by Jay Quinn
The thought of the upcoming meetings reminded him of another fact and that was exactly how urgently he needed to stop taking the painkillers altogether. When he was high, as he was now, he could see the sense of it.
Kai sat back in his seat at the table and lit another cigarette. Immediately, he thought of Robin. He saw his perfect skin stretched taut over his bare chest and the ridges of his abdominal muscles. Robin had such flawless skin, not a hair, blemish, freckle or mole on him. His skin looked like it would taste of cream and honey and it always surprised him to find Robin had no taste at all. That was what he always thought of when Robin stole into the stark empty loft of his buzz. Then Kai recalled his face, his green eyes and the fringe of blond hair that fell over his forehead. When Kai was high, he felt as if he could look at Robin’s face forever. That was another reason he wanted to be off the painkillers. If being high all the time meant he couldn’t see Robin clearly, there was no way he could know if he loved Robin himself or just the idea of Robin.
That conundrum was what was always foremost in his mind. The aesthetic and physical attraction he felt for Robin had been insistent from the first time they had met. Kai had been hanging crown molding in a spec house being built by a realtor-builder he’d been doing work for ever since he’d moved back to the beach. Thanks to his dad, Kai had been hired by the company as a trim carpenter in his own right, not as part of Rhett’s regular crew. Though he was living with his dad at the time, Rhett had made it clear he wanted him to move out on his own as soon as possible. By the time he had found himself working on that particular house in Southern Shores, Kai knew he had overstayed his welcome. It was at that precise time and place that Robin appeared to show the house to a middle-aged couple looking for a new vacation home.
Kai had studiously ignored Robin and the couple as they made their way around the large house, yet he listened carefully as Robin talked with the couple and tried to sell them the house. When they all returned to the dining room where Kai was working, Robin had introduced himself and the couple in order to ask if Kai would be available to do some custom work the potential buyers were interested in. Kai had climbed down from his ladder and discussed what they had in mind, simple work really just some California-style cabinetry in the bedroom closets and a wall of shelves to be built around their planned plasma-screened television and stereo system. It ended with them all exchanging business cards.
Robin had given himself away in some subtle but discrete ways. Kai had caught and held some questioning looks Robin had extended, and he’d reciprocated with some of his own. Robin fascinated him. Not only was he drawn to the younger man’s fey features and lightly-muscled form, but Robin also had a certain shy way of putting himself forward that Kai found exciting. Yet, Robin so quietly made his interest in Kai known that the couple he was trying to sell to probably never noticed the current of attraction that ran between Kai and Robin. By the time business cards were exchanged and Robin took his leave to escort the couple along on their tour of other beach houses, Kai knew he had made a conquest. He looked at Robin’s card for a few minutes and wondered who would make the first move. He decided to give it a few days, and if Robin didn’t call him first, he would definitely call Robin.
In the week that followed, it seemed Robin was everywhere he looked: drawing gas at the 7-Eleven in Kill Devil Hills, buying groceries at the Food Lion, emerging sweaty and bleary-eyed from the sauna at the gym. In a place where locals clung in tight little groups to the people they knew, Robin stood out by being always alone. Kai asked around, but none of the buddies Kai had that he got high with, or worked with, or surfed with knew anything about him. Kai tried hard not to show too much interest as he made his inquiries; he made it a rule to keep his gay activities well separated from his friends. In a community as small as the one he navigated, he didn’t want to be labeled as being gay. If he was, he knew he wouldn’t be shunned outright, but he’d be let known he was suspect and no longer trustworthy among “the guys.”
In the year he’d been back on the beach, Kai had avoided all the local men who were known to be gay in the string of beach towns. He’d limited his sexual activities to hookups on line and that only when there were plenty of tourists around. In the winter, he laid low. Occasionally, he dated and slept with a few different girls, but Kai carefully avoided getting too close to any of them. The girls he met were either very young or if closer to his age, were looking to settle down or on the rebound from some guy he inevitably knew. While the Northern Banks swelled to well over one hundred and fifty thousand people spread over the many miles from Corolla to the Oregon Inlet, off-season the local population was hardly more than thirty thousand in the same area. Whole neighborhoods resembled ghost towns in the off-season.
