10. First
My pants were stained where the insides of a dead rabbit had slammed into them. Standing in the foyer at the Department of Climate Change, I showed my friend Colette. She lowered onto her knees and touched my ankle, hesitantly curious, the metal tips of her stilettoes whining on polished concrete. I had been standing with my bike while a Tesla sped past, I told her, the rabbit slipping under its tires after the guts had sploshed out. I didn’t mention the hour afterward I had spent crying in our muggy change rooms, scrubbing the blood from my pants; the rabbit jounced in my head like something looped on a rear-view mirror.
“RIP,” Colette said, releasing my ankle.
She wiped down the sides of her jumpsuit, levelling its creases, and reached behind me to push the glass doors into the courtyard. I felt ashamed that working in the public service exhausted me when my job was mostly performative: I sat behind a computer skimming draft legislations and stopped the instant I noticed people leaving. Outside the cold air pulsed under my shirt. Colette’s eyes widened, and I caught the basic elements – dark hair, white skin, arms forming a blank parenthesis – that made up Abel’s reflection.
Abel was the university student who’d started interning with us on Monday.
“Warmer outside,” Abel said, pushing off his wireless headphones. He was straddling a metal picnic bench, a grilled croissant steaming between his thighs. His phone lying face-up on the table sparked with text notifications.
“I think Peyton’s missing Adelaide,” Colette said.
“Yeah,” I said, folding into the seat across from Abel. “Summers are longer there.” I looked at the clouds above me, like a stupid person, and wondered if that was actually true. “We’re not always talking about the weather.”
I peered sidelong at Colette. Why were we spending our lunch break with Abel? In my laptop bag I had packed a banana and two protein bars. I took a protein bar and remembered someone telling me that gay men looked perverted eating bananas in public. Abel and I were four years apart. A month ago he’d posted a carousel of his nineteenth birthday party. There were strobe lights and neon party hats, girls wearing sunglasses indoors. When I’d applied for a job in the public service, I had pictured men wearing skinny chinos and thirty-something women trialing bad haircuts. I had never worked somewhere I wasn’t the baby.
“What the fuck is that smell?” Abel said.
Colette explained about the dead rabbit, and Abel blew air through his teeth, the flakes of his croissant gliding across his incisors.
We left the courtyard and went toward Magna Carta Place. Abel followed. A leaf smacked onto my bloodied pant leg and stayed there. At the pavilion Colette unlooped her arm from mine and walked ahead to study a plaque. Colette was the only friend I had made the past three months. She studied witchcraft, overspent on smoked fish, allowed me unsupervised access to her dating profiles. I loved Colette. Today I wanted her dead. She didn’t seem to understand that crushes were ends in themselves – that feeling your desires didn’t always mean pursuing them.
Abel’s phone shuddered in his palm, and I let myself watch a message interaction unfold between Abel and his boyfriend. Ricard was a law student who looked unremarkable except that his hands were enormous. He’d collected Abel from work yesterday and I had noticed Ricard’s hands wrapping the circumference of Abel’s forearm, playfully willing him to leave. Ricard was asking if soy sauce was gluten free. Abel grinned, typed no, then glanced up with his mouth sagging open. His eyebrows nearly covered the total width of his face. He tucked the hair spiralling near his cheekbone. I hadn’t realised I was giving myself away until Abel sloped his chin to one side, pond-green eyes resting somewhere above my head. He covered his mouth and chuckled.
“Okay,” he said, dropping his palm. “Slay.”
Colette walked back to us carrying a four-leaf clover, her thumb and forefinger creating a heart where she gripped the stem. She asked which of us needed more luck, and a lawn tractor boomed in the distance, the smell of mown grass becoming acrid. Abel was tapping through his phone when Colette dropped the clover into the front pocket of my shirt.
While I FaceTimed my brother Lee, I stared at the full moon glowing on the kitchen tap, its perimeter diffusing into foamy water. I lived in a badly insulated one-bedroom unit with popcorn ceiling and scuffed cupboards. A window above the sink overlooked a golden wattle. I opened the lunar phases app Colette had once recommended and realised that access to its usual features now cost eighteen dollars a fortnight. It had previously guessed my happiness, delivered warnings, predicted whether cleaning my bedroom would bring misfortune.
“Where’d you go?” Lee asked.
“I like the intern.”
“Isn’t he–" Lee’s connection failed, his camera freezing on his palm while he adjusted the incline of his phone, “really young?”
“We’re both young.”
