by T. J. Klune
“We had just broken up!” I hiss back. “You say it was never about going behind my back, but that’s exactly what you did! Have you just been waiting all these years for us to break up so you could make your move?”
“Have you?” he retorts, his voice ice. “Is she right? Was she just someone you used until you grew a pair and finally admitted who you really were? You forget that regardless of whom you’re related to in this room, regardless of who you’ve fucked or who you’re fucking, I’m the most like you. I know the guilt you must have felt every time you looked in Otter’s face, because I know the guilt I felt every time I looked at Anna. You can sit there and spout your bullshit, but don’t you think for a second that I don’t know exactly what you did. Otter didn’t have to tell me. Anna didn’t have to tell me. The Kid sure as shit didn’t say a goddamn thing. But I didn’t need to hear it from them because the second I found out, the second, I knew exactly what it was like for you.”
“Didn’t stop you, though, did it?” I snap.
“Didn’t stop you, either. Does Anna know why Otter left to begin with? Does the Kid? Mrs. Paquinn? No? Anyone?” He smiles at me.
My face goes white as Otter growls, “That’s enough, Creed. You’ve made your point.”
But he hasn’t. He turns to Anna and says, “The night Otter left? Bear got drunk and kissed Otter and then freaked out about it. Otter thought he was influencing Bear somehow and had his own freak-out and left town. That’s the real reason why he left. Everything else was a lie.” Even as he says it, the anger in his voice fades, and the blood leaves his face as he seems to realize exactly what he’s just done. The ending comes out as a whisper.
Anna looks at me, pain crystal clear. I wait for the inevitable to come, knowing no matter what I can say in return, Creed’s words ring true, and I hate him for it. I hate him for being so much stronger than I could ever be. I wait, that is, until Anna’s hand suddenly flashes upward and slaps Creed across the face, the sound chilling in its flatness. His head rocks back, and we all stare, dumbfounded.
“I knew that, you asshole,” Anna says, voice even. “I figured that out on my own. You may be right about Bear, but at least he never hurt people intentionally like that. Apologize. Now.”
He stares at her in disbelief. “You just hit me,” he says profoundly.
She glares back. “You’re lucky it was me and not Otter. You may not have noticed when you were ripping open old wounds, but he’s about to do far worse than I can ever do.”
We all glance at Otter, and I shudder as I see his eyes are black yet again. I don’t know why I didn’t notice his arm around my shoulder tensing, his breath becoming ragged, his cheek twitching. I almost want to let him at it, but I can’t do that. I grab his chin and pull his face toward mine, and even though things might not be right between us yet (how could it be with so many things yet unsaid?), his gaze softens once it reaches mine, and I see whatever’s going on in his head start to ebb. I can do this for him and maybe that’s what it means to be in love: to be able to bring someone back from the brink. “We good?” I murmur, just for him to hear. He nods.
I look back at Creed, and while I see the shame written on his face, I still see the weight of his words there too. I think that maybe his immediate acceptance of Otter and me was just an act to cover his own guilt. He was too easy to win over, too quick to jump to my defense over what had to be an impossible change in the way his orderly world worked. I allow myself to be sad for a moment, wondering if things would ever be the same between us again. I hope so, because he was right when he’d said we are the same. Whatever happens, at least I know that.
“I’m sorry,” Creed mumbles.
“What happens now?” I ask, hating how small my voice sounds.
Creed looks at me for a moment, then looks away. “We move on.”
“Is that how you want it?”
He nods. “For now. Maybe… I don’t know. Maybe one day, Bear.”
I get up, feeling Otter’s hands trailing down my back. I walk over to Creed and hunker down before him. He still won’t look at me, but it doesn’t matter. He hears me. “Whatever it takes, man. I’ll be here waiting for you. Whatever it takes.” He gasps in a deep breath, and I see his body shake. I stand and have turned to walk back toward Otter when he reaches up and grabs my wrist. I wait.
“Do… do you think… you think you can just not be mad anymore?” he asks quietly. “That this can all just be over? I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I know.”