Most of the guys Kai knew and hung out with were either married or hooked up with some girl or another over the winter. Those who were hooked up used it only as shelter from the cold. By the time Memorial Day rolled around, they ditched their girlfriends in order to troll the shoals of bikini-clad tourist girls who flocked to the beach in the summer, either to relax in the sun or to work summer jobs before going back to college in the fall. Kai knew this—it was part of life on the beach. He dated women often enough to keep up his street credibility, but he could plausibly lay low in the winter, unattached and free of suspicion.
This suited Kai well. Though he would never admit it, the older he got, the more he found himself more likely to connect emotionally with other guys. Women, he had come to believe, were satisfactory for diversion and sexual pleasure, but were far too needy emotionally, and Kai didn’t want to be needed, not by anyone. He had a full-time job keeping himself together and felt far too vulnerable himself to be able to support anyone else emotionally. One of the mam things that drew Kai to men was the impossibility of them ever needing him for security or for love. That’s what he had thought from the time he became aware of sex—until he ran into Robin again one day in September the year before, when he had gone to the realtor-builder to pick up a check.
Robin had an office in a warren of small offices in the building that housed the company on the 158 By-Pass in Nags Head. Kai noticed him sitting at his desk as he passed by him in the corridor that led to the bookkeeper’s offices. Startled at the sight of him, Kai had jerked up his chin abruptly by way of a greeting and swiftly walked on to pick up his check. But, as he passed on, Kai kept count of the doors between Robin’s office and the bookkeeper’s. After he got his check, he made up his mind to stop and speak. So, in only a couple of minutes, he found himself standing in the doorway of Robin’s office waiting for him to look up from the magazine he had open on his desk. “Hey,” he said simply, and Robin looked up and straight into his eyes with a look that betrayed absolute pleasure and desire.
Now, sitting in front of the bay window in his mother’s kitchen nine hundred miles away and thirteen months later, Kai could replay every detail of what they had said, and every nuance of how Robin had looked. Though the conversation was just brief enough to make a movie date, Kai knew he’d found a lover. He couldn’t have known what else he’d found.
Now, Kai stretched in his chair and sighed. Even though he was high, he couldn’t escape the sting of loneliness and loss he felt. The familiar confines of his childhood and adolescence comforted him, but seemed too small to accommodate the larger emotional life he had grown into during his time in Robin’s trim beach house in Wrights Shores in Kill Devil Hills. It was a neat little place that sat high up on pilings, west of the bypass on a lot that bordered the Wright Brothers’ Memorial tract. From Robin’s back deck, he could look south to an unobstructed view of the small museum and the large dune that had been stabilized with grass to hold the monument, an Art Deco white marble wing. With no neighbors near, they had slept naked on that deck after making love under the black velvet sky seeded with stars. The empty vastness of the acreage of the memorial was surrounded by the beach town, but the constant wind that fueled the first flight of Wilbur and Orville
still smoothed the undeveloped dunescape there.
Kai looked at the clock on the face of the microwave over the stove. An hour had passed as he’d sat there, smoking and wandering through the range of his memories. His last cigarette had burned down to a long cylindrical ash in the ashtray by his left hand. Kai picked up the butt and ground the grey cylinder into flat dust. Then, with steady hands, he lit another cigarette and returned to the first evening he’d spent in that house.
Robin hadn’t invited him in when he’d driven them back after the movie. Instead, they had sat in his truck for many long minutes without saying anything. Finally, Kai had spoken bluntly. “I want to have sex with you,” he said evenly. “But I think you know that already.”
Robin only nodded in reply.