I noticed the band-aid covering Lee’s index finger and imagined him building the apartments he helped designed for his architecture firm. But it was likelier he cut himself dicing tofu or skimming car magazines on the porch. After I had finished rinsing a glass, I left the kitchen and stretched face-up on the carpet. From this vantage, I remembered the popcorn ceiling and its potential hazardousness, the minuscule fissures where dust mites propagated.
“I’ll send you what he looks like,” I told Lee, already tapping through Abel’s social media.
There was Abel sleeping shirtless on a beach in Europe, sunburn contouring the upward slope of his nose. There was Abel dancing in a chain singlet, phosphorescent graphics projected weakly on a concrete panel above him. He’d spent last year in Portugal and Greece. His friends wore skirts that might have been aprons. Narrowing in on his pictures from Lisbon, I noticed his hand, a ring on each finger, cupping a silvery clam shell loaded with burnt cigarettes. I got envious exploring a cool person’s Instagram. How could anyone have lived this much?
“Makes a lot of sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s very Ephraim.” Lee manoeuvred closer into his desk, and I heard something rattle underneath his elbow. He lowered his voice, because my ex-boyfriend was probably just a sheet of plasterboard away. “Have you called him? He asks about you like, a frustrating amount.”
I licked the insides of my cheeks, unsure then if I was stopping myself from exposing pain or delight. A memory popped into focus: Ephraim reading in bed, his lips shaping full sentences while I dozed off beside him, suppressing the impulse to reach for my glasses and look at him longer, more appreciatively. I loved that Ephraim valued cadences, the musicality of storytelling. His favourite books were less than two-hundred pages because he could read them in one frictionless dash, where narrative and character became secondary to the pleasure of absorbing a nicely composed paragraph. When I had asked if we could open our relationship, his face went blank, as though our breakup were something he could skim.
Lee glanced at the ceiling, and there was a lag before he spoke again. “If you sleep with him—”
“I never thought I had a type.”
“It’s normal to like people,” Lee said, “who resemble the people you’ve loved before.” Hearing that, ‘loved before’, momentarily jammed my throat. A lens flare emanating from some off-screen source of light sliced the middle of Lee’s forehead. “But in this case, you shouldn’t.”
Once our call had finished, I searched for my cat, Uma Thurman. I discovered her curling near the laundry on my bed, her paw nudging an emerald bath towel. A jumper slid from the pile, and the gentle resistance of static tingled in the air. I held an image of Abel in my head while I massaged Uma’s chest. His nose lengthened and became Ephraim’s. I had once read that it was physiologically difficult to recall the appearance of your crush because your pupils were too dilated while looking at them, and somehow this limited both vision and memory.
Uma coiled on the dip between my knees, her drawn-out exhales syncing with mine. I stared at the full moon hovering in my window and told her something I wished that I believed: “I don’t need anything I can’t find here.”
Colette had invited me hiking with her housemate Roisin, because she needed more pictures of herself outdoors, looking vibrant in athleisure and sunglasses. We reached the apex of a steep foothill, and she told me that she had only ever hiked when she wanted to impress a crush. Roisin explained that Mount Ainslie was where she had given her first orgasm. This had been twelve years ago, during high school. She was climbing uphill with her girlfriend when she suggested they give up and lie together behind a shrub instead. Their clothes were soaked, and afterward Roisin worried about yeast infections. She had never been the impulsive one.
“But now I am,” Roisin declared.
“You were both okay?” I asked.
Roisin nodded, then tugged her legionnaire hat down her forehead, its flaps pushing into the neck of her jacket. She was a more committed hiker than Colette and me, who dawdled behind picking from a slippery bag of corn chips. We arrived at a lookout facing Anzac Park, the column of trees on either side of its roads becoming gold. There was the uniform rush of cars obeying traffic, and it seemed implausible that regular-sized people were sitting warmly inside them, absently remembering their coworkers and loved ones, second-tier friends, everything they wanted from everyone they knew.
“Let’s take our time going down,” Colette said.
She squeezed a calf, her face pressing into itself with agony, and I managed to capture a photo where the grimace looked charming. She held my arm to steady herself walking on gravel.
Back inside Colette and Roisin’s house we listened to Sade on their record player and drank lemongrass tea from thick, prehistoric-looking mugs. I had thrown my puffer jacket on a coat hook in the foyer and now calculated the number of wears I had before someone would notice its build-up of sweat and Uma Thurman’s piss. I was aware that working somewhere boring meant vaster opportunities for humiliation, because the work itself could never distract or preoccupy long enough to prevent us from paying attention to each other. Beside me Colette was resting with her socked feet on my lap. She brought a crystal ash tray toward her stomach and stubbed the frazzled end of a cigarette.
