by Roan Parrish
“No big deal. Caleb just made hash. Which, ya know, is all Caleb can make.” He rolled his eyes but there was such tenderness in his exasperation that it made my stomach lurch with envy. “Anyway, I came over without calling or being invited because…um. You’re clearly not doing well. Which, yeah, I know is rude to say, and I know you’re a super-stoic-everything-is-fine guy, which usually I’d respect, but…it’s obviously not. So. Here I am.”
“What? No, I’m fine,” I said automatically, and Theo smirked at me.
“Dude. You look like hammered shit. No one falls asleep right after work unless they’re not sleeping. You’ve got a nest on your couch that’s even worse than the one Caleb used to have on his. And you look like you’ve lost ten pounds since I last saw you. Also you’re wearing one of Rhys’s shirts and you clearly haven’t washed it in—” He leaned in and sniffed at me. “Yeah, a long time.”
I tugged the sleeves of Rhys’s shirt down over my fists and hunched my shoulders.
“So anyway. I’m gonna come inside, and you’re gonna take a shower please. Okay? I’ll make coffee. No, please, let me make it,” Theo said as I opened my mouth to protest.
Even though I was vaguely resentful of Theo showing up unannounced and ordering me around, there was a part of me that was so fucking relieved to be told what to do so I didn’t have to choose that I just drifted upstairs and did as he said.
When I came down from my shower, wearing my own clothes, Theo said, “Matt. You’ve got literally no food.”
“Busy week.”
“But I’m hungry,” he said grouchily, and it really shouldn’t have been adorable to see a grown man make that expression.
“Well, then I guess you should’ve stayed home and gotten Caleb to make you some more hash instead of coming over uninvited.”
“Yeah, okay, fair.”
He handed me a cup of sugary coffee, and I had to acknowledge that it was much, much better than mine.
“Dammit, how’d you do that?”
Theo laughed and shrugged, sipping his coffee.
“So what’s with the nest?” he asked, eyes darting to the couch. I wanted to protest, but the blankets were curled up in a damning configuration, and there was a semicircle of books around them. It was a goddamn nest.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.
Theo usually seemed cool, or a little grouchy, or weirdly excitable. But now he fixed me with a look of pure sadness. “God, you must miss him so much,” he said. “I’m really fucking sorry.”
And under the weight of that empathic kindness, something inside me broke. I pushed my coffee away and tried to get up from the table but my foot was wrapped around the leg of the chair and I stumbled awkwardly. Theo reached out a hand to steady me, and I pulled away. If he touched me right now, I’d lose it.
I made a sound like an animal and hated myself for it.
Theo sat back down, but pulled his knee up and hugged it. His silvery-blue eyes stared blankly across the room. “Did you know my grandparents raised me?” he asked.
“No.” I didn’t think I’d ever heard him mention them at all.
“Yeah. My mom took off right after she had me and left me with them. They didn’t tell me until high school, but…I always knew there was something off. They were there and all, and they had rules and expectations, but…I just always kind of knew they didn’t care that much. Or, well. They cared, I guess. They just, um, didn’t really…they weren’t warm and they didn’t, like, love me much?”
His voice was the uncertain scratch of someone speaking unfamiliar words.
“When they told me, I suddenly tried really hard to do everything they said. Like maybe I could…I dunno, earn their love or something. But.” He shrugged. “Didn’t work. And I just felt like a pathetic puppet. I didn’t really get how bad it had felt until I realized how good it felt to be loved by Caleb. You know? Sounds all self-help-book-y or whatever, but I kinda didn’t realize that love wasn’t supposed to be something that you had to earn.”
He gave me a sweet smile, and I could almost see the boy he must have been, before Caleb. Before he was Theo Decker, Rock Star.