Kai reached across the seat of his truck’s cab and gently laid his large hand on the part of Robin’s thigh just below his shorts’ hem. When that wasn’t rebuffed, Kai had slid his hand up under the loose leg of the shorts and reached even higher with his little finger, which he used to lightly caress the inside of Robin’s thigh. “Why don’t we go inside?” Kai whispered huskily.
Robin looked away, outside his window and said, “You scare me.”
Kai withdrew his hand from underneath Robin’s pant leg and instead reached across to gently take Robin’s chin in his hand. He firmly pulled Robin’s face to look at him and whispered once more, “You don’t have anything to be afraid of.”
“God, I hope that’s true,” Robin whispered back. Then, quite clearly he said, “Just remember, you wanted me once this badly. Okay?”
With Robin’s chin still in his grasp, Kai had pulled Robin’s mouth to his own and kissed him hard and long. Then he said, “I won’t forget it, will you?”
In reply, Robin looked at him and shook his head before pulling away, opening his car door and getting out of Kai’s truck. Once he closed the door, he walked to the front of the truck, pulled his keys from his pocket and waited until Kai got out of the truck as well and closed his door. Robin waited for Kai to join him before, together, they walked up the steep wooden steps to the front door and went inside.
The memories of the events that followed were still enough to make Kai hard, despite the control the painkiller was exerting over his body. Kai reached between his legs and readjusted himself in his shorts to accommodate the sudden swell of recall. Robin wasn’t sexually inexperienced, and he was more than a match for Kai’s hunger and need. With more than a year’s experience of Robin and of what he himself was capable of feeling, Kai told himself he should have been the one to be scared that night, not Robin. Robin threatened everything he thought he knew about himself and what he wanted.
Within a week of that first night, Robin gave him a key to his house. Within three weeks, Kai had moved in. It all seemed to fall into place. Heidi fell in love with Robin, just as Kai had, and while she continued to be Kai’s dog, she made it known in ways small and large that she’d accorded Robin a proper place in her pack. It was so logical, so easy, Kai thought now. His father was glad to see him move out and none of his friends knew Robin, so no one asked any awkward questions, at first. But Kai began to change from the moment he walked into Robin’s house.
The Italians have an old saying: “Love and a cough cannot be hid.” Like anyone else in the first blush of love, Kai had little time for anyone other than Robin. Kai came to work on houses when they were near completion, still he had ample occasion to see other tradesmen. It wasn’t long before the people at Robin’s office noted how often he and Kai were together and from the office, word began to trickle out to the job sites speculating as to the reason why the usually laconic and withdrawn Kai was so suddenly full of banter and good humor.
By Christmas, Kai started getting thinly veiled comments from the buddies he got high with about his long absences and sudden interests in Wrights Shores. Others started asking him about “that little faggot realtor.” Kai just blustered past all of it, thinking Christmas would soon come and by the time he got back from visiting his mother in Florida they would all have something else to talk about. Invariably, somebody would get in a fight, or get pulled for DUI, or popped for possession. Besides, work slowed to a crawl during the cold winter months and most of the people who were being nosy would hibernate, get high, or go surfing in Tortolla. He thought he wouldn’t have to deal with any issues about his sexuality that would lead to anything more than some pointed teasing.
Christmas did come, but it came with the realization that he was in love with Robin. On the long drive to Fort Lauderdale down I-95, he missed him with an ache that only grew over the days he spent back home with his mother. Of course, he didn’t discuss anything about Robin with his her. In fact, he kept waiting for the subject to come up, as his father had squarely hit him between the eyes with the question as to whether or not he was sleeping with his roommate before Thanksgiving. Kai had answered his father honestly. As with many other topics between him and Rhett, Kai’s attitude was generally that none of it was his father’s business. As far as Kai was concerned, Rhett had long abrogated any say in Kai’s behavior or life at all.
