ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Well, there'll be more tomorrow. Tonight was a short bit to round out the chapter. We'll see a little bit more of what happens next and how the past links up to the present in the next post.
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EDEN: A Sex Story
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
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ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
CHAPTER FOUR
PART ONE
Isaiah entered the church with Evan Barclay and Burt Haarlem. Jason had gone over a little earlier, and he was there in a suit and tie, looking very nervous. But unlike that first time when Frey had done the play and Jason had shown up to take him out, not silly at all. No hair part, just that slightly tousled, shining, dark wavy hair.
And all around him, or all around the baptismal font was family. Donald, Jason’s brother, who looked much like him only shorter, Jason’s slope shouldered, prematurely greying father; and his blond from a bottle—God bless the bottle because she was a good woman—mother.
And there were others. The other family. And in the midst of them was a girl with a baby. That must be her, and that must be him. That was Elle. He’d never thought of her in a real way, never wondered what she looked like. There would be no baptismal mass. This was an old but well kept church, and the midday sun shone on the marble floors and on the pillars. At the altar, Jason gestured for the three of them to come up. Frey came up, trying not to look like he was looking at Elle, who was thin and thin faced, fox faced almost, sullen looking. Frey looked at Elle and then look at Jason.
“But there is nothing between them,” he said.
But then there was something between them. They were here for the something.
The Something was not held in its mother’s arms, that was a revelation. No, the boy had long ceased to be a baby anywhere except in Frey’s mind, held in the arms of his faceless mother. But this was a busy, brown haired child who kept trying to walk away and, in irritation, Elle kept jerking his hand. There didn’t seem to be much love in her for this baby, but then she didn’t want to even be here. That was all at the insistence of Mrs. Hanley. When they got to the altar, Frey could tell, because he could sense it after so many years of being Jason’s best friend, his sometimes enemy, his bedmate, that Jason was sending desperate glances to him, wishing for him to stand next to him. Outness was not a big idea in those days, and since it wasn’t floating in the world like a cliché, it was subtle and much more honest. Jason would have never said, “This is my boyfriend, Frey.” And Frey wouldn’t have seriously thought of him doing it, but right now Jason wanted Frey to stand next to him so everyone would know what they were, know that Jason wasn’t alone.
“Look at you,” Jason murmured. It was the first time Frey had been in a suit.
“I think I look silly.”
“I assure you, you don’t. You look very... You make me very proud,” Jason murmured.
His hand was on the small of Frey’s back. Whatever they were or had been or would be again, they belonged to each other, and Jason wanted Elle to know it. She had a mean face, and she was so close that Frey, on impulse, felt free to whisper: “Do you know who I am?”
Elle looked at him. She must have discarded instantly the idea that the appropriate answer was, “The godfather.”
Instead she said, in a small voice, “Yes.”
“Good,” said Frey.
Not caring what anyone thought about it, surely everyone had to know something, must have known it long ago, Jason hugged Frey’s waist quickly.
If the priest noticed, and looking back Frey was sure he did, he said nothing. Part of Catholicism was noticing all things, and then ignoring most of them. The priest said:
“Are you the godfather?”
And Frey said, “Yes.”
Elle’s family, though Catholic, was not heavily invested in the rituals of the Church, and so they had no godmother to offer.
The priest frowned over this, but only briefly, and then said to the mother, “The child’s name is?”
The child in question threw up his hands and clapped. He was in a little black blazer with black shorts, and he was laughing, and Mrs. Hanley clapped and laughed in response before remembering where she was. But it was Elle who spoke sullenly.
“His name is Donatus Jeremiah after my grandfather.”
“What an awful name,” Frey whispered. Jason covered his mouth, but nodded, grinning. Mrs. Hanley, who had heard of Frey for years, and liked him now that she’d met him, nodded her head in agreement.
“Don—” the priest opened his mouth.
“Stop that,” Elle told the boy, who was tugging on her skirt.
“It doesn’t matter,” she told the priest. “We just call him DJ.”
“But this wasn’t when you did the book.?
“No….” Isaiah covered his mouth and coughed. “Do you hear anything about a book?’
“No, but—”
“People need to listen,” Isaiah said, reaching for his cup of tea and taking a sip. “You have to go back to work soon. So for now you need to listen. This is not when the book was made. But this was when DJ was made, and maybe when me and Jason were unmade. This is how I was made. Without a me, there could be no book. So, are you listening?”
“Shit,” said Rob. Then, “Yes.”
“So can I go on?”
“Go on already,” Rob said. “Sorry I interrupted.”
“Well then,” Isaiah shrugged. “Just stop interrupting.”
When Isaiah Frey was twenty-seven years old he started graduate school.
It happened thusly.
He had applied to Citeaux’s creative writing program and been rejected, but the head of the department had invited him to lunch.
He couldn’t remember her name anymore, but she said, “I love your work, and I want you to apply again next year. Next year is my last, so do it then because it’s hard to tell what those people want. They don’t want risk takers.”
So Isaiah was a risk taker then. Well, good.
It felt good to be read even by only one person, and it was nice to have his writing validated. The fact was it seemed like years passed quickly, and if he had the promise of Citeaux next year then maybe he could ride out a little more discomfort, waiting in his mother’s house with Sharon and Jazmine.
He had written two books now. That first one, which he had no idea what to do with, a novel, unproofed, and this new thing he was working on. Neither of these, his children, had anywhere to go. He had no idea what to do with them, where to send them, who would want to read them. It seemed nobody read. Most publishers he looked at looked like the wrong one long before he ever thought of sending a manuscript off. Maybe Citeaux could help him. Maybe he would meet someone who would point him in the direction of a publisher and, more importantly, an audience.
Somewhere between this rejection and the next application time, Isaiah discovered the Internet, which was still fairly new, and blogs. Everyone did not have one back then, but there were interesting people with interesting thoughts on the web, and he thought maybe he could put his voice out there too. When he did, on his site, he was surprised to hear voices speaking back. He was meeting people from Australia, from Great Britain, from Connecticut. And then it was with the blog forum, that he thought, here is a place for an audience. And so, slowly, he began posting The Immortals on line.
“I have been reading this like a book,” came one e-mail.
“I print it out bit by bit so I can read it in my own time. I hope you don’t mind. I feel like I know these characters.”
No one had ever told Isaiah Frey they felt like they knew the people who lived inside of him. No one was reading him. Up until now all his writing had been for him, hoping one day that someone else would read, not so much his thoughts, which he didn’t think were that important, but his characters, who were whole other people, other friends who had come out of him but who, as far as he was concerned, were wholly other people.
“We need to go on a poem hang,” Melanie said.
“A poa-who?”
“A poem hang,” Melanie repeated patiently.
This was her idea.
“We will print out my stuff, and your stuff, then we’ll just paste it all over the city, leave it lying around.”
She said with utter seriousness: “This could be how we find our purpose for being alive.”
Faced with the prospect of finding his life’s purpose, Isaiah could not resist. He tacked up poems and short stories in the halls of Citeaux and Monserrat, left things in the bathroom stalls of the public library, and of churches and coffee houses, thought of plastering poems in bathrooms of bars, but then thought better of it.
After that Melanie said, “Let’s take it out of the city. Let’s travel like we did before. Do a poem hang all over the country. Or some of the country, at least.”
And so they did. As spring came to its height, Melanie, Isaiah, Dylan and young DJ prepared to go on an intrastate poem-hang.
A little after Elle’s funeral, Jason had shown up at Isaiah’s door a mess, with DJ. He announced that he had an apartment now. It belonged to Burt Haarlem’s family, and he wanted Isaiah to move in with him and help him care for the boy. He didn’t say it like that, He said, “I wanted to be near you.” which was true enough, Isaiah figured. Melanie came to live there too with her son Dylan, to escape her own mother.
They were happier than they’d been in a long time, Melanie and Isaiah, on their own. One day they woke up and DJ was there, but Jason was not. They waited hours for him to come back, and then at the end of the day there was a phone call.
“Jason?”
“Yeah,” he said breathlessly, over the other end of the phone.
“Where the fuck are you?”
“Look,” he said, “I just need you to look after DJ for a while. Can the two of you do that? The apartment’s paid for and everything.”
“Where are you?” Isaiah demanded.
“I think I’m... I really didn’t mean to do this. I was just driving you know? And I kept driving. And.…”
“Where are you?”
“I think I’m somewhere near New York.”
“What the—?”
“Look, Isaiah, don’t be mad at me. I’ll be back in a few days. I promise.”
Jason didn’t lie. He was back in a few days. But after that he took to fleeing without much notice fairly frequently, and DJ seemed oddly undisturbed by his father’s behavior.
“I was reading a psychology book,” Melanie noted, “that said a child should have two stable attachments. So maybe if I’m one and you’re the other that’s all that matters.”
So it was this makeshift family that set out in the early spring of that year for the intrastate poem hang.
They went through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, the toll road across northern Indiana to Chicago where Isaiah thought, for only a second, of dropping off DJ with his grandparents, and then realized that he wanted the boy, and then moved this time further west, to Iowa, where they stayed at the abbey of New Melleray and prayed with the monks.
In the middle of the night, Isaiah woke up here, and on barefeet he went to the chapel. He was not entirely surprised to see a woman in iridescent gowns, sitting beside a swan, all lit up in the chapel. He wasn’t surprised at all when she nodded and he nodded back and her eyes were shining with a joy he knew was in his own.
He thought of saying something. He thought of saying, “I’m glad to see you.”
He thought of asking, “Have I done well?” But he thought of how all of these things were pointless. They were all taken care of in her appearing. If he was not on the right course, then the She could not have come here. She was the right course. He had taken her. He had created and called her as she had created him.
In Nebraska they fell in with a rock band, and Melanie found Chet, but Isaiah found Adam, who was the lyricist, and they talked about writing for three days and found out they were best friends. Adam was tall and lanky, red haired like…. Now that he thought of it, like Rob, with a bit of beard around his mouth, and deep half serious half laughing eyes behind black Buddy Holly spectacles. The night before they were all about to part ways Adam said Isaiah could come home with him, and Isaiah left DJ with Melanie and Dylan. They listened to Gillian Welsh, drank and smoked cigarettes, and then when Adam leaned over and kissed him it was electric. It was beyond electric.
“Stay with me tonight,” he said simply.
This was the first time Isaiah made love to a man who was not Jason, and whom he suspected he would never see again. They kissed and touched, they grinded bodies together and made love all night and slept in each other’s arms. Adam dropped him off the next morning, making out with him in a dark corner outside the hotel room, and slipped him his cell phone number and his parents’ address because he didn’t have a permanent one.
“I don’t want you to ever lose me,” he said simply.
That was how Isaiah discovered that it wasn’t only Jason, but men in general, that he loved. He loved Adam, tall and thin and walking away, turning around with those saucer ears, the red stepchild hair and those horrible glasses; the best kisser he’d ever known.
“Did you...?” Melanie asked when he came into the room.
“I did,” Isaiah said with a simplicity that refused to be embarrassed.
But in the end the joke was on Melanie, as they found out when they returned home.
“Goddamn!” she swore.
“What?”
She frowned and passed him the stick she’d peed on. Because they’d been friends for years he took it.
“I’m pregnant again.”
PART ONE
Isaiah entered the church with Evan Barclay and Burt Haarlem. Jason had gone over a little earlier, and he was there in a suit and tie, looking very nervous. But unlike that first time when Frey had done the play and Jason had shown up to take him out, not silly at all. No hair part, just that slightly tousled, shining, dark wavy hair.
