by Willa Okati
Ford could see the wrath had given way to a hurt so deep, it broke his own heart. He wanted -- so much -- to brush the wet hair out of Gavin’s face and kiss him. To tell him it’d be okay. They’d get through this.
But Ford couldn’t.
Gavin pulled his lips back over his teeth. “Nothing to say for yourself?”
Ford’s throat unlocked. “Gavin, I am so sorry. God, I’m sorry. Sorry I ever got you into this.”
“Sorry.” Gavin ignored the rain that slicked his face. He shivered from the cold that pebbled his bare chest with goose bumps, but didn’t notice or didn’t care. Probably both. “You’re sorry.”
“I know it’s not enough. Gavin, I can’t… I want, but… My whole life before this. It is what it’s always been, and God, don’t you think I didn’t fight it. You think I want to be here, doing this?”
Gavin turned his back, sharp and deliberate. “Ford, give me some space.”
Ford had heard that before. He knew what it really meant. Go away. He’d always gone after Gavin or come back to him. Tonight…
Tonight he watched Gavin go. It wasn’t a long distance, but it still seemed to take forever. He caught Gavin at the last second possible, the reach of his arm just enough to capture rain-chilled flesh and hold tight.
“Gavin --”
“Give me some space, Ford. Give me some fucking space!”
“Gavin.” That went through to him when shouting hadn’t. Maybe it was the worst idea Ford had ever had. Maybe not. He bent as far over as he could, to press their heads together.
“I will always love you.”
Gavin squeezed his eyes shut. Ford kissed him. No, not a kiss. One last attempt to lay claim and shunt the rest aside. He would have climbed inside Gavin if he could have; he had to settle for moving his mouth over Gavin’s. His tongue fought with Gavin’s, and his hands were everywhere, not able to touch enough at once.
But even as Ford wrapped Gavin as tight as he could without hurting him, and even as Gavin kissed back as desperately as Ford kissed him, Ford understood now what he’d done. He’d forced luck’s hand, and no one could do that and get away unburned. She’d turn on a man as quick as a wink. He should have seen it from the start, and he hadn’t.
Gavin let Ford go when Ford released him. “I’m going inside,” he said quietly. “I’ll wait for you to cool down and get some air. We’re not done here.”
“Gavin…” Ford let it die away, lost in the wind.
The door closed behind Gavin, a last blast of rain hammering it shut with the sound of a thousand nails. And then, as soon as Gavin was out of sight, the rain stopped. The storm was over.
Damn it.
Ford knew what he had to do. He’d rather cut off his arm or his gift. But he knew. Funny thing, fate. No matter how hard he ran, or how many twists he took. He couldn’t outrun the finish line as it stretched out before him.
No matter how much he wanted to.
“Gavin, I’m sorry,” Ford said and turned to walk away. Toward the road.
Back the way he’d come.
* * *
Gavin woke to moonlight in his eyes, bright through the window despite blinds and sheer curtains.
But not to Ford’s smile. Not to Ford anywhere, neither in bed nor on the porch and not, when Gavin stumbled out of the cabin with a blanket still dragging from his shoulders, out on the lake or on the pier.
Baffled -- cold all over again -- Gavin turned to the parking lot. No, the 4x4 was still parked there, safe and sound. He knew he’d almost tripped over Ford’s still-half-packed duffel inside.
Then where was…
Gavin reached for the cabin door, wondering if he’d missed Ford inside somehow. In the bathroom, maybe, standing under a hot spray.
He knew he hadn’t. Ford had gone. Left Gavin the 4x4 so he wouldn’t be stranded. Gone, because -- Oh God.
It should have broken his heart. Made him quit, lay down arms.
The hell if he’d let that happen again. Not if he had one hope, and if Ford had taught him anything else, a man in love had to hold on to hope. He couldn’t give up.
Now that Ford had…
Then that left Gavin in charge, and there was only one thing he knew to do.
* * *
Ford had done the right thing. He had to believe that. Otherwise he’d actually go out of his mind instead of constantly thinking he just about might.
