by Gregory Ashe
The next day was a blur for Tean. His dad and brothers showed up at his door at the crack of dawn. Less than an hour later, he was downstairs with them at the buffet, moving scrambled eggs and a croissant around his plate without eating anything. Ammon was there too, laughing as he talked to Tean’s brothers and dad.
“The girls have a whole day planned out,” Amos said. “They let us off the leash, so we get to do whatever we want.”
“And we’ve got lots of stuff to do,” Timothy said. “Plenty of stuff to do.”
Tean smiled and nodded as they listed out the day’s itinerary. When the conversation shifted, and Tean’s dad began expounding on the history of the mob in Las Vegas, Ammon leaned over and said quietly into Tean’s ear, “Are you ok?”
Tean wanted to shake his head. Instead, he nodded and forced another smile.
“You’re not eating.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Are you sure?”
Another nod. Another smile.
“I just want you to know,” Ammon said, “that I talked to your dad and brothers. I told them they had to include Jem. But we knocked on his door, and he didn’t answer. Do you want to call him?”
Tean shook his head. “He’s doing his own thing today. He’s probably stealing the pearls off widows’ necks and taking candy from babies and torching Shriners hospitals.”
“Ok,” Ammon said slowly.
Tean had to close his eyes, but a few tears leaked out.
“Hey,” Ammon whispered. “What’s going on? Are you all right?”
Tean opened his eyes, wiped his cheeks, and nodded again. Smiled. “Yes. Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Tean—”
“Please don’t do this right now.”
Instead, Ammon squeezed his hand, and after a moment, Tean squeezed back. Hard. He was holding on for dear life, a part of him realized, and Ammon didn’t let go.
“The gals are going shopping,” Tean’s dad announced, drawing Ammon and Tean’s attention back to the conversation. “So the boys have the day to themselves.”
Tean waited for the comment. Somehow, Tean switched groups. Or, I guess Tean already had enough shoes. Or, Tean promised to keep an eye on us for them.
Instead, though, his father only said, “And we’re very happy to have Tean’s . . . friend with us.”
Ammon slung an arm around Tean’s shoulders. Amos looked back at them, beaming like he’d orchestrated this whole thing masterfully. Seth gave a quick glance, an indulgent smile, before turning back to their dad. Tim and Cor didn’t even look, which was its own kind of message.
“Everything’s ok,” Ammon whispered. “Try to relax. We’re going to have fun.”
And they did have fun. Tean couldn’t believe it: even though he was miserable, a part of him had a great time. It wasn’t the events themselves that were enjoyable, although he’d have been lying if he said he didn’t like Madame Tussauds. Not the wax figures, because he had no idea who most of them were, but they played a VR game that involved searching for a way to escape a locked room, and he liked the puzzle-solving aspect of it. Ammon was the one who solved the final puzzle, of course, and when they were all pulling off headsets, Timothy said, “Not fair. You guys had a real detective on your team. Next time, we get Ammon.”
“You had Tean,” Ammon said with a laugh, sliding an arm around Tean’s waist. “He’s solved a couple of murders himself.”
“Tean spent fifteen minutes trying to climb through the mirror,” Seth said, giving him a playful shove as he went past.
“It looked like a secret passage,” Tean protested.
As they were heading out of the VR room, Amos caught Tean’s arm and whispered, “Dude, don’t screw this up.”
“What? I didn’t even say anything when Dad made that big speech about the evils of sex work!”
“No, dummy. Don’t screw this up with Ammon. He’s a stud, or whatever I’m supposed to say.”
“Well, you aren’t supposed to say, ‘whatever I’m supposed to say,’ because that sounds really alienating.”
“Don’t screw this up,” Amos growled, jabbing his finger into Tean’s chest.
“What was that about?” Ammon asked as Tean rejoined him. His arm settled comfortably around Tean’s shoulders.
Tean had absolutely no idea, so he just shrugged and said, “You know Amos.”