He jumps up and wraps himself around me, and I grab him back. That was fast. I expected it to last at least six more hours before we started blubbering at each other. His voice is harsh in my ear: “You know, we didn’t used to be so fucking emotional about shit. I blame this on you.”
I laugh quietly. “Whose idea was it to be blood brothers?”
He pulls back, a look of wonder on his face. “You were thinking about that, too, weren’t you? The day you told us about you and Otter.”
I nod. “It’s strong, Creed. You and me, we go way back. That’s strong. What I have with Otter, it’s strong too. You going to be okay with that?”
“I don’t have a choice, do I?”
I shrug. “There’s always a choice.”
He chuckles. “Not with us. We go way back, remember?”
I do.
“That was so special,” Mrs. Paquinn says, sniffing.
“That’s one word for it,” Otter grumbles.
“Oh, is someone feeling left out?” Creed laughs shakily, stepping away. I notice how his eyes flicker at his words. I hope one day he’ll be okay with it.
“Speaking of,” Anna says, looking pointedly at me and Otter, “I think we’ve said what needs to be said. For now. Don’t you two have somewhere else you’d like to be?”
I nod shyly and look to my brother. “Kid, you’ll be okay for a while?” I ask, needing permission from him, needing him to tell me again that it will all be okay.
He dismisses us with a wave of his hand. “Go finish this. I expect everything back to normal by the time you get back.”
There’s that word again. Normal.
Otter stands and holds out his hand. “Bear, you ready?”
I take what’s offered.
15.
Bear and Otter
HE DRIVES, which is probably safer as I can’t take my eyes off of him. He smirks gently, and I know he can feel my gaze on his face. He does his best to ignore me, but that’s okay. I just want to look at him. He looks older, somehow. Maybe it’s the bags around his eyes. Maybe it’s the lines around his mouth. I don’t know. I don’t care. He looks as good to me as he ever has. I want to reach out and touch him, to rub my hands through his thick, light hair, but I don’t. I still don’t know if this is real.
“What are you looking at?” he says in a low voice.
You, always you, I want to say. But as we all know by now, my mouth doesn’t work that way. “Did I break Jonah’s nose?”
He laughs and shakes his head. “What kind of an answer do you want me to give you?”
I think for a moment. “The right one.”
We pull up to a red light, and he slows to a stop before turning to me. “You didn’t break his nose. Although I thought you had with how far you cocked your fist back.” He grins slightly. “Did it make you feel better?”
I look away and shrug. “He shouldn’t have been so damn smug,” I grumble.
“Are you sure you weren’t just projecting?”
I snap back and glare at him. “That’s not funny,” I say through his giggling fit.
“Oh, Bear, one day it will be very funny.” He picks up my bruised hand and kisses it. “One day, we’ll joke about how you punched some guy out of jealousy for me.”
I scowl. “So I’ve been told. And I wasn’t jealous. What the fuck was he doing there, anyways?” My eyes narrow. “Did you call him?” The light changes to green, and we move forward. Otter looks away. Dammit, I wan
ted to see his face when he answers me.
“No, Bear, I didn’t,” he says quietly.
“Then what the fuck was he doing there?”
“Why do you think he was there?”
My hands tap nervously on my knee. “He wanted you to go back with him. Why did he say he was your boyfriend? Were you trying to get back together with him?” This last question comes out before I can stop myself, and I shrink in my seat, hating how my voice has taken on a whining tinge. It’s not a question I wanted to ask, but it’s been there, haunting me since I had seen Jonah in his room. He shouldn’t have been there. I scowl again.
Otter glances over at me. “Of course I wasn’t,” he scoffs at me. “Why the hell would you even think that?”
I don’t know. “We were… whatever,” I say as I wave my hand. “You didn’t know if I was coming back.”
“Well, yeah,” he admits. “That doesn’t mean I’d run right back to him. I told you, Bear, whatever was between me and him was done the moment I left to come back home.”
