a stock of empty ones in a record shop. He helped me record some of my favorites. But there’s a QR code on the back if you just want it on Spotify.”
“You made a mixtape,” I said, taking it into my hand. And sure enough, it was a cassette,Taylor and Harrison’s Mixtapeprinted across the white background, and a QR code on the back. When I opened it, the inside of the cover was filled with a track list, but the cassette was the most interesting item, rewound already and set for playing, with a white strip across it and a handwrittenT & Hon it.
“Shit, I don’t even know if you have a player,” Taylor said. “Just scan the code. We can listen to it now.”
I still looked at it in disbelief. I didn’t think there were any empty ones for recording left in the world. Or the western hemisphere, at least. But the thing he said snapped me out of it, making me laugh. “You don’tthink I have a cassette player? Do you even know me?” I grabbed his T-shirt and pulled him hard against me, kissing him hard on the lips and holding him close for a while longer, savoring him, taking him in, remembering him. “Thank you,” I said. “It’s wonderful. It’s…well, the best thing I ever got.”
Taylor put a hand on my chest and looked into my eyes with gentle concern. “Your parents gave you a house in the woods,” he whispered.
I laughed aloud and shook my head. “This feels like more. Wait there.” The cassette player I had was in a box of vintage items I’d gotten off a flea market some years ago, so I went downstairs to dig for it, checked that the battery was working, and brought it up to the rooftop for us.
When I inserted the cassette and played it, a crackling noise came from the speakers, and the first song started playing. And of course, it was Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
While Bowie sang about Major Tom, I pulled Taylor by the hips to join me. “I remember the night we listened to it for the first time,” I said. “I remember looking at you as you sang along, thinking how unfair it was that someone so beautiful should be off-limits. Someone who was pretending to be my date, yet someone I shouldn’t even think about.”
“But you thought about me,” Taylor said.
I leaned in until my brow rested against his. “Every waking moment. And some sleeping ones, too.”
“I’m so glad you did,” Taylor said. “Because…because I thought about you, too. I just didn’t know what it meant.” I could hear the smile in his tone. “I remember thinking how I wanted to be friends with you forever. Thinking about how good our chemistry was. But it wasn’t until I kissed you…no. Actually, even then, I didn’t know. Only when you told me to take off that wet shirt, I felt it in my bones. I felt the words and the intent and the, uh, obedience, I guess. I wanted to do what you said, because I knew you wanted to see me.”
“And you just gave yourself to it,” I finished quietly, then pushed his brow with mine to lift his head and kissed him softly again. The kiss deepened as the next song played from the old speakers, and my tongue played with his in his mouth. Then, when the next song came, more memories swirled through me. “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” by Baccara, and the same night, Taylor was dancing in front of me, so free of judgment and self-awareness and shyness. I liked him like that the most, though I liked Taylor in all his editions.
He now sang the words for me and broke into dance while holding my hands, and nothing on this roof or this Earth could have stopped me from dancing with him.
The lights blurred around us as we moved, orbiting around one another, pulling each other close and pushing far. When the song ended, Taylor fell into my arms and looked into my eyes, and his smile was so bright that something in me gave an aching moan, andI leaned in to kiss him deeply because I could, because I didn’t want to resist it, and because he was mine.
We rested over a cooling pot of tea while the music played, and I fought hard against the many words that wanted to rip free from their constraints. They wanted to fly out of my mouth and scare him away and ruin an incredible thing that we had.
There was a certain simplicity to this that I didn’t want to mess with. Taylor was a rather spontaneous person, and he was always on board with whatever the plan was, and I didn’t want to tie him down and trap him in something he wasn’t yet sure of. So I kept quiet, not hurrying with it for his sake or mine, and I enjoyed him for all that he was to me.