And all around him, or all around the baptismal font was family. Donald, Jason’s brother, who looked much like him only shorter, Jason’s slope shouldered, prematurely greying father; and his blond from a bottle—God bless the bottle because she was a good woman—mother.
And there were others. The other family. And in the midst of them was a girl with a baby. That must be her, and that must be him. That was Elle. He’d never thought of her in a real way, never wondered what she looked like. There would be no baptismal mass. This was an old but well kept church, and the midday sun shone on the marble floors and on the pillars. At the altar, Jason gestured for the three of them to come up. Frey came up, trying not to look like he was looking at Elle, who was thin and thin faced, fox faced almost, sullen looking. Frey looked at Elle and then look at Jason.
“But there is nothing between them,” he said.
But then there was something between them. They were here for the something.
The Something was not held in its mother’s arms, that was a revelation. No, the boy had long ceased to be a baby anywhere except in Frey’s mind, held in the arms of his faceless mother. But this was a busy, brown haired child who kept trying to walk away and, in irritation, Elle kept jerking his hand. There didn’t seem to be much love in her for this baby, but then she didn’t want to even be here. That was all at the insistence of Mrs. Hanley. When they got to the altar, Frey could tell, because he could sense it after so many years of being Jason’s best friend, his sometimes enemy, his bedmate, that Jason was sending desperate glances to him, wishing for him to stand next to him. Outness was not a big idea in those days, and since it wasn’t floating in the world like a cliché, it was subtle and much more honest. Jason would have never said, “This is my boyfriend, Frey.” And Frey wouldn’t have seriously thought of him doing it, but right now Jason wanted Frey to stand next to him so everyone would know what they were, know that Jason wasn’t alone.
“Look at you,” Jason murmured. It was the first time Frey had been in a suit.
“I think I look silly.”
“I assure you, you don’t. You look very... You make me very proud,” Jason murmured.
His hand was on the small of Frey’s back. Whatever they were or had been or would be again, they belonged to each other, and Jason wanted Elle to know it. She had a mean face, and she was so close that Frey, on impulse, felt free to whisper: “Do you know who I am?”
Elle looked at him. She must have discarded instantly the idea that the appropriate answer was, “The godfather.”
Instead she said, in a small voice, “Yes.”
“Good,” said Frey.
Not caring what anyone thought about it, surely everyone had to know something, must have known it long ago, Jason hugged Frey’s waist quickly.
If the priest noticed, and looking back Frey was sure he did, he said nothing. Part of Catholicism was noticing all things, and then ignoring most of them. The priest said:
“Are you the godfather?”
And Frey said, “Yes.”
Elle’s family, though Catholic, was not heavily invested in the rituals of the Church, and so they had no godmother to offer.
The priest frowned over this, but only briefly, and then said to the mother, “The child’s name is?”
The child in question threw up his hands and clapped. He was in a little black blazer with black shorts, and he was laughing, and Mrs. Hanley clapped and laughed in response before remembering where she was. But it was Elle who spoke sullenly.
“His name is Donatus Jeremiah after my grandfather.”
“What an awful name,” Frey whispered. Jason covered his mouth, but nodded, grinning. Mrs. Hanley, who had heard of Frey for years, and liked him now that she’d met him, nodded her head in agreement.
“Don—” the priest opened his mouth.
“Stop that,” Elle told the boy, who was tugging on her skirt.
“It doesn’t matter,” she told the priest. “We just call him DJ.”
“But this wasn’t when you did the book.?
“No….” Isaiah covered his mouth and coughed. “Do you hear anything about a book?’
“No, but—”
“People need to listen,” Isaiah said, reaching for his cup of tea and taking a sip. “You have to go back to work soon. So for now you need to listen. This is not when the book was made. But this was when DJ was made, and maybe when me and Jason were unmade. This is how I was made. Without a me, there could be no book. So, are you listening?”
“Shit,” said Rob. Then, “Yes.”
“So can I go on?”
“Go on already,” Rob said. “Sorry I interrupted.”
“Well then,” Isaiah shrugged. “Just stop interrupting.”
When Isaiah Frey was twenty-seven years old he started graduate school.
It happened thusly.
He had applied to Citeaux’s creative writing program and been rejected, but the head of the department had invited him to lunch.
He couldn’t remember her name anymore, but she said, “I love your work, and I want you to apply again next year. Next year is my last, so do it then because it’s hard to tell what those people want. They don’t want risk takers.”
So Isaiah was a risk taker then. Well, good.
It felt good to be read even by only one person, and it was nice to have his writing validated. The fact was it seemed like years passed quickly, and if he had the promise of Citeaux next year then maybe he could ride out a little more discomfort, waiting in his mother’s house with Sharon and Jazmine.
He had written two books now. That first one, which he had no idea what to do with, a novel, unproofed, and this new thing he was working on. Neither of these, his children, had anywhere to go. He had no idea what to do with them, where to send them, who would want to read them. It seemed nobody read. Most publishers he looked at looked like the wrong one long before he ever thought of sending a manuscript off. Maybe Citeaux could help him. Maybe he would meet someone who would point him in the direction of a publisher and, more importantly, an audience.
Somewhere between this rejection and the next application time, Isaiah discovered the Internet, which was still fairly new, and blogs. Everyone did not have one back then, but there were interesting people with interesting thoughts on the web, and he thought maybe he could put his voice out there too. When he did, on his site, he was surprised to hear voices speaking back. He was meeting people from Australia, from Great Britain, from Connecticut. And then it was with the blog forum, that he thought, here is a place for an audience. And so, slowly, he began posting The Immortals on line.
“I have been reading this like a book,” came one e-mail.
“I print it out bit by bit so I can read it in my own time. I hope you don’t mind. I feel like I know these characters.”
No one had ever told Isaiah Frey they felt like they knew the people who lived inside of him. No one was reading him. Up until now all his writing had been for him, hoping one day that someone else would read, not so much his thoughts, which he didn’t think were that important, but his characters, who were whole other people, other friends who had come out of him but who, as far as he was concerned, were wholly other people.
“We need to go on a poem hang,” Melanie said.
“A poa-who?”
“A poem hang,” Melanie repeated patiently.
This was her idea.
“We will print out my stuff, and your stuff, then we’ll just paste it all over the city, leave it lying around.”
She said with utter seriousness: “This could be how we find our purpose for being alive.”
Faced with the prospect of finding his life’s purpose, Isaiah could not resist. He tacked up poems and short stories in the halls of Citeaux and Monserrat, left things in the bathroom stalls of the public library, and of churches and coffee houses, thought of plastering poems in bathrooms of bars, but then thought better of it.
After that Melanie said, “Let’s take it out of the city. Let’s travel like we did before. Do a poem hang all over the country. Or some of the country, at least.”
And so they did. As spring came to its height, Melanie, Isaiah, Dylan and young DJ prepared to go on an intrastate poem-hang.
A little after Elle’s funeral, Jason had shown up at Isaiah’s door a mess, with DJ. He announced that he had an apartment now. It belonged to Burt Haarlem’s family, and he wanted Isaiah to move in with him and help him care for the boy. He didn’t say it like that, He said, “I wanted to be near you.” which was true enough, Isaiah figured. Melanie came to live there too with her son Dylan, to escape her own mother.
They were happier than they’d been in a long time, Melanie and Isaiah, on their own. One day they woke up and DJ was there, but Jason was not. They waited hours for him to come back, and then at the end of the day there was a phone call.
“Jason?”
“Yeah,” he said breathlessly, over the other end of the phone.
“Where the fuck are you?”
“Look,” he said, “I just need you to look after DJ for a while. Can the two of you do that? The apartment’s paid for and everything.”
“Where are you?” Isaiah demanded.
“I think I’m... I really didn’t mean to do this. I was just driving you know? And I kept driving. And.…”
“Where are you?”
“I think I’m somewhere near New York.”
“What the—?”
“Look, Isaiah, don’t be mad at me. I’ll be back in a few days. I promise.”
Jason didn’t lie. He was back in a few days. But after that he took to fleeing without much notice fairly frequently, and DJ seemed oddly undisturbed by his father’s behavior.
“I was reading a psychology book,” Melanie noted, “that said a child should have two stable attachments. So maybe if I’m one and you’re the other that’s all that matters.”
So it was this makeshift family that set out in the early spring of that year for the intrastate poem hang.
They went through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, the toll road across northern Indiana to Chicago where Isaiah thought, for only a second, of dropping off DJ with his grandparents, and then realized that he wanted the boy, and then moved this time further west, to Iowa, where they stayed at the abbey of New Melleray and prayed with the monks.
In the middle of the night, Isaiah woke up here, and on barefeet he went to the chapel. He was not entirely surprised to see a woman in iridescent gowns, sitting beside a swan, all lit up in the chapel. He wasn’t surprised at all when she nodded and he nodded back and her eyes were shining with a joy he knew was in his own.
He thought of saying something. He thought of saying, “I’m glad to see you.”
He thought of asking, “Have I done well?” But he thought of how all of these things were pointless. They were all taken care of in her appearing. If he was not on the right course, then the She could not have come here. She was the right course. He had taken her. He had created and called her as she had created him.
In Nebraska they fell in with a rock band, and Melanie found Chet, but Isaiah found Adam, who was the lyricist, and they talked about writing for three days and found out they were best friends. Adam was tall and lanky, red haired like…. Now that he thought of it, like Rob, with a bit of beard around his mouth, and deep half serious half laughing eyes behind black Buddy Holly spectacles. The night before they were all about to part ways Adam said Isaiah could come home with him, and Isaiah left DJ with Melanie and Dylan. They listened to Gillian Welsh, drank and smoked cigarettes, and then when Adam leaned over and kissed him it was electric. It was beyond electric.
“Stay with me tonight,” he said simply.
This was the first time Isaiah made love to a man who was not Jason, and whom he suspected he would never see again. They kissed and touched, they grinded bodies together and made love all night and slept in each other’s arms. Adam dropped him off the next morning, making out with him in a dark corner outside the hotel room, and slipped him his cell phone number and his parents’ address because he didn’t have a permanent one.
“I don’t want you to ever lose me,” he said simply.
That was how Isaiah discovered that it wasn’t only Jason, but men in general, that he loved. He loved Adam, tall and thin and walking away, turning around with those saucer ears, the red stepchild hair and those horrible glasses; the best kisser he’d ever known.
“Did you...?” Melanie asked when he came into the room.
“I did,” Isaiah said with a simplicity that refused to be embarrassed.
But in the end the joke was on Melanie, as they found out when they returned home.
“Goddamn!” she swore.
“What?”
She frowned and passed him the stick she’d peed on. Because they’d been friends for years he took it.
“I’m pregnant again.”
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
A great start to the new chapter. A lot of revelations about Jason! I hope he ends up in his kids life in some capacity. So Melanie is pregnant again? Interesting. Excellent writing and I look forward to more!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Jason is a character whom I deeply love, but who may not be cut out to be a parent. we will see what happens with him as the story unfolds, and Rob will too. I hope you're having a lovely day by the way, and thanks for reading. More tomorrow.