“Yeah, he seemed to understand that real well,” I mumble, picking at the hole in my hoodie sleeve. I don’t know how it got there. It’s still kind of wet, as are my jeans, and I can feel sand in my ass crack. It starts to itch as soon as I think of Mrs. Paquinn and her sand crabs. Lying on the beach all night in the surf was a bad idea in a long string of bad ideas. This better turn out okay, because I obviously need Otter to think for me. I have too many stupid ideas all on my own. Like not changing clothes before leaving the apartment.
“Jonah’s like that,” Otter says, bringing me out of my thoughts. “When he wants something, he makes sure he gets it.”
“Wow, what a classy guy,” I say, feeling mean. “He seems like the type that beats his boyfriends. Did he hit you? Did he let you leave the house on your own?”
“Hey,” he says sternly. “If I recall, the only one hitting anyone was you.”
“Yeah, well, don’t be smug in my direction. Especially when you’re fucking with what’s mine,” I growl.
“Yours, huh?” He glances at me again, his expression blank.
I suddenly feel embarrassed. I blush and look back out the window. I don’t want to come off sounding so possessive, so needy. A lot of shit has been said between us, mostly by me, and here I am, mouthing off without a goddamn filter. And yet, I feel even worse things rising in my throat like bile, and I choke them back down. Fuck the filter: I need a muzzle.
“Where are we going?” I ask, changing the subject gracefully.
“You’ll see.”
“Oh.”
Silence, just for a few moments. Then, “Bear?”
“Yeah?”
“He went back to San Diego. He came here to try to get me to go back with him.”
“Oh.”
“Bear?”
“Yeah?”
“I said no.”
A FEW minutes later, we pull into a neighborhood I don’t recognize. The houses are older, lower middle class. Some have toys strewn across the lawn. One has pink lawn flamingos in the front yard. Another has their Christmas lights still up. Or up already. I don’t know which. ’Tis the season and blah blah blah.
He pulls up in front of a house toward the end of the street. It’s small and painted a weird shade of green. There’s a waist-high chain-link fence that circles what I guess would be considered a front yard, if it was big enough to be called a yard. The driveway is cracked. The garage door looks like if it opened, it would fall off. Realtors would advertise it as cozy and a great starter home. Realtors are such liars.
Otter turns the car off and puts his hands on the steering wheel, tapping them nervously. He looks at the house and takes a deep breath.
“Did you want to go back with him?” I blurt out, not meaning to. Now that I think about it, even a muzzle probably won’t work.
He exhales explosively and laughs. “No.”
“Then why would he come here?”
He shrugs. “I told you. That’s Jonah. He doesn’t like taking no for an answer. Remember when I said that if I didn’t pick up the phone when he called, he threatened to come here?”
I nod.
“I didn’t pick up the phone. He came here. It’s that simple. Although I expected it to happen a lot sooner than it did.”
Well, yippee for that. “Don’t sound so disappointed,” I say to him snidely.
He cocks an eyebrow at me. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
“No,” I retort. I pause. “Make what easy?”
“Get out of the car,” he orders in that tone of voice he does so well. I get out of the car quickly. My knees crack, and I bend backward to pop my back, feeling sand slide down the back of my legs, tickling my skin, catching on the hairs. He walks around the car and stands next to me looking up at the house. It needs a new roof. It needs new gutters. It needs to be leveled and made into a parking lot for a Walmart that will put all the local shops out of business. Why the hell are we here? I want to go home and take a shower and change my clothes and then take off those clothes and fuck like bunnies. It’s funny, really. Even though I was ready to talk to him until I was blue in the face less than an hour ago, I’m now so sick of talking about my feelings and his feelings and everyone else’s feelings. Shit can wait until tomorrow. I open my mouth to say as much, but Otter speaks first. For once I don’t interrupt
“He came back here to try and make me go with him,” he says, still looking at the house. “I don’t know if he thought he could persuade me or what, but that didn’t stop him from trying. I was shocked when he walked into my room, but I wasn’t surprised. I told you that I thought he would show up at some point. I just didn’t know that he would happen to pick the worst time in the world.”
