by M. Raiya
The predator that had almost taken me over was still there. Had it faded a little since I’d first seen my face in the hospital? Maybe. Vin was my bridge to both parts of me. Along with the predatory glint was the softness of compassion. This is me, I thought. This is who I am. And I am not going to let my grandfather take it away from me again. I would confront him, not as a terrified boy, but as a man. And not alone. But not yet.
I really wanted to see Vin graduate. Being at his ceremony had been my goal, my push to get stronger and leave the hospital, so I could take part in something that had been denied to me. This rite of passage had become a symbol to us both. For him, it defined the moment when he was free of school and the future really began. For me, it was all about being able to walk into the building I’d only been able to look at from a limb on a pine tree.
I sank down on the edge of the bed, savoring the moment of utter privacy for the first time in a long time. I looked at my hands, thin and strong. I pressed them to my face, closing my eyes. I felt a fierce joy sweep me. I had done it. I had survived three years. I was Gabriel Lane. I was a magic wielding, owl shifting, gay young man.
This is me, I whispered deep in my soul. And I can share it with whomever I want. And I chose to share it with Vin Thatcher.
Abruptly I went across the hall to his room. It had been freshly cleaned as well. The bed was made; the laptop was centered on the desk; the ripped screen replaced. I opened the closet door and looked at the railing where I’d perched that first night. I went to the bed and touched the scratches I’d left on top of the headboard, even though I’d been so careful. Finally I looked at my limb on the maple. I had envisioned the great horned sitting there, leering at me, so many times that I thought I saw her for a second. But when I looked closer, the limb was empty. I went to the window and started to pull the curtains across it. Then I saw Vin, sitting down on the dock, his feet in the water, phone to his ear, laughing.
I sank down to sit in his desk chair. It was so natural, so familiar to watch him unseen. I found myself sitting still and gazing the way I had done for so long. It seemed impossible that I could walk down there to him right now and sit next to him and no one would think it was strange. Tomorrow I would meet his friends. I had no idea how he was going to explain me, but I would not be on the outside any longer.
Just when it started to get dark, Vin got up, stretched, and headed for the house. I crossed the hall to the bathroom and got ready for bed, remembering to clean my earrings. When I’d finished, I could hear him talking to his parents downstairs. I went back into the guest room and sat down on the bed, intending to stay awake, but the bed was wonderfully comfortable, especially compared to the one in the hospital, and so much nicer than a bed of dead leaves. I nestled on my side, bending my left arm and putting it over my head like a wing. I was almost asleep, or perhaps I already was asleep, when I heard Vin come in. I dragged one eye open and saw he had his desk chair with him. He settled down quietly next to me. I tried to protest, but I was too tired, and it just felt so right to have him close.
Chapter Thirteen
VIN’S SOFTLY chiming phone alarm woke me. He was cuddled up in the guest bed next to me, his breath warm against my neck. Whoa, I thought, carefully rolling over. Instinctively I checked to make sure my IV line wasn’t tangled, felt a surge of panic when I couldn’t find it, and then a surge of relief that it wasn’t there any longer.
Vin groaned softly and surfaced too, blinking awake. Our eyes, inches apart, met.
“Oh,” he said softly, gazing at me. “My owl.”
I instantly panicked, thinking I’d shifted without realizing it, or that my grandfather had visited in the night, bound me with magic, and replaced the elan.
“Easy, easy,” he said quickly, grabbing my arms. “Shh, I didn’t mean that.”
I realized I was still human. I sank back down onto the bed, heart pounding.
“You are the flightiest person I’ve ever met.” He reached for his phone on the headboard and killed the alarm.
“You scared me half to death.”
“Sorry. It’s just your eyes are the same.”
“Yeah. I know. Soulful.” I made a face at him.
He grinned and nodded.
The home screen of his phone caught my attention. It was the photo of me he’d taken on that blissful kayaking day before the great horned attack, when I’d flown onto the top of the rock formation he’d called the Turtle. I was perched on the Turtle’s head above the cave formed by its two front legs. My wings were spread, my beak open in a deep throated “whoooo,” and my eyes were gazing directly at him.
Never fly again?
Vin registered my expression and blanked the phone. Then he pushed himself up on one arm and looked down at me, searching my eyes. “The chair got kinda hard,” he said. “Hope this is okay.”
I nodded and felt a strange, new sensation slide through me. It was a kind of warm rush that left me wide-awake and energized, but at the same time, made me want to not move, not do anything that might break the intensity of the current moving silently between us. It was like magic, but it wasn’t coming from me. From the way his eyes widened, I knew he felt it too. We both froze.
He bent a little closer. I felt my lips part of their own accord. A strand of his hair fell past his ear and brushed my cheek. I reached up to touch it and raised my head slightly at the same time—
And we heard his father’s voice from his parent’s bedroom. It hit me that Vin wasn’t supposed to be in here. Apparently, he remembered at the same time.
“Shit!” he gasped under his breath, and an instant later, he was gone across the hall to his own room.
It took me a couple of minutes before I could move. Something deep and important had just happened, something new and much deeper than the gentle, awkward kissing we’d been doing. I felt deeply awed.
