Who We Are

by T. J. Klune

  I don’t open my eyes because I think I’m still lost in memory, that the only way he could be at my back is because I wish it to be so.

  “Earthquakes?” he whispers as he curls around me. He’s real. Oh God, he’s so real, and I can hear the memory in my head because he thinks I’m brave and strong, and I want to tell him I’m not, that he sees something in me that’s not there, that I’m weak and scared, and I don’t think I’m good enough for him, but I want to try. I want to try and be the person he thinks I am, because if he thinks I can do it, then maybe, just maybe it’s possible, just maybe it’s true, and I need him to help show me who I am. I need him to show me what I could be.

  But I say none of that. I don’t know if I could get the words out. Instead, I nod.

  He pulls me tighter against his body and breathes me in again. “I never….” His words get caught in his throat, and I feel him shake behind me, and it’s like the earthquakes have followed us here, in this safe place, but then he stops and clears his throat, but it still does nothing to hide the wetness pressed against the back of my head. “I never wanted to be the cause of this. To have to make you feel like you needed to hide in here. I told myself a long time ago that if you or the Kid ever needed to come in here, I’d be right there with you because it’s my job to protect you both now. You’ve done enough all these years, and I promised myself that I was going to be the one to keep you both safe from now on.”

  He squeezes me tighter, and I want to tell him everything, that I love him and only him and that there will never be anyone else for me, that if only he’d hold me like he’s doing now for the rest of our lives, it still wouldn’t be long enough.

  But he continues: “And now you’re here because of me, and I can’t help but feel like I’ve failed you, that I’ve broken my promise.” A light kiss behind my ear, lingering and sweet. “And I didn’t think I could do that, that I could be the one to make you scared. I’m sorry,” he says, his voice cracking, my big, strong Otter, my unflappable man, is breaking behind me, his arms starting to shake again. “I’m sorry if you thought I doubted you.

  I’m sorry if I made you doubt yourself. I never meant for that. I never meant for any of this. The thought… the thought of losing you terrifies me, Bear.

  It’s not that I don’t trust you… but, Christ, you’re so fucking young, and this is all so new to you. What if there is something better out there for you?

  What if I’m just holding you back? I could never forgive myself if I kept you from being happy, from finding out who you are, no matter if I thought I knew who you already were.”

  He sighs in my hair, his voice stronger, another soft kiss. “I love you, Papa Bear. Like I’ve never loved anyone else in my life. I will always love you, no matter what happens in the future, no matter what has happened in the past. You are my family now, you and Ty. You know you’ve always been a part of our family with my parents and Creed, and you both still are.

  But now you belong to me, now you’re both mine, and I get to call you my own, and I promise to remind you of that every day, to make sure you know that I could never want anything other than you, that I will support you no matter what. It’s because of you that I am the way I am. If I’m a good person, if people see me as such, it’s because you made me that way. And I promise to spend the rest of my life making sure you know that.”

  His voice broke at times, the words sometimes rushed and sometimes halting. His voice was low and rough, the words building up steam until the last came out breathlessly harsh in my ear. His grip across my chest grew in strength until it felt like I was trapped in a vise, fused into the chest behind me. I could feel his groin against my ass, and I could almost resist the urge to press back against him, grinding myself into him. But it was his words, his words that negated all the rest, his words that caused me to gasp into his arm, that let the tears fall from my eyes in a hot rush all because—

  you belong to me

  —while I knew how he felt, I’d never heard him say it with such clarity, and I’m annihilated, my heart shredded, and body weak and loose. He’s waiting for me to say something, anything, and Christ, I’m dragging this out, but I can’t even think, much less process any coherency that would be remotely close to the gift he’s just given me.

  Well, it says, chuckling. You could always ask him to marry you. That’d top his speech for sure. Could you imagine the look on his face? Four words, Bear. Four words is all it would take. It might not solve everything, but don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it, that it’s not there at the back of your mind like a gnat buzzing in your ear. You see him and you wish and you hope and you pray, but you don’t name it. You never do. It has a name, though. You could give it one and finally admit to yourself what you really want.