“Anyway, I don’t know that much about your story. Good old Rhys told Caleb it wasn’t his business. But I think maybe you know what I mean? And if you do, I just wanted you to know that I get how hard it must be to have Rhys be gone. People say it’s weird or…I dunno, codependent or whatever, to need someone. But sometimes with Caleb, I get this panic if he’s not there. I don’t believe something has happened to him, or that he’ll never come back. But I kind of feel what I imagine it would be like if he never did. You know?”
I nodded slowly, his every word landing like a bullet.
“I am okay without him. He is okay without me. But when I told him about that, thinking he’d say it was silly, he got this relieved look on his face. He said sometimes he would pretend I was there when I wasn’t, so he didn’t feel alone. Kinda like the idea of me there watching him made him feel safe. For him, it’s safe from using again, or safe from wanting to. But still. I just—yeah, I don’t think it makes us less…grown up or functional or whatever to need each other.”
He bit his lip and finally looked at me.
“It also doesn’t make you less whatever if you’re not quite doing okay without him. Okay?”
I sighed and slouched over to the couch. I flopped into my nest and put my head back. The ceiling was plastered unevenly in the corner. In the kind sunlight of the morning it was invisible. At night, the lamps I lit against the darkness made it glaring.
“My best friend, Grin?” I said finally. “He says I’m freaking because I was abandoned so much as a kid and now my stupid brain thinks Rhys abandoned me. Even though my regular brain knows he didn’t.”
Theo came and sat next to me, tugging one of the blankets over his knees.
“Makes sense. Does Rhys know?”
“No.”
“You gonna tell him about your stupid brain? And also your regular brain?”
I’m already so much work. He could be with someone so much easier.
I shook my head.
“He gets so sad. I know I should tell him…things. But sometimes…I just can’t. I can’t tell him that the world’s not a shiny place. You know? His world is so shiny.” And, fuck, I didn’t wanna be the one to disillusion him. “Besides, he’s having a blast. I don’t wanna mess up his tour.”
Theo nodded. “Yeah, I hear you, and I get it. That’s the wrong answer, though.”
I looked up at him, and he smiled slightly.
“You can’t protect Rhys from the whole world, Matty. Because you’re his world, and that’s your world.”
I swallowed hard, and Theo gracefully pretended he didn’t notice.
“The thing about tour,” he went on, “is that it feels really alienating. Even when it’s good, even when it’s fun. There’s always this sense that you’re not a part of real life. That people are doing things without you and you’re left out. Or things are moving forward and you’re, like, up in space somewhere. So, no matter how good a time Rhys is having, probably he’d want to know what’s going on with you. Otherwise he’ll feel cut off from you.” After a pause, he added, “And obviously you feel cut off from him. But he’s your husband. You should tell him.”
I closed my eyes, and the sun burned red from behind them.
Husband husband husband, I tried to soothe myself.
“I still can’t believe he married me. I don’t know why he did,” I whispered, then clamped my mouth shut. Jesus, I must still be sleep-deprived.
“Probably because he loves the pants off you,” Theo said lightly.
“You and Caleb love each other but you’re not married.”
“I would marry the fuck out of Caleb if he wanted to, but he doesn’t care and it’s not a big dea
l to me either.”
“I’m just saying. Loving someone isn’t the same as marrying them.”
“No,” Theo said slowly. “It’s not. But you know Rhys. I bet you do know why he married you if you really think about it.”
* * *
—
Rhys and I had been driving in the country on a cold Saturday in February. It had been a little over two months since we met. The night before, we’d had the kind of explosive sex that I was just learning wasn’t anomalous with Rhys, and we’d fallen asleep tangled up together and woken up murmuring I love you and other things I’d never thought I would hear or say.
Rhys pulled over to piss, and I saw something past a copse of trees and tugged his hand. We walked toward it, Rhys teasing me about being such a city boy that I thought a half-crumbling barn was a tourist attraction. I’d hip-checked him and run toward what had, indeed, turned out to be a half-crumbling barn.