Steam from the shower he’d badly needed after half a night’s hitchhiking covered the glass he’d wiped clean, leaving his reflection smudged into something smoky and Picasso-like. Gavin would have known the kind of art he meant. Dalí? Escher?
Ford tched impatiently and wiped the mirror clean again. He couldn’t meet his eyes this time. Not without seeing, down by his mouth, the mark of where Gavin had kissed him with all the fire in that small body and left his mark. His lips were as swollen as if he’d been punched, not kissed.
The steam crept in. Ford knew he shouldn’t be surprised. He’d taken the hottest shower he could coax out of his plumbing and stood underneath until it ran cold and his skin glowed a deep pink.
Funny how it’d never quite seemed to warm him all the way through. Just washing hadn’t been quite right. Everywhere he went, there was a reminder of where Gavin had been. In places no one else had gone, the tenderness of abused flesh and a deep ache inside, one that he’d have loved to dwell on and enjoy with each stretch, each stoop if -- if -- things were different.
Fuck it.
Ford’s thermal-knit shirt and jeans clung to his still-damp body, and his bare feet were cold on the floor. He stuffed them into a pair of old slippers and called it good. Old King Kong slippers, gorilla heads bouncing every time he took a step. A joke gift he’d taken seriously. Hey, his feet got cold, same as everyone else’s. Gavin would have either loved and laughed his ass off at those or cringed at the sight of them and begged Ford to burn them. Ford wasn’t sure which.
Seriously, he had to stop thinking about Gavin. Yeah. Good luck with that.
Ford shuffled to his kitchen and pulled down a dusty bottle. What was this, Crown Royal? Honestly, he wasn’t a drinker. Maybe a glass of wine, like at that dinner --
Damn it, again. Ford rummaged in the same cupboard for a shot glass. He settled on a one-quarter measuring cup instead.
Oof. Ford’s throat burned after the first swig. Possibly that’d been too much at one go. Just possibly. Gavin would have laughed at him right now, Ford bet. It had to look strange, but no weirder than anything else Ford did on a regular basis. Besides, run of the mill shot glasses looked like rejects from baby-doll tea sets in his oversize mitts. Thimbles. He had to hold them way too carefully for fear of breaking them. Like he’d broken Gavin.
Ford took a second shot and didn’t like it any better than the first, but at least he didn’t splutter. No, actually he did. He just wasn’t admitting it to himself. At least with his kind of body mass, it wouldn’t go right to his head.
He poured out a third and shuffled back into his sitting area. Usually, it was barely big enough to contain him. Felt weirdly empty tonight with just him and his Crown Royal.
None of this was fair. None of it was right. He’d be okay. Eventually. Maybe.
Probably not. But he didn’t matter. Gavin did, and Gavin…
Ford drank his third shot and poured a fourth. Why not, right?
* * *
Ford sat cross-legged in front of a shelf of bric-a-brac, drawn there by the blinking light on his house phone’s answering machine. Wow, that light was going. Ford tossed back the fourth shot, still truly not liking it, and punched the Play button.
“Ford?” Ah. Kayla. “Ford, where the fuck are you? Gavin phoned me --”
Ford hit the Stop button. Or he meant to. All he managed was skipping ahead to the next. Kayla continued, “And for all either he and I know, you’re dead in a ditch somewhere, and if you are dead, I’m going to hunt you down and feed the bits through a meat grinder --”
Ouch. Ford picked at the label on the Crown Royal and let the ranting wash over him. She meant well.
He couldn’t help but notice, though, that although the message clicked from one through nine, only six of them were from Kayla. Two, silence and then nothing. Plus one wrong number.
Ford tuned back in on the last once the whisky bottle’s label rested in confetti shreds on his knees. Still Kayla, come full circle. The time stamp on that one was maybe thirty minutes ago, when he’d stood under the shower, hot outside, frozen stiff inside.
“Just answer me one thing,” Kayla said. “Tell me how you could do this. Not to Gavin, though believe me, I’m not forgetting that. How could you do this to yourself?”
The tape ran out. Ford had the urge to chuckle, even though it really wasn’t funny. Kayla: the only other person on the planet who could outchatter -- and apparently outrant -- him. He thought about taking the tape out and saving it to tease her with later.
