“Sometimes I wish I could find him to apologize. He had no idea what was going on in my head, or how trying to give him a blow job was just too much of a reminder of Mack, and how suddenly I felt like I was betraying our entire relationship by being there.”
Lee’s eyes stared off into the distance for a moment, then he looked back down at me. “Mack had been dead two years at that point. I’m pretty sure he was beyond caring, but I’ve always wished I could find that guy and apologize, try and explain what was going through my head.”
I sighed, looking up at him. His eyes had turned thoughtful and sad. I didn’t like seeing sad Lee. I reached my hand up and traced the skin on his face, across his upper lip, his nose, his eyebrows. I felt like I was memorizing his face with my fingers. I brushed my fingertips across his eyelashes, feeling the spindly weight of them, resilient and protective. Kind of like the man himself.
“What?” he asked, looking down at me, a suspicious look on his face.
“What, what?” I asked.
“You’re smiling,” he said, as if that was sufficient explanation.
“So? Can’t a guy smile when he’s looking at his…” I paused, unsure how to finish the sentence. What did I call him? We hadn’t really talked about this. I was going back to Seattle in a few days, and Lee would go back to his life. There was no way a long-distance relationship could work. We hadn’t known each other long enough to just say “friend”, “lover” seemed too intense. Fuck. Where was my Word Boy persona when I needed him?
I thought Lee sensed my confusion, but he decided to tease me anyway.
“…When he’s looking at his… antelope?” Lee suggested.
“No,” I laughed.
“…polar bear?” He teased, and I laughed some more.
“No, asshat. What is it with you and animals? I just… I don’t know what to call… this,” I said, gesturing between us.
“Hmmm, okay. I understand your confusion. I know we haven’t really talked about this,” Lee began, sitting up and leaning against the headboard, but pulling me up to rest against his chest.
“But I was kind of hoping that at some point you’d maybe feel comfortable calling me your… boyfriend,” he whispered. “If that’s not too, um, grade school-ish.”
I could feel the tension in him as he said the magic words I'd been wanting to hear but had been too afraid to hope for.
“You know I’m a mess, right?” I asked, looking up at him. As if the last few days hadn’t been enough to make him realize. I had to go into full disclosure mode, because I couldn’t handle him ever feeling like I hadn’t prepared him for the fuckedupedness that was me.
“Yeah, I noticed,” he whispered down at me, his hand stroking across my chest. “I’m no catch, either, when it comes to that.”
“Riiiiight. In what world was that exactly?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at him. “Is this like, Bizarro World, or something? Are we suddenly sporting mustaches and goatees, so everyone can tell we’re evil?”
“I think that was Star Trek, not Bizarro World. But, no, I promise. No facial hair,” he teased, the backs of his fingers stroked over my cheek and over my top lip. “Other than morning scruff, that is,” he smiled.
“What about the fact that I live, oh, a few thousand miles away? And that you have an extended family that makes the Brady Bunch look like a traditional nuclear family?”
He grinned.
“I always hated the Brady Bunch. Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!” he sang in falsetto. He sobered quickly though, when he realized I was serious.
“I don’t know yet. I could move there. You could move here. Or maybe… we do something in between,” he shrugged. “All I care about is… that I haven’t felt as alive with anyone as I do with you. How about we take it one day at a time, to start. We’ll wait and see where it goes from there.”
His green eyes bored into me, seeming to chip away at the stony wall around my heart.
“Okay,” I answered. “One day at a time.”
“In the meantime,” He teased, his hand beginning to roam lower and lower on my body. “I think I have an idea on how to help with one of our challenges,” he said.
I was pretty sure what he meant by “challenges”, but the fact he said “our” made my heart do little flips in my chest. I tried to keep the heat from blooming on my cheeks, but I knew it was there anyway.
“I’ve noticed that when something sets you off, you seem to just kind of… go away, inside your own head,” he said, his fingers continuing to absentmindedly stroke my skin.
