Peeling Grapefruit

After his shift at the café we swallowed them. I was drinking an iced mocha with oat milk that he had made for me. He drank a can of something.

Then we were walking to his apartment. It was quiet, the middle of the day and the middle of the week. The sun hid somewhere up in the sky. Everyone was on campus. His roommate was gone. In the bathroom he put his laundry into the dryer while I looked at the things in his room. He had torn out pages from a notebook and taped them to his walls, scribbling famous poems on them, sometimes whole passages from novels he loved. On the floor, a twin-sized mattress was shoved into the wall by the window. His record player rested next to the bed, balanced on two stacks of books. Some records were fanned out nearby. Clothes spilled out of a small closet in the corner. A philodendron sat on his windowsill, exploding green leaves and vines halfway to the floor, like a tired firework. He didn’t have much furniture, or anything, really. I left my coat and bag on the hardwood floor. My shoes were already off.

Then we were on his bed. It was too small for both of us, so we had to lie close. 

“This is why I always come to you,” he said, “imagine us both trying to share this bed.” 

I laughed and said, “we could make it work.” 

I never ended up spending a night there. I could hear the dryer rattling gently in the bathroom until he was up, putting on one of the records that I brought.

“The Beatles,” he said with a flourish of his head as he got back beside me, “classic.” 

“I love The Beatles,” I said. 

“Everyone loves The Beatles,” he said, and I crawled into his arms. The record spun on the player and his clothes spun in the dryer. All I had to do to kiss him was look up. A foot of his, dangling off the end of the bed, bounced to the music. 

“I’d love to turn you on” - John Lennon’s words revolved out from the player and then disappeared into the sound of instruments, leaving us alone.

Then we opened the window by his bed, raising the blinds, letting the late afternoon light cast the room in amber, fossilizing us. The trees in his courtyard were breathing, shuddering their leaves on the exhale. At some point the record had clicked and stuttered to a stop. We could see, through the window, a man on the roof across the courtyard of his apartment building. He was working on the parapet. Materials and tools were strewn about. He was hammering at something, playing his portable radio. Something tinny. We stared at him until he started to stare at us. We were both naked and tangled in his comforter, but we felt no shame. I felt his chest shake with my head. He was giggling a little. 

“Look at him looking at us,” he said, “I wonder what he thinks of all this.”

“Of what?” I asked. I fully turned to the window and watched the man, who was trying not to watch back. I waited for his eyes, and when I found them, I didn’t flinch, a little smirk found its way up my throat and into my mouth. I held it there. 

“You know,” he said, “this.” Then his hand crept up my shoulder and pulled me toward him. 

Later, when it started to get dark and we were hungry, he put on underwear and went to the kitchen and returned with a grapefruit and a knife. It felt like he was gone for so long and the room was starting to stretch and shift. 

“What took you?” I asked. 

“Sorry,” he replied, “it was hard to know what I wanted.” 

When he sat next to me the bed dipped, and it sent a wave of something heavy through my stomach. I watched as he spiraled the peel and scraped off the pith. 

“My dad taught me this,” he said as he pried the fruit in half. It almost sounded like Velcro. He cradled a half in one hand and used his fingers to peel off a segment, red and glistening. The organization of the fruit impressed me with its design, naturally brilliant. It was comforting, each segment fitted snugly to the next. The organic compartments, viscid teardrops of fruit. A little juice dribbled down my chin as he fed a piece to me. His fingers shone sticky.

“Soft hands,” he said, handing me another slice, “that’s the secret. Otherwise, you’ll crush it - everything will fall apart.” He continued to dismantle the fruit, piece by piece, placing each slice on a plate that sat between us on his tiny bed. 

“I think that peeling fruit is my love language,” he went on. “It’s because of my parents. One of them would almost always be in the kitchen, with a pineapple or grapefruit or something. Whatever was in season.” He looked at the carnage of the grapefruit and said, “I’ve never really done this for somebody else before.”

I nodded and put another slice into my mouth. He seemed to be somewhere else now. He set the bowl of peels and the knife on the windowsill next to the plant. Resting his head right next to the blade of the knife, he let the breeze hold his face. The sunlight was beginning to drain, slowly, from the room. I felt alone so I stared at his floor. The grain of the hardwood floor warped, moving like pond water. As I watched the floor stir, I thought about him peeling the grapefruit. All the attention and care he gave to the fruit that was for me. I asked myself if I’ve ever done something like that before. I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t remember. It was possible. What he didn’t know didn’t matter until the end. At that moment I looked at him and he seemed so familiar, a friend from a different life. A lover, maybe.

Then the three months I’d known him expanded into years. I saw him sitting, still twenty, on a lawn chair in my backyard at my house in Modesto, laughing at something my father had said. It was my seventh birthday party, and I was dressed like a fairy. He gave me a soft smile. Then we caught eyes in the rearview mirror of my Yukon, parked in the parking lot of my high school. He was sitting up front, messing with the old radio, twisting the knob, searching for a clear signal. And I was in the back, seats folded down, fumbling about with my prom date. He was even there right before I knew him, laying on my bed, reading one of his books in the background of my bedroom while things ended between me and someone else. When I was finally alone, he looked up from his book and made a funny face, one that made him look like he’d arrived at a party before anyone else. At this point I looked over at him, the present him, and wondered if he was thinking similarly, if he saw the same things. From the window I could hear the gate to his courtyard clang shut, as someone came or left.