He took it out, broke it in half, and tossed the pieces over his shoulder instead. Wonder what Grandpa Xiao would have said about this? Probably nothing. He’d have been too busy beating Ford half to death with either his cane or a switch the size of a tree limb he’d marched Ford outside to choose for himself.
Ford poured another quarter cupful. Hangovers weren’t much as cosmic spankings went, but it was the best he could think of right now.
Better to have loved and lost.
Sure. Ford tossed the cup aside in favor of trying to swig from the bottle itself.
WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.
Ford couldn’t have called it a knock on his door. That would be like calling a Roman candle a sparkler. This was more like a battering ram. His whisky-raw tongue swelled in his mouth, choking him silent.
Gavin?
Wham. Wham. “Ford Tremaine, there are lights on in your window. If you don’t open up this second, I’m going to show you why hell hath no fury like a woman --”
Ford’s heart hammered hard at all his pulse points. This called for a tactical retreat. He couldn’t cope with Kayla right now. She meant well but right now all she could do was make it feel worse.
He’d never used the window that opened out onto the fire escape. Actually wasn’t too sure it’d work. Wasn’t aware of his choice until he got there and found himself hanging on to pitted iron in a sudden driving shower of sharp, cold rain.
The storm had followed him from the lake to the city.
“I get the point,” he told the sky as he hurried down the steps. Too fast, he knew that. Funny how easy it was to keep running once he’d started. “I can’t run from the trouble I brought on myself. I have to face it. Real subtle.”
A shot of lightning sent everything into negatives, black turning white and white black. Knocked Ford on his ass, one foot slipped on an already chancy step and body weight doing the rest. He thudded down to the bottom of the landing and grabbed the railing, gasping for breath, his head aswim.
“I get it already!” Ford yelled. He tried to stand up. He had all kinds of new bruises now. Ow.
If there’d ever been a chance of the whisky working, it’d long since passed, and a good dousing of cold rain took care of any hope of its recovery.
So where did that leave him? Locked out of his apartment. As gummy and gritty and cold as he’d been before he got there, without a car, without the bike he’d chained up inside before they had left town. No keys and no wallet.
He’d ask if the night could get any worse, but even now Ford knew better than to tempt fate that way.
He kind of wondered if it might not be worth finding out.
I should have stayed. If I got one sign wrong, who knows what else I misinterpreted?
He heard Gavin’s echo when he thought, Because of this, I lost it all.
Ford shook wet hair out of his eyes and glared up at the storm. “Fuck you. Fuck you!”
Nearby tenants started shouting. Ford truly didn’t care. Once he’d started yelling at the fates, it was as if he couldn’t stop. “Come on! What do you want? Give me a sign -- any sign; I don’t care!”
He’d ended up in the alley, where no one went, and not another soul out there tonight where there was no shelter from the rain except a pile of trash bags and cardboard boxes too small for humans to crawl inside.
Only Ford could have sworn --
He dropped to his knees, not really giving a damn about the pain of it, and bent over sideways to look inside the nearest box.
At first he saw nothing. Then, deep inside, the solid, huddled mass of a giant cat. Amber-green eyes. Ford knew those eyes, especially when they locked on to his.
He knew that purr too, raspy like an old saw grinding through hardwood. Oscar crept forward paw by paw. Never looking away.
Gavin would be going crazy if he had found out Oscar was missing. “How did you even get here?” Ford murmured soft and low. “How’d you know to come to me?”
Harsh lightning strobed the alley.
It made up Ford’s mind for him. He wouldn’t think about the rest. Couldn’t. Oscar would run if Ford made a grab. Ford knew that. All he could do was hold out his hand and coax closer the wary cat that had somehow chosen to come to him for shelter.
Oscar crawled closer still.
Overhead, the thunder rolled.
* * *
By the time Gavin reached the city, the 4x4 was more of a 4x3. Almost wreckage. Long, screeching scratches from tree branches out in the middle of nowhere, a flat tire he’d fixed despite not having a clue how -- maybe a knack he’d never known he had, and about twenty bucks’ worth of emptied gas-station coffee cups littering the passenger-side foot well.