I nodded. “Dissociation. I called it going between, after something I’d read as a kid. My therapist has been working with me on it. When I was…when things were bad, it was how I escaped. I’d go into my own head, make up stories, characters… I’d only come back to myself after it was all over.”
Lee’s arms tightened around me. I could feel the tension in his body as I spoke, anger making him tense. Part of me froze. Anger, I understood. I knew what happened with anger.
Lee must have felt me still beneath his touch, because he shook me gently, then scooted out from behind me and turned to face me.
“Mason, I’m not mad at you,” he said, concerns growing on his face. “I’m furious at all the bastards who hurt you, all the adults who turned a blind eye, but mostly I’m angry at your uncle. I’m really glad he’s not in your life anymore,” he said.
“…me, too,” I whispered, my voice small and thin. There was no way he could understand how happy. As he moved, the wonderful smell that surrounded him hit my nose again.
“Yeah, well, mine might be for different reasons. I really don’t need to go to jail for killing the son of a bitch,” he answered as he moved down on the bed, his body blocking the morning sunlight that streamed through the glass doors, creating a halo effect around his body.
I froze, the words echoing in my ears. “I really don’t need to go to jail.” That voice, that smell, everything clicked. My mind began playing another slide show. This time, of the person who had saved my life. His height, his walk. The walking cane in the closet. My Dark Angel. The man who had saved me from death, and worse. My Dark Angel was Lee.
“Mason? Mason, what is it?” he asked, shaking me gently, turning me around in front of him so he could see my face. “What is it?”
Flashes of breakfast yesterday when he had been such a goof. Malone. Mason Malone. He’d called me by my real last name yesterday and I hadn’t noticed.
My thoughts turned to the past. The timeline fit. It would have been about three years after Mack died. He’d been there. My Lee. He’d been a customer. The customer who had saved my life.
“You’re him.” I said, my voice desperately thin as I shrank away from him. “You son of a bitch. You’re him.”
Not a question, a statement. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Lee was my Angel, but he’d also been a customer, and customers were the source of my humiliation, the cause of all my pain. If it wasn’t for men like him, men who liked little boys who couldn’t fight back, there wouldn’t be thousands of kids in the world forced into prostitution.
“It was you. You were one of them,” I growled, pulling away from him. “A customer!” I spat at him, fury growing in my chest. Part of me hoped he would deny it, say the awful certitude growing in my chest was wrong.
I saw his eyes turn from concern, to confusion, to understanding, all in a heartbeat. His eyes, his beautiful green eyes, normally so open and honest, shuttered as if someone had drawn the blinds, and I saw something cross his face I’d never expected to see there. Shame. Anger, too. Grief, as well, but a whole helluva lot of shame.
His hands dropped away from my skin like I’d burned him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. This time, he was the one who ran.
21
Lee
I didn’t even know how I ended up dressed, but before I knew it, I was pulling the Jeep onto the highway, my soul sick from the look on Mason’s face.
He’d known. He knew who I was. He knew what I’d done. And he hated me for it.
I felt the tears running down my face, but I didn’t care. I deserved his hatred, deserved his contempt. Fuck. Well, what had I thought was going to happen? I knew this would happen eventually, but to figure it out on his own, without me acknowledging what happened, had to be the worst sort of way for the truth to come out.
I swiped my eyes with the back of my hand and struggled to focus on the road. There wasn’t much traffic at this time of day, but one thing I’d learned as a driver was never to underestimate the stupidity of other people. I’d seen way too many close calls or outright accidents just because people drove distracted. Food, phones, kids, fucking laptops. I’d seen a lot of distracted drivers, and that wasn’t even counting the ones I was pretty sure were drunk or high.
I managed to focus on the road long enough to get where I was going. Without even realizing, I’d headed for the one place I’d always found comfort – my parents’ home.
