Holy. Fucking. Shit.
“Fuck!” I say. “That tastes like death. Why the hell did you eat it?”
Rex starts chuckling.
I take a bite of the toast—that, at least, can’t be bad. It’s not even burned.
Wrong.
The toast tastes like I pulled it out of a burning building, the congealed butter only adding to the gross consistency. I look at Rex desperately. How can eggs and toast possibly taste that bad?
“That’s the worst thing I’ve ever tasted,” Rex says, laughing, but he pulls me to him and kisses me, so it barely even stings.
“Ew, get away,” I say. “You taste like death eggs and fire toast!”
Rex laughs deeply and buries his face in my hair.
THE NEXT week, Rex and I hang out at his house a lot. It’s this weird feeling I haven’t had since I was a kid: this sense that I want to spend all my time with someone. The last time I felt it was with Corey Appleton in seventh grade. I was captivated by him, just wanted to watch him do… whatever. The way he sharpened his pencil seemed to suggest something deeply contemplative about his character and his choice of apple juice over soda at lunch indicated a sweetness that pulled me in. Of course, when I groped him after school, sure that his companionable arm around my shoulder was a message, my heart pounding so hard with hope that I thought I might pass out, I found that nothing about his pencil-sharpening gestures or his choice of beverages had indicated shit. There was nothing sweet about the way he shoved me against the brick and definitely nothing contemplative about the way he told everyone at school what I did.
I’ve learned a lot about Rex this week too. He really is shy. I can see how hard he works to be polite to strangers, but years of saying as little as possible to avoid stuttering has made him terse. It’s clearly made people intimidated by him.
He’s also incredibly healthy. He exercises and eats well and stays hydrated, but he’s not obnoxious about it. It’s like his body is the only thing he can depend on, so he tries to make it run as well as possible, like customizing a luxury car.
There’s something about Rex that makes me feel calm. As if I’m scattered until the moment I see him and when he touches me I fly back together in a configuration that makes sense.
And ever since he told me about his dyslexia, things feel more settled between us or something. It makes sense, in that it must have been weighing on him, trying to keep it a secret. At first, I was surprised it didn’t come out sooner. I mean, how many times might I have asked him to read something to me or look something up? Then, when I thought about it, it became clear how hard he’s worked to make sure those situations didn’t arise. How much thought he must’ve put into avoiding them. How on edge he must have been, wondering if he’d be forced to out himself every time we were together. I hate that he felt like he had to do that, but I’m glad he can just relax now.
He’s worked incredibly hard to educate himself. Partly as a reaction to people thinking he was stupid due to his dyslexia, and partly because he’s just interested. He’s taught himself vocabulary and listened to books on CD.
He keeps trying to teach me to cook, but I’m hopeless, mostly because when he starts moving around the kitchen all I can do is watch him. He’ll be explaining how to mince something or how long it takes to make a hardboiled egg, and I’ll be watching the way his muscles bunch as he wields the knife or the way he blows his hair off his forehead. When he’s trying to show me how to roll out pasta dough or knead bread, I’m looking at his huge hands and strong forearms (which I’m basically obsessed with).
Once, I was so distracted by the thought of him kneading my ass the way he was kneading the bread that I was shocked to find cheese in the bread when I bit into it. Rex thought that was quite amusing, but I think he knows how hot I find watching him in the kitchen and milks it on purpose. Jesus, no wonder I can never re-create anything I see him do.
I’m cutting up pears for some delicious-sounding dessert when Rex comes up behind me, slow so he won’t startle me into cutting my finger off. He learned the hard way that I zone out sometimes when he came up behind me while I was making a fire and I almost clobbered him with a large piece of kindling.
“Sweetheart,” he says against my neck, “you don’t need to make everything so exact. You can just chop it up. It doesn’t need to be so much work.”