I’d always loved exploring alleys and narrow streets in the city, but all the abandoned buildings in my neighborhood as a kid had been squats or crash pads, and I’d learned young that no matter how tempting the exploration, wandering into a room with crackheads in every corner wasn’t worth it.
So I tugged Rhys into the barn with me to poke around. The weak sunlight fell in slashes, dust swirling in its beams giving the place a fairyland feel. “Wow,” I said and turned to find Rhys looking at me like I was magical. He slid a hand to the back of my neck and kissed me, suddenly, like a declaration. A vow.
“Matt, marry me,” he said, eyes on fire and lips inches from mine. I laughed at him, looked at the ground. Even as a joke, though, it had awoken something I hadn’t even known was there. “I’m dead serious,” he said. And then, when he cupped my face, I saw it. Saw that he was serious. That he was holding this out to me and all I had to do was take it.
“Marry me,” he said again. Then, “Please.”
And instead of laughing, instead of disbelieving, I had a single, unknowable moment of certainty, and I said, “Okay.”
“Wait, really?” He froze, staring at me. “Really, seriously, you will?”
And the moment of certainty evaporated. “I—did you not mean it?”
“I absolutely meant it, but I thought you’d make me wait a lot longer before I convinced you,” he said, grin irrepressible. “Matt, really? Say it again.” He clutched me to him.
“I—okay. Yes, I mean.”
“Yes what?” he murmured against my ear.
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I’ll marry you. Asshole.”
Rhys gave a whoop of glee that startled mourning doves nesting in the rafters into flight, and grabbed me by the waist, swinging me around. When we got dizzy and collapsed onto the floor, he looked into my eyes and said, “Thank you. I’m so happy.”
And I kissed him, wanting to give him anything to keep that happy look on his face. But every second that passed, I waited for the bubble to burst. For him to say we’d talk more about it later, or we’d figure it out sometime in the future.
When we got back in the truck, though, Rhys drove straight into town to the courthouse. He asked five times if it was okay, if there was anyone I wanted to invite, anything I needed to get. But there was no one. Nothing.
“I’m just so excited. I don’t want you to change your mind,” Rhys said. It was the most vulnerable I’d seen him. He shone like the sun.
The way I saw it, it was me who’d jumped on the chance for something official and legal to tie us together; me who should be asking him if he was sure, since he actually had a family he might want to invite. But when I asked him he just smiled again, and said, “Nope. I just want you. Now.”
That night, for the first time in my life, when I fell asleep, I didn’t wonder if I’d be all alone in the morning. I fell asleep with a kind of dazed happiness that I thought might be monumental, but felt as warm and easy as Rhys’s hand on the back of my neck.
Chapter 8
I woke up and I knew that Sid was dead.
I’d been dreaming of my mother. I was watching her get ready in the mirror she’d stuck to the wall of the bedroom we shared, as I’d done so many times. She’d brush her hair, holding each curl in her palm and brushing them separately so they shone. Then she’d continue the brushstroke until it hit my curls, and she’d brush my hair softly.
It was four in the morning so I couldn’t call Grin. I dialed the old number I had for Sid and let it ring and ring, like that was some kind of proof. Then I made coffee and drank it on the couch as I waited for the sun to rise.
At seven, I called Grin.
“I think she’s dead,” I said.
“What? It’s fucking early, man.” I’d forgotten it was Sunday.
“Sid. I think she’s dead.”
“Why?”
My hands were shaking and something shimmered in the corner of the living room, above the bookcase where I couldn’t reach.
“I don’t know. I just know.”
Grin made me hang up the phone and said he’d call around and get back to me.
I turned on the TV and waited. I felt like bugs were crawling under my skin.
I left the house and walked. I ended up at the gates to the cemetery even though I’d thought I was walking the other way.
When my phone rang, I answered on the first ring.
“Is she?”
“Is who what?” It wasn’t Grin; it was Rhys.
“Oh hey, sorry, nothing. Hi.”