Still, his father had surprised him. Rhett had let him know, rather kindly, that he knew it was none of his business, but that he approved of Robin and his son’s relationship with him. While Rhett was mainly concerned with Kai’s reliability as a tradesman he recommended and supported and how that reflected back on him, he was loyal when it came to other things. Rhett had long accepted responsibility for essentially abandoning his son, but he still loved him. After all the years that had spun by so quickly in Rhett’s life, he had sired no other children. Nor had he married again. Rhett had been serially monogamous with an array of increasingly younger women, but he was of the age and generation that liked to be married in the winter and single in the summer. A lifetime on that beach hadn’t cured him of his old habits, one of which had been Maura. He’d fallen in love with her when he was still a boy and lost her when he was just becoming a man. No other woman had ever held on to his imagination the way she had, and his only child was the living proof of that.
As old-school as his father was about so many things, Kai was surprised by his attitude concerning his relationship with Robin. He had expected his father to be belittling or condescending about his gay side. While Kai would tell anyone, especially his father, that he didn’t care what they thought, the truth was, he did care. Kai knew all about labels. He’d grown up being labeled as mentally ill. He’d had to cope with getting special permission to miss school for psychiatrist appointments. Each year he was in school, he noticed how his teachers had treated him differently than they had the other children. In the small Catholic school he’d attended through eighth grade, there was no way he could escape being labeled as special, different, and often, odd.
This was where he didn’t give his father enough credit for loving him or for the responsibility he felt for Kai’s emotional troubles. Rhett blamed himself, just as Maura did, for Kai’s mental illness. Rhett secretly thought his own drug use had poisoned his sperm. Then, when he added on his own guilt over his failures as a husband and father, he had promised himself to be as accepting of Kai’s peculiarities as he could be. When Maura had called him late one night to tell him she’d caught Kai in the dominant role of anal intercourse with another boy when Kai was only fifteen, Rhett did his best to console her, telling her boys would be boys, and that all of them “experimented.” He even admitted to experimenting some on his own when he was a kid. Maura was somewhat mollified by his confession and Rhett himself was consoled by the fact that Kai was at least the fucker and not the fuckee. Again, he blamed himself. His son was growing up without any male influence. Rhett carried his shame deeply but couldn’t see any way to make things right. He’d already failed when Kai had chosen to live with him when he was twelve. Those months with his silent, tormented son were seared into his memory.
Rhett had tried to make up for the fact he’d packed Kai off on a plane back to hi
s mother when he was obviously so hurting and ill. He had first welcomed Kai back when he’d returned when he graduated from high school. He’d taken his son under his wing and taught him to surf and how to make a living as a trim carpenter. From the time he was eighteen until he was nearly twenty-one, he’d kept Kai as close as Kai would allow. In those years, Kai had thrived. He’d stayed on his medication and thrilled Rhett with his talent at the craft that Rhett had made a living off of since he, himself was Kai’s age.
When Kai had decided he wanted to go to the Art Institute back down in Fort Lauderdale, Rhett had been supportive. He knew Kai was too talented to become just someone who banged nails on the beach for a living. He’d sent him back to his mother and also sent along any spare cash he could to help Kai out once he was back in school. And, after Kai had finished his degree in graphic design and had failed in his early career in advertising, Rhett had once again welcomed him back to his home on the beach. But by then, Kai had turned twenty-five and Rhett’s patience had grown thinner. He began to realize having a son meant he’d always be a father and, in that sense, Kai would never fully get grown to adulthood. He seemed to Rhett to be perpetually eighteen years old and forever starting over. He wouldn’t settle down and seemed to have no interest in having any sort of abiding relationship with anyone. When Rhett recognized the tell-tale signs of being in love from his son’s behavior toward Robin, he felt no shame that it was a gay relationship. He just wanted Kai off his hands. If a boy like Robin could do it for his son, Rhett really didn’t give a damn. He just wanted an end to his own feelings of guilt and responsibility.