  I don’t… I… I can’t….

  It sighs. Of course you can’t. I don’t know why I would’ve thought otherwise. Give him what you can, Bear, and hope it will be enough.

  Otter starts to tense behind me, and I’ve let my silence drag on too long.

  I’ve gotten so lost in my own neurosis that he’s taken it for rejection, that I won’t speak because there’s nothing left to say. There is, there’s so much to say, so many words that one more eloquent than myself should be saying to him, but he’s stuck with me, for better or worse—

  in sickness and in health for as long we both shall live amen amen amen

  —and I turn over, his arm sliding off my waist, facing him, still using his other arm as a pillow, and he’s watching me, the gold-green wet and bright. He must see something in my eyes, because his shoulders start to relax, and when I tell him that there will only be him for me, he looks relieved and his body starts to shake again, and I pull his face to mine and kiss his cheeks, his lips, his forehead and hair, and then I cradle his head against my chest, and he floats away in that relief, but it’s okay, because I’ve got him. He’s attached to me, a part of me, and there’s no way I’m letting go.

  We breathe in and out. And for the moment, we live.

  6.

  Where Bear Contemplates

  Brotherhood

  “WHERE were you last night?” the Kid asks Otter the next morning, a look of suspicion on his face, eyeing the both of us in the kitchen.

  “I had to work late,” Otter says cheerfully as he comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist, nuzzling against my neck. I lean back against his chest as he hugs me tightly, whispering something I can’t quite make out, but it doesn’t matter. I get the meaning. I understand the point of it. We might not be fixed, but we’re on the mend, like stopping a leak with duct tape.

  “And that’s all?” the Kid asks. “Nothing else going on that I need to know about?”

  Otter squeezes my ass before he sits down at the table with the Kid.

  “Nothing else you need to know about,” he says with a grin, reaching up to ruffle the Kid’s hair.

  “Otter!” the Kid complains. “It just took me ten minutes to do my hair so that people would take me seriously when I walked into class this morning! Now I have to go redo it, and it’ll make me late. I’ll get a tardy mark on my permanent record, and then I won’t be able to get into an Ivy League school, and I’ll be stuck here with you two for the rest of my life while I wallow in my own self-pity and work at McDonald’s!”

  “Bullshit,” I tell him as I hand him his bowl of yogurt and granola. “You wouldn’t work at McDonald’s if your life depended on it.”

  “I feel bad for those people,” he says with complete seriousness. “Could you imagine having to listen to the bovine screams all day? I would think it would be enough to drive a person crazy.”

  Otter snorts. “I don’t think they actually have a rendering plant at each McDonald’s, Kid. It would detract from the ball pit in the play area, I would think.”

  “Bear likes playing in ball pits, or at least that’s what I’ve heard—”

  “Tyson,” I warn. “We keep it clean now, remember? Child Prot
ective Services and all that. Wouldn’t want them to take you away and put you in a run-down haunted orphanage just because you couldn’t watch your mouth.”

  He looks scandalized. “You just said bullshit!”

  “No, I didn’t. I said Bolshevists.”

  He cocks his head at me. “What’s that?”

  Shit, I have no fucking clue. I just heard that word on TV a few days ago on the History Channel while flipping through trying to find Maury Povich. I glance at Otter for help, and he grins at me before turning back to the Kid. “They were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the early 1900s.” Exactly. That’s exactly what I meant. I totally knew that. Maury Povich had been a paternity episode. Those are my favorites. The guy was obviously the baby daddy, even though he said he wasn’t. What a liar.

  “Really,” the Kid says dryly. “Bear randomly dropped Marxism into the conversation? You should have gone with something a little bit more believable. Like how he was talking about toast, or how much he likes sunshine because it makes his insides feel warm.”

  “You better hope you get scholarships,” I growl at him. “Because I’m not paying for you to go to college anywhere since you’re acting like a jerk.”