“I only smoke a few times a month,” she said. “In small doses, I think it’s healthy. Nothing better for stress-relief.”
“What gets you stressed?” I asked.
“Oh, like–” Colette waved her cigarette, gesturing at nothing, the chalky vapour bending around her wrist.
“When I think about Abel, my stomach hurts. I want to start making good choices. But I do think he’s beautiful.”
Colette frowned and I nearly explained about my past manager at the environmental consultancy in Adelaide. It was bland torture seeing him at the office after we had started fucking, never talking to anyone because I felt sure that I would inadvertently give myself away. The sex had never compensated for the unremarkable embarrassment of knowing a coworker’s body too well. It was draining, an arrangement that was only attractive when you didn’t know its anxious and empty, sexless intervals. I worried that sleeping with Abel would demonstrate I was failing to become a different person, which had been among the only reasons I had moved.
“Smoking wouldn’t help,” Roisin said.
“I don’t get why he’s unavailable,” said Colette.
She propped up to lift The Spell Book for New Witches from a side table. She had already shown me instructions for moon rituals and handmade poppets. Now she read from a chapter on love sigils, and I tried paying attention while also catching the harmonies in ‘Kiss of Life’. She explained that I should write mine and Abel’s name on a scrap of paper, reduce our names to basic strokes, then arrange those strokes into an emblem, which I would keep until Abel and I fell in love.
“Are nineteen-year-olds ever actually monogamous?” Roisin asked.
She and Colette were squinting at me. The light spearing from outside cast them in shadow. On the wall above Roisin’s head was a framed picture of herself and Colette as teenagers, and a fabric poster on which an excerpt from Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech was printed in capital letters. I wondered if Colette had been the girlfriend who Roisin had hiked Mount Ainslie with during high school.
It was a Thursday afternoon, sunset glossing empty desks, when Abel arrived at my cubicle and dropped his phone on the ground. He bent forward, his face hovering above my lap. Porn only worked as a template for seduction when neither of the people involved were sober. Surely everyone, even teenagers, understood that. We both laughed, although I couldn’t decide what exactly the laugh was meant to acknowledge. I tapped the bridge of my glasses and Abel toggled into focus. The droplets of sweat extruding from his nose reminded me of a dog’s snout.
“You’re getting drinks later,” he said after some time, peering between me and the screen of his phone.
“With Colette and everyone.”
“I’m not in the group chat.”
“You aren’t?” Of course he wasn’t.
“It’s workplace bullying,” Abel said.
He crossed his arms and smiled, the fake-wood smell of his perfume rising off his skin.
I let myself observe the dark nipples showing through his T-shirt, the gap between the waistband of his jeans and his intricately veined lower abdomen. I hated being someone who leered, but I knew that disciplining my attraction would only magnify its needs.
We sat outside a packed bar on Lonsdale Street, at a high table with stools that jolted every time I tried leaning forward. Colette was opposite Abel and me, with a part-time gymnastics coach who spent the workday microwaving premade meals, and another coworker who Colette had dated last year. When Colette was almost drunk she asked everyone about their first kiss. Colette was obsessed with first times – first orgasm, first unrequited love – because they were usually the milestones we never planned, or that we’d planned imperfectly.
The gymnast’s first kiss had been at his formal, with a girl who later revealed that she had also been dating his cousin. The other coworker had made out on a trampoline during her thirteenth birthday party, when everyone but herself and her closest friend had gone inside to avoid mosquitos. Colette’s first kiss was nearly the same. It had started raining at a January 26th barbeque, and she took shelter with two other girls inside a bouncy castle. I explained that my first could have been imagined: Ephraim had always rejected that we had made out in primary school, when his parents had left us alone in the backseat of their car.
We looked at Abel, and he told us that he’d given a blowjob long before he’d kissed anyone. “Some guy in his fifties,” Abel said. “I didn’t like him, so I made sure our lips never touched.”
I told Abel that he wasn’t answering the question.
“Right,” Abel said. “I kissed Ricard on a date.”
Abel held his glass, then released it once he discovered there was only melted ice. He was embarrassed, I guessed, that his first kiss had been unadventurous.