JACK AND Coleen had fixed a fancy breakfast of pancakes and sausage and eggs. I was trembly with nerves, sitting at the table with them, waiting for Vin to come downstairs. The graduation ceremony was in a few hours. Some of his friends were picking him up shortly, and I was going to ride to the school with his parents a little later.
“How did you sleep? Are you rested?” Coleen asked me, pouring me a cup of coffee.
“No nightmares?” Jack passed me the plate of pancakes. “Vin has nightmares.”
He hadn’t had any since I’d known him, at least that I’d been aware of. Which I’d take as a good thing.
“None,” I said. “I slept great, thanks. You have no idea how good it felt not to listen to things beeping all night.”
“Oh, believe me, I do,” Coleen said. “Hospitals are no place to get any rest. I was in for a week after Vin was born. Cesarean. We’re lucky he’s with us, you know. His heart stopped during labor, and—”
Just the idea of a world without Vin in it was bone chillingly awful. In fact, the only reason he existed was because the two of them had decided to make love one night. Coleen saw the look on my face and suddenly put a hand on my arm.
“I’m sorry, Gabriel. I didn’t mean to—” She broke off and shrieked.
A mouse scampered across the floor from a crack under a cupboard toward the door that led down cellar.
Without an instant’s hesitation, I leaped up, pounced, and grabbed it with my right hand. Food, hunger, predator….
Petrified, the mouse froze. Little eyes gazed up at me unblinking. Eat me alive, or kill me first? Belly up, watching as my insides were ripped from me, still pulsing with my life. What would that feel like, seeing vital parts torn away….
I did not want my life to end. But death didn’t ask first.
I looked up and saw Vin frozen on the stairs, staring at me in shock. I had a confused impression of him looking like a stranger in a dark suit and blue tie, graduation gown over his arm, and then Coleen shrieked again and the mouse started wiggling frantically.
I ran to the door, flung it open, and let the mouse gently go free on the
porch. It dove down the stairs and vanished beneath them.
“Riel,” Vin said quietly, behind me.
I turned, and our gazes met. Again, that new connection seared between us. I knew that it would be there every time we looked at each other for the rest of our lives.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You didn’t need that one. You didn’t hurt it.”
“I thought I knew who I was,” I whispered. “But now I’m not sure.”
“You’re Gabriel Lane. Whoever you make of yourself, I will love.”
“Thank you,” I said, closed my eyes, and leaned on his shoulder for a moment, his arms close around me.
“Come have some pancakes,” he said after a long moment. “It’s okay.”
I drew on my inner core of strength and raised my face to look at Coleen and Jack. God, what would they think?
They stood tensely in the doorway. They’d been wonderfully accepting so far, but….
“I’m sorry,” I said, dragging my gaze to theirs. “It was just instinct.”
“It’s true,” Jack said in a neutral voice. “You really were an owl.”
“Yeah.”
“Your reaction was so—quick,” Coleen said.
Vin abruptly cracked up. His laugh was disarming, natural, and in a second both his parents were laughing too. Even I couldn’t help it after a moment. There were a hell of a lot of other adjectives she could have come up with.
“Well, come back in and finish breakfast,” Coleen said. “Unless you’d rather take your meal out here?”
“Um, no,” I said, and something in my tone made them laugh even harder. At least my hand-eye coordination had returned, I thought.
I was washing my hands when a carload of Vin’s friends arrived to pick him up.
Vin cursed under his breath, wolfed down a pancake, and headed for the door. I hesitated, then slipped after him. He turned to me on the porch. We were in full sight of the car of kids, so we didn’t even touch hands for a second, but another of those looks was enough.
Then Vin said quickly, “Okay if I introduce you as my boyfriend later?”
“Yeah,” I said. And then I said, “Yeah,” again, more firmly.
“Okay,” he said, and there was that look again, only, if possible, even deeper than before. It made me want to be wholly and completely one with him. Desire burned through me, but the urge for sex was just one part of it. I wanted to be with him forever from deep in my soul.
He was gazing back at me with the same need in his eyes. I didn’t realize how long we’d just been standing there before his friends honked.
“I don’t want to leave you.” Vin’s voice was full of emotion.
“It’ll be all right.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.” Our eyes locked for another few moments, and then he jumped down the steps, his blue graduation gown flying over his arm in the breeze.
This was the last time, I vowed, he was driving away without me.
As soon as the carload of cheering teenagers had pulled out, I went back in and sat down at the table. Coleen started cutting a grapefruit. Jack passed me the pancakes. Everything was awkward.
Jack got up to get more coffee. “You want more?” he asked me.
“Please,” I said, knowing Vin would roll his eyes at the thought of me on two cups of caffeine. It would probably not be a good thing. Stay calm, I told myself. Stay calm.
Jack filled our cups. Sat back down. I sipped coffee and ate my pancake. More silence.
“At least it’s warm out,” Coleen finally said at the same time Jack said, “It’s supposed to rain later.”
We all laughed. “Look, I am so glad Vin and I found each other,” I said.
