This is how I remember the winter after my 19th birthday: overpriced lattes, afternoons browsing bookstores, sleeves of saltines scarfed down between hour-long lectures on blackbody radiation. My bed is littered with books, I write my favorite lines on the sticky notes on my headboard. My roommate spends the weekends with older men, brings me breakfast when I am too lazy to get out of bed. Winter in Chicago starts with the onset of grey skies followed by a seemingly never-ending seasonal depression. West coast transplants exchange athleisure for puffer jackets, order vitamin D supplements in bulk, complain daily about missing San Diego. Theatre majors not talented enough to hack it on Broadway descend on the North Loop looking for work. Parents take up residence in overpriced hotels, eager to watch their children lose collegiate basketball games, complimentary hot dogs in hand. We are the same, these visitors and me. I will be gone in two years. The imprint of my boots in the ice coating the walkway of the Kenwood Redline stop is the only reminder I will leave behind.

#

On the way to the art institute, M and I discuss our winter break plans. I am taking him on this excursion because I’m the only person who knows he has just broken up with his boyfriend. I am also the person who, less than ten minutes ago, helped him return his ex-boyfriend’s clothes. Sometimes it seems our friendship is predicated on me offering a sympathetic ear whenever he feels sorry for unwittingly hurting boys who love him. It happens often.

We get off the train at Monroe. The wind tears at the scarves wrapped around our necks, and I inch closer to M to avoid the brunt of it. He glances at me, but when I turn to face him, he has already crossed the street, backpack jangling in the wind.

I know it’s not me he’s mad at, but it doesn’t make the silence any easier to bear. This was meant to be the day I finally met his boyfriend. The three of us were going to meet at the Art Institute after they spent the morning browsing the Christmas market. M offered to ask if I could join them in the morning too, and at the time, I thought it was only a courtesy. Now, I wonder if he didn’t want to be alone with the boy he planned to dump.

“We can go home if you want,” I say when I finally catch up to him.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

I grab M by the wrist and pull him to a standstill. His skin is warm beneath my fingers. I let go before the warmth can travel any further up my arm. “Do you even want to be here?”

M rubs a thumb against the cross hanging from his neck. It was a gift from his grandfather. He used to keep it at the back of his underwear drawer. Since his grandfather passed away at the beginning of the school year, though, I’ve never seen him without it.

“I keep thinking I should call S,” M says.

“That’s the exact opposite of what you should do,” I say. “Give him space.”

“I just want a chance to explain. I don’t want him to think I’m the kind of person who would cheat on purpose.”

“You did cheat,” I say.

“I was drunk,” M says.

A couple—tourists, judging by the head-to-toe Canada Goose—pushes past us.

M says, “Do you think I’m the kind of person who would cheat on purpose?”

There’s a tremor in his voice, as if he is trying to convince himself as much as he is trying to convince me. It’s a far cry from how nonchalant he sounded when he called a few days ago to tell me he’d made out with a boy on the lacrosse team at a frat party. To hear him tell it, there were no feelings involved, only a drinking game gone wrong. Too bad S didn’t see it that way.

“Come on,” I say. “We’re standing in the middle of the sidewalk.”

#

M and I met in an astronomy lecture our freshman year at the University of Chicago. He sat next to me the first day of class and asked if I had a pencil.

I pointed at the one on his desk. “I think you’re doing just fine.”

M grinned and leaned forward so his elbow was balanced on the edge of the armrest between our seats. For the most part, he looked like ninety percent of the lecture hall: tall, brunette, a smug self-assurance that only arises out of the combination of whiteness and wealth. There was something about his eyes, though. The way they crinkled at the edges, a bit of sincerity even his terrible attempt at flirting could not diminish. At the very least, it made him interesting enough to tolerate.

After the lecture, M invited me to a small café on the other side of campus. I said yes for a variety of reasons, but the simplest one is that while the coffee was some of the best I’d ever had, it was outrageously expensive. I was in the process of getting a job, and I figured there was no better way to take advantage of M’s interest in me than having him buy me the most ridiculous drink on the menu.

“You know that’s just twelve ounces of pure sugar, right?” M said, pointing at the salted caramel milkshake in my hand.

“I like caramel,” I said. “What’s the point of buying a drink I could make at home?”

