Read Tear You Apart for Free Online

smiles at me.
    The weather’s so much nicer today than it was the night we met. The air light and clear and warm enough for me to understand why someone might wait half an hour for a milk shake. I want to stretch out on a blanket in the grass and stare up at the sky.
    Will takes a picture of the statue, then looks at the digital image on his view screen. “...Art,” he mutters. “Jesus.”
    “You don’t like it?” I follow him along the path toward the street again, but spy something that stops me. I bend to pick it up, already grinning. “Oh!”
    “I’m just jealous. What’s that?” Will says, leaning over me.
    The shiny piece of gravel’s been broken into a misshapen heart. I lay it flat on my palm to show him. I trace the outline. “See?”
    “Cool.” He sounds as if he means it.
    “I collect them.” I study this one for a second or so, then look at him. “Silly, I know.”
    “It’s not silly.” Will takes a picture of the rock on my palm. “It means you have a creative eye. Most people would’ve passed right by that. Never looked twice. I wouldn’t have.”
    His praise warms me. My fingers close over the rock. I feel the press of it against my flesh. Impulsively, I hold it out to him. “Here.”
    He looks surprised. “What? No. It’s yours, for your collection.”
    “I have a lot and I always find more. You have it.” I hold it out again. “Now that you’ve seen this one, I bet you find them all over, too.”
    Will takes the rock and keeps it in his hand for a second or so before tucking it into his pocket. We stare at each other the way we’d both looked at the giant white statue of a head. Pondering.
    “What else?” I ask him when I can’t look at his face any longer.
    “I have a commission for some underground stuff. You up for it?”
    I can take the train into and out of the city, and I can find my way around once I’m there, but I always take cabs. I’ve never mastered the subway. I have a secret, not-unfounded fear of getting on the wrong train and ending up lost, and the smells can be overpowering. The sound of the subway, the clatter-clatter, echoing, hurts my teeth and coats my tongue with the taste of gray.
    “Of course.”
    It’s easy for me to imagine H.G. Wells’s Morlocks down here under the city, creeping along the tunnels and snacking on innocent tourists in I Love NY T-shirts and fanny packs. Will is serious as he takes shot after shot of the escalators, the curving tile walls, the dirty concrete.
    Watching him, I say nothing. I hand him his bag when he asks for it, and hold it when he doesn’t. Every so often, he shoots me a grin, and every time he does I’m surprised again that I’m here.
    “I’m all done for today,” he says at last. “C’mon. Let’s go back to my place, see what I got. I’ll make you dinner.”
    “Oh...I...” My mouth tries to make the noises that mean no, but it’s useless. I’m already following him. I knew when he asked me to meet him today I’d be going back to his place. “Sure. Great.”
    Will leads and I follow.
    He does make me dinner. Pasta, bread, salad. Wine. I eat but taste nothing. We talk, and I hear the sound of my own voice in answer to his, but if you asked me what it was I said, I’m not sure I could tell you. I watch his hands, fingers on the fork twirling spaghetti. The sleek fringes of hair in front of his ears, against his cheeks. When he gets up to refill my wineglass, I breathe him in and keep myself from touching him by keeping my hands on the table, instead.
    Time for me to leave. I stand in Will’s foyer, and I look at the door I know I should go through. But first, of course, there’s got to be a goodbye.
    How do I say it? What do I do? I offer my hand, because what else is there to do for a man who is not my friend, and still mostly a stranger? Will, with a small, strange smile, takes my hand, and I think that’s the hand he uses to jerk off with.
    It happens all at once, so smoothly, how he