A bartender took our beers, and above his tattooed bicep Abel lifted his phone to check himself in the front camera. He coiled a lock of black hair with his index finger, pressed where his cheekbones were lightly sunburnt. I registered the proximity between our elbows, the risk of touch somehow generating the tingle of actual contact. There was a message from Colette on my smartwatch asking if I would like a second venue? Only Abel and us.
We chose a club well-known for its straightness, because Abel told us the drinks were inexpensive. Men wearing oversize T-shirts were stacking shot glasses at the bar. A blond woman pushed behind me and united across the crowd, her fingers elongating, with two other blond women carrying small bags. I rubbed where the buckle of the woman’s purse had scuffed my arm, eliminating the residual coldness, and Colette screamed above an EDM remix of ‘Sweet Escape’ to order each of us a fireball. I gulped it fast, the back of my tongue prickling.”
“You should flirt with Abel,” Colette said in my ear while she led us toward the dance floor. She grazed the back of my neck, drawing me closer, and said, “I made you guys a love sigil.”
Colette scratched a pendant on her necklace, its yellow gem dropping into her clavicle. Her smile widened and I guessed that she was high, although I wasn’t sure at which point during the night she had taken or been offered anything. Looking into her face, bug-eyed and beaming with expectation, I realised –
“You’re fucked,” I told her.
“What’s that?”
“I said, I fucking love you.”
I wriggled from Colette and danced closer to Abel. The strobe lights depersonalised Abel somehow. He was beautiful and indistinct.
A man wearing a business shirt with sweat running down its underarms touched Abel’s chest while he moved past us, and another man, taller and less attractive, paused to hold either side of Abel’s waist. The men danced behind us, pushing between Colette and me, and Abel flicked back his shoulder to force them away. Then someone jump-dancing toward Colette slammed her chest with his elbow. There were raised arms, Abel barricading us. A man pushed the heel of his palm into Abel’s nose, and Abel quickly seized his bicep, shoving the man aside. I tasted the oil in Abel’s hair as it sloshed into my face.
A security woman broke us apart. She guided Abel, Colette, and me outside, where Abel rocked beneath a streetlamp, threads of blood coming from his nostrils. It was a new moon, I remembered – the sky was a dull, unmitigated blue – and I felt weirdly desperate to check the lunar phases app and understand what this should mean. I unbuttoned my shirt and pushed it onto Abel’s nose, holding it there while a pop song welled from inside. All three of us moved to its rhythm, a little dazed, our heads bobbing with pleasure.
We ordered an Uber to collect us from outside the club. Colette took the passenger seat and wrote our locations into her phone, scoffing when Abel gave his address, a suburb known for being inconveniently distanced from the city. Abel scrunched my shirt in his lap, its whiteness glowing through wet blood. His nose was fine, only red around its edges, and stray glitter from someone’s makeup shimmered on the skin below his mouth. I looked at Colette in the rear-view mirror. When she winked at me, I tapped the screen of my smartwatch, pretending that I hadn’t noticed. A neon line graph showing the number of steps I had taken throughout the day made it seem as though I were dead most of the afternoon, then alarmingly active past eight. Once Colette had been dropped off, Abel shuffled closer toward me.
“That was fun,” Abel said, his seatbelt tightening across his chest.
“I’m sorry you got hurt.”
“I can’t tell if you like me or not.”
“Oh.” I laughed. “Of course I like you.” Although I realised then that I was lying. I didn’t normally like someone for whom I only felt sexual desire.
The car had stopped at a red light and Abel opened his window to graze the cold air, his fingers straining apart.
“We both kissed our boyfriends before anyone else,” he said, glancing back at me. “What was he like?”
I thought about Ephraim when he and I had been together during uni: lying on the grass between seminars, the zip-lock bag of loose tobacco that materialised when either of us became bored, Ephraim rolling us cigarettes that would disintegrate before we could finish burning them. I had wished I were someone who preferred stability to newness, but in the end monogamy was boring. I had wanted Ephraim most when he wasn’t my boyfriend – when our boundaries and desires were undecided, negotiated carefully within every interaction.
“Ephraim was too nice for me,” I said.
Abel took his hand from the wind outside – the car had zipped out of traffic now – and placed it on my knee, coldness sinking through fabric.
“You need someone to put you in your place.” He grinned, although I couldn’t tell if he was joking or half-joking.
The driver interrupted to ask where he should stop. Peering at my building, I spotted Uma perched on her condo in the living room. Separating from a hug, we both paused to stare at each other. I thought again that he really was gorgeous, a face so balanced, so deeply adherent to conventional standards of beauty, that you wondered if you were looking at someone real.