M leaned back in his chair and pressed his head against the wall behind him. We were sat beneath one of the dozens of fairy lights strung from the rafters. The gold strands in his light brown hair glinted beneath them. As he brought his Americano to his lips, the wide neck of his t-shirt shifted to reveal a slice of his collarbone.

“Anyway,” I continued. “You’re awfully judgmental for someone who ordered the equivalent of coffee-flavored water.”

“Funny,” M said. “Except, I didn’t invite you here to make fun of me.”

“But I was having such a good time.”

M set his drink down and slowly brought the two front legs of his chair back to the ground. He crossed his arms and set them on the table, leaning forward until our faces were six inches apart at most. It would have been unsettling if I didn’t suspect he was that familiar with everyone.

“Tell me. What is an English major doing in an astronomy lecture?”

“How do you know I’m an English major?”

“I’ve got a sixth sense when it comes to these things.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And,” M added. “I might have seen your course schedule when you pulled your notebook out to doodle during the lecture.”

“Nosy and a coffee snob. Terrific combination.”

“So that’s it?” M said. “You’re going to write me off before you even get the chance to know me?”

M didn’t know how lucky he was, not really. Sure, he understood wealth and privilege, but he seemed to lack an understanding of the social hierarchy. He had no idea that my agreeing to get coffee, sitting down with him rather than feigning a reason to leave, was evidence he was already well on his way to getting what he wanted.

“That’s not what I said.”

Before I could lose my nerve, I reached for M’s drink. Our fingers brushed as he let go and I brought the cup to my lips. The coffee was bitter going down.

#

In all the excitement, neither M nor I bothered to check if the Art Institute was open. Instead of beaming volunteers with more fun facts than anyone should reasonably know, we were met with locked doors and “No Trespassing” signs in a looping font not too dissimilar from the illegible notes my professors leave on my essays.

We are on our way back to the train station when M suggests we stop by the Christmas market. He pointedly avoids looking at my face as he says it, but there’s no way for him to disguise the suggestion’s blatant subtext. Still, who am I to point it out? Today is not about me and my ability to see through M no matter how hard he tries to shut me out.

M fills me in on the origin of the Christmas market as we walk. I tune him out and imagine him giving this same speech to S. Except they were most likely naked in bed, legs entwined as they ran their fingers along the ridges of each other’s spines.

S wasn’t M’s first boyfriend, but he was the first one who felt like a fully formed person. Though, I should say “sounded like.” Everything I know about S, from his favorite color (purple) to his favorite instrument (violin), comes from late-night conversations with M. We’ve discussed his other boyfriends too—charted their hopes and dreams—but they always seemed like a means to an end. When he talked about S, M lit up from the inside.

It was hard to be friends with M when they started dating. I wanted to see him happy, but the fact that his happiness was predicated on someone else was a constant reminder I could never be happy in the same way. While he had the free time to pursue the first romantic entanglement at school to truly catch his eye, I was stuck making sure the loans I was accumulating weren’t for nothing. It wasn’t resentment that I felt, but more of a sadness—a sadness in the pit of my stomach brought on by the knowledge that the first friend I made in the city would forget me by the time I left.

The Christmas market opens up before us as M and I walk up to the corner of 50 Washington Street. Older couples hover outside the fence, counting change with one hand while they balance their canes in the other. Groups of teenagers run around inside, skateboards tucked beneath their arms for safekeeping, earbuds tucked into their ears to block out the shouts of the parents trailing after them. In front of us, a photographer is setting up a tripod.

“Here.” M bends down to steady the base so the photographer can attach the camera on top. “I got you.”

“Thanks,” the photographer says. He looks around our age, with bleached hair and a piercing above each eyebrow. “Do you guys want a picture? It’s on me.”

M agrees before I can steer us into the market. With a practiced fluidity that stings more than I am willing to admit, he pulls me in so we’re standing shoulder to shoulder.

“I did not agree to this,” I say.

“You’ll thank me later.”

“Ready?” the photographer says. “Smile.”

