Trevor fished a crumbled dollar from his pocket and smoothed it out against the dirty plastic of the vending machine before punching in his order and hearing the satisfying clink clunk of a bottle hitting the bottom. We were miles from home, cutting through the empty west of Texas and headed to New Mexico for a pit stop at his parents’ place before moving north to the outskirts of the Grand Mesa to disappear into green brush for a week.
He was a caffeine addict: three cups of coffee a day, hands always jittery. He was six foot something (I never bothered asking) buzz cut hair and broad shoulders hanging out of a crop top tank he fashioned from an old band tee grown ragged from use. We were barely together, though I guess I was meeting his parents. We got together every couple of months out of pure obsession, spent all our time around each other, got mad, broke it off, and continued the cycle again.
I was the only person he could see himself loving. That’s not me being hyperbolic or grandiose, he told me so himself.
Everyone else, he said, felt like going through the motions. Like maintaining speed. But with you, I could wild out—go too fast.
Around others he was soft spoken and straight faced. He thought through each of his jokes and took weeks to text back, anxiously crafting each syllable for its maximum impact. Around me he, well as he put it: wilded out. He got silly, goofy, rolling around or making funny noises or simply dramatically flinging his body on to the couch. I got the feeling that his childhood had been rough. He was probably a precocious child. He probably felt too much too intensely and had nowhere to place that energy. He kept it in his body: some constant vibrating energy exploding when he got a bad grade, saw a dead animal on the road, or got bullied at school.
He could only love me because he didn’t know how to love people. He thought loving someone was feeling it not doing it and it didn’t matter how often you told him that it took both he wouldn’t listen. He got bored during the dry parts of love: managing schedules and planning futures; decorating a house; arguing about who would pay the bills. He didn’t want to live with anyone and I appreciated that about him because, who wants to share their space anyways?
I was mad for him but, then again, I was mad for every man that gave me attention. My parents never showed an interest in me. They gave me things and kept me fed but they never asked a question about my life. They had no clue what I was up to or what my hobbies were. When I came home for the holidays they got this long look of befuddlement on their faces as if we were two strangers meeting for the first time. In such, I fell hard for any man that love bombed me or listened to my stories.
I could probably have a lot of men. I thought I was the type of ugly that people politely talked around, but I likely wasn’t. I could punch above my weight. Men were drawn to that needy part of me, hoping they could fix it or fill it or understand it. When they did I got bored and ran away. Dyed my hair and moved to Chicago to spend a harsh winter under-dressed and feeling sorry for myself.
Trevor downed half the bottle and offered me some. I shook my head no. We should get moving, I said. We got a lot of road to cover.
Sure, he said. Just let me stretch first.