  “Maybe I’ll just find a sugar daddy, like you did,” he retorts.

  Otter laughs. I don’t think it’s funny. At all. On so many levels. “He’s not my sugar daddy!”

  “Of course not,” the Kid placates soothingly.

  “Eat your food,” I demand. “We’ve got to get a move on, especially if you have to go fix your hair again.”

  “Er…,” he says. “About that.” He almost looks embarrassed. Or shy.

  “Now what?” I sigh.

  The Kid stirs his granola, thinking hard for a moment. Then his forehead scrunches up, and he looks up at me. All-Important Question Time.

  “Derrick?”

  “Yes, Tyson.”

  “You know how I’ve been doing better, right?”

  Huh. Not his usual type of question, but a question nonetheless. “You have been, Kid,” I tell him quietly. “And I’m very proud of you.”

  He nods. “And you know how I’ve agreed to go to therapy even though I think it’s so unfair, and I’m not crazy even though you seem to think I am?”

  Ah. Now I get it. He wants to ask me for something. “Right. Unfair.

  Crazy. Therapy. Go on.”

  “And you know how I’m nine and one-quarter, which is almost practically ten?”

  “Tyson, the quicker you make your point, the quicker you’ll have my decision.”

  “I can’t wait until I get a little brother,” he grumbles. “The hierarchy in this house will change, that’s for darn sure.”

  Of course, he says this right when I’m taking a sip of coffee, which causes me to inhale and choke, and I spray it out of my nose and mouth back into my cup. I glare at the Kid as I wipe off my face, and he stares right back, as if in challenge. Nuh-uh. There’s no way I’m going to touch this one. First I have thoughts about… marriage (precipitated, of course, by Ty’s insistence and my apparent undying fantasy from hell to have a wedding on a beach—talk about lame) and now the Kid wants a baby brother? I can’t even be bothered to correct him that it wouldn’t be his brother, but a nephew, but the lines are so blurred about who we are, that I don’t think it matters. Not that it’s going to happen. What the fuck is going on in this house?

  I turn to look at Otter for help, expecting to see him filled with the same incredulity as me, the same expression of unbridled horror, but it’s not there.

  Of course it’s not. What’s there is a thoughtful expression, one I don’t expect after hearing the Kid’s words. Otter’s watching Tyson, and he smiles quietly, but there’s something behind the gold-green, something that I can’t quite make out, whether by choice or not, I don’t know. He must feel my eyes on him because he turns to me and catches my eye, and I still don’t know what I’m looking at, but it scares the royal crap out of me. This is one thing that needs to be shelved for later. Quite possibly forever. I know we’ve been through a lot and that I’ve already bought my ticket to the forever train (metaphors are like crack—bet you can’t use it just once!), but that doesn’t mean I want to be traveling in the family cabin. Besides, how would we even do that? Would we like adopt an Asian baby like famous people do?

  Or would we find some woman to pump full of our little swimmers with a turkey baster (ugh, I can’t get that image out of my head)? Where do you find women to do that? Like on Craigslist, or something? I can see it already:

  I need a woman to carry our juices!!!!

  Hi! My name is Bear. I am a reluctant homosexual (or, at least, I resemble one). My boyfr—er, life partner (gag!), is apparently like a forty-year-old woman, and his biological clock is exploding all over the place, and we don’t know how to turn off the alarm. We need a woman (ha!) to allow us to put our sperm into her so that we can create the miracle that is life! You, as the surrogate, must not be crazy !!!!! Seriously, there is already enough of that with the donors, so to compound that would just make things worse, and the child will already have enough shit they’ll have to deal with by having two dads, so we’re asking for a complete mental health history to make sure you are not bat-shit insane. Also, dark hair would be nice.