#

Our friendship came all at once, a waterfall roaring to life. After every astronomy lecture, we walked across campus, standing close enough to give the illusion of body contact but never quite going all the way. We talked about our ambitions and the things that keep us up in the middle of the night. I learned he is the youngest of five siblings, spoiled and quick to anger, but even quicker to flash the unbridled smiles of a well-loved childhood. He took his coffee black because his father was a lawyer and had taught him that the quickest way for someone to take advantage of him was through the exploitation of his comforts. Window seats were off-limits because when he was eleven a poorly inserted pane of glass at his public library fell and shattered at his feet.

As the semester progressed, we found new haunts. There was a room in the library, tucked in one of the furthest wings of the building, where we spent weekends studying, thighs pressed together beneath the table. At night, we snuck into the clock tower and climbed to the top to lean against the bell and look up at the stars. Voice light as a feather, M leaned his head on my shoulder and named the constellations: Orion, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major. They kept us company until the sun rose and campus came alive.

“Do you ever think about the future?” M said one night. We were lying side-by-side at the top of the bell tower. The air was thick with the weed we had just smoked.

“What kind of intro to philosophy question is that?”

“I’m serious. What does life look after this year?”

“Well,” I said. “Considering I have to come back every August for the next three years, I don’t think it’ll change too much.”

“Will we still be friends?”

I rolled onto my side and cupped his chin with my right hand. “You’re needy when you’re high.”

M giggled, turned his head, and buried his nose in the skin of my palm. He breathed in and out. I imagined he was inhaling me, memorizing the way I smelled as he parsed the citrus top notes of my deodorant from the pungent aroma of weed that still clung to us.

It was easy to make M a fantasy, more God than mortal. And the truth is, I was also needier after a drag or five. I grew up as the eldest of three brothers. My parents were first-generation Puerto Rican immigrants, and they ran our house in Queens with an iron chancla. Comfort was a reward back home, not a given. I could count the number of times my parents had wrapped their arms around me in the last year on one hand. Physical touch was not something I devoted conscious thought toward until M. It was easy for him. A necessity. Every weed-infused physical interaction raised goosebumps on his skin. If I put my hand on his chest, his heartbeat would quicken. Though, I did not know if it was physical contact in general or physical contact between us that he reacted so strongly to.

I dropped my hand. M whined at the loss of contact and it took everything in me not to return my fingers to his jaw. “Will you sing me a song?”

“No,” M said.

“You did it last week.”

“Because you were high off your ass and needed something to take your mind off your impending panic attack.”

I shifted so that my head was in his lap. His hands immediately made their way to my hair. I shivered as he wound one of my curls around his finger. He played with my hair for what felt like an eternity before bringing his fingers down to my face. I’d seen a few pictures of his sketches, and though he denied it, he was a talented artist. One of those people who excelled at every creative outlet they pursued. Not because of innate skill, but because of the genuine, wide-eyed curiosity they approached the world with. With M’s index finger tracing the line of my mouth, nearly slipping inside, I was a work of art, pieced together by strong, deft hands.

I was about to nod off when M began to sing. He chose one of the most popular songs of the year—a mid-tempo ballad about the pain of unrequited love.

While the original song was flush with forced vocal breaks and warbling vibrato, M’s performance was understated. He was singing for a crowd of one, not one thousand. It was almost sadder that way. Stripped to its bones, there was nothing between M’s voice and me. Every line felt like a piece of glass lodged in my skin.

I closed my eyes and pressed my face against the hard plane of his stomach. His voice echoed off the stone walls around us and into the night sky. I imagined students stumbling home from parties stopping in the middle of the quad, moved to tears by a performance they could not see or commit to memory. But while they could listen to his song, only I could feel his body pulse with every beat of his heart.

#

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

M arches an eyebrow as he holds up a hand-woven tapestry depicting Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. The old woman behind him wants twenty dollars for it.

As if.

“What question?” I say.

“Come on,” M says. “I can handle it.”

“You’re only asking because you know I care about you enough to lie. It’s manipulative.”

“Asking you for your opinion is manipulative now, is it?”

The small group of retirees and newlyweds gathered to browse the old woman’s overpriced crafts are doing a terrible job of pretending they aren’t eavesdropping. I can’t blame them, though. M and I have been here for ten minutes and he’s already fixated on his breakup with S again. We are surrounded by some of the most beautiful Christmas ornaments in the city, yet he wants me to spend my afternoon absolving him of his guilt.

“I just don’t understand,” I say, “why you ask questions you don’t want the answer to. And it’s always me you’re asking.”