I stay silent. My eyes don’t leave his profile.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Bear. I’m human. I considered it, if only for a second. And that was the worst second of my life. Even through everything that had happened over the past few days, that was still the worst moment of it all. That I actually considered leaving with him. I felt like I was betraying you, but worse, that I was betraying myself.”
I find my voice. “Creed called me. That’s why I came over. He said you were going back to California.”
He turns to face me. “I was, and don’t you give me that look, either. Creed was right: you two are the same. You never let me finish.” His admonishment is soft, but there nonetheless. “I said I was going back to San Diego, and Creed flipped out and started screaming that I couldn’t, that I just couldn’t. Then he called me a fucking bastard and ran out of the room.” He pauses. “I think he’d had quite a few shots by that point.”
“Then what were you doing?”
“I was going back to get the rest of my stuff,” he says as he takes a step closer to me. “I was going back to pack the rest of my things, and to tell my work that I wouldn’t be back after all. You see, even though this guy broke my heart, I wasn’t just going to run away again.” Another step closer. I can smell him now, his Otter-ness.
“You weren’t?” I say, staring up at him, unable to move.
He shakes his head. “I had plans for me and him. And I wasn’t going to allow a little thing like him saying I was a mistake and that he never wanted to see me again deter me from what I wanted.” Another step. I could raise my hand and touch him now, if I was so inclined.
“You weren’t?” I say brilliantly.
“Of course not.” His eyes flash, gold and green. “How was I to know that this guy was trying to protect me as much as he was trying to protect everyone else? How was I to know what was really going on behind those words he said to me? I didn’t know, but I knew that this guy, my guy, wouldn’t have said them without reason, without something that made sense, at least to him.” Another step and his chest bumps mine. Our hands stay at our sides. His breath warms my face.
“I should’ve told you,” I mumble, staring at the freckle on his cheek, a patch of
stubble he missed while shaving near his jaw line.
“Yes, yes you should have. You should’ve told me a lot of things. Do you know how much it hurt having to hear this from Creed? To hear this from my little brother and not the man I loved?”
I gulp. “Loved?” As in past tense?
“Loved,” he repeats. “Love.” Oh, how my heart beats faster. “Do you know what it felt like? I felt like I couldn’t be trusted to help figure this whole stupid mess out, that I wasn’t capable of understanding how scared my guy must have been. But then I realized how selfish I was being, how I was just thinking about me, and how it was I, I, I. It was never just about you or me. It wasn’t even just about the Kid, even though you thought it was. It was about all of us, Papa Bear. All of us.”
“It was?” I sniff.
He raises his strong hands and places them on my waist. The tenuous connection has been made. Electricity flashes through my body. I tremble. “It was. It is. And that’s the way it always should be. That’s the way it always will be. You should have told me what had happened, Bear. You should’ve told me so that you had someone to lean on, someone to make it seem like the world wasn’t such a scary place. I understand why you did what you did, but you should’ve trusted me enough to take care of it, to take care of us.”
For some reason, this makes me angry. I step out of his grasp, and his arms fall to his side. “I should’ve trusted you to take care of it?” I snarl. “What the hell would you have done? She was threatening to take the Kid away from me! She made me choose between the two of you and, God help me, I hate her for it. But I did what I had to do. Don’t you say that you would have taken care of it, because there’s nothing you could have done!”
“You’re right,” he agrees, and this causes me to deflate slightly. “You took care of it all on your own, didn’t you? But that’s not what I’m saying, Bear. I’m saying that while you can do it, you shouldn’t have to.”
I throw my hands up in the air and start to pace in front of him. “We’re quite fine on our own, Otter. We’ve been fine for three fucking years. So the last three months have been great, so it’s been over the fucking moon. We don’t need you to take care of us!” Who is this person talking? Who is this person who only moments ago was wanting him to tell me what to do? Why can’t I shut up for once in my life? These same old arguments keep rearing their heads, and it’s always me bringing them up. “He’s the only thing I’ve got!” I say, my voice breaking.