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
CHAPTER FOUR
CONCLUSION
Melanie’s pregnancy drama, and the discovery of men, cushioned the blow of being rejected from Citeaux yet again. When he’d reapplied, sending in something even better than what went with the original, a lot of time had passed and he wondered if he really wanted Citeaux that badly. Isaiah began looking for other schools. He was shocked to learn that the university in town had begun its own English Masters program; not, certainly, the cushy, all expenses paid creative writing program Citeaux had, but a writing progam all the same. And so Isaiah got his stuff together and filled out what was a much simpler application. He went back to Monserrat College and marshalled some letters of recommendation. By the time the next rejection letter had arrived, he was already accepted at Morvin College.
Melanie followed suit. She decided to take a few classes at Morvin, so she and Isaiah started together. That first year was, in a way, the year of unremarkable things. Everything they did was appropriate, but it wasn’t what would eventually lead to their happiness. It took a while to be approved for the financial aid, but when they were, with the additional money Isaiah and Melanie moved out of the apartment, which Burt’s family wanted back, and into a small house near Colby Street and Citeaux and Monserrat, the area they’d always known.
The classes were all at night with about ten or eleven people who had gone either always gone to Morvin, or some place like it, so they’d never had a campus life. This meant all they had done in school was study without the benefit of fun. They and Isaiah were not in the same world, and then when he looked at the list of classes required, nothing really new or interesting, his heart began to sink a little.
Adam wrote all the time, or called, more than Isaiah in fact, and always there was the question of when he would finally come, or if Isaiah might leave during winter break and meet him.
“It just makes no sense for you to have to come and see me,” Adam said, “when you’ve got this life and everything, and I’m the one traveling. And Chet needs to see that baby.”
It was agreed that Adam would come with Chet a few weeks after Thanksgiving, the same time Jason was going to come for DJ. The child which had swelled and swelled in Melanie was Chet’s, could have been no one else’s, and though Isaiah didn’t ask much, Melanie figured Chet was surprisingly enthusiastic to be having a baby.
“Of course,” Melanie noted, “I’m the one having a baby. He’s just the man on the road with some woman having his bastard.”
Whatever private drama Melanie and Chet had to work out, when Adam arrived, Isaiah’s anticipation became nerves. They were glad to see each other, glad to talk, to be together, but neither one of them brought up their last time, when they’d slept together, or what they were hoping for this time. Melanie said she needed to get out of the house for air, and Isaiah looked at Adam for a while and then took him by the hand and into his bedroom.
When they both lay naked, on their backs, catching their breaths, settling into their bodies, Isaiah said, “I just thought that was the elephant in the room... the thing we were both nervous about.”
Adam laughed and turned to him, lying on his side, running a finger over Isaiah’s chest. The cat leapt onto the bed, and Isaiah shrugged, leaving it.
“So you thought, let’s just screw, and get all the awkwardness out of the way?”
“Or at least know where we stand.”
“Or where we sleep?”
“You’ll be sleeping here, then, tonight?”
Adam moved so that his legs went around Isaiah. He hooked Isaiah’s leg in his, and his stomach was pressed to Isaiah’s side, his semi-homely face, his lovely face next to Isaiah.
“Every time I write you or talk to you I want to bring up that last night. I... Every time I’ve thought about you I’ve thought about us doing what we just did again. You notice you didn’t have too work hard to convince me.”
They kissed for a while, entangled in each other, Adam pressing his body to Isaiah’s, stretching himself across the bed.
If he’d been younger and, in fact, if he hadn’t had the experience of sleeping with Jason long after they were broken up, and then raising his child, he would have asked what was Adam? What were they? This was a waste of time. In Isaiah’s mind the whole world worked to make men fight each other and, if now, he and Adam were making love and trying each other’s bodies, helping each other to silent pillow biting ecstasy, marveling in watching each other still and spill in orgasm, then all the tenderness, the kissing, the touching, the sucking that went on in that bed, was a sort of combat against the violence men had inflicted on each other since Cain carved out flint to kill his brother.
And still that mild nervousness. That last night they had entered each other. He’d never penetrated anyone but Jason, and was surprised when he’d done it to Adam.
That night they were completely in the moment. Later on, he said that many other times he thought about the future, about the past. But with Adam he thought of Adam’s fingertips, of the light hair up and down his thighs, of the wetness of his mouth, the pressure of him, Adam entering him gently, a lover asking permission. Then later, his own cock being pulled into Adam’s heat, being fiercely welcomed and overwhelmed.
When it was over Adam said, “It’s funny but I didn’t know I wanted that. Not until we did it.”
Isaiah said nothing. Adam stopped talking after a while. Isaiah said everything with his hands, gently moving across Adam’s breast, his stomach, under his stomach where the hair went from red to deep black like the earth, then he came up again, kissing him.
“I can’t wait to see this book,” Adam told him as he was getting dressed in the morning.
Was it his imagination, or were Adam’s eyes penetrating him? Was it possible that once someone had penetrated you, everything in him did? No, Jason’s vision was opaque. This was all Adam. It must have been the other way around, not that Adam’s eyes bore into him because his penis had the night before, but rather both had happened because Adam was Adam and they’d always, really, seen into each other.
“I want to help any way I can,” Adam said while he and Chet were getting ready to go. “Then I can say I knew the two of you ‘back when’.”
“Take out your camera,” Isaiah said.
“What?” Adam blinked.
“Take out,” Isaiah said again, “your camera.”
Adam climbed out of bed, and Isaiah removed the covers from the bed, then lay naked on his side, one leg brought toward his chest.
“What are you….?” Adam began.
Isaiah recited:
i need the companion,
i need the boyfriend,
i need the love
i want that body,
long and sweet,
smelling of sleep and milk and earth
and sweat so naked beside mine
“Now,” Isaiah said, drowsily, “shoot me.”
“what?’
“Photograph me,” Isaiah said, almost kissing the pillow, his eyes closed. “Now.”
i need the one who is there most of the time,
if not all,
who can give me some of his strength,
when i have none
i need him to make eggs for me
i need him to share coffee
i need his stiff dick inside me
i need to make him cum
i want to wash his floors
knit him hats and hold him when he is down
i want to go down, and lick
his balls with the base of my tongue
and then have about a child or two and
run the water outside in the backyard
while he plants bulbs in the backyard,
and we have barbecues in the backyard
and are so happy and then real hard
he fucks me deep in the backyard
and showers all his seed on me
and i need this
i need that boyfriend
i need him true
i need him certain like the lord our god
i need him till i'm black and blue…
And so, Adam photographed the length of thighs, the curve of ass and small of back, the gentle roundness of stomach, the child innocence and sexiness of face, the inviting lips, moving around the bed, his camera gently clicking.
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great section! Seems like things are going well with Adam at the moment. Sounds like the photo's Adam is taking of Frey will be good ones. Great writing and I look forward to more soon!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Well, remember, this is the photo that Rob is looking at when he finds the book with Frey in it. Adam is a wonderful guy, but if you reading the first paragraph of the book, you'll know exactly what happens there. I'm really glad the poem made you think. That's the biggest compliment. And hopefully this does too.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
PART
T W O
BREATH
F I V E
“I don’t want to talk. Sometimes talking isn’t enough.”
- Joshua Dwyer
“Hey, you coming to see me?”
“Yeah, I’m coming to see you.”
“You coming to see me?”
“I’m coming to see you.”
“You coming to see me!’
“I’m here to see you!”
` They always did thais when Pat came into the room.
“Whaddo you got for me?” Mrs. Grimmner demanded.
“I’ve got, let’s see,” Pat said pushing the tray before him, “Drugs, drugs and let’s see… More drugs.”
“I know I’m dying, but how quick are you trying to kill me?”
“It’s not how quickly we kill you,” Pat said. “It’s how kindly we do it.”
“Speaking of doing it…?”
“Yes.”
“When you have the time, Joe College, could you pick me up and take me to the commode so I could shit?”
Pat looked at Mrs. Grimner, gave her his cheesiest smile and said, “You don’t want a woman?”
“No. I want you cause I don’t trust anyone else.
“Well, then alright,” Pat said. “I’d love to help you shit.”
As Florence dozed, Pat sat back in his chair and turned on the Grindr app. It was not news that there was no one around here, but it was a comfort to get on there, look up Chicago and see that there his choices were almost as bad. To imagine that there was a place where things were much better would have entailed either travel or envy. The idea thart even in Chicago, or San Francisco, the same collection of empty headed twenty year olds, entitled old men along with the fat, the insane, the addicted and the sloppy who were told to love themselves and think they deserved the best, still existed was a sort of relief. He switched his app all over Chicago, and then to Mesa, Arizona, just for the fun of it, and was sort of relieved that rather than things being wildly different, they were more or less the same. White men looking for big black dicks, black men promising that they had big black dicks, hillbillies on meth, Mexicans on coke barely speaking English and searching for cocks to suck, the same assortment of graduate students making references to Lord of the Rings who wanted to, in the end, be fucked in back alleys.
Florence was coughing and Pat put down his phone and looked to the old woman across from him. Couldn’t they get something that would kill off that sharp cough that she said cut up her throat. This was, after all, hospice. This was the place no one was leaving alive.
As she woke herself up, Pat got up and poured Florence a cup of water. He lifted her up and waited for her cough to died down. He wiped her nose, and she shook her anc couhed again before letting him place the cup to her lips.
“Ah, thank you, Pat,” Florence said. “Thank you.”
Then she said, “I got it now. I got that cup’o.”
Pat handed it to her without asking her if she was sure. That would get an earful. She drank it down and held out her hand for another one.
“Fuck,” she declared, taking a Kleenex to wipe her nose, “Dying is a pain in the ass.”
“Why are you here?” Dinah asked.
They were on the porch outside the hospice, and she was smoking a cigarette, but Pat was looking out at the river.
“What does that mean?”
He didn’t quite feel like her today.
“I mean, didn’t you go to some nice school. Couldn’t you be anywhere?”
“I guess you could be anywhere too.’
“Not really,” she said, ashing, and then tossing her cigarette. “It’s a job. It pays the bills.”
“Well, it does that,” Pat agreed.
He didn’t feel like he wanted to talk to her. After she got up and left, Pat still stood outside of the back door, looking at the river, his arms folded over his chest. He looked around to see if anyone was out her before he spat. And then he kept looking over the water that was at the bottom of this grassy hill and needed so badly to be trimmed.
“I guess because I like it,” he thought. He liked being here. He didn’t want to go into it, certainly not with Dinah, but that was why.
He shrugged, took out his ID, and put it to the lock. The door clicked and he went back in.
He was going to check on Mrs. Grimner, but when he entered room 148 he saw she wasn’t there.
“Is she in the bathroom?” he asked Naomi.
Naomi was Jewish, and for some reason this meant something to Pat, and he liked her. She looked very sad, and she said, “Oh, Pat. Oh no. She isn’t.”
They left him alone at the bar. They were surpsied when he came in. The town was made up of two types of people, the people who sent their kids off to college and worked outside of town, maybe even drove into Chicago. And then there were the farmers and what the not. Pat was definitely from the first class. He had come into Jovi’s last year for the first time, and ever since, it was a good place to be left on his own, to knock back as many drinks as he wanted. He had been told it was sad to drink alone, and he believed it. It was better to have one overpriced, watered down Scotch and then another while country music played in the background, maybe get some beer nuts, than to sit at home just chugging away and pass out on his floor. That was more than the road to being an alcoholic. It was pathetic.
