When it began, I played tough to counter his legend of tattoos and bands and girls and drugs and straight razors carried in pockets. I talked hard so he wouldn't notice the difference between my 16 and his 21, or how skinny and untouched I was: how unsuited for someone so fiercely cool.
I spent nights on his dirty sheets and laughed deliberately at the stories he tried to scare me with, instead of telling him how long I'd been watching him and how far inside me his quirky smile cut.
Before long, he was taking my arm on the street and making me mix tapes labeled with cartoons of his grinning spiky head. Talking, playing, kissing on his living room carpet, he was no longer scary. He was me: just as skinny (without his big boots and heavy jacket) and, he confessed late one night, just as untouched.
He'd flexed facts to fit his legend, but between us it would be different, because suddenly what we were in couldn't be anything but love. I worried he'd outgrow me when he graduated college in a few months, but he told me I was his lifeline, the best thing to ever happen to him.
It started to turn when those months were done and he took a dead-end job in town to wait for my own graduation three years hence. He planned our eventual move back to his hometown, named our first child, and set all the rest out plain and small in front of me. He bought me a ring with borrowed money.
When I'd call his lonely apartment to plan a night out, he'd say, "Just come over... PLEASE," and the urgency came clearer every time he said it.
I turned seventeen and he turned into weight with a fine Ass.
I pulled back when he reached for my arm. The drunken indiscretions he began suspecting were only partially untrue.
I lost the ring.
Finally, he said he wanted to "take the weekend off" and I could only say, "No, this has to be through."
But he followed. He followed me to class, to work, to friends' houses, to my house with letters and desperate notes and his frenzied presence. Parents and police used Serious Words.
He screamed and howled and wept at me one night in a parking lot and I screamed back that he was scaring me. The next week, he chased me out of a party, reminding me of the straight razor in his pocket.
I didn't see him again for months. I heard he'd swallowed a bottle of aspirin, spent three days nearly dead in the hospital, slashed his wrists with the straight razor (again unsuccessfully) a week after that.
A year later, he resurfaced and asked to see me a last time. We sat in a borrowed apartment and he told me about getting Last Rites, showed me the scar on his wrist and the new track marks on his arms.
The kiss was inevitable (and the next few minutes on the unfamiliar bed fumbling and sad).
The next day, I stopped taking his calls and eventually he disappeared for good. For years I wondered if he'd died -- until a friend told me he'd turned up working in a record shop back in his hometown.
Some of his late-night confessions have since been found out false, so I wonder about this story now, particularly about its end.
Facts flex and legends grow, and it's almost too operatic, isn't it?
But that we really did love each other, at least for a while, there is no doubt.