And the weird thing was, it was true: Ammon did know Amos. He knew all of them, and they knew him, and more importantly, they liked Ammon. They didn’t know all of it, of course. They didn’t know what a lot of those years had been like, the really bad ones, when Tean didn’t know if he could keep living the half-life Ammon had offered him. They knew Ammon from when he’d been a three-sport athlete, a star, the golden boy at church and school. And they all obviously had big-boy crushes on him. Still.
Even, in some weird way that Tean didn’t understand, his father. When Ammon ordered a beer at lunch—they ate at Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen, which was apparently a restaurant based on a TV show based on a game, from what Tean could tell—Tean’s dad gave a twenty-minute, rambling speech about the Israelites drinking beer and the importance of alcohol in providing safe drinking water and sufficient calorie intake.
“I’m starting to remember where you get it from,” Ammon whispered, his breath yeasty and warm when it tickled Tean’s ear. He grunted when Tean elbowed him, but Tean didn’t bother hiding the smile.
They stopped to see the Bellagio fountains, but by then it was mid-afternoon, and the heat shimmered in the city’s trapped air. They went inside the Bellagio instead, wandering the halls, listening to the electronic chings of the games. Seth stopped at a quarter slot machine and said, “What do you think, Ammon? Should I do it?”
“Do it,” Ammon said.
Seth dropped the quarter, pulled the arm, and burst out laughing when he got a horseshoe, a heart, and a bell.
“Am I exclusively related to twelve-year-olds?” Tean asked as his brothers moved away.
“Maybe just primarily,” Ammon said. He stopped, stopping Tean with him, and kissed his cheek. “Sorry. Maybe that’s crossing a line, but you’re so beautiful when you’re happy.”
From ahead came whoops and laughter.
“Kiss, kiss, kiss,” Timothy and Cor shouted.
“I guess they don’t object,” Ammon said with a smirk. “And it is a pretty good suggestion.”
“It’s a terrible suggestion,” Tean said, pushing Ammon’s face away and slipping free of his arm. “You’re all jerks,” he shouted up to his brothers.
For some reason, all of them, including Ammon, thought that was the funniest thing Tean had ever said.
Their next stop was Sin City Smash.
“But what’s the point?” Tean asked as they waited in the lobby.
“That is the point,” Cor said. “You smash things.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s fun. Oh my gosh, Ammon, please help.”
“It is kind of fun to destroy things.”
“See?”
“But we’re paying to do it,” Tean said. “Why not just destroy things you already own? Or when it’s already part of the process. I kind of had fun breaking things when Jem and I were searching—”
The brothers traded glances, and Tean cut off.
“It’s just a guy thing,” Ammon said into the silence. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Yeah, it’s a guy thing,” Cor said. Then he yelped when Amos swatted him across the back of the head. “What the heck? Ammon said it, but I can’t?”
Their rage room had plenty of things to smash: hardwood chairs, particleboard tables, an Ikea bookshelf with ceramic figurines of lambs and dairy maids and what Tean imagined were probably meant to be Swiss villages. It had clocks, computers, brick cell phones. It had a mirror, with a warning that seemed to be completely unironic: WARNING – PIECES WILL BE SHARP.
The guys went to to
wn: smashing, stomping, bashing, kicking. When Ammon picked up one of the hardwood chairs and hit it against the wall, it exploded into pieces, and Cor, Tim, and Seth actually cheered. Tean and his dad stayed off to one side. Neither of them spoke, and Tean waited for a comment about the sanctity of the family, about the trials of the flesh, maybe just something truly banal like how disgusting it must be for two men to do such things to each other. Instead, Robert Leon, who had spent the cab ride over lecturing their driver, who was from Ethiopia, about the current situation in Ethiopia, said nothing.
When time was up, Cor grabbed Ammon’s arm. “You’re a beast, dude. What have you been doing?”
“Just changing things up at the gym,” Ammon said. He was flushed. Sweat trapped fine blond hairs on his forehead, and his chest rose and fell rapidly. His arms were ropey with veins.
“Is it a website? A book?” Cor patted his stomach, where a little pouch had formed. “I’m in the worst shape of my life.”
