This Is What I Want Read Online Free PDF

mountains and lakes and liberalism you wanted—Norby smiled to remember how much he had desired all of those things—you’d do better to point your nose toward Missoula. And that’s what he’d done, the first westward unfurling of his ambition and discovery of self. It’s where he shed his given name, Samuel, and took his first steps toward becoming Norby, because he was finally allowed to be who he believed himself to be. After four years there, summa cum laude tucked into his pocket, he also knew his desires lay farther still from where he’d come.
    But today, as Norby piloted his rental car down the Rimrocks into town, he was forced to reconsider his long-held positions. In his absence, Billings had grown into itself, with high-end bars and restaurants crowding corners once blighted by neglect; a new city library, linear and beautiful and modern; a parking lot where the beaten husk of the old library used to stand. He spun through town in wonder, cutting his way through leafy neighborhoods and business districts to a new hotel on the city’s southern edge, convenient to tomorrow’s interstate escape.
    Now, a few hours later, Norby finished the last of his pasta and dropped the to-go box into the trash can by the table. He stood, linked his hands above his head and stretched, a tingle moving through him from the small of his back and radiating toward his shoulder blades. He spread out perpendicular to the alignment of the queen bed, propping a pillow under his arm and taking in the industrial scent of the laundered linens. The display on his phone read 9:13. At home, his parents would be getting ready for bed, to take advantage of the last night of decent sleep before Sunday. He wanted to call and come clean to his mom, to tell her he was in Billings and that he wanted to come alone for his own reasons. Like most lies, the one about traveling by way of Bismarck had been spawned by expediency and expanded by necessity. He felt foolish, but his father would surely be there if he called now, and Norby didn’t want to get into it with him, so he wallowed in the frustration he’d stoked.
    He turned on the TV and rifled through the channels, settling on one of the ubiquitous police procedurals. He’d seen this one before; it was the brother, the seemingly normal one, who hid the bodies of those girls in the crawl space of the family home. The detectives always got at the truth of the matter, it seemed.
    A message flashed on his phone.
    Where u?
    Derek.
    Norby stared at the screen for the better part of a minute, caught between joy and revulsion. When would one name, five simple letters, stop holding sway over his emotions and self-regard?
    Out of town , he typed back.
    Shit.
    What?
    I came by.
    Why?
    The reply was long in coming, and too banal for the wait. I wanted to get my shirt. The one from Seattle. U know the one?
    As if Norby could forget. Seattle, a year ago next month. A concert at the Neptune, the sweet scent of alcohol seeping from their pores as they moved in rhythm under the houselights. They’d spent the preceding day roaming the University of Washington campus, with Norby basking in sweet envy at his lover’s fortune in having matriculated there. Before the show, Derek had found the shirt—disco purple with silver cross-threading and mother-of-pearl snaps down the middle—at a vintage shop on Brooklyn Avenue, and it hung perfectly on him. Such fun those buttons had been to pop open hours later, back at the hotel, in their drunken rambunctiousness. Derek’s skin, hot to the touch. The scent of him on Norby as they slept, entwined. Yeah, Norby knew the shirt. If he closed his eyes and thought of Derek, something he tried to avoid, the shirt was part of the image. When he’d found it after Derek cleared out, he cast it to the back of the closet, not wanting to lay eyes upon it—and holding the furtive hope that he could keep it somehow.
    Sorry. Not there.
    Where u?
    Montana.
    The words lingered