The Other Half

by Jess Whitecroft

  “I want this,” he whispers. “I want you, Jody. I want you.”

  He lifts his thigh. The cap is off the lube, but then the light goes out again and I can’t see a thing. He squirms inside the sleeping bags. There’s barely enough room to get his legs open, but somehow he manages it, and the tightness of it all means that he has to wrap his legs around my waist to make us fit. We’re squashed together, my dick pressed against the underside of his balls, his cock crushed against my belly. I reach down to adjust us and my fingertip finds the edge of the hole.

  I can’t resist. I can’t see, but I know the whole landscape intimately. I ate him raw in that motel room that time, tracing circles with my tongue and moaning up his ass in sympathy as he hitched his heels higher and higher and called out my name.

  He’s soft under my fingers, a crumpled bud of velvet softness. The weight of lust tugs at my balls and I can’t believe what he’s asking for. I wish I didn’t want it, but I do. I do.

  Chris shifts, his arm wriggling into the tight space between our bodies. The corner of something hard scratches me on the way down, then I feel something cold and slippery spreading between his cheeks, and realize it’s the lube. I picture the stuff oozing down onto the inside of the sleeping bag and instinctively reach to dam the flow, but he moves his hand and his hips and then my dick’s right in the cool, slick mess.

  “Please,” he says, hugging me with his thighs. I rock, because I can’t help it, my cock gliding through the warming lube. Everything is silky wet down there and it would be so fucking easy to just push inside like I did last night. No, not like last night, I remind myself. This time I’d be unwrapped, totally naked inside of him, and goddamn if the flare of caution that sparks in my brain doesn’t make me even harder. What if I just put it in for a minute, to see what it was like? I wouldn’t come in him.

  He lifts his knees higher, and I can’t resist. I reach down to find the right position, teasing him with the head, not really trying to get in. But then he moves and I pop right through the slippery resistance, and then wild horses couldn’t drag my ass in the opposite direction. His ankles cross over my back, and I feel him laugh. From the inside.

  “Oops,” he whispers.

  “Chris…” This is nuts, and it only makes me want him more. So tender, so hot, so trusting, so totally mine.

  “Fuck me,” he says, moving against me. He’s tight, but he’s not going to let that slow him down. I can’t stop. This is straight up primitive stuff. My dick’s found a warm hole in the dark, and I can feel every crease and groove of him. The texture is unbelievable, soft as petals, slippery as satin. He’s giving me everything, and my belly’s full of fireworks as I move faster.

  “You’re crazy,” I tell him, but I don’t stop fucking him.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too. God, what you give to me…”

  He gives a shuddering gasp. “Move. Make me come.”

  The only world that matters to me is in this tent. Panting breaths. Squeak of the mattress. The slick, lewd sound of my unwrapped dick moving in and out of him. The bag’s too snug for any kind of acrobatics, so we’re glued tight together like this, rutting animals in the dark. I tell myself I’m going to pull out and put on a condom, but he’s riding me so sweetly that I know I won’t. I feel his insides shiver, his pulse under the head of my dick. He cries out and grabs my hair, his breath rasping, and I fuck him harder, faster, because even if I mean to pull out, I have to feel him in there when he comes.

  “God, yes, there, right there, oh God…” he says, in a desperate, sexy voice. And I feel him. I feel him open and close and squeeze, and that’s all it takes. I come inside him, bathing him in heat.

  Everything is flesh and warmth. I push deep, because the damage is already done and the last clutches of his relaxing muscles feel so, so good. “God,” he whispers, and this time I see his lips move. The sun’s coming up.

  “I came inside.”

  “I don’t care,” he says, squeezing me with his thighs. “I wanted you to. I don’t want to leave here without something of you inside me.” His fingers lace into my hair. “Without the taste of you in my mouth.”

