Holding Still for as Long as Possible by Zoe Whittall Read Free Book Online Page B

fine. She had liked Jason, my high school boyfriend, all right. But she really took to Josh. She’d send us envelopes with clippings of anything in the news related to paramedicine or hospital issues, with True Heroes! written in coloured pencil crayon in the margins. She bragged about Josh to her book club when they read a book about the health care system. It felt as if Josh fit into all the areas of my life that had once felt separate.
    I have a tattoo on my lower back that says Hope . When we got the tattoos, we were twenty, and in that stage where we still did things like have sex in cabs. Back when I felt somehow invincible, we got each other matching tattoos for Christmas. I still loved every inch of those letters, albeit a bit differently now.
    I remember Josh pulling me out of the cab on our way to get the tattoos done and sitting me atop a bright green Now magazine box, and kissing me. If you’ve been kissed like this, you know what I mean. Heart-attack city, hair-ballad worthy, “throw all your money away for one more chance at love” kind of kissing.
    The sun was going down and we hadn’t left the apartment since Boxing Day, hadn’t talked to anyone else, had turned off our phones, unplugged the computer. I was wearing a bright blue ball gown and he was in a ’70s-style tux, and we didn’t have anywhere fancy to go. We weren’t high, just feeling momentous.
    I’d been videotaping that whole day, watching through the camera lens the way Josh moved. At dawn, I had stood on a high stool in the corner of our bedroom, had caught him waking up from a beautiful angle, kicking the soft blue sheet down and stretching out his body. Our bed surrounded by Christmas paper and abandoned clothes. Usually he didn’t let me record him so much, but his guard was down. “I like the way you see me,” he’d said, “so I suppose I don’t mind so much.” You’d be hard-pressed to find much photographic evidence of Josh’s existence, but on occasion he let me document us .
    I met Josh when I was nineteen, through our mutual friend Roxy. She was teaching me how to edit movies on her computer, and there he was, asleep on her pullout couch.
    â€œMy friend Josh came to town to have chest surgery, so we have to be quiet.”
    â€œWhere’s he from?”
    â€œGuelph.”
    â€œHuh. How do you know him?”
    â€œWe played in a band together last year. He used to come to the city to drum. Now he’s moving here to go back to school and stuff.”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œTo be a paramedic.”
    â€œWeird.”
    â€œI know.”
    I was drawn to him immediately. Chemical.
    When we first started dating, every once in a while we used to have this conversation:
    Him: “You’re going to leave me for a girl, right? ’Cause you’re really queer?”
    Me: “No. I date girls and guys. Are you going to leave me for a straight girl?”
    Him: “No way, uh-uh. Why leave the perfect woman?”
    It seems funny now, that we used to care about those things, be hung up on the politics and the way we were seen. But I suppose it’s natural to question, given the hostility of the entire universe outside our safe bubble of progressive folks. Josh never, ever looked like a girl, even as a kid. He went on testosterone at seventeen. He’s never not passed. He just looked a lot younger than he was, like a teenager. It bugged him.
    He never really went back to Guelph, except to get his stuff and move in with me. We graduated the same year, he got a job with TEMS , and my internship at the film centre turned into a job. We were pseudo-married with careers while most of my friends were still dodging student loans and working at Starbucks.
    By the time I had unzipped my dress on the second floor of the tattoo parlour, I was no longer concerned that the cooler-than-shit tattoo artist thought I was a tattoo-virgin wimp. She