His fingertips were locked in the overgrown hair swirling down my neck. Before I was able to kiss him he pushed my chest and his other hand slid away. I tried kissing him again, because I hadn’t yet processed that he’d withdrawn, and my lips fell across his cheekbone. He fell into shadow as he backed farther off, and I wondered if it was only paranoia that made me certain he was pleased with himself.
“Goodnight,” he said.
“See you next week,” I said.
I staggered from the car, the air outside prickling underneath my damp singlet. When I became embarrassed, I wanted to experience physical pain, so I continued shivering under a streetlamp for a couple of minutes after Abel and the driver had gone. There was a shattered wine bottle catching light on the footpath, the veins of a gum leaf imprinted on cement. I imagined that someone at the club had slammed the bottle into Abel’s face, a hunk of glass cutting through his mouth.
There were multiple gazebos in multiple parks on either side of our building. I had trouble describing my location to Colette, who was offering to bring me an umbrella. I still don’t know the names of things, I wrote. A rainstorm had begun, water streaming on the gazebo’s iron balustrades and contouring with puddles where the lawn undulated. I had been staring dazedly at my phone while I’d walked, refreshing my email and messages to check for anything from Abel. He hadn’t come to work since the previous Thursday.
I slid open a call from Lee the moment it came. Normally I liked to wait until the ringtone almost ended, because I relished opportunities to seem unavailable. Lee was reorganizing bookshelves.
“I’m still thinking about Abel.”
There was the crack of dense weight dropping onto wood, Lee exhaling through his mouth. He was kneeling in the foyer, I guessed, where a dark-wood bookcase occupied the wall below a vintage sconce. I had told Lee that I’d tried kissing Abel the Friday after it had happened.
“He’s really young,” Lee said now. “Didn’t you do this, too?”
“What is ‘this’?”
“Peyton.” I heard Lee’s phone case drumming as he rested it somewhere. “I remember what you were like. You’d flirt with guys, just to see, then you’d get close to having them and suddenly back away.”
“If I hadn’t been with Ephraim—”
“I think you would still back away.” Lee’s voice dropped out, and I couldn’t tell if he was speaking through poor signal or only hesitating to finish his thought. “Regardless, doesn’t Abel have a boyfriend?”
The rain became stronger, white fractals blitzing the horizon. I told Lee I had an incoming call from work, and during the seconds before I hung up, I thought I overheard Ephraim in Lee’s backdrop, someone asking for the spare key we kept inside a shot glass in the bathroom.
Looking back on my relationship with Ephraim, I could never locate the exact increments by which we’d become a couple. Ephraim had argued that I hadn’t noticed him until he and I were seventeen, whereas I had remembered us having been close for at least a year during primary school. We’d had sex after we had snuck away from our graduation dinner and walked to Ephraim’s house. In Ephraim’s opinion, that night had barely qualified as anything. There were pinpricks of blood where he’d shaved his perinium, a smear of pink on the jockstrap he’d been wearing. He moaned while I pushed against him, performing woundedness, and the performance was so endearing, so realistic, that I had the sensation of total physical closeness without the tedium or difficulty of actual penetration. If that hadn’t been Ephraim’s first time, what was?
Colette held two umbrellas open above her, and I noticed where strands of rain fell between them when she came running toward the gazebo. We hugged each other, the warmth of her chest and shoulders pulsing against me. I nudged my glasses when the cold rainwater from an umbrella slipped into its gel nose pads. I hadn’t told her about Abel.
“I love being valiant or whatever,” Colette said.
I laughed, appreciating that she could recognise this wasn’t a selfless deed. I remembered her tucking the four-leaf clover into my shirt and felt unsure, now, if she was bestowing luck because she had liked me, or if she had only wanted to become a conduit for magic.
“We’re gonna run back out,” she said, passing me an umbrella.
After I had pocketed my phone she took my hand and lightly wriggled her shoulders, which made her cardigan slide off from where it had snagged on her carabiner. We stepped from the gables together, and there was a blast of cold air, speckled moisture, rain darting against our ears. The wind pushed my umbrella backward, a snap in the wiring, and I felt the water from its panels rushing underneath my shirt. I held the fragmented umbrella between my arm and chest. When Colette arrived at the portico she skipped toward the automatic doors, waving them apart with her foot.
She tapped my arm to usher me forward. “Why aren’t you inside already?”
Edmario Lesi (he/him) is a PhD candidate of English and Creative Writing at The Australian National University.