Cal made everything feel intimate, even the most mundane moments, a simple look. When we shared cigarettes, he put his lips perfectly on the places where mine had wet the paper, and it reminded me of the stolen sips he’d confessed to taking from my unfinished Canadian Club. He’d yearned to taste me back when I feared him more than I feared him now, and I wanted to be savored.

He touched me in mindless ways that were not indifferent at all, like when he rubbed his little finger over my knuckles and showed me the prodigious power of a pinkie, a digit I had clearly underestimated. A chaste touch was made so much less so by the way he circled each of the muscles of my fist slowly, evoking thoughts of other things he did in an unhurried manner, amazing things that had me alive and dead at the same time.

I was sated, bordering on happy, and perpetually waiting for everything to fall apart, just as it typically did. Cal was full of conviction, a quality I lacked. Perhaps it was easier to be assured when you had nothing to lose. The stakes were low for him, while they soared through the skies for me, tempestuous and ready to pour consequences down upon me with one wrong move. I envied him. Despite how pathetic that was, I think it was my strongest emotion toward him at the time.

“Have you been following the batty shit that happened with Billy Jurges?” I asked Cal as we lay on a dandelion-dotted knoll, sweltering under the early July sun. Bughouse Square was bustling as it often was, packed full of people who bubbled with the ignorant energy of youth. We weren’t like them, not that day. We’d been young the night before, chasing each other on Cal’s bed while we slowed the eight hours that fled from us too quickly. In our dimwitted determination to retard time, we hadn’t slept, leaving us listless and lethargic, but glad just the same.

“Who’s that?” Cal questioned, alabaster skin appearing ethereal among the phantom blooms. If he had been anyone else, his incomprehension of all things Cubs would have peeved me, but it was him, so it didn’t. Cal, who was blowing the seeds of the flower into the air, not knowing how much the act would entice me. He, who drove me crazy by simply holding the stem with tenderness before carelessly tossing it away when the bud was bare, a man who didn’t know anything about baseball, but knew everything about how to play the game.

“He’s the Cubbies’ shortstop,” I informed him, picking a flower and studying it for a moment.

“So, he’s not tall then?” he smirked, well aware of how to press my buttons.

I chuckled and tossed the dandelion at him. “Are they flowers or weeds?”

“Does it matter?”