“Sure, I’ll send you the link. Or we can meet up, and I’ll coach you through it the first few times.”
“Seriously?”
“Why not?”
“Jeez, maybe I’ll actually get to have sex again this side of eternity.”
“Oh my gosh,” Tean muttered, putting his head in his hands.
“You try having four kids,” Cor snapped, but he was grinning. “See what that does to your libido and your diet.”
“We’ll get you back into fighting shape,” Ammon said with a laugh as they headed for the door.
“Ammon,” Tean’s dad said, his voice cutting through the conversation.
This was it, Tean realized. This was the speech or the lecture or the confrontation, although why his father had chosen this moment, he didn’t know.
But what his dad said was “I’ve been thinking about buying a new rifle, and I’ve been having a hard time deciding between a Seekins and a Browning.”
Ammon nodded. “Good guns.”
“I have to admit,” Robert Leon said, “I’m leaning toward Browning because he was a man of the church.” That sentence opened the floodgates, and Tean’s dad was talking a mile a minute as he walked Ammon out of the room.
“Holy crap,” Timothy said, grabbing Tean’s collar, “did you see that?”
“See Dad turn a question into a lecture? Yes, I’m very familiar with it.”
“Maybe you forgot, but Dad doesn’t ever ask questions. Never. And he just asked Ammon one.”
“Not really. He didn’t even phrase it as a question. He mostly wanted to prove—”
“Ammon is awesome, and he’s into your scrawny butt and your chicken legs. Don’t screw this up.”
“Why does everyone—”
“Don’t screw it up,” Seth said, pointing a finger at him.
“There’s not even anything to screw up because—”
“I already tried to tell him,” Amos said, arms crossed, his expression supremely satisfied.
“Look, you guys don’t know—”
From the other side of the room, where he was smashing a few final ceramic figurines, Cor shouted, “Don’t screw it up, Teancum!”
“Frick,” Tean muttered, knocking Tim’s hand from his collar. He looked around, saw all four brothers staring at him like he was planning on immediately going out and screwing things up, and said, “Frick,” again.
They ate dinner at the Rainforest Café, which seemed to sum up everything about Vegas: a manmade tropical illusion, with plastic macaws and machine-generated humidity and artificial waterfalls all manufactured in a desert city. An animatronic capuchin monkey seemed to be touching himself in a way that wasn’t acceptable in polite society, and Tean spent a good part of the meal trying to figure out who had programmed that behavior and why.
After dinner, dusk settled across the city. The disc of the world burned red to the west, throwing the miles and miles of suburban homes into a sharp contrast of glare and shadow. To the east, though, blue haze settled over the desert, deepening to purple, then black at its farthest point. The heat was still tremendous, crushing, made worse by the unending parade of taxis and the billowing clouds of exhaust. When the Strip’s lights came on, flooding the street with neon blues and fluorescent reds, Vegas could have passed for beautiful: the dappled shadows hid the flyers for titty bars that papered the sidewalk; the inelegant bumps and swells of industrial air-conditioning units and construction scaffolding softened in the shadows; dramatic lighting raked the facades of the Venetian, Caesar’s Palace, Paris Las Vegas, and none of it seemed quite so preposterous.
For whatever reason, Robert Leon wanted to do the Eiffel Tower Experience, which consisted of riding up to the observation deck of a half-sized Eiffel Tower replica. In the elevator, Amos poked Tean in the back, hard, and whispered, “Hold his hand, dummy.”
Everyone in the elevator heard. A tiny smile played around Ammon’s mouth before he got it under control.
When they got off the elevator, Tean took a deep breath. The air was cooler up here. The breeze coming in smelled like fried food and what he guessed was a pumped-in cinnamon fragrance to entice people into buying something sugary and fattening. People moved around the observation deck singly, in pairs and in small groups. In suspicious silence, Tean’s brothers and dad hustled away, leaving Ammon and Tean alone.
Ammon laughed quietly.
“I’m going to murder all of them,” Tean said. “There’s not a single court in this country that will find me guilty.”