I pulled into the driveway, but I didn’t see any cars. Both moms would be at work this time of day, but I’d been hoping maybe Kaine would be here. Shit.
After I parked the car, I noticed I’d received a notification from Uber. I'd received a drive request and hadn’t even noticed. I pulled up the app automatically, only to be staggered by the address for the pickup. It was my house. With a drop off at the airport, twenty minutes ago.
Of course. It figured he wouldn’t want to stay with me any longer. Not after… everything. Fuck. I stared at the screen, frozen, unsure what to do.
A loud knock on the car window made me jump. “Fuck!” I barked, about jumping out of my skin. I looked up to see my brother, Bishop looking at me curiously through the window. His head was cocked sideways, like a bird eyeing a tasty worm.
“You staying in there all day?” he asked, one eyebrow raised at me. Bishop was about as different as you could get in the looks department from most of the family. He was a little shorter than me, his hair was a long shaggy dark brown, pulled back from his face in a messy tail. I might have called it black once, but after seeing Mason’s true black curls, I didn’t think it could compare. He was standing in the mid-morning sun in a pair of track pants and a white t-shirt.
I opened the car door and stepped out. “It’s bad manners to sneak up on someone like that,” I groused and sniffed. Maybe he’d think it was just allergies… Yep, because that particular deception always worked.
“Um, dude, you’ve been sitting in your car staring at your phone for like, ten minutes,” he said, looking at me strangely. “I walked up and stood here for a couple of minutes waiting for you to realize I was here. You didn’t, so I knocked,” he shrugged, looking around the car as if he was expecting someone else. Of course. He was looking for Mason.
“I… I was just…” Bishop’s eyes locked back on mine, no doubt taking in my red and teary eyes, rumpled clothes, and shattered look.
Finally, he spoke.
“You, my brother, are in desperate need of caffeine. Come with me.”
I followed him into the house, mind too numb to do much of anything else. I sat at the table without direction and watched Bishop walk into the kitchen and start making coffee.
Bishop took his coffee seriously. No instant or Keurig coffee for him. He bought his coffee from some specialty store downtown, ground the beans himself, and only added flavorings to it if he was in a major mood. I watched him move around the kitchen with grace and remembered with a pang how well he and Mason had gotten along at the house the other night. They both had artistic souls.
Bishop was an artist masquerading as a computer programmer. He loved doing pen and ink drawings, which were pretty amazing, but he was going to be starting a new job in a few weeks as a computer program developer with a firm in Cleveland. The moms had really hoped that Bishop would decide to do something with his art. He had a real talent for conveying mood with just black and white, but he had insisted to everyone that he wanted a stable career, a job he could rely on and income to support himself, and art wasn’t stable.
Stability had always been important to Bishop. Ever since his parents had disappeared on him, he’d experienced an almost pathological need to plan for the worst. For months after he came to live with us, he had hoarded food in his room, hidden stacks of warm clothes in hidey holes around the house and yard and squirreled money away anyplace he could find to hide it. I guessed having your parents vanish overnight would do that to you.
He had insisted on keeping his belongings in a trash bag for the first few weeks he was here, saying almost every day that he didn’t want to unpack, because his parents would be back for him any time now. Even after he’d finally unpacked, he’d driven the moms to distraction with his panic attacks whenever there was an unexpected change to someone’s schedule. Reliability and predictability were of paramount importance in Bishop’s life. When the courts finally terminated his parents’ rights in absentia, he was devastated, but his nightmares had finally eased.
Lots of counseling later and Bishop had become an integral member of our family, his quiet good humor hiding an anxious soul, fearful of loss.
Bishop had come out to the family when he was sixteen, almost as an afterthought. He brought a boy home from school one night to study, introduced him to everyone as his boyfriend, then proceeded to kiss the dickens out of him in front of the family. The moms had to have a talk with him about public displays of affection and what was and was not allowed at the dinner table.
