Image Source: JoseMa Orsini
Dawn broke gently, casting charcoal blocks of light against the ink-black ceiling and walls. It was early May, the world in half-bloom, the semester nearly over. An overcast Sunday morning, with spits of rain and fog and birds and lilacs in the air. A beautiful morning to be alive.
Tom Moody lay in bed watching the gray light creep further and further into the room. He had been awake for hours, replaying a night that seemed to start an eternity ago and inhaling the pillow next to him to try to hold on to Corey.
Tom thought of the Galaxy Effect and the time when he coined the phrase. He and his brother Rick, five and eight respectively, awoke at 4:45 AM one Labor Day weekend morning for a flight back home from their grandparent’s and summer vacation. Rick said in the driveway, “Look, there’s Venus!” And Tom thought of that moment at 8:00 PM, 2,000 miles later, and he couldn’t possibly fathom that it had happened on the same day. It seemed like a galaxy ago. Thus, the Galaxy Effect, and he was feeling it thinking of the mere hours it had been since Corey was in this same bed with him.
As he lay in bed in the advancing dawn, Tom thought of Saturday night and how Corey’s boyfriend, his best friend Hank, had been short with her, and how he had left the club early after threatening to smack her one. He thought of Corey at the bar, alone and vulnerable, and how crazy he had been for her for so long. And he thought of how he had found enough of a pair to tell her, and how she had reciprocated in kind and how they had ended up at his off-campus apartment.
He thought of their time together, mutual lust overflowing in…not reckless, but contained…abandon, both of them knowing that this was just an interlude: a break in routine…and that all was fleeting but perfect.
He thought of Corey lying next to him, recovering, radio playing low, and her retreat back to Hank. He thought of her final kiss: firm, on closed lips, a definitive “if I weren’t with this guy, then…” statement.
He thought of her closing the bedroom door and slinking out of his off-campus apartment, back to her man, while he lay there sleepless and restless, the night and the past barreling through his mind like a film montage.
He thought of the gray blocks of light on the ceiling. The Gray Hour. Gray in the middle of everything. Black and White, Night and Day, Good and Evil. A world with a best friend and his girlfriend, and a world of recrimination and acrimony after the truth inevitably comes out.
But right now was the gray middle. The past was the night, and the inevitable future was the morning yet to come. Tom Moody laid back in bed, inhaling the pillow next to him like it was the night before and relishing a moment of consummation that he had been craving for years. The radio played low, and it all became the soundtrack to a magical evening in a spring of rebirth.
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