“Teancum, may I please hold your hand?”
Tean nodded, and Ammon’s fingers laced with his.
They strolled around the observation deck. The city was bright, fierce, insistent against the darkness dropping steadily over the desert. A pre-recorded accordion track played in the background. Tean vaguely recognized it as the music often associated with Venice and gondolas; he wondered if it was carelessness or intentional. Perhaps whoever had chosen the music hadn’t realized that Venice wasn’t in France and had nothing to do with the Eiffel Tower, but Tean doubted it. Everything else in this city was designed to take you by the throat and make you do what it wanted; why not this?
When they stopped at the rail, looking out over starbursts of artificial pinks and blues and red, Ammon stood shoulder to shoulder with him. His body painted a line of heat down Tean. His hand bumped along the knobs of Tean’s spine and came to rest at the small of his back. His thumb moved in a small circle there. Tean remembered that gesture. After the first time they had made love, horny teenagers in a shower in Lima, they had climbed into bed together, and Ammon had held him and made the same slow circles with his thumb. Tean’s brain made lists: Vegas, the city where you could have Venice and Rome and Egypt and Paris all within a half mile. Vegas, the city where you could have romance and adventure, shopping and gambling, dinner and dancing. Vegas, the city where you could have it all.
Tean’s face was hot. His eyes stung, and the lights swam in his vision. He took a deep breath, and then another.
“Are you ok?”
Tean nodded.
“Tean—”
“I’m ok.” His voice was wet and broken.
“Talk to me. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” But what he wanted to say was, Everything. “Today has been wonderful. Thank you for being wonderful.”
“You’re upset. What did I do?”
“Nothing. You’ve been amazing. I’m sorry, I’m just being weird. As usual.”
Ammon cupped his face and kissed his cheek. Then he kissed him on the lips. Softly, just a brush. And then once more.
“This isn’t the right place to do this,” Ammon whispered, “because you deserve everything to be perfect, but I want to tell you that I love you.”
“I love you too,” Tean said, and he didn’t know why, but he started to sob.
For some reason, that seemed to make things easier for Ammon. He told Tean to wait, and then he left. Tean’s cryin
g turned into racking, hitching gasps that he managed to choke back only barely. The men and women around him took a few steps back. One woman removed a tissue from her purse, clutching it in her hand, staring at him but not willing to approach. When Ammon came back, he put an arm around Tean and led him to the elevator.
“My—my—my—” Tean tried to say.
“I told them you need to go back to the hotel. They’re fine.”
Tean cried the whole ride down. He cried the whole walk back. He couldn’t say why, and he couldn’t stop. He cried on the elevator ride up to the Augustus tower. He was crying harder than ever when Ammon removed the wallet from Tean’s pocket, found the card key, and let them both into the room.
Ammon helped Tean lie down. He lowered the blinds and turned on a single lamp. He got water from the sink in a thin plastic cup that crinkled when he set it on the nightstand. Then he removed Tean’s shoes.
“I’m sorry,” Tean said. Or tried to say. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s ok. You don’t need to be sorry. It’s been a lot; you’ve been through a lot lately.” Ammon’s hand was hot on Tean’s leg. “Do you want me to stay? Go?”
Tean put an arm over his eyes.
“I’d like to stay,” Ammon said.
After a moment, face still hidden in his elbow, Tean nodded.
Ammon stretched out next to him, his hand gliding up to rest on Tean’s belly. His breathing evened out and became an anchor, and eventually Tean’s breathing slowed too. His face was still hot and puffy; when he peeled his arm away, the dried salt of tear tracks pulled at his skin.
Ammon’s hand came up, his fingers combing slowly through Tean’s hair. “Have some water.”
Tean propped himself on his side. The plastic was cool and flexed in his grip. He managed a swallow, coughed, and drank again. When he lay down again, he rolled to face Ammon, who was still running one hand through Tean’s hair. A tiny furrow marked the skin between Ammon’s eyebrows. His mouth was a thin, hard blade.