The Distance

by Alexa Land

  A tear snaked down my brother’s cheek, and he grabbed me in another hug. “I wish you’d told me ahead of time when you were planning to come out. I would have helped you.”

  “You were only seventeen, and sis was even younger. I didn’t want either of you to get in trouble, since you had to go on living under his roof, and Dad would have made your lives hell if you’d sided with me,” I said. “That’s why I told Samuel to wait until I was gone before he gave you the letter. It’s also why I came out when you and Ruthie were at Bible study, to make sure you didn’t get caught up in all that hatefulness.”

  “But you shouldn’t have gone through that alone, J.J.”

  “It’s Jessie now. I legally changed it.” I took a long look at my brother, and touched his upper arm as if to prove to myself he was really there. The kid I’d last seen at seventeen was taller than me by a good couple inches, and his short, golden blond hair was a few shades darker. He’d filled out a lot, too, and probably had thirty pounds of muscle on me. Behind his glasses his blue eyes were exactly the same though, and they crinkled at the corners as he smiled at me.

  “You always liked the name Jessie. Remember when we were little and we’d pretend we were spies and hide clues in the barn? Sometimes, you used Jessie as your code name. You insisted on spelling it with an i-e, even though I told you it was a girl’s name that way.”

  “Oh my God, I’d totally forgotten about that, and you know what? I ended up spelling it that way.” I tried to laugh, but it came out as a sob. My brother pulled me into another hug and I stammered, “I thought I’d never see you again, Jed. I thought you hated me.”

  “I could never hate you, J.J. I mean, Jessie. You’re my brother.”

  “How did Kai and Dante find you?” I raised my head from my brother’s shoulder and looked around, and only then did I realize my friend and boyfriend had cleared out to give us some privacy.

  “I’m not sure. Dante ended up approaching me on the S.F. State campus between classes.” He grinned and added, “I thought I was in trouble at first. He’s a pretty intimidating guy.”

  “Wait. You go to college here? In San Francisco?”

  Jed nodded. “Ruthie’s at U.C. San Diego. She started crying when I called her and told her I might be seeing you. I didn’t know what to expect, though. Kai swore you’d be happy to see me, but I thought maybe you’d cut ties with the whole family on purpose.”

  I wiped my eyes with the hem of my light blue t-shirt and said, “I thought everyone sided with Mom and Dad.”

  “Jacob did. No surprise there, right?”

  “None at all.” My older brother had always been every bit as bigoted as our father.

  “Our grandparents, and our aunts and uncles sided with them, too. Pretty much everyone in the older generation was ranting about how you’d chosen the path to damnation when you ‘chose’ to be gay. They held a big prayer meeting for you, which from what I hear turned into a three hour sermon on the sins of homosexuality. Most of the congregation joined in. Ruthie and I and our cousin Bethany all pretended we had the stomach flu. We weren’t going to participate in everyone damning you.”

  “I thought I lost everyone when I didn’t hear from you. I thought I was all alone,” I said softly. “I had no idea. And here you were, living in the same city!”

  “I know! It’s wild. We have so much to catch up on,” he said.

  “We really do. But first, come with me to the patio out back. I need to thank Kai and Dante, and I’ll introduce you to some more of my family.”

  “Is Kai your boyfriend?” I nodded as I headed to the side door and hit the buttons to lower the garage doors. “He’s gorgeous. Does he have a brother?”

  I turned to Jed and grinned. “Oh my God, are you gay?”

  “Imagine Mom and Dad’s delight. Two gay kids out of four. Potentially three, I’ve always suspected Jacob is deep in the closet. I think anyone who yells that loudly about the sins of homosexuality probably has a lot they’re trying to hide.”

  “I’ve always thought that, too. And no, Kai doesn’t have a brother, just a twin sister.”

  “Dang.”

  “So you’re single?”

  “Very.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In a cramped apartment in the Western Addition with five roommates.”

  “Five, good lord,” I said as I locked up and led him to the patio.

