Destination, Wedding!

by Xavier Mayne

  “As delightful as it would be to seduce another dozen strong, flexible young men, we simply must get on our way. The wedding of the century is going to happen soon, and it shall not happen without us. Now, that darling ticket agent over there,” Bryce said as he gestured toward a handsome gentleman in a uniform, “said the best way to England is to grab a ferry at the port.”

  Nestor beamed. “Sound like fun.”

  “Not that kind of fairy. A boat ferry.”

  “Oh.” Nestor slumped a little but shrugged stoically.

  “Patience, my darling. All we need to do is take the ferry and we’re nearly there. Simple!”

  Nestor nodded as if he believed anything Bryce set his hand to could possibly be simple.

  But true to his word, Bryce shortly had them off the train and at the ferry terminal, buying passage to Newcastle.

  “It sounds lovely, doesn’t it?” Bryce said as he handed Nestor his ticket.

  “The wedding, it is in the new castle?”

  Bryce, desperate to keep Nestor’s spirits up, skipped lightly over the truth. “Not exactly, strictly speaking. But we’ll be able to get to the wedding lickety-split. After the ferry, we just need to take a train to another train and then a taxi or a horse or something. It’s a little vague once we get out into the countryside. But we will get there, my darling, we will!”

  Late night, at sea

  DONNELLY TURNED over again, thrashing restlessly in his sleep. The creeping dread of a nightmare returning iced its way down his spine.

  “Because you fucking punched me, that’s why,” Gabriel shouted, slamming the car door shut again.

  “I can explain. But I can’t do it here. Please, get in.” Bryan again opened the passenger door of his sleek Euro sedan.

  “So you can… what? Drive me to a meeting of your football buddies so they can all take their turns at me? You were the one who grabbed me, asshole. I should be the one who punched you in the fucking face.”

  Bryan stepped close. “We both know that’s not what you wanted to do when I grabbed you.”

  “Fuck. You.” Donnelly shook his head, snarling. “Just fuck the fuck off.”

  Bryan grabbed his wrist, held it tightly in his fist. “Gabriel, give me a chance.”

  “A chance to do what? Tell me why you grabbed my dick?”

  He looked side to side as if checking to be sure no one was looking. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I’ll tell you. But you have to come with me. Look, I’m not going to beat you up or anything.”

  “And why should I believe you?”

  “I… I just can’t tell you here. Come with me, please. It’s important.” Bryan was pleading now, his eyes wild with desperation.

  Gabriel looked up. “Where are we going?” The speedometer was about to hit ninety, so wherever they were going they would get there quickly.

  “We have some hunting land about ten miles out,” Bryan replied. His seemed to be more relaxed now that they were putting the town well behind them. He barely slowed down when the dirt road appeared on the right, sweeping a billowing cloud of dust behind the car as the back end fishtailed around before coming true out of the turn. The road dipped down into a little valley covered with trees, and he made another quick turn and slid to a stop where the road ended overlooking a wide green meadow. He switched off the car, then sat silently with his hands in his lap.

  The sun, suddenly setting, glared orange in Gabriel’s eye. He could wait no longer. “What were you going to tell me?”

  Bryan huffed out an anguished breath. “It’s not something I can just blurt out,” he said quietly.

  “Then why did we come all the way out here?”

  “Because you have to stop.”

  Gabriel looked at him, looked for some sign that would tell him what he was supposed to stop doing. Bryan’s face was utterly inscrutable.

  “I have to stop… what?”

  Bryan swallowed hard. “You have to… I need you to stop… doing what you’re doing.”

  Still nothing. “What am I doing? What are you…?” Gabriel hammered his fists on his knees in frustration. “What the fuck are we doing out here?”

  “I need you to stop looking at me, okay?” It was clear that blurting this cost Bryan greatly. He looked away, out the side window of the car, panting.