He had flipped the record, so the music came back. I focused on the sounds and pressed my thumbs into my eyelids, and I could see a universe in my head. There was a distant thumping sound from somewhere around me. It grew closer and closer. His voice came into play. 

“How are you feeling?” 

I was about to reply when keys clicked the door open. His roommate was home. He jumped up and closed the door to his bedroom. 

“Does he know?” I asked. 

“One second,” he replied, and he put on shorts and went out the door. I could hear voices in the living room, laughs. I felt they were talking about me. The sun, receded from this segment of the world, left the room blue. The music stopped, again. For a time, I couldn’t move my body. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t if I tried. I laid on the bed looked out the window and the man on the parapet was no longer there. I saw the bowl of skin and the flesh of the grapefruit crawled in my stomach, breaking down, dissolving. Since then, I haven’t eaten any grapefruit; I’m not allowed.

“How long was I gone?” He asked, returning, smiling. He set a glass of water next to the bed. 

“Forever,” I replied. He moved next to me and I wrapped my arm around his chest. 

“Well, I’m back,” he said, “but how are you feeling? How is it going?”

I wished he wouldn’t ask.  “Fine,” I said. I could feel the cool dark from the living room that hugged his chest.

He told me he felt like his senses were heightened, firing on all cylinders, so that he could see and hear and feel so much more. 

“I’ve never been in a place like this before, in my room and with you,” he told me, “everything is so different here.” 

It felt wrong, but then I said, “I’m so glad that I’m here with you, in this place.” Though I had been in a place like this before, I did feel comfortable. Content even. 

Then the room was dark, save for the yellow bar of hallway light at the bottom of his bedroom door. Stars punctured holes into his ceiling, surprising me. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know if they were real. I looked to him and he was looking at the ceiling, too. I felt connection, like I was seeing a picture of myself from a different time. 

“They’re on a timer,” he said and chuckled like he had thought of something funny. I looked up and saw the skeleton of the string lights, how they were fixed to the ceiling with packing tape. 

“I hope they don’t fall,” I said. 

“I was thinking the same thing,” he said, “but I don’t think they will, not this time.”

 We laid together for a while and watched the stars pulse with light. A gust came through the window; the packing tape made a small, crumpling sound and a few of the lights shivered, that was all.

I was on the cusp of something like sleep when he woke me getting up. He sat in front of the record player, cross-legged, surveying the albums on the floor. 

“Anything you want to hear?” He asked. “Are you leaving soon? You can stay as long as you’d like.”

I had told him that I would have to go, that it would just be an afternoon. But I had nowhere to go and I wanted to stay. Then I remembered the laughter while he was gone, and I didn’t say anything. He looked up at me from the floor, and although his mattress was on the floor, too, we saw each other differently.

He picked up the glass of water and gulped some. He handed it to me, getting back into bed, and I gulped some, too. It had been so long. From the golden crack under his door came the sounds of cooking: the opening of the fridge, the tapping of the knife on the cutting board, the quick ticks of the stove. His roommate making dinner. Smells soon followed, but I couldn’t tell what they were. They warmed my nose, and I could hear him inhaling beside me. It sounded like he was trying to breathe all the air in the room.

“Do you want to get dinner?” I turned and asked. He was back on the bed, stretching his limbs, spreading himself over it. 

He held the pose and replied, “Really?” 

He relaxed on the bed and I moved on top of him. “I’ve been waiting forever to hear you say that,” he said, and saw my face. “They kind of look like marbles, your eyes,” he said. I kissed him and rubbed them. 

“So, do you want to?” He looked at me. He was almost smiling. Then I nodded and he kissed me and looked at me like I was someone familiar.

We arose and clothed in a quiet sort of satisfaction. He turned on the light and it looked like dried tears had left streaks down his face. I asked him if something was wrong. 

“What?” He said.

And I said, “your face.” 

Placing his hands on his cheeks, he pressured them with his fingers. He laughed. “It’s grapefruit juice, some got on my face while I was peeling it.”

I licked my thumb and wiped the streaks off his cheeks. It was dark outside the window and the air was cold. Sliding the window down, he pushed it closed. It bounced up a little, though, and there was a small gap that still let the cold air infiltrate the room. Handing me my coat, he put on his. On top of the pile of spilled clothing from the closet, I grabbed one of his beanies. I put it on, and he opened the door to the hallway. In the hallway, our shoes sat by the door, where I couldn’t seem to remember leaving them. He emerged from out of his room, jingling keys and reaching back in to flip off the light. 

“Where do you want to go?” He asked. 

“Wherever you want,” I answered. 

When we were about to leave and he was about to say that I was strangely familiar to him, too, that it seemed like he had known me, in some way or another, for his entire life, the laundry finished in the dryer. From the bathroom came a tune, a tinny little song that meant it was all done.

Henry Hua