  “I’m on a work-study program at school, and money’s tight. I wish I’d studied harder in high school like Ruthie. She landed a full scholarship to UCSD, but then she always had the brains in the family. It’s cool though, most of my roommates are really nice. There are two women and three gay guys. Well, four if you count me.”

  “I can’t believe you turned out to be gay. There were never any signs.”

  “Well, no. I always hid it, just like you did. It’s not surprising, given the way we were raised. I was closer to you than to anyone else, and I still didn’t tell you.”

  “What happened when you came out to our parents?”

  “I took the coward’s way out and told them in a letter. According to Bethany, there was a lot of screaming and yelling and more prayer meetings. I guess Mom really milked it for sympathy. Poor her, punished so unfairly with two gay kids.” Jed rolled his eyes.

  We reached the yard, and I went up to Kai, pulled him down to my height, and kissed him passionately before whispering, “Thank you.”

  He grinned at me. “Good surprise, then. I was worried.”

  “Great surprise.”

  Dante called from across the patio, “Don’t I get a kiss? I helped too, you know.”

  I chuckled at that, crossed the yard and pulled Dante down too so I could plant a big kiss on his forehead. “Ew, that felt moist. I’m sorry I asked,” he joked.

  “Don’t make me lick your face, Dombruso. I’ll do it,” I threatened. He pretended to be horrified and playfully pushed me away.

  I introduced my brother to everyone in the yard, and Nana spun on Jed and asked, “By any chance, are you a gay homosexual?” When he said he was, she clapped her hands, then said, “Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you were straight. But somehow, when I find out a boy likes boys, it just feels like he was meant to be a part of my family.” Jed blushed at that and fidgeted with the collar of his dark blue polo shirt, but he also smiled shyly and looked more than a little pleased.

  *****

  That night, I draped my arms around Kai as we reclined on the mattress in his little attic bedroom. It was late and the house was still. The only light was the one that radiated from the dollhouse on the desk across the room. It was almost done and had turned out beautifully. That night, I’d helped him finish painting it, and in the morning we were going to carry it downstairs for Izzy.

  We’d been kissing ever since we finished painting. After a while, I said as I put my head on his shoulder, “I can’t thank you enough for finding my brother.”

  “I had to believe at least one member of your family would prove to be a good person. If it hadn’t been Jed, I would have kept looking.”

  “If he’d said he wanted nothing to do with me when you found him, would you have told me?”

  “Eventually. It’s not like I wanted to sneak around and keep things from you. But I would have found one supportive relative first. Anyone, I didn’t care who: a second cousin twice removed, a great-great aunt, the family dog, whatever.” I grinned at that, and he said, “I’m thrilled that we ended up with a three-fer, your brother, sister, and a cousin.” Jed had come over for dinner that night, and we’d called Ruthie and my cousin Bethany on a video chat. There’d been a lot of happy tears and promises of get-togethers in the very near future.

  “I love you so much, Kai,” I said quietly as I looked into his dark eyes. “I’ve been afraid to say that out loud. I don’t know why. ”

  “I love you, too, Jessie. I didn’t know when or how to tell you that. It kind of felt like it needed fi
reworks, or a parade, or skywriting or something, so you’d know how much is behind those words.”

  “I already know. You show me you love me all the time, in a million ways.”

  He turned his head away from me as he admitted quietly, “I was always worried about being enough for you. You’re like this exotic tropical bird, bright and colorful and beautiful, and by comparison, I felt like a plain old crow that somehow found its way into your amazing, vibrant world.”

  “You don’t still feel that way, do you?”

  Kai turned toward me again and brushed my hair from my eyes. “I’ll always wonder how you fell for someone like me, especially given how closed off and defensive I was when you met me. But I don’t question that it’s real. I knew you loved me too, long before you said it. It’s always there, in every look you give me, and in the way you say my name, and the way you reach for me when you start to wake up at night.” He smiled at me and said, “I sound completely corny, but oh well. I just needed to say all of that to you, and now I have, so I’m going to shut up.”

