Page 98 of Studs Up
Nolan
Two weeks passed as though someone hit fast forward on my life. No matter how hard we tried to slow down, the pace of the international schedule would not let us.
All too soon, it was our last morning together, and I was left unsatisfied. These little bits and pieces were painfully short and spread too far apart.
“I can’t go that long without seeing you,” I said. He looked at me in the mirror in the bathroom as he packed his potions and then turned.
“Then how do we do this?”
I tossed him the key, and he caught it. He stared at it, then at me, and back down to the key.
“What is this?” He asked.
“A key.”
He sighed, exasperated.
“I can see that, but…”
“To my place.”
His mouth fell open as he looked at it again and then back to me. “Nolan, I-”
“I looked at the schedule, and if we waited for days off to align, there would be a week in October for the last international break.” I walked toward him. I loved how his face changed the closer I got from concern to need in just a few seconds. When I was close enough, he slid his arms around my neck.
“This way, you can come up when you have time off, and we can at least spend the night together.”
“You really want to do that?”
“You really want to wait for a week in October?”
“Fuck no,” he murmured.
“Good.”
Less than twenty-four hours later, another delivery person knocked on my door. This time, he had a small box I had to sign for.
When I opened it, a key was nestled in white tissue.
And just like that, we had at least one night a week together. Sometimes two.
…
Ma wanted an update, so I was resigned to spending an afternoon being badgered and prodded until she got the answers that satisfied her. I was deeply resentful that I had agreed to this because it was on a night Holden could have come up. But when Ma calls asking for my presence, to Ma’s, I go.
She was on the porch and shouting at a man wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt buttoned all the way up. The outfit was like waving ‘I’m a fucking prick’ flag.
“It’s just a petition. The people have the right to choose,” he shouted at her. I leaned against my car and watched. Some people mistook my mother for being too grandmotherly.
“Get off my fucking porch, you stupid fucking boy,” she shouted.
“I am not a boy,” he insisted, turning beet red. “I am a man, and you will treat me like it.”
“I’ll treat you however the fuck I like if you ever come back here with that bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic bullshit.”
“This is why our society is crumbling,” he shot back. “It’s bitches like you that think you know everything.”
I cringed. “I wouldn’t have said that,” I called and watched my mother chase him off her porch with the baseball bat I gave her. The bright magenta muumuu waving in the breeze and her yellow Crocs slapping against the ground made for an almost unbelievable scene.