  He shifts his hips, wincing, and I finally slip out. We’re sticky and messy and we’re probably going to get glued together, but I don’t care either. “You’re out of your mind,” I say, kissing his eyelids, his flushed cheeks. Plunging, he said, the very first time he kissed me, and now he’s letting me plunge into him.

  “Maybe,” he says. “But whatever happens next, I want us to be able to look back at this and say that we were perfect. And amazing.”

  “Why do you say that? What do you think is going to happen next?”

  Chris sighs. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “Probably nothing. I expect it’s just my fear of New York talking. These days, every time I’m there, some other part of the world comes crashing down on me.”

  His family, his ex, his job. All the things I’m not part of.

  “You’re scaring me,” I say.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.” He pulls me so close that its like we’re trying to dissolve into one another. “Just remember – when I’m away. Remember that I love you. And that I’m coming back to you as soon as I can, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  *

  And then there were two.

  Me. And Jack.

  I want to ask him what’s up, but a lifetime of experience has taught me that you don’t ask that of Jack, not if you ever want to find out what’s really going on. Lying is like a reflex with him, so that when he puts on a pair of reading glasses and takes out a tape measure, I’m already sizing him up, trying to figure out the role he’s playing. He’s got a long piece of wood laid out in the hallway, and he’s all over it, drawing lines with a thick pencil.

  “Now,” he says. “You got lucky. You could be fucking about forever, calculating the risers and runners versus the length of the floor, but lucky for you, we can measure the proportions of the old staircase.”

  “What old staircase?”

  “The one behind the kitchen. The one you demolished. The one I’m replacing.”

  I take a seat on the lowest stair. This I’ve got to see. “You’re going to build a staircase?” I say, starting to laugh. Jack’s so fundamentally twisted that I picture him turning out some Esher type deal, stairs upside down and backwards, leading to nowhere and looping back round on themselves.

  He raises a grizzled eyebrow. A patriarch’s dirty look. “I can build a staircase,” he says. “I have a lot of hidden talents.”

  Maybe, but he never hid his talents all that well. Like how he has the dubious distinction of being the drug mule who swallowed the largest number of condoms filled with black tar heroin and lived. Or how some fancy doctor from Princeton once wrote an entire paper on the remarkable regenerative properties of Jack’s liver. We all heard about that one, including Jack’s pet theory that he just had more stem cells than regular people, and how his pickled liver was going lead doctors to the cure for Alzheimer’s. He almost lost the tip of his other pinky finger in a heavily alcoholic bet that his extra stem cells would simply allow him to regrow it, like a lizard that had dropped its tail.

  “We get the first one right,” he says, measuring and marking away. “And we use that as a master template for the rest of the stringers.”

  “Stringers?”

  “That’s what you call the sides of the stair. And the middle. You set the treads on the stringers. That’s what’s going to hold your whole staircase together, so it’s gotta be true.” He reaches for a rusty steel square. “Now, we gotta square here, where we’d usually be using a stair gauge, but I’ve marked here and here with tape, you see? And when I line that up against the sides…that’s your stair.”

  I squint down at the zigzags he’s drawn. They look like the triangular teeth of a Halloween pumpkin, but I feel as though I’m on the cusp of understanding how this works. It’s like a sneeze stuck in my head.
“Do you actually know what you’re doing?”

  “Sure I do. You cut three of these, then you attach the top ends to the floor above, right?”

  “Right.” I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  Jack takes a small piece of wood and draws around it. “And this…here. We’re gonna cut about an inch, two inches from the bottom here, and that’s for the kicker.”

  “The what now?”

  “The kicker. You take a piece of wood the same height, nail it into the floor at the bottom and that’s why we’re cutting this into the stringers, see? You set the stringers on the kicker at the bottom and that keeps your whole staircase from sliding across the floor under its own weight.”

  I think I get it, but that notch he’s cut doesn’t seem very substantial. “And it’s just one little piece of wood? That high?”

