The Best of Us

nine

OCTOBER. 2014. [ unedited !!!! ]

"BUT WHEN ARE you going to read Julius Caesar?" Bradley frowned, pinching my ankle. "You know, since we're on the subject of Shakespeare and everything."

"Let me borrow yours," I told him, gently kicking him in the abdomen with the side of my foot.

Friday afternoon was quiet. Morning's gentle autumn breeze had stilled and the sun, heavy and idle, was seeping lazily into the air, right in our eyes and hot on our faces on the way home, our jackets abandoned in the backseat as soon as we made it to the car. The drive home was quiet, too; the music relaxed and our mismatched fragments of conversation lulled and half-hearted, eventually lapping into pleasant silence until we were in my driveway.

As soon as we got inside and threw our stuff on the floor, we were sitting together on the sofa in my living room, my back against its arm and my legs resting along it. Bradley was sitting closer to the other end, upright but slouched, with my feet propped on his lap, one of his hands resting comfortably on my shinbone and the other holding the remote. Twin Peaks was on the TV.

"Mine has annotations all over it," he remarked distractedly, his eyes locked on the screen like it wasn't the third time we were watching the show. He was watching it, anyway. I, on the other hand, had finally gotten around to opening the collection of Frost poems that Mr Dylan let me borrow and was trying to tune out the noise of the TV to read them. "It's barely readable."

"I could read it," I insisted, glancing over the book. "I like reading annotated books."

"Tucker, it's so messy," he replied, still not looking back at me. "There's pencil and highlighter all over it."

Grinning, I turned around Mr Dylan's collected Frost poems to show him the inside; penciled annotations climbing and twisting across the page like vines, neat little arrows shooting across from one squashed, scribbled idea to another and swollen explanations deflating into sharp, condensed abbreviations and notes; tangled webs of analysis and context with key words about poetic technique trapped inside.

He smiled at me and leaned towards me to grab the book out of my hands. I watched as his eyes, bright and blue and lovely, darted over the page and he melodramatically cleared his throat. "Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; but only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf, so Eden sank to grief—"

"So dawn goes down to day," I interrupted, leaning forward and snatching the book out of his grip. "Nothing gold can stay."

"Enjoying it?" He asked, smiling still when his gaze found mine.

"It's digestible," I admitted, shrugging and reading the same poem again. "It's pretty much exactly what I needed."

"He's pretty good at figuring you out," he murmured, his grip tightening slightly above my ankle. "Dylan, I mean."

"He is," I agreed, offering him a little nod and returning my attention to the annotations when his gaze became too heavy to bear; I could feel the weight of it budding in my chest, like a little garden of roses, "but you have me figured out better than he does."

When he laughed— that warm, silvery sound, familiar to me in the way that my dad's and Thomas's old playlists were— I frowned at him, swiftly lowering the book. "What's funny?" I asked.

"You are," he replied, pinching me again and then stopping to listen to the rumble of a car turning off outside. Before I could ask what he meant, he was talking again. "Who's home?"

"No idea," I shrugged, returning to the book, "but I hope it's Thomas."

"Where's he been?" Bradley asked tentatively.