  No way in fucking hell. Otter can give me those sweet, innocent eyes until they fall out of his head. There’s no fucking way that’s going to happen. I’ve got enough to deal with, what with the smartest vegetarian ecoterrorist-in-training (although, he might well be heading to full-blown ecoterorrism by now) on the planet, and the fact that I seem to be thinking about where I’d like to go on a honeymoon (Stonehenge!) after a wedding to a man I’ve known all of my life, but have only been with for four months (Jesus Christ, what am I, a lesbian penguin?). I don’t care if the Kid wants a little brother. I’ll get him a goddamn goldfish instead, and he’ll be happy he’s getting anything.

  “Clock,” I mutter at the both of them. “You’ll be happy with a fish, and I am not a penguin who goes to Stonehenge. Craigslist isn’t getting my juices, that’s for damn sure.”

  Otter and the Kid glance at each other before the Kid says, “I don’t think even I could figure that one out.”

  “Maybe you can buy penguins on Craigslist?” Otter suggests.

  “I don’t think they have a penguin section,” the Kid says wisely.

  “Ah,” Otter says.

  “What were we even talking about?” the Kid asks.

  “I never know,” Otter assures him.

  “You were asking me something,” I say, taking a sip of my coffee before remembering that it had come out of my nose and back into the cup.

  Dammit.

  He flushes. “Oh, right.” The Kid takes a deep breath. “So I know you’re worried, and that makes me worried, and you want to be there for me, but Dominic asked me if I wanted to ride the bus to school with him today, and since the high school is right next to the elementary school, it’s all the same bus! And I’ve never really ridden the bus before, and I thought, what if the very first day of fifth grade is how the rest of my fifth grade will be defined, and shouldn’t I try to act like I fit in even though I really don’t? Most kids take the bus, and I think that if I don’t and you drop me off every day, people are going to think I’m too good to ride the bus, and then they’ll tell everyone I’m stuck up, and I’ll be a social pariah whose only redeeming quality is that I’ll do your homework for you if you let me eat lunch at the same table as you.”

  “Thought that one out, did you?” I ask, amused and sad all at the same time.

  “For days,” he laments. “Please, Papa Bear? Pleeeeeeeease?” Ah, Christ, he’s trying to give me Bambi eyes while sticking out his bottom lip.

  It’s an expression I’ve seen a billion times before, and I reprimand myself each time, telling myself that it’ll be the last time I fall for it.

  Okay, so next time will be the last time I fall for i
t.

  “Compromise,” I say. “Otter and me will drive both of you to school today. It’s your first day and all, and we want to be there, okay? Any day past today is open for discussion.”

  “Okay,” he says slowly. “I see your offer, and I’ll counter with allowing you to take us today if you’ll allow me at least two days a week to ride the bus.”

  “We’ll agree,” Otter says, “if you don’t complain at all when we have to go to your first therapy appointment tomorrow. You have to give it a chance before you decide you hate it.”

  He scowls at the both of us. “You two drive a hard bargain. I’ll say yes if you also give me five dollars.”

  “For what?”

  “None of your business.”

  I pretend to think on it a moment. “Deal.”

  The three of us shake on it and adjourn our breakfast meeting for the day.

  DOMINIC looks wary but gets in Otter’s Jeep at the Kid’s insistence (as he also proudly proclaims he talked me out of five whole bucks, wasn’t that soooo awesome?), glancing over his shoulder at his front door a few houses down the road before climbing in. Otter reaches back and shakes his hand, and I smile at him. He mumbles hello, looking uncomfortable as he buckles the seat belt over his chest.

  Otter and I had decided shortly after the social worker’s first visit that we’d see how it went with Dominic. I still found it slightly odd that he hung around Ty like he did (even though I’d done the same with Otter, as Georgia had so conveniently pointed out), and I was even more worried about how he would act now. While Georgia’s words had been encouraging, that he seemed to be opening up around Tyson more than anyone else, that still didn’t mean that he was in his right mind. Not that I’d blame him. I study him discreetly as he watches Ty (who’s babbling to him about how he hopes that the fifth grade will at least give him some kind of challenge) but I don’t know what I’m looking for. If you saw your mother murdered by your father in front of you, would you show it on your face years later? Would it be embedded in your skin like a memory that wouldn’t go away? How would it shape you as a person?