  He grins, baring his latest gap. “Don’t look like much, does it?” he says. “But that little piece of wood does a lot of work.” He laughs at his own joke, and his breath smells awful. Growing up with Jack was always interesting in that regard – a never-ending game of ‘What Does Dad Smell Like Today?’ Will it be Wild Turkey? That perennial favorite – Cigarettes and cheap perfume? Or will we will be changing it up with a new fragrance, like Heroin Shits, or The Inside Of A Crackhouse. I’ve held my breath against hundreds of such aromas over the years, but this one is different. This smells like decay, a rot that not even Jack can deny. This smells like endgame.

  If he sees the alarm that flashes behind my eyes, he doesn’t show it. “Now, we’re gonna take a sliver here from each riser,” he says, taking out his rusty square once more. “Just a few degrees, and that’s gonna make everything fit better, so the edge of the tread is smooth, you see? If you don’t take that angle, your riser’s gonna go like that…see? And that’s ugly. Boxy. A bitch to carpet. So we take out this sliver here, and voila – smooth. Beautiful.” He glances up at me. The whites of his eyes are too yellow and my heart is beating too hard. This is still my dad, after all. “And don’t look so fucking surprised. Your old man’s not completely useless.”

  Oh, this hurts. More than it should. And the worst part is that Cats In The Cradle is now playing in my head, and I know it will continue to do so for an annoying length of time.

  “Are you sure the floor’s up to this?” I ask.

  “Sure. Your joists over there are pretty solid. It’s only this side where you’ve got subsidence and stuff.”

  After we cut the wood to size, the hardest part proves to be wrangling the huge stringers through the narrow doorway, but once they’re in the whole thing starts making sense to me. I help screw the stringers in place at the top, reinforcing them with metal straps, and when I feel how solid they are I’m impressed. That’s the kicker – barely a couple of inches tall, but lending the whole thing an admirable solidity. The treads and risers need to go on, but they’re the easy part. We have a staircase. My dad and I just built a staircase.

  “See?” he says. “Oh ye of little faith.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. I guess I wasn’t ready for the revelation that you knew how to do actual work.”

  He flinches, and for once I don’t blame him. “Jesus,” he says. “When did you get so hard?”

  “Me?” My resentment flares right back up like heartburn. He doesn’t have the right to ask that question, especially since he was the one who made me this way. “I’m not hard.”

  Jack sighs and takes a seat at the kitchen table. “It was inevitable,” he says. “You were always the smart one, and it’s tough, being smart. You’re always gonna spend your life surrounded by idiots, since it’s all relative and all.”

  “You’re wrong,” I say. “I’m not like you. I never thought I was that special.”

  “Yeah, well,” he says, and I never even knew I wanted him to look at me that way until he did. “You are.”

  Dashed hopes, I tell myself. They hurt ten times as much as if you’d had no cause for hope in the first place. I pull out a chair and sit down. Something tells me I have to ask now, because it’s the only time in Jack’s life I’m ever going to get a straight answer.

  “Why are you, here, Dad? What’s the story?”

  He hesitates and I worry the moment’s already passed.

  “Corey told me,” I say. “How you taught him Grandma’s stuffing recipe, and how you didn’t get into Skye’s pharmacy cabinet, even though you knew where she kept the keys. What’s really going on with you?”

  He exhales, and I can smell it across the kitchen table. It’s sickly sweet, with a side order of acetone. “I’m…” That’s as far as he gets on the first go, and I know what’s coming next, because he’s rotting right in front of me. “I’m running out of time, kid.”

  It’s eerily quiet. A hoarse voiced bird – perhaps a crow with a serious sense of occasion – croaks loudly into the silent woods.

  “My liver’s shot,” he says. “Considering what I put it through, it held up pretty well, but I guess everything has an expiry date.”

  “Do they know how…”

  “How long?” He shrugs. “Six months. Ball park.”