  We both shifted around and stretched out on the little bed. As I curled up against his right side with his arm around me, he said, “Just watch. Someday, when we have our own place and buy a king-size bed, we’ll still only use this much of it.” He held his hands a couple feet apart, encompassing the two of us. He was right. I’d always want to sleep just like that, wrapped up in the warmth and comfort of him.

  I put my head on his bare chest and he kissed my hair. A few feet away, the drawing Izzy had made of the three of us sat among the family photos on Kai’s dresser. He’d found a nice frame for it and treated it like the treasure it was. My heart felt like it was filled to overflowing.

  Chapter Fifteen

  One month later

  “If Ollie’s straight, explain his bachelor party to me,” Jed yelled over the pulsating techno music. He leaned in close, holding his coke aloft and trying not to spill it on his plaid button-down shirt as people crowded around us.

  We were in a gay nightclub on the outer edges of the Mission District, two nights before Nana and Ollie’s wedding. Dante had booked the small club in its entirety for the private party. Some of the guests had gone home, given the late hour, but maybe seventy-five Dombrusos and friends of the family planned to party until dawn. Meanwhile, across town, Nana and sixty of her closest girlfriends and relatives were probably getting arrested at a gay strip club.

  “Ollie just wanted someplace we could go and get drunk,” I told my brother. “He has no interest in ogling women, and a lot of Nana’s family members are gay, so he figured, why not a gay bar?”

  “And he’s actually cool with all the half-naked go-go boys?”

  “Of course. They’re all friends of the family,” I said, gesturing at the dozen buff, bronzed guys who’d stripped down to colorful briefs and were shaking it on the bar, tabletops, and on the tiny dance floor. “You missed Cockstock, when all those guys were working at Nana and Ollie’s house around the clock. I’ll tell you about it sometime when I don’t have to yell.”

  “This is such a different world from the way you and I grew up. Ollie’s the same age as Grandpa Howard, but could you imagine Grandpa or any of the other church elders in a place like this, acting like it’s all as normal as breathing?”

  I looked over at Ollie and smiled. He was wearing an old-fashioned 3-piece suit and a captain’s hat that one of the dancers had given him, and was on the dance floor teaching three go-go boys the right way to do the twist. When I turned back to Jed, he looked wistful, and I asked, “Do you miss Grandpa and the rest of the family?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I try not to dwell on it too much, you know? Classes and my job on campus keep me really busy, and I’ve been applying to graduate school. Between all that, there’s not much time to mope. There’s not much time for anything at all, actually,” he said as he turned to watch Will, one of the Cockstock dancers, cross the room in a pair of tight, red briefs.

  “Want me to introduce you to that guy? He’s so nice.”

  “Oh man, no way. He’s totally out of my league.”

  “He is not,” I insisted.

  “Sure he is. I mean, what would I even talk about with a guy like that?”

  I smiled at my brother and said, “Who says you have to talk at all?” By the way Jed colored at that, I got the impression my nerdy kid brother was pretty inexperienced.

  Zachary appeared at my side and kissed my cheek, then said, “I’m out of here. Thanks for inviting me, this was surreal.”

  My friend had only shown up half an hour earlier. I was surprised he’d come at all. He was still living with Chance and working at the restaurant part-time, but he’d been disappearing for days at a time, then insisting everything was fine and refusing to talk about where he’d been when he resurfaced. I still wondered if he’d gone back to prostitution, but he’d always spoken openly to me about that, so I didn’t know why he’d suddenly start keeping it a secret. “I’m so glad you stopped by, Zachary. I’ve missed you. I’ll come by the restaurant one day this week if you want, so we can catch up.”

  “Sounds good.” He turned to my brother and took his hand, as if he was going to shake it, but he just held it instead. “I’m glad I got to meet you, Jedidiah. I hope I see you again sometime.”

  “I hope so, too.” My brother hugged him awkwardly, and when he let go, Zachary gave him a shy smile before turning and disappearing into the crowd.

  Jed watched him go, and I did too, for different reasons. Something was obviously wrong, and it killed me that I didn’t know what to do about it. When I told Jed I was worried about my friend, he said, “You can’t help people who don’t want to be helped, Jessie. All you can do is be his friend and make sure he knows he can always talk to you.”