He liked the hospice because it felt right there. He hadn’t understood for a long time, but he was always looking for something real. He ‘d known he was a fake, but he was looking for someone he wouldn’t have to be a fake with, a place where he wouldn’t be so artificial. He was surrounded, at school, by people who talked about high purposes and political rights and what a shame the government was this and people in power did that. They talked about essays written in the 1970’s that they had halfway read. But he wanted to so somehting real, and suddenly, in the hospice, he was doing something.
Anfd it wasn’t that it was effective, or that it was changing the world. It was just real, and it needed to get done. Dying people needed to be picked up and put on toilets so they could shit. Pills needed to be dispensed, backs needed to be washed, the frightened needed to be talked to,and all the time, those sad feelings which were underneath, which were shadowy, were no longer shadows. They just were. They were just life.
Everyone he worked with was going to die. Florence was going to die. She could be dead tonight, right now. Mrs. Grimner had slipped away between his time with Florence and his break outside. Still, he’d felt like he had something to tell her, like he couldn’t wait till tomorrow to see her, like he could always wrest from death one more day. But now that was done.
He felt someone sit down beside him, and looked up to see Josh Dwyer.
“Hello, Josh,” he said, wearily, because, why was Josh here? And he hadn’t had good words for or from Josh in years.
“I saw you in church this morning.’
“Yeah, I saw you too. It means we both have eyes.”
“I just want you to know, I remember what you did to my brother.”
“Josh, I don’t think you even know anything abut me and your brother.”
“I know more than you think.’
“Did he send you here?”
“No. He wouldn’t do that.”
“That’s right,” Pat said, running a finger along the rim of his glass, “he wouldn’t. If he had something to say to me, he wouldn’t send you to say it. So, until you have something to say to me, and I have something to say to you…” Pat tapped the space in front of Josh, “why don’t you clear off?”
Josh looked at Pat hard and Pat seemed unmoved, and then Josh said, “You’re the same old Pat,”
“Fuck you,” Pat said, and kept drinking.
Isaiah stood over the sink scrubbing and scrubbing, running more hot water in and coughing a little, before rinsing off his hands and going to sit down.
“You don’t have to stay here,” he said to Rob.
“Do you want me to go? Some people like to be alone.”
“I,” Isaiah said, “have been alone a large part of my life. No, I don’t want you to go. I just thought you might want to go. You might have other things to do.”
Rob Dwyer cleared his throat and sat, wide legged, in the chair across from the sofa where Isaiah had just plopped himself down.
“I actually don’t have anything to do or any place to go.”
“That’s sort of refreshing,” Frey said with a small yawn. “But if you do… don’t hang around here just looking at me.’
“You know what?” Rob said, making a face and scratching his thin beard, “what if I lie sitting her and looking at you?”
Frey coughed, covered his mouth and said, “I’d say you need to find better things to look at. Why don’t you turn on the tv?’
“Whaddo you wanna see?’
“I don’t really want to see anything. I’m good with no television, but I thought you might want something. Besides looking at my sick ass on this sofa.”
“Can you turn that radio on? On your phone. We can hear about disasters and feel better about our lives.”
Frey shuffled in is pocket and pulled out his phone saying, “Switch that speaker on, would you?”
“I swear,” Frey was saying, even as he pulled a pair of soiled underwear off the ground and dabbed his nose with it, “tomorrow we are going to go out and do some shit. I promise.”
“If you’re better.”
“Fuck better. I want beer. You know, I started smoking again today?’
“You… What the fuck, Frey!”
“Well, with a cold and everything, you stop because you hate coughing, and then you take the cough medicine and you hope it works, but it’s kind of for shit. And then you finally figure, what he fuck, I miss being healthy, and one of the things I miss about being healthy is smoking, and I’m gonna cough anyway, so you just…” Frey turned around and gave a mighty honk into the old pair of underwear and wiped his nose.
“That’s fucking disgusting,” he decided.
Rob, who had watched it and now saw Frey wiping his face, and getting up to go the bathroom, could only agree. Frey took the ill used garment to the sink and put it in the hot water with all the other transformed snot rags.
“See, this is what you get if you stay with me tonight, so I hope you can handle it.
“I’ve put my hand up a cow’s ass before, I can handle it.”
“Did you do it for fun? Cause we might need to have a talk about sexual expectations.”
“”I grew up on a farm.”
“Oh,” Frey said, considering. “Well, that almost answers it, then.”
Then Frey said, “Tell me about Pat Thomas.”
“Oh….” Rob looked distracted, “What? No…. I don’t want to talk about him.”
“I’ve told you everything,” Frey said. “Or so close to it. I’ve told you everything. Now, you tell me about Pat Thomas.”
Rob looked genuinely frustrated, but he also looked like there was no good way to get out of this, so he sat back down in the chair and said, “It’s complicated.’
“It is really?”
“It…”
“My experience,” Frey said, “is that things are less complicated than you think. Once you tell them.”
“Well, I guess he was my first love.”
Frey nodded.
“My brother thinks he knows everything. He thinks that what happened was that we dated. That I loved this guy, with his shiny hair, and his … you know, he’s half Italian. But I think he’s got some Arab or something in him. And we were friends from sixth grade. He was always around. You know, eventually I started to realize what he looked like. We used to be jealous of him because Pat was so smart, but now I look back. His pants never fit. I mean, when I look back I think I remember how nice he looked, cause his pants were a little tight, and I’d never looked at another guy. But they were short too. You always saw his ankles. He was the oldest of a bunch of kids.
“The first fight we got into we just started slugging it out in class, and then when we thought it was over, Mrs. Romant led us all down to the bathroom. You know. This was back at Saint Pancras, when we lived in LaPorte. And I remember, I was standing at the top of the steps, and I turned, and there was Pat, running like he was sneaking up behind me with his fist out, and he was going to hit me, and I turned around and popped him instead, and he started crying, and Mrs. Roman came, and she had us make up, and Pat was just like, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Rob. You’re my friend. And I hugged him, but I sort of didn’t like him still. But I guess we just still stayed rriends.
“But like I said, he did better than me. When we got to high school, he was on swim team and honor roll, and in the special classes when I was doing remedial shit. And then, in the end, my parents couldn’t afford the school, so I went to public school, and Pat kept going to Saint John’s. Eventually I dropped out and got a GED, and then we both went to college. Not the same college, you know. Pat went to Notre Dame, and I was at Valpo. But, we were in college.”
The whole time, with an occasional sniffle and wipe of his nose, Frey was listening, and Rob said, “But at summers and holidays, we came together. Because we were still friends, and probably best friends.
“And then, one night, Pat’s Mom and his sister were killed in a car accident.”
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah,” Rob said. He called me and I came over, and we were just really stunned, and didn’t say a lot. I took care of him. His hair was all wild and crazy, a real mess, and his eyes were spaced out, and I remember he just looked so… beautiful. I made him shower and I fed him and everything.”
“Like you’re doing for me.”
“Yeah,” Rob said. “Yeah, “I guess so.
“And then he cried and talked about how bad he felt, and I listened. And then, he kissed me.”
Frey waited for Rob to continue.
“We had never done anything like that. I had never said anything about… being gay. I had never said anything like that. We’d never talked about it. But he kissed me real hard and I didn’t stop him.”
“Did you want him to?”
“I don’t know,” Rob said. “I don’t know. But once he’d started kissing me, Pat just, he undressed me, he got undressed, and he had sex with me. That’s… that’s what happened. I didn’t ask him to, but I felt like I couldn’t stop him either, because of what he’d been through. And we did… I mean, we were friends. So I just let him do it to me on the sofa, and then when he was finished, he started crying, and I was… it was awkward. I kept saying it’s alright, and stuff like that. And he got dressed, said he was going upstairs and went to bed.”
“Did you… go with him?”
“No,” Rob, said quickly. “I stayed on the couch, and I just went to sleep.
“The next morning I got up and I thought I’d go upstairs and... check on him. Pat was curled up in a ball and I kept calling him, and he just said, “‘I’m really tired. Do you think you could go?’”
“Are you serious?” Frey said, more for support than anything else, because men’s bad behavior didn’t surprise him anymore.
Rob nodded.
“So, I nodded,” Rob said. “And I left. And that was the last time I talked to Pat.”
Neither of them said anything for a long time, and Rob finally said, “It’s very quiet in here.”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
“Sometimes I guess it’s best not to say anything, I guess,” Rob said.
“It’s late,” said Frey. “Do you want to go to bed? We can sleep back to back so I won’t cough in your face. If you’d like that. I do miss you.”
“Let’s go,” Said Rob.
Frey coughed, and murmured, “Sickness is bullshit .”
T W O
BREATH
F I V E
“I don’t want to talk. Sometimes talking isn’t enough.”
- Joshua Dwyer
“Hey, you coming to see me?”
“Yeah, I’m coming to see you.”
“You coming to see me?”
“I’m coming to see you.”
“You coming to see me!’
“I’m here to see you!”
` They always did thais when Pat came into the room.
“Whaddo you got for me?” Mrs. Grimmner demanded.
“I’ve got, let’s see,” Pat said pushing the tray before him, “Drugs, drugs and let’s see… More drugs.”
“I know I’m dying, but how quick are you trying to kill me?”
“It’s not how quickly we kill you,” Pat said. “It’s how kindly we do it.”
“Speaking of doing it…?”
“Yes.”
“When you have the time, Joe College, could you pick me up and take me to the commode so I could shit?”
Pat looked at Mrs. Grimner, gave her his cheesiest smile and said, “You don’t want a woman?”
“No. I want you cause I don’t trust anyone else.
“Well, then alright,” Pat said. “I’d love to help you shit.”
As Florence dozed, Pat sat back in his chair and turned on the Grindr app. It was not news that there was no one around here, but it was a comfort to get on there, look up Chicago and see that there his choices were almost as bad. To imagine that there was a place where things were much better would have entailed either travel or envy. The idea thart even in Chicago, or San Francisco, the same collection of empty headed twenty year olds, entitled old men along with the fat, the insane, the addicted and the sloppy who were told to love themselves and think they deserved the best, still existed was a sort of relief. He switched his app all over Chicago, and then to Mesa, Arizona, just for the fun of it, and was sort of relieved that rather than things being wildly different, they were more or less the same. White men looking for big black dicks, black men promising that they had big black dicks, hillbillies on meth, Mexicans on coke barely speaking English and searching for cocks to suck, the same assortment of graduate students making references to Lord of the Rings who wanted to, in the end, be fucked in back alleys.
Florence was coughing and Pat put down his phone and looked to the old woman across from him. Couldn’t they get something that would kill off that sharp cough that she said cut up her throat. This was, after all, hospice. This was the place no one was leaving alive.
As she woke herself up, Pat got up and poured Florence a cup of water. He lifted her up and waited for her cough to died down. He wiped her nose, and she shook her anc couhed again before letting him place the cup to her lips.
“Ah, thank you, Pat,” Florence said. “Thank you.”
Then she said, “I got it now. I got that cup’o.”
Pat handed it to her without asking her if she was sure. That would get an earful. She drank it down and held out her hand for another one.
“Fuck,” she declared, taking a Kleenex to wipe her nose, “Dying is a pain in the ass.”
“Why are you here?” Dinah asked.
They were on the porch outside the hospice, and she was smoking a cigarette, but Pat was looking out at the river.
“What does that mean?”
He didn’t quite feel like her today.
“I mean, didn’t you go to some nice school. Couldn’t you be anywhere?”
“I guess you could be anywhere too.’
“Not really,” she said, ashing, and then tossing her cigarette. “It’s a job. It pays the bills.”
