Page 41 of With Love, from Cold World
“Onestuffed animal,” he said, “for the record. A dalmatian named Sparky my sister got me for Christmas when I was four. Unfortunately, I left Sparky at an Olive Garden when I was nine. And I’ve never gotten blackout drunk and jumped off the roof, but presumably it would only take one time?”
“Okay,” she said. “Point taken.”
Unconsciously, he rubbed his chest, the area above his heart where he saw the same four-digit number every morning when he looked in the mirror. “You asked me about my tattoos once,” he said. “The truth is that most of them don’t really mean anything—they’re just stuff I thought looked cool. Some of them I even got on a whim, or a dare.” He pointed to a small illustration of a flying saucer on his forearm, done in a solid black outline with some simple shading. “Like this one. Elliot had to go to this convention to cover a story, and there was an artist doing some flash work on the main floor. Elliotwanted to know who would get something as permanent as a tattoo that way, I said why not, they dared me to do it, and half an hour later I had this on my arm.”
Lauren was looking at his arms with such focused attention now that he felt goose bumps prickle across his skin. And he generally ran warm—it was the reason why he rarely bothered with long-sleeved shirts even with the air conditioning running so cold inside. It wasn’t just so he could show off his arms, whatever Lauren might think. Although with the way she was looking at him now, it gave him further reason not to cover up.
“You never have any regrets?” she asked.
“Nah.”
“I guess by now you have so many, it probably doesn’t feel like such a big deal. Was it hard to choose your first one?”
He rubbed at his chest again, thinking back to the tattoo parlor he’d walked into on his eighteenth birthday, the less than ten minutes it had taken to mark his body with the only tattoo he did regret. “I got the numbers six-five-four-three tattooed right here,” he said, poking a finger so hard into the muscle around his heart that it almost hurt. “That was the number of days I lived in my parents’ house. When I figured that out, it seemed significant somehow, that the number so perfectly descended like that. I don’t know.”
She was watching his face now, instead of looking at his arms, and it felt like she could see right through him down to his broken, shitty inside. “Was that a homesick kind of tribute, or more of a newfound independence kind of thing?”
“Neither?” He gave a bitter laugh. “Both? When I was seventeen, one of my dad’s parishioners saw me making out with my boyfriend. Like I told you, my dad is a pastor, and while I know there are churches that are LGBTQ-friendly,let’s just say that my dad’s church was... definitely not. Long story short, we had a big fight, stuff was said, and he told me to pack my bags and get out of his house.”
It had been a while since Asa had allowed himself to think about that last day. He’d come home from school to find his dad waiting for him at the kitchen table. His dad would often sit there with his books and papers, when he was preparing a sermon or working on church business, but it was never a great sign when he sat there with nothing in front of him but his hands, clenched together on the table. Those hands had never been raised against Asa, but he feared his father in other ways—the way his booming voice could rattle the windows, the way his disapproval could swallow you up like a sinkhole.
His father had given him the chance to deny it, even with the photographic evidence. Sometimes, late at night if Asa couldn’t sleep, he still wondered how things might have gone differently if he’d just done that. Said that he didn’t know what the parishioner was talking about, he hadn’t even beennearthat Burger King, much less sucking face with some random dude. He had a feeling his father would’ve accepted it—not because he believed the explanation, deep down, but because it was easier to sweep the truth under the rug and move on as if nothing had happened.
Instead, he’d owned up to it. The worst part—the part heneverlet himself think about, no matter how late it was—had been the rush of exhilaration and power he’d felt at finally getting the words out. He’d told his dad to his face that he was bi, that his boyfriend’s name was Mark, and that he’d love to bring Mark home for dinner to introduce him to the family.
Any confidence had been woefully naive, and short-lived.Asa’s father had said a lot of ugly things that Asa tried not to let take up space in his head anymore, although the general refrain ofno son of minewas always there, pulsing like a heartbeat. Asa’s mother had been there, lingering in the kitchen. He’d cried, she’d cried, but she hadn’t intervened. An hour later, Asa had two bags packed and was on Mark’s doorstep. That relationship hadn’t lasted long—he and Mark were never destined to be anything more than a fun couple of months, and he could tell Mark’s parents were sick of having him in the house—but luckily by then Asa had landed the job at Cold World and could rent his own place.
“I’m sorry,” Lauren said now, her soft voice pulling him back up from the memories. “That must’ve been really hard, to hear that from your own father. You deserved to be treated with love and support, not kicked out.”
“It’s funny,” he said, “because I say the same thing all the time to these teens I counsel through a crisis text line once a week. They’re twelve, thirteen, sixteen years old, and wondering how to come out or how to ask their parents about transitioning or what to do about bullying at school. And I try to listen to their problems, validate their experiences, remind them that they’re worthy. But sometimes I wish I could get on a direct line with their parents or their peers or whoever, and just say, do you have any idea how much this kidcares? How much they internalize your words, how much they want to please you, how much thought they’ve given to trying to figure out who they are and how they fit into the world? Can’t you just for one fucking secondlistento them, and tell them that they’re worthy, so that they hear it fromyou?”
His eyes were burning, and he scrubbed his hand over his face, trying to unclench his jaw. “Obviously, there are alsolots of people out there who have beautiful stories of support and acceptance. We don’t tend to see as many of them through the crisis line, so my data set is a little skewed here. Elliot’s parents have a cake delivered to the house every year on the anniversary of when Elliot came out to them. And it’s Publix buttercream, so you know that shit’s real love.”
Lauren smiled. “You’re really fortunate to have found Elliot, and Kiki, and John. They seem like great friends.”
“The best,” Asa said. “Whose turn is it? I’ve lost track.”
“Yours,” she said. “But we can stop, if you want. It’s late.”
He’d already tapped the button for a new randomly generated number, and he held up his phone to show her the six on the screen. “And miss a chance to get a compliment? No way. Tell me something good about myself.”
She compressed her bottom lip with her teeth, as if thinking. He didn’t know if she even realized how close she was sitting to him by now. If he turned at all they’d be practically nose to nose.
“Don’t be so quick with it,” he said dryly. “I’ll get a big head.”
“You smell really good,” she blurted, then covered her face with her hands, like she needed to physically retreat from the words. But he wasn’t about to let her off that easily. He lifted his arm, giving it a sniff.
“Do I?”
“It’s your soap or something,” she said. “It’s not even really a compliment toyou. More like a compliment to the products you use. Tell me what kind of soap it is and I’ll leave the company a really nice online review.”
“I know that trick. You want the name so you can buy it for yourself and smell me all the time.”
“I’m not going tobuyit—”
“You want to carve a little soap doll of me. It’s sick. I refuse to feed this obsession.”
“More like a voodoo doll, and I know right where I’d stick the first pin.”
