His right eye had swollen shut, his once beautiful caramel nose transformed into a purple mess, and dozens of lacerations cut across his previously immaculate cheeks and forehead.
At his bedside, medical instruments hissed like angry snakes. Others beeped like an alarm clock, faithfully marking the beat of each breath or pump of Justin’s heart. The discordance threatened to drive Spencer insane and send him running from the room, from the nightmare that followed him out of his dreams and into his reality.
But he was done with running. Whatever time he had left with Justin would be spent at his side. Too much of this past year had been wasted already with bitterness and bile. It was time to begin anew, to focus on rebuilding not just Justin but everything else they had broken in the madness they both created.
Spencer reached out and stroked Justin’s cheek. When he made contact with Justin’s warm skin, tears poured down his cheeks and unstoppable sobs of agony and regret unleashed from Spencer’s soul.
He felt awful for what he had done, for how he had contributed to Justin’s accident. While he knew nothing of the details, he felt confident in his guilt, and his self-hate was not only warranted but just.
Let’s put things in perspective, shall we? his father’s voice asked, once again rising from the depths of his sub-conscious. What you feel bad about is fucking Dutch while Justin almost died.
You’re right, Spencer admitted. He wiped the tears from his eyes. Crying would do him no good right now. Justin needed him to be strong, to be his anchor, so he could find his way back to the land of the living. I do feel bad about that.
What? his father asked in disbelief. You’re actually agreeing with me? You’re not going to say I’m crazy? Or that I’m wrong? Or tell me to shut up?
Spencer shook his head. You’re right. I’ve been denying too many things for far too long. Doing so has only brought me here. No, not just me. Us. All three of us.
Well, hallelujah! I think we’re finally making some motherfucking progress!
I think so, he admitted while holding Justin’s left hand in his own. You’ve been right about so many things. My feelings for Dutch. The source of my real anger for Justin. I’ve wanted things that I’ve been too afraid to admit, like a stupid little boy. But I’m not a boy. I’m a man. I may not have had the balls to say this before, but I do now. I want Justin and Dutch. I love them both.
Fuck me! his father’s voice interjected. It was his father’s way of agreeing with someone, when they finally understood something he had been trying to explain to them for far longer than was necessary. Maybe you’re not so stupid after all. Maybe you are the son I helped raise.
His father’s voice grew quiet. Spencer knew he wasn’t gone. He could feel his presence lurking in the background, wanting to say something but apprehensive about giving voice to it.
Maybe you don’t need me anymore, his father finally muttered.
Maybe I don’t, Spencer replied.
“You okay?” Dutch asked from behind him.
His voice startled Spencer. He had almost forgotten Dutch was in the room with him. They had come together, and they intended to both be here for Justin. After all, they both loved him, and they hoped even in his present condition that Justin would sense the love in their hearts and come back to them both.
Dutch rested his big hand on Spencer’s shoulder, trying to offer comfort. Spencer loved him for that. “You’ve been quiet for a long time,” Dutch commented.
“I’m fine,” Spencer replied. He covered Dutch’s hand with his remaining free hand. The other still held Justin’s firmly in its grasp. Holding onto both their hands at the same time felt right. It felt natural. It also gave him the strength he needed to move on.
I think you’re right, his father said. His voice sounded distant in his head, almost as if he were walking into a dark, deep tunnel. It’s time for us both to move on.
Dad! he called out. His voice sounded more like a child than a grown man.
What is it, son?
Thanks.
His father voiced no reply. All Spencer heard were his father’s footsteps echoing in the distance until the sound disappeared altogether.
THOUGH Spencer’s voice seemed distant, which caught Dutch off guard, an unusual confidence emanated from him, and he had no idea why. Justin’s condition looked dire. For Spencer to seem this self-assured made him wonder if Spencer were perhaps suppressing his feelings instead of dealing with them, instead of accepting how they might have contributed to Justin’s current state.
“Are you sure?” he asked again.
“I am,” Spencer repeated. “I think everything’s going to be okay. I really do.”
“I truly hope so,” a voice from behind them said. “I truly hope so.”
They turned around and saw Justin’s mother, Elena, a woman he heard a lot about but someone he had never previously met, standing behind them. She clutched her black purse as if it was the only lifeline to sanity she had, as if it was the one thing keeping her from falling apart.
When they got here, she had been consulting with the doctors, too busy to talk to them. But now she stood before them. Her stony face betrayed no emotion. She was terrified, and she was angry.
“Elena,” Spencer said as he moved to greet her. She held out her arm, stopping him from embracing her. She stared at Spencer and him suspiciously. The weight of her gaze told him she blamed them both for what happened to her son.
“I assume you’re Dutch,” she said, staring only at him. She moved past Spencer as if he weren’t there, as if he no longer mattered in her world. The look of pain in his eyes told Dutch that Elena’s actions hurt him deeply.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. Although he was almost twice her size, Elena towered over him. Her body was rigid, ready to strike out and seriously damage anyone who might further threaten her son. “I’m sorry for what’s happened to Justin. I’m sorry for everything,” he said in complete misery.