“Well, it does that,” Pat agreed.
He didn’t feel like he wanted to talk to her. After she got up and left, Pat still stood outside of the back door, looking at the river, his arms folded over his chest. He looked around to see if anyone was out her before he spat. And then he kept looking over the water that was at the bottom of this grassy hill and needed so badly to be trimmed.
“I guess because I like it,” he thought. He liked being here. He didn’t want to go into it, certainly not with Dinah, but that was why.
He shrugged, took out his ID, and put it to the lock. The door clicked and he went back in.
He was going to check on Mrs. Grimner, but when he entered room 148 he saw she wasn’t there.
“Is she in the bathroom?” he asked Naomi.
Naomi was Jewish, and for some reason this meant something to Pat, and he liked her. She looked very sad, and she said, “Oh, Pat. Oh no. She isn’t.”
They left him alone at the bar. They were surpsied when he came in. The town was made up of two types of people, the people who sent their kids off to college and worked outside of town, maybe even drove into Chicago. And then there were the farmers and what the not. Pat was definitely from the first class. He had come into Jovi’s last year for the first time, and ever since, it was a good place to be left on his own, to knock back as many drinks as he wanted. He had been told it was sad to drink alone, and he believed it. It was better to have one overpriced, watered down Scotch and then another while country music played in the background, maybe get some beer nuts, than to sit at home just chugging away and pass out on his floor. That was more than the road to being an alcoholic. It was pathetic.
He liked the hospice because it felt right there. He hadn’t understood for a long time, but he was always looking for something real. He ‘d known he was a fake, but he was looking for someone he wouldn’t have to be a fake with, a place where he wouldn’t be so artificial. He was surrounded, at school, by people who talked about high purposes and political rights and what a shame the government was this and people in power did that. They talked about essays written in the 1970’s that they had halfway read. But he wanted to so somehting real, and suddenly, in the hospice, he was doing something.
Anfd it wasn’t that it was effective, or that it was changing the world. It was just real, and it needed to get done. Dying people needed to be picked up and put on toilets so they could shit. Pills needed to be dispensed, backs needed to be washed, the frightened needed to be talked to,and all the time, those sad feelings which were underneath, which were shadowy, were no longer shadows. They just were. They were just life.
Everyone he worked with was going to die. Florence was going to die. She could be dead tonight, right now. Mrs. Grimner had slipped away between his time with Florence and his break outside. Still, he’d felt like he had something to tell her, like he couldn’t wait till tomorrow to see her, like he could always wrest from death one more day. But now that was done.
He felt someone sit down beside him, and looked up to see Josh Dwyer.
“Hello, Josh,” he said, wearily, because, why was Josh here? And he hadn’t had good words for or from Josh in years.
“I saw you in church this morning.’
“Yeah, I saw you too. It means we both have eyes.”
“I just want you to know, I remember what you did to my brother.”
“Josh, I don’t think you even know anything abut me and your brother.”
“I know more than you think.’
“Did he send you here?”
“No. He wouldn’t do that.”
“That’s right,” Pat said, running a finger along the rim of his glass, “he wouldn’t. If he had something to say to me, he wouldn’t send you to say it. So, until you have something to say to me, and I have something to say to you…” Pat tapped the space in front of Josh, “why don’t you clear off?”
Josh looked at Pat hard and Pat seemed unmoved, and then Josh said, “You’re the same old Pat,”
“Fuck you,” Pat said, and kept drinking.
Isaiah stood over the sink scrubbing and scrubbing, running more hot water in and coughing a little, before rinsing off his hands and going to sit down.
“You don’t have to stay here,” he said to Rob.
“Do you want me to go? Some people like to be alone.”
“I,” Isaiah said, “have been alone a large part of my life. No, I don’t want you to go. I just thought you might want to go. You might have other things to do.”
Rob Dwyer cleared his throat and sat, wide legged, in the chair across from the sofa where Isaiah had just plopped himself down.
“I actually don’t have anything to do or any place to go.”
“That’s sort of refreshing,” Frey said with a small yawn. “But if you do… don’t hang around here just looking at me.’
“You know what?” Rob said, making a face and scratching his thin beard, “what if I lie sitting her and looking at you?”
Frey coughed, covered his mouth and said, “I’d say you need to find better things to look at. Why don’t you turn on the tv?’
“Whaddo you wanna see?’
“I don’t really want to see anything. I’m good with no television, but I thought you might want something. Besides looking at my sick ass on this sofa.”
“Can you turn that radio on? On your phone. We can hear about disasters and feel better about our lives.”
Frey shuffled in is pocket and pulled out his phone saying, “Switch that speaker on, would you?”
“I swear,” Frey was saying, even as he pulled a pair of soiled underwear off the ground and dabbed his nose with it, “tomorrow we are going to go out and do some shit. I promise.”
“If you’re better.”
“Fuck better. I want beer. You know, I started smoking again today?’
“You… What the fuck, Frey!”
“Well, with a cold and everything, you stop because you hate coughing, and then you take the cough medicine and you hope it works, but it’s kind of for shit. And then you finally figure, what he fuck, I miss being healthy, and one of the things I miss about being healthy is smoking, and I’m gonna cough anyway, so you just…” Frey turned around and gave a mighty honk into the old pair of underwear and wiped his nose.
“That’s fucking disgusting,” he decided.
Rob, who had watched it and now saw Frey wiping his face, and getting up to go the bathroom, could only agree. Frey took the ill used garment to the sink and put it in the hot water with all the other transformed snot rags.
“See, this is what you get if you stay with me tonight, so I hope you can handle it.
“I’ve put my hand up a cow’s ass before, I can handle it.”
“Did you do it for fun? Cause we might need to have a talk about sexual expectations.”
“”I grew up on a farm.”
“Oh,” Frey said, considering. “Well, that almost answers it, then.”
Then Frey said, “Tell me about Pat Thomas.”
“Oh….” Rob looked distracted, “What? No…. I don’t want to talk about him.”
“I’ve told you everything,” Frey said. “Or so close to it. I’ve told you everything. Now, you tell me about Pat Thomas.”
Rob looked genuinely frustrated, but he also looked like there was no good way to get out of this, so he sat back down in the chair and said, “It’s complicated.’
“It is really?”
“It…”
“My experience,” Frey said, “is that things are less complicated than you think. Once you tell them.”
“Well, I guess he was my first love.”
Frey nodded.
“My brother thinks he knows everything. He thinks that what happened was that we dated. That I loved this guy, with his shiny hair, and his … you know, he’s half Italian. But I think he’s got some Arab or something in him. And we were friends from sixth grade. He was always around. You know, eventually I started to realize what he looked like. We used to be jealous of him because Pat was so smart, but now I look back. His pants never fit. I mean, when I look back I think I remember how nice he looked, cause his pants were a little tight, and I’d never looked at another guy. But they were short too. You always saw his ankles. He was the oldest of a bunch of kids.
“The first fight we got into we just started slugging it out in class, and then when we thought it was over, Mrs. Romant led us all down to the bathroom. You know. This was back at Saint Pancras, when we lived in LaPorte. And I remember, I was standing at the top of the steps, and I turned, and there was Pat, running like he was sneaking up behind me with his fist out, and he was going to hit me, and I turned around and popped him instead, and he started crying, and Mrs. Roman came, and she had us make up, and Pat was just like, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Rob. You’re my friend. And I hugged him, but I sort of didn’t like him still. But I guess we just still stayed rriends.
“But like I said, he did better than me. When we got to high school, he was on swim team and honor roll, and in the special classes when I was doing remedial shit. And then, in the end, my parents couldn’t afford the school, so I went to public school, and Pat kept going to Saint John’s. Eventually I dropped out and got a GED, and then we both went to college. Not the same college, you know. Pat went to Notre Dame, and I was at Valpo. But, we were in college.”
The whole time, with an occasional sniffle and wipe of his nose, Frey was listening, and Rob said, “But at summers and holidays, we came together. Because we were still friends, and probably best friends.
“And then, one night, Pat’s Mom and his sister were killed in a car accident.”
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah,” Rob said. He called me and I came over, and we were just really stunned, and didn’t say a lot. I took care of him. His hair was all wild and crazy, a real mess, and his eyes were spaced out, and I remember he just looked so… beautiful. I made him shower and I fed him and everything.”
“Like you’re doing for me.”
“Yeah,” Rob said. “Yeah, “I guess so.
“And then he cried and talked about how bad he felt, and I listened. And then, he kissed me.”
Frey waited for Rob to continue.
“We had never done anything like that. I had never said anything about… being gay. I had never said anything like that. We’d never talked about it. But he kissed me real hard and I didn’t stop him.”
“Did you want him to?”
“I don’t know,” Rob said. “I don’t know. But once he’d started kissing me, Pat just, he undressed me, he got undressed, and he had sex with me. That’s… that’s what happened. I didn’t ask him to, but I felt like I couldn’t stop him either, because of what he’d been through. And we did… I mean, we were friends. So I just let him do it to me on the sofa, and then when he was finished, he started crying, and I was… it was awkward. I kept saying it’s alright, and stuff like that. And he got dressed, said he was going upstairs and went to bed.”
“Did you… go with him?”
“No,” Rob, said quickly. “I stayed on the couch, and I just went to sleep.
“The next morning I got up and I thought I’d go upstairs and... check on him. Pat was curled up in a ball and I kept calling him, and he just said, “‘I’m really tired. Do you think you could go?’”
“Are you serious?” Frey said, more for support than anything else, because men’s bad behavior didn’t surprise him anymore.
Rob nodded.
“So, I nodded,” Rob said. “And I left. And that was the last time I talked to Pat.”
Neither of them said anything for a long time, and Rob finally said, “It’s very quiet in here.”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
“Sometimes I guess it’s best not to say anything, I guess,” Rob said.
“It’s late,” said Frey. “Do you want to go to bed? We can sleep back to back so I won’t cough in your face. If you’d like that. I do miss you.”
“Let’s go,” Said Rob.
Frey coughed, and murmured, “Sickness is bullshit .”
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
A great start to Part 2! It was interesting to read about Rob's past. Seems like both him and Frey have encountered some men such as Jason and Pat who in the end didn't treat them that great. Great writing as usual and I look forward to the next bit of this story!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I think it would be rare if Rob or anyone else hadn't had a bad experience or two... or three.... or four in the past, and it was time to get into Pat, whom we met earlier, but as you see, he's got a story of his own, so we'll see more of that later. Can you remember any Pats or Jasons in your life?
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
I can remember a Pat or a Jason in my life so I get what you mean about bad experiences.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I don't even know if they should be called bad experiences. Jason isn't a bad experience. Jason is a love that ran its course from someone who couldn't handle much of his life. What Pat is remains to be seen. If we're going to have love lives or/and sex lives, I think in the end we have to stop lumping people in the bad boyfriend pile and saying, this is just the reality of what happens when frail people come together. Does that make sense?
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Yeah it does make sense.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I hope you have an excellent day, and keep away from villainous boyfriends
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Thanks! I hope you have a good day too!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION
In the night, Frey reached for him.
“What’s up?”
“I miss you,” Frey said.
“I’m right here,” said Rob.
“That’s not what I meant,” Frey’s hands, reaching behind him, ran over Rob Dwyer’s tee shirt, over his shorts.
“Aren’t you… sick?”