  “Looking at you?” Gabriel felt the heat rising up into his face as the heavy weight of guilt settled onto his chest. He felt the truth of Bryan’s accusation thickening in his arteries, and his heart struggled to keep beating.

  “I see you.” Bryan’s statement was terse but devoid of emotion. “You think I don’t notice, but I do.”

  “I don’t understand.” Gabriel understood perfectly.

  “Look, I don’t hate you. Until today I didn’t know if I was imagining it, so I had to test you. I asked the coach if I could cross-train with the wrestling team, and I grabbed you to see what you would do. And when I did, I saw it in your eyes.”

  Gabriel was silent for a long moment. “Saw what?” He knew exactly what Bryan had seen, but there was some masochistic streak in him that wanted to hear it, needed his mortification to be completed by the uttering aloud of his perverse longing.

  “I saw you wanted it too.”

  Gabriel had to play that statement back in his head several times before he fully understood the import of what Bryan had said. By the time he had, Bryan had opened the car door and stepped out. He strode out into the meadow and stood there, arms crossed adamantly over his chest as if he could withstand anything, fortresslike.

  Gabriel must have gotten out of the car too, for he found himself standing next to Bryan.

  “I wanted it… too?” he asked, laying emphasis on that final word. He stared straight ahead, afraid to even glance at the man standing silent next to him.

  Bryan was silent for long enough that Gabriel had to break the tension. He turned and saw tears running down Bryan’s cheeks. His stony expression hadn’t changed—he looked like a statue of a classical virtue, like Fortitude or Valor, that had been rained on. The tears were the expression of an emotion deep enough not to show any other way.

  “What does that mean, that… I wanted it too?” Gabriel asked.

  Bryan exploded. “It means that every time I see you looking at me it is like a fucking knife in my heart. I know you can’t walk past me without looking at me. And you know how I know that? Think about that for a minute. How do I know you’re always looking at me? Because I’m always looking at you, asshole. That’s why. Did you ever think of that?” He jabbed Gabriel in the chest, knocking him back a couple of stumbling steps. “Did you?” he screamed.

  Gabriel was confused. And furious. He lunged forward, closing the gap between them in an instant, red lights flashing at the edges of his vision. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he screamed back, matching Bryan’s anguished tone.

  “I don’t want to be like you!” Bryan bellowed, sobbing. Then, without warning, he bent double and threw up, monstrously, horribly. He staggered a few steps away, then fell to his knees, gasping.

  Gabriel stepped back in shock. He had no idea what he was witnessing, other than that it was the most terrifying spectacle he could imagine. Bryan retched and cried until he could make no more sound, then collapsed onto his side, panting. Gabriel reached out and put his hand on Bryan’s shoulder, not knowing what else to do.

  “Are you okay?” he asked lamely.

  Bryan groaned and twisted his shoulder out from under Gabriel’s hand. “No, I’m not fucking okay,” he muttered.

  Gabriel sat silently for a moment. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  Bryan slowly brought himself upright, sitting on the grass at the top of the meadow. He gave a long sigh and spat off to the side several times. “I don’t either, to be honest.”

  Gabriel sat down next to him. “Then tell me the parts you do understand. I’m a pretty good listener. Tell me what you can, and w
e’ll figure out the rest.”

  Bryan turned and stared into Gabriel’s eyes as if searching for something. “Figures,” he said.

  “What figures?”

  “That you’d turn out to be nice.”

  “Thanks, I guess?” Gabriel shook his head, frustrated by his inability to understand anything Bryan said.

  “I kind of hoped you’d be an asshole. That I could tell you to stop, and then you’d get pissed at me, and then I’d beat the shit out of you, and then it’d all be over.”

  Gabriel’s mouth dropped open. “That’s what you hoped for?”

  For the first time, a hint of a grin showed at the corner of Bryan’s mouth. “Not really.” He looked down at his feet. “I guess part of me really wanted you to be amazing, but that’s the part of me I have to shut down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t be like you.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not gay.”