“You’re sorry?” She laughed. “My son is standing at death’s doorway, and you’re sorry?”
Dutch made no reply. He simply cowered before her, his posture reflecting his wretchedness and his complete subservience to her authority.
“My son left me weeks ago, and neither of you did one thing to find him, to bring him back to me.” She glared at them both and looked as if she wanted to slap them. Very hard. “My son might have hurt you. He might have made mistakes, but he loved you both. Very much.”
She shooed Dutch away from Justin’s bedside, forcing him to stand side by side with Spencer as if they were criminals lined up to face charges she was about to read to a courtroom. “What did you do for him while he was gone?” She asked while throwing her purse to the floor like the proverbial gauntlet. “From the looks of you both, the answer is quite obvious. Not a damn thing!”
Beside him, Spencer winced. Dutch understood what that meant. Elena Jimenez never cursed, and by doing so now, she was about to unleash a mother’s fury upon them.
“It seems to me the only thing you boys, not men, boys, have done is screw around with each other. Did you think this would somehow even the score? Did Justin mean that little to you both?”
They said nothing. All they could do was accept her anger because they both knew she was right.
“Answer me!” she screamed at them.
“I don’t know what to say,” Spencer replied. “We messed up. We should have done more.”
“We do love your son, Mrs. Jimenez,” Dutch finally said. “We love him a lot. And if we could take back these past few weeks, if we could do it all over again, we would do things differently.”
Elena seemed unconvinced. Her gaze remained steady and dangerous.
“But none of that matters at this point. We’re here now. The both of us. And we’ll do whatever we can to make Justin better. To make him come back to us. To you.”
Slowly, her eyes wavered. Tears she held back rose quickly, and unable to stop them, they fell with such force the
y almost knocked her off her feet. She was in deep misery, facing a fear most parents in the world never wanted to confront—the possibility of outliving her child.
Dutch rushed to her side and took her in his arms. At first, she resisted. She fought back. She beat his chest and yelled at him. “This is all your fault,” she screamed. “You should be the one fighting for your life on that bed. Not my son,” she bawled. “Not my son!”
Her naked sorrow ripped through his soul like a blade, not only because of the power of her anguish but because her words were true. He should be the one fighting for his life. He was the one who had brought all this pain into their world. If he had been strong enough, if he hadn’t self-destructed, he never would have had his accident, his sister never would have called Justin, and Justin and Spencer would still be living their happy lives without him.
“I would take his place in a heartbeat,” he admitted to her as he stroked her hair. Dutch wanted her to feel his sincerity through his words but also through his touch.
Although she resisted his comfort at first, trying with all her might to wriggle herself free from his arms, the fight suddenly left her body as she sank deeply into his chest. Her tears rolled out of her body, covering his shirt until it was soaked worse than if he had been caught in a cloudburst. “I would die for him,” he told her.
“I would too,” Spencer said, embracing Elena from behind. “I know you’re angry with me, and you have every right to be. But my love for your son hasn’t changed. It will never change. It took me a long time to realize that, but I realize it now. I’ll make this right,” Spencer told her. “If it’s the last thing I do on this earth.”
Her body still convulsed in insurmountable torment, refusing to accept what she heard as fact. But after a few minutes wedged between two men who professed their undying love for her son, her heaving body slowly quieted. Her sobs gave way to heavy exhalations until at last she was calm.
She looked up into their eyes. First at Dutch. Then at Spencer. She gazed deeply, searching their souls for the truth and determined to ferret out any dishonesty. When she found none, when she realized what they told her to be undeniably true, her tense body relaxed.
“You do love him,” she said. “Both of you.”
They nodded simultaneously.
“But there’s something you’re not admitting to me,” she told them. “I can see it.”
“What do you mean?” Spencer asked.
Dutch was confused as well. “What do you think we’re hiding?”
She wiped her tear-stained face and stood directly between them. “You love my son,” she said. “I believe that. But I can see you also love each other.”
They stared at Elena in disbelief. Dutch couldn’t believe how incredibly perceptive Justin’s mother was. Justin had always told him that it was difficult to keep anything from her, but he found the accuracy of her insight not only uncanny but almost magical.
“Am I right?”
Spencer nodded.
“You’re right,” he told her.
At that moment, the beeping monitors that kept time to Justin’s beating heart sounded in alarm. All three of them turned and watched as the pulse monitor, which previously displayed a dark green line rising and falling, suddenly dropped into a straight flat line.
JUSTIN drifted flat on his back amidst a dark black sea. The waves slapped against his body mercilessly, threatening to drown him and drag him down to the gloomy depths below. Every so often, one of the unforgiving waves washed over his face, forcing water down his nose and throat.
He expelled the vile liquid, which tasted like swill, by violently coughing, but each time another wave forced him to inhale more water, it became more difficult to recover.