“Hey, baby. Who’d you think I was?”
“Uh, Grin. He’s calling me in a sec.”
“Okay, well. I won’t keep you, then.” He paused. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, sorry, yes.”
“Okay,” Rhys drawled. I knew I was supposed to say something, supposed to stay on the line. But all I could think of was Sid and whether it was true. And I didn’t want the darkness I felt to touch Rhys. “I guess I’ll let you go, then. Home stretch.”
“Is it?” Somehow, after weeks of checking his schedule every day—twice a day—and keeping up with every detail, I’d lost track of the days, lost track of the tour. Now, every day without Rhys stretched on, bleeding into the next in an endless wash that my brain cringed away from.
“Uh. Yeah, one more week.”
One more week. One more week. Week, week, week. A period of time measurable in a single word. Relief slammed through me. How could I have lost such track.
“Really, only one more week?”
“You forgot?” He sounded hurt.
“I—no, I…I just lost track of time.” Silence. “I…it’s hard to…I miss you a lot and maybe it was easier to lose track,” I choked out.
I could feel the tension ease through the phone.
“I miss you too, babe. So much. I can’t wait to be home, honestly. Matty…I’m worried about you. You seem…The last few times we’ve talked, it feels like…”
Panic streaked through me. “Like what?”
“It feels like I’m talking to the Matt I first met in Huey’s bar. The Matt who didn’t trust me. Didn’t let me in.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
I’m not him anymore. I’m not, I’m not.
“Don’t be sorry, baby. I just want to make sure you’re okay. That you’re…I just miss you, I guess. Miss being with you.”
Another call beeped. Grin.
“Oh shit, that’s Grin. Can I call you back?”
“Yeah, I…okay, sure. I love you, Matt.”
“Love you, bye.”
I clicked over to answer Grin’s call and hung up by mistake. “Fuck, fuck, dammit.” I mashed the button to call him back and got the immediate voicemail that said he was still calling me. I forced myself to wait. To take a deep breath and let it out, to count to ten. My fingers slipped on the phone. Finally, the call connected.<
br />
“Grin? Is she—”
“Matt.”
“Huh? What?”
“Why’d you think she was dead?” His voice was thin and scared.
“I just…I just did, man, what the hell. Did you find out?”
“But why?”
“I don’t know, dude, I just woke up this morning and I…I felt it, I dunno! Fucking is she?”
Grin’s voice trembled. “Yeah.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. Even though I’d thought I was sure, up until the moment he said it I hadn’t realized how much I didn’t believe myself. I leaned on a grave jutting up in front of me, the stone so old the name was blasted to nothing. Erased.
“I finally got ahold of that cat Carl she used to live with. Got his number from that Jill girl, remember? They, uh, said she had an aneurysm that burst. Last night. Funeral’s on Thursday. You gonna go?”
My heart was pounding. Sid, dead. It was ridiculous.
“Yeah, I guess. I should, right?”
“I guess. I was gonna say if you want to, but I guess no one ever wants to go to a funeral. Man. I can’t believe Sid’s fucking gone. I can’t believe you went all freaky psychic about it either. Seriously, bro, what the fuck is that shit?”
“I swear I have no fucking clue how I knew.”
My heart pounded and the vision that dropped into my head was of myself, sitting on the front stoop the day my mother hadn’t come home, and feeling a vague sense of foreboding. Had I known? But it slipped away the second I grasped after it.
From somewhere on the path off to my left, I swore I heard the clip-clop of pounding hooves drawing closer through the graves, then retreating just as the horse should have drawn into view. I looked around wildly, but the early morning fog just slipped through tree branches and wisped around the tallest mausoleums.
“—pulled a Shawn or something,” Grin was saying as the pounding hooves faded away.
Shawn was a kid in St. Jerome’s with us. He seemed to know how everything worked and could explain anything. He was also completely rational. Didn’t believe in God or ghosts or psychics or anything.