Kate McMurray - Walk in the Dark, New folder 1
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A Walk in the Dark • Kate McMurray
A Walk in the Dark
I
was never big into the holiday season. Most years, I put
up with it, but Christmas had a way of reminding me that
I didn’t have anyone to share the holiday with. The image
on TV was of all these happy families sitting down to big
turkey dinners, while I mostly spent the last two weeks of
December sitting alone in my apartment and eating leftover
Chinese food. My mother lived in the city, but she thought
Christmas was a lot of materialist claptrap and was generally
disinterested in making the holiday the Norman Rockwell
painting that part of me yearned for.
My roommate Rex was certainly not helping matters
that one Christmas a few years ago. We’d been friends for a
zillion years, but he’d been trying my patience lately. See, he
had this boyfriend. I was at home one night when they came
in, all smiles and giggles. By my estimation, Brandon and
Rex were parading arm in arm into my apartment for the
437th time, and I wanted to vomit.
Yes, Rex. After all the time I’d known him, I still didn’t
know if that was his real name, but that wasn’t important.
The real problem here was that Rex and Brandon were
laughing and leaning on each other, headed for Rex’s
bedroom, where I knew they would fuck, probably loudly. It
was as if I didn’t exist, even though this was my home, too,
and Rex and I made eye contact on his way by.
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A Walk in the Dark • Kate McMurray
I didn’t know what it was about
this
time, but something
in me snapped. I could not listen to them fuck one more
time.
Unfortunately, I’d been camped out on the couch in a
stretched-out T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts, hardly
appropriate for the cold winter night outside. The building’s
heat was turned up to sauna levels, but there was no way to
adjust the old radiators, so Rex and I had taken to spending
our December wearing as little as possible around the
apartment. Well, Rex did that regardless of the season. The
bottom line was that going outside would require going to my
room to change, which required walking past Rex’s room,
where he’d be fucking Brandon. Poor, sweet, adorable
Brandon, who spent several nights a week with Rex but
somehow still didn’t know what an asshole he was. Like the
name alone wasn’t enough of a tip.
Luckily, my iPod was on the coffee table, so I picked it
up, popped in my earphones, and cranked the volume up to
eleven. Just as the telltale moans began to seep out from the
space below Rex’s door, a good thumping beat flooded my
ears and drowned them out.
I slipped into my bedroom and kicked the door closed. It
took some work, but I managed to wrestle myself out of my
workout clothes and into jeans and a clean shirt, only
extracting my headphones when I thought I heard someone
knocking on my door. (The sound turned out to be Rex’s
goddamn headboard banging into the wall that separated
our rooms.) I tripped and stumbled when I tried to shove my
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A Walk in the Dark • Kate McMurray
feet into a pair of sneakers and hit my knee against my
dresser, sending bolts of pain through my leg.
It took me a few more minutes to track down my wallet
and keys. I took my winter coat off the hook near the door
and slid it on. I had no idea where I would go. I just knew I
needed to get out of the apartment.
But just as I reached for the knob, Brandon tiptoed out
of Rex’s room. He was wearing his coat, a pair of dark jeans,
and a sheepish expression. His dark-blond hair was tousled
and his face was flushed, and he was just so goddamn
adorable.
“Uh, hey, Jared,” he said, walking up to the door. “You
going out?”
“Yeah, I thought maybe I’d….” I let that hang there as I
pointed my thumb toward the door.
He stood at the door for a moment, shifting his weight
from one foot to another. “Yeah, I, uh. I have to run. I have a
class. I’m kinda late, actually. Rex and I had dinner, and I
wasn’t even going to come over, but you know how he is.”
“Oh, I know how he is.”
“Yeah, so, here I am, but I need to be going.”
“Want me to walk you to the subway?”
His face lit up. “Would you? Yeah, that’d be great. No
offense, but I hate your block after it gets dark. That park
down the street totally creeps me out.”
“Sure, no problem. It’s on my way.”
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A Walk in the Dark • Kate McMurray
So off we went, out onto the streets of Chelsea. I lived
two blocks west of the A train, and my residential block did
get pretty dark at night. We chatted as we walked, mostly
about how cold it was outside. He seemed a little agitated.
When I asked if he was okay, he just said he had an exam
coming up.
I walked him to the subway entrance at Sixteenth
Street. We stood there awkwardly at the top of the stairs for
a moment. He said, “Thanks. I feel like such a wuss
sometimes. You didn’t have to walk me here.”
“Eh, it’s not a big deal.”
He smiled. He had this completely disarming toothy
grin. “You’re a good friend, Jared.” He stood on his tiptoes
and kissed my cheek. Then he turned and descended the
stairs to the subway. I might have stared, watching his
tousled hair and narrow shoulders disappear into the
station. Man, he was beautiful.
Yep. I was completely, totally, head over heels in love
with my roommate’s boyfriend.
I stopped by a bodega on the way back to the
apartment. The owner had tossed up some perfunctory
Christmas ornaments: mangled-looking tinsel on the edge of
the counter, lights strung around the cold-beverage cases. It
was tacky, just like everything in New York at Christmas
time. I picked up a quart of milk so it would look like I had a
purpose for being outside. When I got back to the apartment,
Rex was sitting on the couch in his underwear, drinking a
beer and flipping through the channels.
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