  “Oh.” Gabriel thought this over for a moment. “So when you said you look at me as much as I look at you, what you meant was… what, exactly?”

  “It means that when I see you, I imagine what it would be like to… to be like you. To be able to look at someone the way you look at me.”

  Gabriel was starting to see. Maybe. He wanted to help Bryan, but doing so meant exposing himself completely. Could he do that? He looked at Bryan’s helpless, tear-streaked face and knew what he had to do.

  “Don’t you look at Cheryl that way?” There. Now he knew. It was like an analogy on a standardized test: you are to me as Cheryl is to you. Simple. And deadly.

  Bryan flinched as if Gabriel had punched him in the throat. “Why would you bring her into this?”

  “Because of what you said about the way I look at you. Look, I’m being completely honest with you right now, and it’s scaring the shit out of me. But now I’ve said it, so there it is. I look at you all the time because I cannot drag my eyes away from you.”

  A strangled moan wrenched its way out of Bryan’s throat. He blinked hard, as if forcing back tears.

  “I hear your voice in the corridor and I have to stop and look for you, because I need to see what you look like today, what you’re wearing and how it fits you, who you’re talking to. I have to see if you’re smiling or serious because both of those are beautiful.” Gabriel was shivering now in the cold light of truth-telling but could not stop. “Sometimes I turn and follow you even though it makes me late for class. I walk behind you and listen to you talk to your friends, or to Cheryl, hanging on every word you say because it’s you saying it. And if it’s too noisy in the hallway to hear your voice, I just watch your amazing ass and dream about getting into those jeans. So if that’s what you mean about not wanting to be like me, I totally get it because it sounds like I’m the most pathetic thing in the world, and creepy too.”

  Bryan was shaking his head. “No, it’s not pathetic and it’s not creepy. You think I haven’t done that before? I spent six months following Cheryl around before she finally said she’d go out with me. I used to watch her cheerleader skirt swish back and forth and dream of getting up in there.” He looked out at the horizon, just starting to pink up.

  “Okay, I’m confused again,” Gabriel said.

  Bryan’s head whipped around, the faraway look transformed in an instant to one of hawklike intensity. “I’ve been chasing girls like Cheryl my whole life. Long as I can remember. My mom has a picture on the fridge of me in preschool with my arm around a girl, and she wrote on the bottom of it ‘Bryan’s first girlfriend.’ I don’t even remember her, but I see that picture every day. But then you….” He turned and looked back out at the horizon.

  Gabriel waited a long moment. “I… what?”

  “You came along. When I started here freshman year, I didn’t know anybody—just the guys on the football team, because my dad made sure I got on the team as soon as we moved to town. You were in my math class that first year. And every time Mr. Chandler made me get up at the whiteboard and work a proof, I could feel you staring at me. Everyone else was watching to see what bonehead error the dumb football jock would make, scanning my chicken scratch for any little mistake, but you—you were watching me. I could feel your eyes boring into my biceps.”

  Gabriel had been about to protest when that detail about the biceps came out. Then he knew Bryan really had noticed. His secret had never been a secret.

  “In my defense, have you ever seen your biceps? They are like melons that fell from the garden of the gods and landed, still round and full of divine strength, on your arms.”

  “All of that poetry inside you, and that’s what you waste it on? My biceps?”

  “I won’t apologize for appreciating your biceps,” Gabriel replied with something that sounded like dignity.

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about, right there. That’s what I could never do.”

  “What, write a poem about biceps?”

  Bryan grunted, maybe a laugh. “No, doofus. I could never tell a guy that I thought his biceps were sexy.”

  “I don’t think I used the word ‘sexy,’” Gabriel replied, mirroring Bryan’s sly half grin. “But of course you wouldn’t do that. You’re straight. Surely you’re attracted to Cheryl’s biceps?”

  Bryan laughed and shook his head. “I’m straight except when you’re around,” he whispered.

  Gabriel felt the smile evaporate from his face, just as he felt the breath leave his lungs. “What?” he managed to huff out.