“Not that sick—” Frey coughed. Then he said, “Well, yes. But it doesn’t change things, and I’ll probably be sick for another week. I’ll keep my face from you if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m not,” Rob said, turning over. “I’m worried about you not feeling well.”
Frey touched Rob’s chest.
“I miss you.” He said, simply. “I want you. Even if this is the worst sex you ever have.”
“It won’t be the worst sex I’ve ever had,:” Rob said, frankly. “You want me to shut the window?”
“What for?”
“To keep out the breeze.”
“It’s seventy degrees. I hate being sick in summer.”
Rob nodded, Frey struggled out of his tee shirt and shorts, and Rob pulled down his underwear and took off his top. Frey opened his legs for Rob, and closed his thighs about him, running his hands over his hair, the hot back of his neck, over his back and shoulders up and down his back, as they gathered each other up, Frey closed his thighs about Rob and ran his hands over his ass, his ass, his soft, round ass, ran his hands back up again. They fitted themselves together, slowly at first, then quickly. Like that very first time, they didn’t make any noise, only the bed did. It was done quickly, with a strangled cry from Rob as his body arched up, and then they lay sighing both on their backs, and Rob turned over on his side, still breathing heavily.
“You alright?”
“Yeah,” Frey said after a moment. “I… I thought my nose would run or I would cough or throw up or.. whatever, but yes, I feel more alright than I have in a while.”
Rob leapt up from bed and said, “I’ll get something to clean us up. Clean you up.”
A few minutes later they lay in the dark, drifting to sleep, and Rob heard the occasional cough, cough, from Frey. No one wanted to be hugged during a cough, but no one wanted to be alone either. Rob pressed his back against him until he feel asleep.
Half asleep, Josh heard the cat scratching at the door. No, not the door. The window. But that didn’t make sense either. He stirred from bed and yawning, he realized that pebbles were hitting his window.
He got out of bed. He and opened the window and looked down.
“What?” he began, then said, “Hold on.”
A few moments later Josh came downstairs and opened the kitchen door, leaning in the doorway. He turned on the porch light so he could see Pat Thomas better.
“What was that all about?” Pat said. “All of that in the bar?”
“Why are you here?”
“I think I just told you. Now, what was that all about?”
“I…. I have to stand up for Rob.”
“You had to chase me to a bar?”
Josh sighed, leaning against he door.
“Can I come in?” Pat said.
“You can come in, sure, but…”
“It was an awful day,” Pat said. “One of my patients died.”
“Isn’t that par for the course?”
Pat looked at him.
“Really?”
“Sorry,” Josh said. “I was being a dick.”
“Yes, you were. Are you going to let me in?
“Or do you want to come with me?”
Pat touched Josh’s arm and Josh pulled his arm away.
“Or do you want to come with me?” Pat repeated.
Josh sighed and turned his head away for a moment.
“Hold on,” Josh said, “I’ll come with you.”
“I should go,” Josh said.
“You don’t have to go,” Pat turned over in bed and touched his hip. “You can stay.”
“I…” Josh shook his head and took his hand through his springy curls. “I gotta be up in the morning to take dad to church. I took that off of Rob’s hands.”
“I can wake you up later,” Pat told him.
Josh climbed out of bed and Pat watched his thin body as he bent to pull on his underwear and reach for his shorts.
“Are you still angry at me?” Pat sat up, planting his hand in his hair.
“What?” Josh said. Then, “No. It’s… no, I’m not.”
Josh sat on the edge of the bed.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that at the bar. I was just…. Making up for the way I felt. For the way I should… Look, you need to to talk to Rob.”
“I will,” Pat said. Then, “I would, if he ever wanted to talk to me. But… look,” Pat sat up next to Josh. “everything between us can’t always be about Rob and…You deserve some happiness too.”
Josh was looking at his lap, not speaking, and Pat said, “And I’m not saying that I’m your happiness, but, we could be… tender with each other. I needed to be with you. I think you needed to be with me. I’m talking too much.”
“Pat, I’m sorry you lost your friend today,” Josh said. “I’m sorry. I can stay a little longer. If you want.”
“I’m not the only one with stuff. Your stuff is still on you. I see it,” Pat said. “Even if no one else does.”
They sat in the room together, in the rumpled bed.
“What time is it?”
“A little after twelve,” Pat said. “Stay.”
“You know,” Josh said. “Sometimes I still see it. Dream about it.”
“You ever talk to anyone about it?”
Josh shook his head.
“You can talk to me, you know,” Pat said. “We don’t have to have sex. We can just talk.”
Josh sighed, and put his head on Pat’s shoulder.
“I don’t want to talk. Sometimes talking isn’t enough. I want…”
“To fuck.”
“To fuck you,” Josh said, specifically, “To be with you.
“I just… I think this is why I came to the bar. I feel guilty because I like being held by you. I feel safe with you. And…”
“We don’t have to talk,” Pat said, wrapping his arm around Josh and stroking his arm.
He reached up and turned out the light.
CONCLUSION
In the night, Frey reached for him.
“What’s up?”
“I miss you,” Frey said.
“I’m right here,” said Rob.
“That’s not what I meant,” Frey’s hands, reaching behind him, ran over Rob Dwyer’s tee shirt, over his shorts.
“Aren’t you… sick?”
“Not that sick—” Frey coughed. Then he said, “Well, yes. But it doesn’t change things, and I’ll probably be sick for another week. I’ll keep my face from you if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m not,” Rob said, turning over. “I’m worried about you not feeling well.”
Frey touched Rob’s chest.
“I miss you.” He said, simply. “I want you. Even if this is the worst sex you ever have.”
“It won’t be the worst sex I’ve ever had,:” Rob said, frankly. “You want me to shut the window?”
“What for?”
“To keep out the breeze.”
“It’s seventy degrees. I hate being sick in summer.”
Rob nodded, Frey struggled out of his tee shirt and shorts, and Rob pulled down his underwear and took off his top. Frey opened his legs for Rob, and closed his thighs about him, running his hands over his hair, the hot back of his neck, over his back and shoulders up and down his back, as they gathered each other up, Frey closed his thighs about Rob and ran his hands over his ass, his ass, his soft, round ass, ran his hands back up again. They fitted themselves together, slowly at first, then quickly. Like that very first time, they didn’t make any noise, only the bed did. It was done quickly, with a strangled cry from Rob as his body arched up, and then they lay sighing both on their backs, and Rob turned over on his side, still breathing heavily.
“You alright?”
“Yeah,” Frey said after a moment. “I… I thought my nose would run or I would cough or throw up or.. whatever, but yes, I feel more alright than I have in a while.”
Rob leapt up from bed and said, “I’ll get something to clean us up. Clean you up.”
A few minutes later they lay in the dark, drifting to sleep, and Rob heard the occasional cough, cough, from Frey. No one wanted to be hugged during a cough, but no one wanted to be alone either. Rob pressed his back against him until he feel asleep.
Half asleep, Josh heard the cat scratching at the door. No, not the door. The window. But that didn’t make sense either. He stirred from bed and yawning, he realized that pebbles were hitting his window.
He got out of bed. He and opened the window and looked down.
“What?” he began, then said, “Hold on.”
A few moments later Josh came downstairs and opened the kitchen door, leaning in the doorway. He turned on the porch light so he could see Pat Thomas better.
“What was that all about?” Pat said. “All of that in the bar?”
“Why are you here?”
“I think I just told you. Now, what was that all about?”
“I…. I have to stand up for Rob.”
“You had to chase me to a bar?”
Josh sighed, leaning against he door.
“Can I come in?” Pat said.
“You can come in, sure, but…”
“It was an awful day,” Pat said. “One of my patients died.”
“Isn’t that par for the course?”
Pat looked at him.
“Really?”
“Sorry,” Josh said. “I was being a dick.”
“Yes, you were. Are you going to let me in?
“Or do you want to come with me?”
Pat touched Josh’s arm and Josh pulled his arm away.
“Or do you want to come with me?” Pat repeated.
Josh sighed and turned his head away for a moment.
“Hold on,” Josh said, “I’ll come with you.”
“I should go,” Josh said.
“You don’t have to go,” Pat turned over in bed and touched his hip. “You can stay.”
“I…” Josh shook his head and took his hand through his springy curls. “I gotta be up in the morning to take dad to church. I took that off of Rob’s hands.”
“I can wake you up later,” Pat told him.
Josh climbed out of bed and Pat watched his thin body as he bent to pull on his underwear and reach for his shorts.
“Are you still angry at me?” Pat sat up, planting his hand in his hair.
“What?” Josh said. Then, “No. It’s… no, I’m not.”
Josh sat on the edge of the bed.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that at the bar. I was just…. Making up for the way I felt. For the way I should… Look, you need to to talk to Rob.”
“I will,” Pat said. Then, “I would, if he ever wanted to talk to me. But… look,” Pat sat up next to Josh. “everything between us can’t always be about Rob and…You deserve some happiness too.”
Josh was looking at his lap, not speaking, and Pat said, “And I’m not saying that I’m your happiness, but, we could be… tender with each other. I needed to be with you. I think you needed to be with me. I’m talking too much.”
“Pat, I’m sorry you lost your friend today,” Josh said. “I’m sorry. I can stay a little longer. If you want.”
“I’m not the only one with stuff. Your stuff is still on you. I see it,” Pat said. “Even if no one else does.”
They sat in the room together, in the rumpled bed.
“What time is it?”
“A little after twelve,” Pat said. “Stay.”
“You know,” Josh said. “Sometimes I still see it. Dream about it.”
“You ever talk to anyone about it?”
Josh shook his head.
“You can talk to me, you know,” Pat said. “We don’t have to have sex. We can just talk.”
Josh sighed, and put his head on Pat’s shoulder.
“I don’t want to talk. Sometimes talking isn’t enough. I want…”
“To fuck.”
“To fuck you,” Josh said, specifically, “To be with you.
“I just… I think this is why I came to the bar. I feel guilty because I like being held by you. I feel safe with you. And…”
“We don’t have to talk,” Pat said, wrapping his arm around Josh and stroking his arm.
He reached up and turned out the light.
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
A great conclusion to chapter 5! I am liking Pat more now and am very curious to read what happens next. It seems like he has learnt from his past. Great writing and I look forward to the next portion! Hope you are having a good night! 
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Thanks! Hope you're having a great afternoon! Pat's a work in progress. I mean, what else can you say? He needs a lot of mercy, but I suppose we all do.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
S I X
“Sometime you don’t want to talk, Sometimes you just want to be with someone who has seen something awful too.”
- Patrick Thomas
Most people lived in a world where they didn’t really live at all. That was the only way he could describe it. There was a world where you could go from thing to thing to thing and never remember one hour to the next, where you could get in your car to drive someplace and not remember how you got there. There was a world where you could turn to someone and say, “Did you know such and such a thing, and they could say, “Yes, and so did you, because I told you a year ago.” And you won’t remember the year ago, because you weren’t paying attention. Dates become confused. Names and times and what you did and what you wished you’d done become confused. You want it this way, really. That was the world Josh belonged to, he supposed, before things had changed.
That last day he remembers because Darcy said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
And even though he doesn’t really remember stopping to look at it, it is forever etched in his brain. The most perfect blue sky, the most perfect black branches of early spring with their little green buds. The light on Tom’s red jacket, and on the red flecks in Tom’s red hair. How pretty and pale Kathleen looks because, even though she is his girlfriend, she understands, somewhere somehow she must understand. They are all together and laughing and Mike is talking about spring break. Mike is best friends with another Mike, and they have gone down to Florida for Spring break. That is where Mike One is from. His baseball cap is turned backward.