“We’re friends.”

I grab the tapestry of Judas and Jesus out of his hands. There, I can see how close they were at the moment of the betrayal, how intimate the kiss was. “I know we’re friends. It’s why you’re not into me.”

“That’s not why,” M says.

“It is,” I say. “Partly, at least.”

M’s eyes flicker from my mouth to the painting in my hand. I wonder if he thinks S would like it. Neither of them is big into organized religion (or reading) but their relationship was one never-ending stream of gag gifts. Once, I helped M scour the dollar store for the perfect whoopie cushion. I got a text a few days later telling me how much S liked the gift. But there was no “thank you” embedded in it.

“It has nothing to do with us,” M says.

“That stopped being true when you decided I, not your boyfriend, was the person to call after you cheated.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I think it’s more than fair, actually.”

M and I don’t fight. We argue, and we shout, but we do not fight. He says it’s because we never let anything fester. We might lie to other people and conceal parts of ourselves from those closest to us, but even when we try, the other always has a way of finding out the truth—it makes us better friends. But what would he do if he knew how many fights we have had in my head? How many times have I smiled when he hurt me?

“Let’s go,” he says.

While he stalks off toward a hot chocolate stand, I slip a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and hand it to the old lady. She flashes me a gummy smile and watches as I fold the tapestry and tuck it into the pocket of my jacket. Judas’s kiss burns against my fingers.

#

M and I only kissed once.

We were sitting on the top floor of the bell tower, fingers stained purple from the popsicles we stole from the dining hall. Soft rock pulsed from the earbuds in our ears and the space between us was charged with something I couldn’t quite name.

If it had been up to M, we would have kissed earlier. He talked about sex and physical intimacy so nonchalantly for someone who’d been single all his life. I envied him that. But as much as I wanted to be as open and free as he was, I couldn’t bring myself to reciprocate whenever he traced the inside seam of my jeans with one hand while letting a joint dangle in the other. What if, after his first experience with me, he decided he could do better elsewhere?

“You’re overthinking it,” M said.

“You don’t even know what I’m thinking about.”

“We’ve spent the past six months together. You can’t hide anything from me.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” I said.

M paused the music and pulled the earbud out of his ear. He placed a hand on my knee. He rubbed his thumb against my skin and leaned down until his head came to rest against my shoulder. “What are you so scared of?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“You can tell me anything. We don’t lie to each other.”

He still, all those months later, hadn’t realized where he stood in the grand scheme of things. He didn’t have to hide anything from me because the world was his. Once he left school, he would be a king. But still. I wanted to keep him to myself just a moment longer. So, I took his hand in mine and told him about my family. I recounted stories of being sent to bed without dinner and screaming matches that bled through my parents’ bedroom door. I let him discover what it is to know me.

Do you know how scary that was? How meaningless your life is when laid bare for someone to see? There was nothing I could do but wait for M to pass judgment on me.

“You never had to hide any of that from me,” he said when I was done. “We all have fucked up families.”

“Not you,” I said.

M’s grip on my leg tightened and his thumb stilled. He buried his face in the crook of my neck. “Yeah. I’m the exception.”

“Lucky.”

It didn’t occur to me then, that M might have been lying. That the boy who wanted me to pour my heart out to him was denying part of the one he’d promised me in return. Maybe, if I really cared for him, I would have refused to kiss him until he told me the truth. But I was only seventeen.

My hands trembled as I leaned back and forced M to look up at me. His eyes were wet. Without hesitation, I shifted forward and pressed a kiss to each of them. M gasped at the feeling of my lips on his eyelids, and I took that as an invitation to move further down, kissing a line toward the cupid’s bow in the center of his mouth.

Kissing M was even more painful than hearing him sing. I wanted him so much and each nip at my bottom lip and swipe of his tongue was proof I would only have him for this singular moment. After six months, I knew what disappointment looked like on M’s face, and now I could taste it on his tongue. Whatever he was searching for, I was not it.

#

I catch up to M at an ice cream cart just outside the Millennium Park ice skating rink. With his hot chocolate in one hand and a twenty-dollar bill in the other, his signature smile bright and deadly, he almost looks like the same pretentious asshole I met in that astronomy lecture. But we have not been those people for a long time.