I chuckled when I remembered the look on his boyfriend’s face when Bishop had kissed him in front of both moms. Bishop looked up at me from the coffee maker where he was pouring freshly brewed hot coffee into a mug. He put the creamer away, and I couldn’t help but stop him before he went any further.
“Bishop, I’m sorry, buddy, I know it smells wonderful, but I kinda hate coffee…” I began as he set the coffee mug down on the table.
“No shit,” he said wryly, grabbing a glass from the cabinet and filling it with ice. “That must be why I was getting you this,” he said, setting a cold soda on the table in front of me. “The coffee is mine.”
I sighed, cracked the soda can open and poured it over the ice. Bishop sat down across from me, blowing gently on his coffee to cool it. He took a sip, closed his eyes, and a look of utter bliss flashed over his face as the coffee hit his system.
“So, what happened?” He asked as I took a sip of the soda. He pushed a box toward me, which I couldn’t resist opening, only to find cream sticks from Jubilee Donuts inside. Now this was heaven.
I took a bite of one of the pastries, pausing to let the sugary goodness seep into me. Bishop grabbed the other one, making short work of it.
“Where is everybody?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“Moms are at the dojo. Twins had to go in early to get their order in for next month’s pulls and Kaine stayed over with someone,” he answered.
“Who?” I asked, concern creeping in as I thought of my younger brother.
“You know who,” he said, rolling his eyes at me as if I was simpleminded. “Nicki. If his parents hadn’t moved, I swear to god he and Kaine would have been married already.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea…” I said, my hand reaching for my phone.
Bishop’s hand came down on mine as I started to swipe my phone.
“Lee…” his voice came out, a tinge of warning to it. I looked over at him, surprised by the strength in his grip. Bishop had always been the smallest of us, physically, but that just meant he worked twice as hard as the rest of us to be number one - in or out of the dojo.
“He’s a grown man. He can make his own decisions,” he said. His gray eyes were dark and serious, a contrast to his tanned skin tone.
“I know, Bishop. I just can’t let him—”
“What? Sleep with the person he’s been in love with for ten years?” he asked, his lips thinning as he looked at me in disapproval.
“I need to warn him—”
“No, you don’t,” Bishop cut me off. “This is between him and Nicki. The rest of us don’t get a say,” he continued.
“But—”
“No ‘buts’,” Bishop continued, his eyes flashing. “Kaine is a grown ass man. He is an informed adult and he can make adult decisions without everyone else in the family weighing in on them.”
Bishop released my hand, but I let the phone remain on the table where it had started.
“But is he?” I asked. “Informed, I mean?”
Bishop’s gaze held mine for a moment, the unspoken question heavy between us, but then he nodded.
“He is.”
I sighed and looked down at the table. I didn’t know if I could ever stand to have kids. It was hard enough letting my younger siblings grow up.
“Okay,” I said, taking another sip of my soda. “That’s that, then.”
“So?” He asked, as I used a paper towel to wipe a last smear of sugary goodness from my mouth. “What happened?”
“Who said something had to have happened?” I demanded defensively. Suddenly the pastry and soda combination didn’t feel like it was sitting so well in my stomach.
“Well, you and Mason have been joined at the hip ever since he got here,” he said. “Then you show up at the ‘rents, on a weekday, I might add, and look like someone just hit your favorite puppy. So. What. Happened?” He asked, punctuating his words with silence.
I sighed. Bishop was the quiet observer in the family, not that I’d been exactly subtle about how I felt about Mason. He always knew when someone was bullshitting.
So, I told him, at least the parts that were mine to tell. His eyes got a little bigger when I told him about my trip to Milwaukee and shooting Ricky.
“I remember that week,” he said, drinking the last of his coffee. “I remember you being gone for, like, ever. The moms were really worried about you, but they were trying to hide it,” he said, grinning at me. “Unsuccessfully. When you showed back up, you were—different.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Lighter, somehow. Better. It was the first time since Mack died that I started to see the old Lee again.”
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