  “I guess that’s what I needed to tell you,” Bryan said, then turned away to look at the sunset.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means,” he answered without turning his face to Gabriel, “you do this to me.”

  “I do what to you?” Gabriel felt the frustration that had finally been relieved by their light moment of laughter returning.

  “This,” Bryan answered, gesturing to Gabriel, and himself, and the entire meadow in which they stood. “Do you think I would drive out to the most remote place I know to have a heart-to-heart with any other guy? You do this to me, Gabriel. I have a girlfriend. I’m on the football team. I’m a normal guy. But not when you’re around. When I see you, and I see you’re looking at me, it’s like a door opening on another world… another life. A life I am only part of when you’re around. And then once you’re gone, I can’t get it back, couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

  “Are you saying you… feel the same way about me?”

  Bryan shook his head. Then, like a metronome with a failing battery, his head slowed its side-to-side motion. He began to nod. “It’s that, and it’s more than that. When you’re there, I feel more myself than any other time. Like you’re leading this life of truth and opportunity, and as much as I want to follow you, I can’t because I’m not you. And there are times when I wish I was.” He stared at Gabriel, hard, as if blinking would break the spell of truth-telling. “I’m only gay when you’re around. I’m not… that way. But you made me.”

  “I haven’t done anything to you,” Gabriel protested. “We’ve been at the same school for almost four years, and this is the first time we’ve actually talked to each other. I don’t know anything about you, and you know even less about me.”

  “That’s not true and you know it. Who was my girlfriend before Cheryl?”

  “Sarah,” Gabriel answered without hesitation.

  “And why did we break up?”

  Gabriel paused, not sure he should reveal what he knew—what he’d heard through the grapevine. “Because she cheated on you with Troy.”

  “That’s right. And I know that you and Cameron were together for most of junior year, but you cut him loose because he got with a guy in a car after the Homecoming dance.”

  Gabriel blushed at the recollection, but he decided not to point out that he’d been there with Cam in the car and that their decision not to be exclusive was a direct result of Gabriel’s obs
ession with Bryan.

  “How did you know I was with Cam? We never did anything at school to make a big deal of it or anything.”

  “Haven’t you been listening to me? I was watching you. I saw the way you two would meet up after school and walk together. The way he lit up when he saw you coming.” Bryan sighed softly. “I wanted to be him. I wanted to be able to smile like that and not care who saw me. I wanted… you.”

  “Bryan, I don’t want you to get mad, but I have to ask this.” Gabriel paused, looking for agreement. Bryan finally nodded, so he continued. “If I’ve been dreaming about you, and you’ve been wishing you were with me, then why are we standing here? Why don’t we grab a blanket or something out of your car and just throw down right here, give it a try?”

  “Because I’m not gay.”

  “Look, I don’t care what we call it. We can do this and not have it change who we are.”

  “You don’t get it. When I say I’m not gay, I don’t mean that I’m not attracted to you. I don’t mean that I don’t like musicals or interior decorating or whatever. What I mean is that out of everyone I’ve ever met, in my whole life, you’re the only guy I’ve ever been attracted to. At all. And I’ve tried. During spring break freshman year, I was home alone for a whole day while my family went to my dad’s company picnic, and I decided to test whether what you did to me in the hallway was just you being you, or if it meant I was actually gay and just didn’t know it. For months I told myself it wasn’t me, and that you were just this kind of demon that God sent to test my faith or something. I pulled up some gay porn—a lot of gay porn, actually—and tried it out. I must have watched a hundred guys boning each other.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. It did exactly nothing for me. Couldn’t imagine myself doing it, wasn’t turned on by it, never looked at it again.”

  “Well, not everyone—”

  “Gets off on porn? Yeah, I thought of that. So that summer I visited my gay cousin and got him to take me with him to a party so I could meet some actual gay people.”

  Gabriel looked him up and down. “They must have enjoyed meeting you.”