His body grew increasingly weary from trying to stay afloat while at the same time keeping even more water from swamping over him. Simply trying to hold his head above water seemed increasingly impossible, for it appeared to weigh fifty pounds instead of the average of nine pounds.
Even his legs found it difficult to stay at the water line. Anchored with what felt like stones, they kept slipping beneath the water. Forcing them back up to maintain his buoyancy proved more problematic with each passing second.
He knew it was only a matter of time before the dark sea claimed his body.
The thought didn’t fill him with the abject terror he expected. He was, after all, deathly afraid of water, and being stranded in the middle of the ocean was one of his most frequently recurring nightmares. Right now, he should be panicking, kicking and flailing at the water while searching for some foothold, some lifeline that would keep him afloat.
Instead, he felt only calm. A dead calm.
There was simply no reason to be afraid. Death was part of life, after all. It was the end every living thing ultimately faced, and he found he was more than ready to embrace it.
A reason to live no longer existed. He had seen the love in Spencer and Dutch’s eyes. It was a love that was all their own and didn’t include him. They had found what they had been searching for, what had been missing in their lives. They had found each other.
While he was angry at first, he realized now that he had no right to be. He had hurt them both a great deal. In his quest to understand his emotions for the both of them, he’d nearly destroyed the two men he claimed to have loved. That wasn’t what love was supposed to do. It was supposed to be a nurturing force, something that created only joy not heartache.
Perhaps he was never meant to live his life with Spencer. Or Dutch. Maybe his entire purpose was to bring Spencer and Dutch together so that when he died he left them with someone to fill the void he had uncaringly created.
When he thought about it, he hoped that was his final gift to them both. He wanted to believe that his life, that everything he had done the past few years, had some meaning, some divine purpose that he at first failed to comprehend.
His purpose might never have been to keep true love for himself but to grant it to two men far more deserving of each other than he was of either of them.
When he thought about it in those terms, it made his inevitable end much easier to accept. It filled him with a sense of satisfaction that made his heart less heavy and his spirit soar.
The internal exuberance did nothing to stop the increasing weight of his body, however. His legs now dangled well below the surface. He listed at an awkward forty-five degree angle, ready to plummet downward into the waiting arms of death below.
He fought to right himself, not quite ready to disappear beneath the water, to quietly slip into the fathoms below. Flapping his arms back and forth like a wounded fish, he attempted to force his legs back to the surface, and at first they started to rise, slowly.
But no sooner did they ascend a few inches then another wave rolled over him, filling his lungs with water and weighing down his already exhausted limbs.
His lungs contracted uncontrollably, attempting to squeeze all liquid from its airy sacs up and out his throat. In this endeavor, they failed.
There was simply too much water to combat in his lungs and in the churning ocean around him. Wave after wave assaulted his already fatigued body. It no longer possessed the strength it needed to fight or to keep him afloat.
Instead of fighting a losing battle, Justin surrendered. He gazed up into the darkness that loomed above him as his body resumed its unstoppable journey beneath the watery surface.
Hanging over him in the dark sky a single pinprick of light blinked into existence. Its presence filled him with warmth that only came from love. He wanted to reach for it, but his arms were too heavy. Already, they dangled helplessly underwater with the majority of his body.
As the water rose above his waist and abdomen, the light above sparked into a coil of flame. It stretched across the sky, igniting another spark and then another until an entire constellation of stars somehow blazed to life overhead.
The water reached his chest and then his neck, but still all he could focus on was
the swirling mass of fire and light. It bulged outward, trying to take on a shape as if it battled the very darkness that surrounded him, as if it refused to be snuffed out and would only stop once light once again held dominion over all.
An expansive fiery wing erupted into view. Then another wing split the sky with tremendous fury that sent shockwaves of flame raining down around him and the water, which had now risen to his chin.
In the center of the blazing wings, a familiar form took shape. It was a horse, a flying horse made of fire.
He knew of the constellations called the Phoenix and the one named Pegasus, but never before had he heard of an amalgamation of the two in the stars. This, however, was what the flaming creature seemed to be—a union of two constellations that somehow merged into a third, more beautiful creation never imagined before.
The newly born creature whinnied above him and then darted through the sky, headed straight for him. On its back sat two forms. He couldn’t make out who they were, but they seemed familiar, as if he had known them his entire life.
Before the fiery flying horse could reach him, before he could identify the people who rode on the magical creature’s back, his head slipped below the water’s surface. He fell deeper into the dark, watery folds until the light of the blazing horse was suddenly snuffed out of view.
When its light was gone, only darkness remained.
CHAPTER 48
2011
SPENCER looked around at the hollowed-out remains of the house he and Justin had shared for almost ten years. Once filled with the treasures of their past—pictures of numerous trips around the world, furniture purchased for the apartment they once shared, and scores of other objects with their own stories—the house now stood completely empty. The memories they’d spent years collecting were now safely packed away in boxes and loaded into the moving van waiting outside.
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