  The breath comes out of me in an ‘oh’. I remember when Becky told me she was quitting chemo, and that felt like a weight, like one of those one ton ACME things from the old cartoons had come crashing down and squished me like a bug. But not this. I feel as though I could float clean out of my body, and that can’t be right.

  “Started with an itch, would you believe?” he said. “I was itching and itching every damn night. Thought it was bedbugs again. Or worse. So I got my ass to the free clinic, and they asked me to pee in a cup. Turns out it’s not supposed to be that color. I was like ‘Yeah, it’s always been on the dark side,’ but by then it looked like Coca Cola.”

  This day was always going to come. I knew that, the same way every adult knows that. One day your parents are going to die and you’ll be next in line. Fact of life. It’s always a tough thing to swallow. Even tougher when your old man has flown in direct defiance of the usual rules of life and death for so long that you’d think he was part cockroach.

  “My feet started swelling up like water balloons,” he says. “Apparently that’s gonna get worse, too, the more my liver struggles to cope. Then the fluid will start to build up in my belly, until I look like I’m twelve months pregnant with eleven-pound triplets. Then it all…” He swallows, his eyes too bright. “…builds up. All the poisons and toxins and all the shit my liver can’t flush out any longer; they’re gonna get into every corner of my body, including my brain.”

  “Dad…”

  He shakes his head. “And that’s how I’m going to die. Bright yellow, puking blood and crazy as a loon from swimming in my own poisons.” He’s not crying, not quite, but I am. “I daresay there are some that’ll say it served me right.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, because that’s what you’re supposed to say.

  “Nah. It’s not so bad,” he says, and that’s the most screwed up thing of all, because the Jack I know is a tremendous coward. The lying, the cheating, the frequent disappearances; all of it was because he never had the balls to look anyone in the eye – least of all the people he claimed to love – and admit that he’d fucked up.

  If anyone had told me that one day Jack Ohanian would calmly stare his own death in the face and pronounce it ‘not so bad’, I’d have laughed until I puked.

  “It is that bad,” I say. “You’re dying.”

  He moves his chair next to mine. “So is everyone,” he says, his hand on my shoulder. “Look, I didn’t lead the best life. I know that. And God knows you know it, and your brother.” His fingers dig into my muscle. “I can’t make amends, Jody. I know I can’t undo all the shit I put you boys through, but I want you know – no, I need you to know – you kids are the best fucking things I ever did.” His hand is in my hair and he pulls me close, into the cloud of death smell that hangs around him. “Come on. Don’t cry, kiddo. We still got some time.”
/>
  14

  Chris

  I’m about to slide the key into the lock of my old apartment when it occurs to me that the key might not even work any more. And for a fraction of a second, I hope it doesn’t, because I’ll have an excuse to turn around and head back to New Hampshire. He changed the locks. He was being unreasonable. Not my fault. I tried, and he shut me down. End of story.

  But the key works, and as the door opens, that particular route to avoidance is closed off to me.

  The apartment smells strange – antiseptically clean, as though someone’s been scrubbing away like Lady Macbeth. There are early tulips in a vase on the hall table, their pale cups pristine as porcelain. Is there anybody home? And is he alone? Am I going to have to dig him out from under another Italian?

  Sebastian is in the kitchen. He’s barefoot, chopping celery with my good knife, the one I always had to nag him about sharpening after he’d used it. He must have heard my key in the door, because he doesn’t startle when I walk in. He looks pale and spotless and so perfectly beautiful that I almost remember what it felt like to love him, but then the memory of that awful day bobs up, dark and bloated, like a body that’s been weighted underwater. In our bed. That was always the part that hurt the most.

  “Hey,” he says, and sets down the knife. I’m afraid he’s going to try to touch me, and I step back as though he were pointing the blade at me. The kitchen smells green and clean, celery and soap, a million miles away from the smell of that other kitchen – damp, pine and sweat. And Jody, dark and definite and dirty. He’s still in me.

  “You should sit down,” says Sebastian, like I’m a guest in my own house.