Everywhere he’d gone, he’d asked if anyone had seen Ford. Nothing.
Didn’t matter. I will not quit. Gavin took out his cell phone, still warm from the clutching when he’d hit Redial not two minutes ago, and called Ford. Again. He’d forgotten what number this would make. He couldn’t think.
Thinking was overrated. Right now he just wanted to stay on the move.
You will not do to me what Donny did. I don’t care if you thought your heart was in the right place. You were wrong. I lay down and died before.
His call went straight through to Ford’s voice mail. Didn’t matter. I will not quit. Not again.
I will find you, Ford. Believe that. It’s true.
Dry clothes. If Gavin didn’t get some, and fast, he’d catch his death. He twisted awkwardly around in the driver’s seat of the 4x4 to rummage through his duffel.
Damn, damn, damn! Nothing. He’d barely packed much to begin with, probably forgot a few things back at the cabin, and all he had left was a wadded-up pile of rain-soaked, mud-smeared ragtag tatters.
And Ford’s clothes. Gavin could have worn one of Ford’s shirts. He wanted to. To breathe in his smell and let the folds of cloth wrap around him.
He did not want to trip over the hem of a hockey jersey.
Damn. Gavin drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel. The only place he could go was home, which wasn’t a home at all without Oscar or Ford to keep him company.
But he had no other choice.
He revved the 4x4’s engine and started it down the streets he traveled every day on foot. They looked different from up here. The wrong angle.
Time for a change of plans.
Chapter Twelve
Ford had been on foot; Gavin would go by foot. He knew these streets better this way anyhow.
Only he didn’t know where to go. All the stores were still closed. Not even a coffee shop open yet. The rain picked up and kept going. Lashed him from stem to stern and just… wouldn’t… stop. All he could manage was to put his head down and keep one foot in front of the other and keep going until he reached the steps of his building.
Not that they were any comfort. Gavin wanted to pound the concrete newel with his fist. He dropped his forehead on it instead and ground his teeth.
I won’t give up. But I don’t know how much longer I can keep going before it’
s too late.
“Anyone up there want to give me a sign?” he muttered. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”
No answer. He hadn’t expected one, not really. Fine. He still had a few drops of hope left. He’d cling to them. Gavin stood up, blinking against the rain.
Looked up the stairs, and there, in the overhang that kept the rain from a balustrade. There.
There sat Ford, with a cardboard box tied with heavy, dirty twine in his lap. Arms wrapped around it, hanging on for all his considerable strength was worth. He looked worse off than Gavin, both of them soaked to the bone and whiter than ghosts, Gavin had no doubt.
But. Ford. Ford, here.
A dark striped paw fought its way free of the box. My God. Ford and Oscar. Somewhere, somehow, Ford had found Oscar and brought him -- them -- all home.
He’d asked for a sign…
There were no words. No. Wait. There were two. Gavin murmured them out loud, though he didn’t know to whom or what. “Thank you.”
* * *
Walking up the steps, Gavin couldn’t look away from Ford any more than Ford could look away from him, the terrible silence of uncertainty far louder than the driving rain. My God. Gavin knew he must look like a drowned mouse, and Ford looked like… a drowned redwood -- wet, tired, and grubby, but Gavin didn’t care.
Gavin remembered, as if from far away, that at the first he hadn’t thought Ford was built to be handsome, and he never had understood how a man could be called “beautiful.”
Now, he did. He still wasn’t sure about himself, but to him Ford was beautiful.
And now, anything could happen.
They could apologize. They could explain. They could collide like two cars spinning and crashing together on black ice. Gavin didn’t know what Ford had in mind. But above, the rain slowed from pounding off the streets to a fine drizzle, almost a mist. He’d asked for a sign, and he’d gotten one.
Ford sat quietly, waiting for Gavin. Gavin could feel the helplessness in him, the not knowing what to do. Maybe expecting Gavin to shout or turn his back on him and walk away.
Gavin put his foot on the first step. He did not look away from Ford. There were words -- so many Gavin could have wasted time sorting through them. He didn’t have to.