“Keep the change,” he says, winking at the sixteen-year-old operating the cart. “And tell your brother I say h–”

M falters when he turns and sees me standing only a couple of feet behind him.

“Can we talk?” I say.

M doesn’t respond. Instead, he turns back and takes a cup from the sixteen-year-old's outstretched hands. A caramel milkshake. My favorite.

“Ice cream first,” he says.

We find a spot with a good view of the families and tourists stumbling their way up and down the ice and sit down. I can’t remember the last time we sat in silence like this, content with each other’s company. After M started seeing other people—and I attempted to—so many of our moments together seemed to be dominated by an endless string of complaints and grievances we had with the boys we liked. He once told me he wished he could find a boyfriend as understanding as I was. I only smiled.

M tugs on the cross hanging from his neck. “It’s good, right?”

“It’s great,” I say. “I’ll pay you back once we get home.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m not going to let you buy my silence.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“What are you doing, then?” I say. “Why is it so important for you to know what I think about you cheating on S?”

“Because you never said anything the entire time he and I dated,” M says. “Or when I dated Jack, Keith, and Dylan.”

“I definitely said something about Dylan. He had a piss kink.”

“The point,” M continues, “is that you shut down every time I get a new boyfriend.”

“I wonder why.”

I’ve only told two people what happened in the bell tower that night. Half of campus knows M and I were involved in some capacity, but only my roommate, Dannel, and cousin, Yudelka, know how devastating it all was for me. Both of them asked me the same question the first time I told the story.

Why stay friends with M?

#

I told M things in that bell tower that I will never repeat. In that moment, he was the person I trusted most in the world. It was a sort of confession, almost. Once I was vulnerable, I couldn’t take it back. What was said was done. And it did not matter that M didn’t feel the same. That a few weeks later, sitting in the same spot where we’d kissed, he told me he just wanted to be friends. Best friends.

Because even if he was not mine, I was his. I would rather have him in my life than cut ties with a boy who’d seen me at my most vulnerable. His betrayal was meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

#

M is talking again. “—is this about what happened last year? Because you said you were okay.”

“I don’t think you’re the type of person who would cheat on purpose.”

M drops his hot chocolate. It splatters all over our shoes. We bend down to pick up the cup at the same time, bumping heads. A laugh bubbles up from my stomach, and M is quick to follow. For the first time all day, it feels like I can breathe.

“You don’t have to lie,” M says when we’ve calmed down.

“We don’t lie to each other.”

“We don’t lie to each other,” M repeats.

“You were still a shitty boyfriend,” I say. “But that’s not mutually exclusive to your relationship with S.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“I’m always right. It’s why you’re not into me.”

M stands up and offers me a hand. I take it and let him pull me to my feet. This time, I don’t yank my hand away. “That’s not why,” he says.

It would be easy to fall back into old patterns. M is an easy person to love. The kind of idealist who doesn’t understand his dreams have consequences. Anyone who isn’t attracted to that freedom is a liar. But I know him too well to want it anymore. He doesn’t need me to love him. He needs me to trust him.

“I’m going to get us some napkins,” I say.

M leans forward and kisses my cheek. His lips land just along the corner of my mouth. “You’re the best.”

The sixteen-year-old running the ice cream cart hands me napkins without me even having to ask. I get the feeling she’s been watching us.

“Y’all are such a cute couple,” she says.

I look over my shoulder at M. Framed by the ice rink behind him, he looks like a silhouette in one of the paintings hanging in his dorm room. He hasn’t sung since that night, but he still paints. I haven’t asked him, but I know the person he keeps painting is me.

“No,” I say. “Just friends.”

#

This is how I remember the winter after my nineteenth birthday: caramel milkshakes, mornings at the Christmas market, cups of hot chocolate splattered across Millennium Park. M spends the weekends with his boyfriends and turns to me when they’re gone. My room is littered with paintings of me in profile, and I pose for M to continue painting more. Winter in Chicago starts with the end of long-term relationships. Old women hawk their homemade, vaguely blasphemous tapestries at the Christmas market. Married couples try (and fail) to corral their children, save up for a home, and eavesdrop on arguing college students. Well-meaning friends find people to replace the boyfriends they’ve lost. We are not the same, these friends and I. That’s what I tell myself. That’s the best proof that I was ever here.

END