“We were on the beach and there are these guys, and they are a little away from us, and they took out this huge blunt and lit it. And started smoking it. It was so much smoke. It was so huge.”
There was a time when marijuana was exciting. That’s how innocent they were. This is at Saint Alban’s, before he would transfer. This is a place where they say things like:
“Did you hear that Sister Anne said something about gay marriage being good?”
“Well, it’s not a sin,” Kathleen said,
“Yes,” Joe reminded them. “You can be gay in your heart. It’s carrying it out that’s a sin. Like pre-marital sex. Like any kind of sex.”
Josh sinks into his seat. It’s Kathleen who says, “But that’s not really the same, because even if you wait till you get married, then you will have sex. But if the Church says gay people can’t bet married,” she shrugs.
Josh remembers that several people have walked into the restaurant. Through the plate glass windows he can see the shops of Main Street, the sun bright on the hoods and rooves, cobalt blue, cherry red, of the passing cars, one lime green.
“But,” Joe says, sticking his finger out pontifically, “that’s their cross to bear, because Jesus gives us all crosses.”
These are the discussions they have had in the past. This is not what they are discussing today. He can’t remember what was going on. There was laughter and Mike was telling some off color joke and Joe was pointing out one of his useless facts.
“Did you know that they put actual gold dust in the Notre Dame football helmets, and that’s what makes them so shiny?”
And then, just like that, the effects were there before the sound. Joe, twenty-one, handsome in his way, but always with rings about his eyes, stops talking. His head hits the table. All around the shots are fired. As Josh sits there. Mike is down, Kathleen is down. A man in line with his baby hits the floor. The baby cries, is silent, bullet holes ricochet through the glass. There is a another shot, the shooter is down. In the midst of those once alive, Josh sits trembling, blood on his face, all over his tech vest and baseball cap. Joe stares up at him and keeps staring as blood flows out of his mouth. Katey grasps for something and then is done grasping. He turns his head halfway to see Mike, sitting beside him, his hands at his side, his face looking up, his mouth open as if he has given up. But his throat is covered in blood, and Josh looks at his goodlooking friend, the one he remembers he had a crush on, and realizes he has given up, he’s given up his spirit, his slumped shoulders fall, and Mike keeps looking up, his dead face full of sorrow.
None of his friends live.
He is just trembling. All he does is shake, like those poor wet dogs in the cold rain, after they’ve been dried down but the cold still makes them tremble like their having a seizure. No one asks questions. It’s shaking like this that he is found in the hospital by Rob and his mother and father. Mom stays in the car. This is before the stroke, when Dad was all of himself, and all of him was nearly too much. He has told mom to stay in the car, that no one needs to see her fits. He and Rob come for Josh. Rob embraces his brother. Josh doesn’t respond. His eyes are still wide, and he is still shaking. He can’t talk. If he could talk he would say, “Never let me go. Just keep holding me.”
He can see, partially, the fluorescent lights of the hospital, the pale blue and dark aqua blue of hospital scrubs. He can see the white of his hands, scrubbed clean of blood. On the way home, the fields and the hills are golden green, rolling up and down like great lazy waves, the height of the sky is piled with clouds. He can see the back of his father’s head and feel Rob’s hand. Rob has moved to the backseat to be with him.
But all of this is transparent, and through the hills and the road and the sky and his family, it is the restaurant he still sees. The restaurant is full of the brightest colors, and his friends and Joe, knowing they’re laughing at him for telling one of his long factoids, Joe with his lazy half smile, self deprecating, and then Joe falling down across the table. And he can hear the breathing, labored. He turns to his side to see Mike’s chest, rising and falling. It isn’t like the movies. No, they don’t know what hit them, at first. But Mike knew in the end. Mike and Mike, There was a time when they both kept breathing, when a noise like air squeezed out of an accordion came from Mike on the other side of Mike, where Mike, next to him, let out his last breath and looked up at the ceiling before his spirit left, if spirits are a thing. The pain was a thing, grief was a thing, the not anger, and not fear, but the sadness on Mike’s face as he died, aged twenty, was a thing.
He goes back to finish the semester because he is sure that the only thing worse than not doing so is having to do it later. Better to get it done now, while the pain is fresh. Better that than having more credits than he wants when it is time to transfer, and he knows he will transfer. He sits exams early, He is home at the end of April.
All the other college kids are coming home. In town, there is a solid line between college kids and the kids who do not go away. Sometimes you can see it even in one family, those who went and those who stayed. Rob tried it out for a bit, but he didn’t last Now, Rob is always here. At the end of May, Pat Thomas comes home. Josh has always noticed Pat Thomas, but it isn’t until now that Josh notices his noticing Pat Thomas. That was Pat Thomas who did his brother so wrong, who his brother used to care about, who used to care about his brother. Pat with the dead mom and the dead sister. Now and again you can see him in church, which is the only place you would see both him and Rob. Pat looks over at Rob, and then he looks away just in time for Rob to do the same, one long, incomplete, unending but broken look.
One Sunday, Josh says, “I will walk home, and he is at that place where his family is afraid to leave him alone, but also they don’t dare refuse him a thing he asks. He has seen Pat sitting in the church by himself after Mass. Pat who, when once asked if he was part Arab or part Black said that his mom was Italian. But it turned out she was Sicilian and it turns out Sicily is, at least, part Black and part Arab. Pat Thomas is a mass of always dark nearly black curls over deep black eyes and lashes long enough for a girl’s, He is red lips and a shy expression, and it is hard to believe he could ever do Rob wrong. And yet he did. And Josh finds himself, well now, plants himself, beside Pat Thomas in front of the Virgin Mary.
Josh is there so long he can hear Pat’s breathing, and he thinks to stand and light a candle, but this seems like play acting, would be. He says, “Do you believe in her? In it?”
“Mary? The Church? Or God?” Pat says.
“All of it. I try, but it seems like lately… well, it seems like I believed more when I was more shallow.”
Pat smirks. “You think you’re deep?”
Then instantly he remembers and says, “Oh, God. Josh, I’m sorry.I forgot what happened to you. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine.”
“You can imagine a little,” Josh says. “After all… your mom.”
“Yeah,” Pat concedes. “But it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t on purpose.”
They sit together a while and then Pat says, “You know, if you want to talk about it you can.”
“I don’t know that I do,” Josh says.
Pat nods his head.
“That makes sense.”
Josh notices that Pat always wears shorts sleeves, notices the hills of his humble biceps.
“Sometime you don’t want to talk,” Pat says. “Sometimes you just want to be with someone who has seen something awful too. If you’d like that—”
“I would.”
“Just… call. Whenever you’d like to do something. Or… whatever.”
“What about now?” Josh said.
“Now is good.” Pat said.
I don’t know,” Pat sighed as they sat in the thick grass on the top of the dune. Lake Michigan stretched endlessly pearl blue, beneath them and Pat said:
“The truth is, I hope more than I believe. I always admired people who really believed in things. In God. It’s harder and harder to do it.”
Josh didn’t say anyting. He only tugged at a particularly long and tough long blade of grass.
“I thought you hated me,” Pat said. “For what happened with Rob.”
“I don’t even really know what happened with Rob,” Josh said. “I know Rob told us all he was gay, and everyone just sort of accepted it. And I know we all thought Rob was in love with you, that you were in love with him. And then, after your mom died, he went to your house, and after he came back, you all were never together again. That’s what I know.”
Pat didn’t answer back, and the water pulled in a deep breath before sending itself to roll back over the sand again.
“I thought you all had sex, and then you turned away from him,” Josh said.
“Well, that is sort of what happened,” Pat said. “But I would have turned away from anyone. I wasn’t at the place to be there for anyone.”
“Did you ever tell Rob?”
“No.”
“Never? You never made it right with him?”
Pat shook his head.
“My girlfriend was killed,” Josh said. “That day in the restaurant she was killed along with all my friends.”
To his credit, Pat didn’t try to say anything. He let the silence fill the space between them, and seagulls entered it, and the soft crashing of waves entered. A car in the distance playing country music.
“The thing is, I can’t see her face. When I think about it, I think about Joe, cause he was right across from me. I think of his eyes. They were grey. Almost green, and how tall he was. And I think of my friends, of Mike and Mike and how Mike’s Adam’s apple kept rising and faling while he was dying. And I think how I wish I could have done something. But at the same time I think about… how beautiful he was. How… and this sounds awful—good he smelled that day. The colonge, you could still smell it after that son of a bitch killed him. And it’s him. I think about him. Him and the other Mike and Joe, A little.I…” Josh shook his head. “I don’t think about Kathleen. I…”
“You think you’re gay.”
“I know I am,” Josh said.
“Have you told anyone?”
“You.”
“What about Rob?”
Josh shook his head.
“It’s… Rob’s thing.”
Pat burst out laughing.
“What?”
“It’s Rob’s thing?” Pat repeated.
“It.. he came out to Mom and Dad. He... he’s the worst fag ever. He’s not fabulous. He’s a fucking hillbilly. He can’t even get a boyfriend. I used to think… I’d do this whole thing so muich better than you. But he’s the gay one. Mom and dad can’t, they cannot have two gay sons.”
“But they do,” Pat said, simply.
That hung in the air for a while before Josh spoke again.
“I just never let myself think about it. I nevcr let myself think about it at all. But now that Mike’s gone, I think, I wish I’d kissed him once, just to know what it was like. Even if he would have slugged me. Even if he would have told his girlfriend what a fag I was. But you know, I keep thinking about it, and I don’t think he would have slugged me. I don’t think he would have hated it at all. I’ll never know, though. Not now.”
“You want me to kiss you?” Pat said.
“What?”a
“I said,” Pat said, “do you want me to kiss you?”
Josh stopped himself from looking around. He’d been to college and even though it wasn’t a particularly progressive collge, he told himself that he was above caring about people seeing him.
“Yes.”
“I… ah… don’t have much experience,” Pat said.
Josh stopped himself from saying, “Just my brother.”
Pat leaned in.
His lips were so soft, and his mouth was strong, Pat’s hand in his hair was so gentle. It felt so good to be close to Pat, to touch Pat. He felt so hungry. His dick was hard and it hurt. It kept stiffening and stretching until it hurt like it wanted to cry, and Josh wanted to cry. He wanted to keep kissing Pat, and hold onto him, never let him go. And kissing Pat was like kissing Mike and Mike and Joe, and bringing them back to life and wiping thr blood from their faces and kissing Pat was like kissing Pat and when they stopped, Pat’s mouth was close to his, and his dark eyes were blinking into Josh’s.
“No one’s home,” Pat said. “Dad won’t be back till tomorrow.”
Josh said, “You can’t do me like you did Rob. You can’t turn your back on me like that.”
“I won’t” Pat said.
“Let’s go, then,” Josh said.
“Sometime you don’t want to talk, Sometimes you just want to be with someone who has seen something awful too.”
- Patrick Thomas
Most people lived in a world where they didn’t really live at all. That was the only way he could describe it. There was a world where you could go from thing to thing to thing and never remember one hour to the next, where you could get in your car to drive someplace and not remember how you got there. There was a world where you could turn to someone and say, “Did you know such and such a thing, and they could say, “Yes, and so did you, because I told you a year ago.” And you won’t remember the year ago, because you weren’t paying attention. Dates become confused. Names and times and what you did and what you wished you’d done become confused. You want it this way, really. That was the world Josh belonged to, he supposed, before things had changed.