  “You’re right.”

  Jed grinned at me and lowered his voice when a slower song started playing. “You’ve always been a caretaker, Jessie. That’s why being a second daddy to Kai’s little girl comes so naturally to you. It’s just like when we were kids, if Ruthie or I scraped our knee or needed help with something, we’d come to you, even though you weren’t much older than us. We always knew you’d fix it.” He sighed and said, “Shoot, I mean Rue. That’s going to take some getting used to. Maybe I should change my name too, it seems to be all the rage.” Our sister had visited us the weekend before and insisted that at twenty, she was far too old to be called Ruthie anymore.

  “Well hey, I adopted my spy name, maybe you can start using yours too, Steele Skywalker.”

  Jed chuckled and said, “Oh my God, never call me that again! Talk about embarrassing.”

  “What is?” Skye asked as he came up to us with Dare, Haley, and Kai.

  “My brother’s thinking about changing his name, since all the cool kids are doing it. He wants to be called Steele Skywalker.” I winked at Jed.

  He grinned and turned red as he said, “I hate you so bad.”

  Haley grabbed his hand. “Come on, Steele, dance with us. We’re going to go tell the DJ to pick it up a bit.”

  “Oh no, I don’t dance,” my brother insisted, his blush deepening.

  “Of course you do,” Skye said as he helped Dare and Haley herd him away. My brother looked to me for help, and when I smiled and waved, he shook his head and went with his new friends.

  “Alone at last,” Kai said, which was kind of funny since we were surrounded by people we knew. He kissed me, then handed me a soda and the keys to his Impala. “I’ve had too much beer. Can you drive us home later?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re the best,” he said, and draped his arms around my shoulders.

  We were kissing deeply sometime later, when someone came up beside us and said, “Sorry to interrupt, but we wanted to say goodnight.”

  I turned to Chance and Finn and exclaimed, “You’re leaving already? The night is young!”

  Chance said, “It’s two a.m., party animal.”

  “Exactly! It’s
only two! We booked this place until five.”

  “You’ll just have to carry on without us, and just so you know, it’s your fault we have to leave. I have a nine a.m. interview with a bigtime photography blogger to talk about my show at Christopher’s gallery, and I want to sound at least somewhat coherent. You just had to push me into my dream job.” He grinned and gathered me into a hug. “I love you, Jessie. Don’t forget that you, Kai and Izzy are coming for dinner next week.”

  “Looking forward to it.”

  We said goodbye to our friends, and Kai put his arms around me again after they took off and asked, “Where were we?”

  “Right here.”

  I kissed him deeply and he said, “Dance with me, Jessie.”

  An up-tempo song was playing as we found a spot in the center of the dance floor. My brother was trying his best to rock out with Skye and company, and everyone was dancing with abandon all around us. But Kai and I put our arms around each other and slow-danced as if the most romantic song in the world was playing. After a few moments, we were joined by Trevor and Vincent, who grinned at us and started doing the same thing we were.

  Kai and I kissed and slow-danced our way through three songs, and finally he whispered in my ear, “Would it be totally low class to sneak out to the back alley for a few minutes? I really need to give you a blowjob.”

  I smiled at him as my cock twitched at the suggestion. “Well, if you insist.”

  We joined hands and wove through the crowd, greeting people along the way. Dante and Ollie were doing a shot contest at a little table by the bar as a bunch of family and friends gathered around. Dante looked a bit tipsy, but Ollie was steady as a rock as Charlie leaned in and refilled their glasses. “Ollie’s totally got this,” I told Kai on the way past, then flashed Dante a big smile.

  Kai and I ducked through a swinging door and cut through a disused industrial kitchen, a leftover from one of the many lives the old warehouse had lived. Apparently the kitchen was mostly used as a store room, since cardboard boxes were piled to the ceiling in the left half of the space. There was one door at the back of the kitchen, a service entrance leading to an alley used for deliveries, and I jiggled the handle before saying, “It’s locked.”