“Well, we’re glad he finally got his act together,” Jack said. “I guess all parents go through this whether their kid is gay or straight, but we were kind of worried about what kind of guy his tastes were going to run to, you know? For all we knew, he could have brought home some motorcycle type with tattoos everywhere, or someone who wore high heels. Not that we wouldn’t have accepted that. Don’t get me wrong. But you seem pretty normal.”
I stared at him, shocked.
“Well, aside from the owl bit. But you know what I mean.”
I nodded. “We’re figuring it out as we go. Don’t worry, I won’t wear my feather boa to graduation.”
Coleen laughed. Jack went all serious. “Just want to say,” he said, “you’re older than he is. And he’s never been in a relationship before. You’ve got more world experience. Granted, it’s been a strange world, but still. If we know you’ll be careful, we’re good.”
“I love him,” I said, looking levelly at his father, seeing Vin in his face. “I’ll treasure him. I promise.”
“Good man,” Jack said. “I’m going to go shower.”
“Take the mail upstairs with you,” Coleen said, nodding toward a stack on the counter next to one of their laptops. I was impressed at how they had shut them down for breakfast on their son’s graduation day. Vin had been right. They were always there for him when he needed it. And that was translating into being there for me.
“Right,” Jack said, picking up some envelopes and sorting through them. “Nothing from Arnold about those properties yet? He was supposed to send me an example of their mailings.” A brochure fell out and landed on the table in front of me.
I gasped and seized it.
Irwin Lane Boats. World class designs. Cruising and racing sloops out of London, England and Moonview, New York.
The logo was an anchor juxtaposed over a billowing blue and green spinnaker. Below was the photo I’d put on my Facebook page of my ice-green Sea Foam under full sail, awash in sparkling sun and glistening water. This time, I looked at it. The photo had been taken the summer before my sophomore year. I was sixteen and at the helm, tanned and sun glowing and windblown, my long hair streaming back. Confidence just exuded from me as I sat there behind the wheel, my left bare foot braced against the port side seat as we raced along, well-heeled over. I was flying, fearless….
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Jack asked. “I always dreamed of learning to sail when I was a kid. We invested in this builder a couple of years ago when they went big, and they’re doing very well now. Magnificent wooden boats, all handmade by this guy Irwin, over in New York. Someday….” He sighed.
I couldn’t get my voice to work. The other part of me just stared at the brochure.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Coleen asked.
I cleared my throat. “Irwin’s my dad,” I managed to say.
“What?” The same level of shock was in both their voices.
“That’s me.” I nodded at the photo.
They looked down, then back up.
“Oh my God,” Coleen breathed.
“Your last name is Lane,” Jack said. “It never clicked. Never in my wildest dreams.”
Coleen had the brochure now, and she gazed at the photo a few moments, then looked back at me. “How long ago?”
“Three years. It was right before I—before everything went wrong.”
“Yeah,” she said, looking back and forth between me and the photo. “Your face. So different.”
Jack sent it another glance. “No earrings,” he commented.
“Yeah, he got those yesterday,” Coleen said, sending him a strange look. “With Vin.”
Jack’s jaw dropped a second time the same minute. “What? Vin—earrings?” He looked like that shocked him more than seeing me on the brochure.
“You didn’t notice?” Coleen was trying hard not to laugh.
“My son has earrings?”
I couldn’t tell if he was mad or just stunned.
“What color?”
“Blue,” I said. Tentatively, I lifted my hair. “Like mine, but the color of his eyes.”
Jack slammed his fist on the table. “How can he expect to get a good job with holes in his ears! What was he thinking?”
Okay, that was t
he old Jack showing through, I thought. I took it as a good sign that he was comfortable enough with me that he didn’t have to fake nice when he didn’t feel it. And at least now when Vin had the music vs. prelaw program discussion with them, I would be there with him.
“Jack,” Coleen said reproachfully. “Lots of very successful men have earrings today. It’ll be fine. And it’s not like he got a tattoo.” Then she whirled on me too. “Did he?”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “No tattoos.” The thought of all those needle pricks made me shudder.
Then they both looked at me with narrowed eyes, as if wondering how I could be so sure their son had no tattoos. I opened my hands in surrender mode, feeling my cheeks flush hot red. “I mean, I don’t know. He didn’t get one yesterday. I know that.”
Coleen laughed first. Then Jack, grudgingly, got up and clapped me on the shoulder, man to man. “Dude,” he said, trying to be cool and failing utterly. “Someday, maybe you could give me a sailing lesson?”
“Yes,” I said quickly. “Absolutely. Sure.”
“Okay.” And then he finished gathering his mail and went upstairs. If Coleen hadn’t still been in the room, I would have put my head down on the table. I’d only been up for half an hour, and I was exhausted already.
Coleen popped the last of her grapefruit in her mouth. “Are you full? More of anything?”
“I’m good for half an hour, probably,” I said. “All I seem to want to do is eat.”
“Well, you’ve had a rough couple of weeks.”
“Yeah. Mrs. Thatcher, thank you. For everything. You know what I mean.”
Her smile was genuine and warm. “Of course, you’re welcome, Gabriel. I think it’s—quite wonderful, really—to know that there’s something more to this world. I’m looking forward to getting to know you better. And please, call me Coleen.”