That last day he remembers because Darcy said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
And even though he doesn’t really remember stopping to look at it, it is forever etched in his brain. The most perfect blue sky, the most perfect black branches of early spring with their little green buds. The light on Tom’s red jacket, and on the red flecks in Tom’s red hair. How pretty and pale Kathleen looks because, even though she is his girlfriend, she understands, somewhere somehow she must understand. They are all together and laughing and Mike is talking about spring break. Mike is best friends with another Mike, and they have gone down to Florida for Spring break. That is where Mike One is from. His baseball cap is turned backward.
“We were on the beach and there are these guys, and they are a little away from us, and they took out this huge blunt and lit it. And started smoking it. It was so much smoke. It was so huge.”
There was a time when marijuana was exciting. That’s how innocent they were. This is at Saint Alban’s, before he would transfer. This is a place where they say things like:
“Did you hear that Sister Anne said something about gay marriage being good?”
“Well, it’s not a sin,” Kathleen said,
“Yes,” Joe reminded them. “You can be gay in your heart. It’s carrying it out that’s a sin. Like pre-marital sex. Like any kind of sex.”
Josh sinks into his seat. It’s Kathleen who says, “But that’s not really the same, because even if you wait till you get married, then you will have sex. But if the Church says gay people can’t bet married,” she shrugs.
Josh remembers that several people have walked into the restaurant. Through the plate glass windows he can see the shops of Main Street, the sun bright on the hoods and rooves, cobalt blue, cherry red, of the passing cars, one lime green.
“But,” Joe says, sticking his finger out pontifically, “that’s their cross to bear, because Jesus gives us all crosses.”
These are the discussions they have had in the past. This is not what they are discussing today. He can’t remember what was going on. There was laughter and Mike was telling some off color joke and Joe was pointing out one of his useless facts.
“Did you know that they put actual gold dust in the Notre Dame football helmets, and that’s what makes them so shiny?”
And then, just like that, the effects were there before the sound. Joe, twenty-one, handsome in his way, but always with rings about his eyes, stops talking. His head hits the table. All around the shots are fired. As Josh sits there. Mike is down, Kathleen is down. A man in line with his baby hits the floor. The baby cries, is silent, bullet holes ricochet through the glass. There is a another shot, the shooter is down. In the midst of those once alive, Josh sits trembling, blood on his face, all over his tech vest and baseball cap. Joe stares up at him and keeps staring as blood flows out of his mouth. Katey grasps for something and then is done grasping. He turns his head halfway to see Mike, sitting beside him, his hands at his side, his face looking up, his mouth open as if he has given up. But his throat is covered in blood, and Josh looks at his goodlooking friend, the one he remembers he had a crush on, and realizes he has given up, he’s given up his spirit, his slumped shoulders fall, and Mike keeps looking up, his dead face full of sorrow.
None of his friends live.
He is just trembling. All he does is shake, like those poor wet dogs in the cold rain, after they’ve been dried down but the cold still makes them tremble like their having a seizure. No one asks questions. It’s shaking like this that he is found in the hospital by Rob and his mother and father. Mom stays in the car. This is before the stroke, when Dad was all of himself, and all of him was nearly too much. He has told mom to stay in the car, that no one needs to see her fits. He and Rob come for Josh. Rob embraces his brother. Josh doesn’t respond. His eyes are still wide, and he is still shaking. He can’t talk. If he could talk he would say, “Never let me go. Just keep holding me.”
He can see, partially, the fluorescent lights of the hospital, the pale blue and dark aqua blue of hospital scrubs. He can see the white of his hands, scrubbed clean of blood. On the way home, the fields and the hills are golden green, rolling up and down like great lazy waves, the height of the sky is piled with clouds. He can see the back of his father’s head and feel Rob’s hand. Rob has moved to the backseat to be with him.
But all of this is transparent, and through the hills and the road and the sky and his family, it is the restaurant he still sees. The restaurant is full of the brightest colors, and his friends and Joe, knowing they’re laughing at him for telling one of his long factoids, Joe with his lazy half smile, self deprecating, and then Joe falling down across the table. And he can hear the breathing, labored. He turns to his side to see Mike’s chest, rising and falling. It isn’t like the movies. No, they don’t know what hit them, at first. But Mike knew in the end. Mike and Mike, There was a time when they both kept breathing, when a noise like air squeezed out of an accordion came from Mike on the other side of Mike, where Mike, next to him, let out his last breath and looked up at the ceiling before his spirit left, if spirits are a thing. The pain was a thing, grief was a thing, the not anger, and not fear, but the sadness on Mike’s face as he died, aged twenty, was a thing.
He goes back to finish the semester because he is sure that the only thing worse than not doing so is having to do it later. Better to get it done now, while the pain is fresh. Better that than having more credits than he wants when it is time to transfer, and he knows he will transfer. He sits exams early, He is home at the end of April.
All the other college kids are coming home. In town, there is a solid line between college kids and the kids who do not go away. Sometimes you can see it even in one family, those who went and those who stayed. Rob tried it out for a bit, but he didn’t last Now, Rob is always here. At the end of May, Pat Thomas comes home. Josh has always noticed Pat Thomas, but it isn’t until now that Josh notices his noticing Pat Thomas. That was Pat Thomas who did his brother so wrong, who his brother used to care about, who used to care about his brother. Pat with the dead mom and the dead sister. Now and again you can see him in church, which is the only place you would see both him and Rob. Pat looks over at Rob, and then he looks away just in time for Rob to do the same, one long, incomplete, unending but broken look.
One Sunday, Josh says, “I will walk home, and he is at that place where his family is afraid to leave him alone, but also they don’t dare refuse him a thing he asks. He has seen Pat sitting in the church by himself after Mass. Pat who, when once asked if he was part Arab or part Black said that his mom was Italian. But it turned out she was Sicilian and it turns out Sicily is, at least, part Black and part Arab. Pat Thomas is a mass of always dark nearly black curls over deep black eyes and lashes long enough for a girl’s, He is red lips and a shy expression, and it is hard to believe he could ever do Rob wrong. And yet he did. And Josh finds himself, well now, plants himself, beside Pat Thomas in front of the Virgin Mary.
Josh is there so long he can hear Pat’s breathing, and he thinks to stand and light a candle, but this seems like play acting, would be. He says, “Do you believe in her? In it?”
“Mary? The Church? Or God?” Pat says.
“All of it. I try, but it seems like lately… well, it seems like I believed more when I was more shallow.”
Pat smirks. “You think you’re deep?”
Then instantly he remembers and says, “Oh, God. Josh, I’m sorry.I forgot what happened to you. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine.”
“You can imagine a little,” Josh says. “After all… your mom.”
“Yeah,” Pat concedes. “But it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t on purpose.”
They sit together a while and then Pat says, “You know, if you want to talk about it you can.”
“I don’t know that I do,” Josh says.
Pat nods his head.
“That makes sense.”
Josh notices that Pat always wears shorts sleeves, notices the hills of his humble biceps.
“Sometime you don’t want to talk,” Pat says. “Sometimes you just want to be with someone who has seen something awful too. If you’d like that—”
“I would.”
“Just… call. Whenever you’d like to do something. Or… whatever.”
“What about now?” Josh said.
“Now is good.” Pat said.
I don’t know,” Pat sighed as they sat in the thick grass on the top of the dune. Lake Michigan stretched endlessly pearl blue, beneath them and Pat said:
“The truth is, I hope more than I believe. I always admired people who really believed in things. In God. It’s harder and harder to do it.”
Josh didn’t say anyting. He only tugged at a particularly long and tough long blade of grass.
“I thought you hated me,” Pat said. “For what happened with Rob.”
“I don’t even really know what happened with Rob,” Josh said. “I know Rob told us all he was gay, and everyone just sort of accepted it. And I know we all thought Rob was in love with you, that you were in love with him. And then, after your mom died, he went to your house, and after he came back, you all were never together again. That’s what I know.”
Pat didn’t answer back, and the water pulled in a deep breath before sending itself to roll back over the sand again.
“I thought you all had sex, and then you turned away from him,” Josh said.
“Well, that is sort of what happened,” Pat said. “But I would have turned away from anyone. I wasn’t at the place to be there for anyone.”
“Did you ever tell Rob?”
“No.”
“Never? You never made it right with him?”
Pat shook his head.
“My girlfriend was killed,” Josh said. “That day in the restaurant she was killed along with all my friends.”
To his credit, Pat didn’t try to say anything. He let the silence fill the space between them, and seagulls entered it, and the soft crashing of waves entered. A car in the distance playing country music.
“The thing is, I can’t see her face. When I think about it, I think about Joe, cause he was right across from me. I think of his eyes. They were grey. Almost green, and how tall he was. And I think of my friends, of Mike and Mike and how Mike’s Adam’s apple kept rising and faling while he was dying. And I think how I wish I could have done something. But at the same time I think about… how beautiful he was. How… and this sounds awful—good he smelled that day. The colonge, you could still smell it after that son of a bitch killed him. And it’s him. I think about him. Him and the other Mike and Joe, A little.I…” Josh shook his head. “I don’t think about Kathleen. I…”
“You think you’re gay.”
“I know I am,” Josh said.
“Have you told anyone?”
“You.”
“What about Rob?”
Josh shook his head.
“It’s… Rob’s thing.”
Pat burst out laughing.
“What?”
“It’s Rob’s thing?” Pat repeated.
“It.. he came out to Mom and Dad. He... he’s the worst fag ever. He’s not fabulous. He’s a fucking hillbilly. He can’t even get a boyfriend. I used to think… I’d do this whole thing so muich better than you. But he’s the gay one. Mom and dad can’t, they cannot have two gay sons.”
“But they do,” Pat said, simply.
That hung in the air for a while before Josh spoke again.
“I just never let myself think about it. I nevcr let myself think about it at all. But now that Mike’s gone, I think, I wish I’d kissed him once, just to know what it was like. Even if he would have slugged me. Even if he would have told his girlfriend what a fag I was. But you know, I keep thinking about it, and I don’t think he would have slugged me. I don’t think he would have hated it at all. I’ll never know, though. Not now.”
“You want me to kiss you?” Pat said.
“What?”a
“I said,” Pat said, “do you want me to kiss you?”
Josh stopped himself from looking around. He’d been to college and even though it wasn’t a particularly progressive collge, he told himself that he was above caring about people seeing him.
“Yes.”
“I… ah… don’t have much experience,” Pat said.
Josh stopped himself from saying, “Just my brother.”
Pat leaned in.
His lips were so soft, and his mouth was strong, Pat’s hand in his hair was so gentle. It felt so good to be close to Pat, to touch Pat. He felt so hungry. His dick was hard and it hurt. It kept stiffening and stretching until it hurt like it wanted to cry, and Josh wanted to cry. He wanted to keep kissing Pat, and hold onto him, never let him go. And kissing Pat was like kissing Mike and Mike and Joe, and bringing them back to life and wiping thr blood from their faces and kissing Pat was like kissing Pat and when they stopped, Pat’s mouth was close to his, and his dark eyes were blinking into Josh’s.
“No one’s home,” Pat said. “Dad won’t be back till tomorrow.”
Josh said, “You can’t do me like you did Rob. You can’t turn your back on me like that.”
“I won’t” Pat said.
“Let’s go, then,” Josh said.
