by Amy Lane
“Yeah,” Tommy muttered. “Really fucking cold.”
His voice sounded like a child’s broken toy, and Chase sat down with a horrible chill. “Tommy, what’s wrong?”
“My mom. Chase, she’s been sick a year, and she didn’t fucking tell me, okay? So I get here, and she’s got hospice and shit, and the only thing she hasn’t made plans for is where to put the fucking cat. So my mom’s dying on Christmas, and I’m trying to figure out how to….” His voice faded out for a minute. “How to transport a fifteen-year-old cat on a plane without killing him.”
Oh God. Tommy Halloran. Tango. For a week he’d made Chase feel like a god, like one whole, wonderful person and not two fractured, fucked-up pieces.
“Oh God,” Chase whispered, his lips cold. “Hang on, Tommy, I’m coming.”
“Naw, man. I can’t do that to you—”
“It’s no worries. I’ve got the money for the ticket, rent’s covered until my next shoot. It’s good. I’ll leave tonight, come back Christmas Eve. It’ll be no big. You’ll have someone there, right?”
“For three days? Chase, that’s insane!”
Yeah, but I don’t think that’s out of the court for me, Tango. I’m really just held together with ball stitching and glove oil, you’re the only one to see it, is all.
“It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. Seriously.”
And Chase came out of the bathroom with his cell phone tucked in his pocket and the regular phone in his hand.
“Babe,” he said, trying to meld the two sides of his brain together with words and Oreo cookie filling, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”
By the time he was done explaining, Mercy was looking as confused on the outside as Chase felt most of the time on the inside.
“Your dad’s sorry, and he’s coming for dinner, but you’ve got to go somewhere for work?”
Chase nodded. “A bridge went down. Don’t worry. They’ll get me back here by Christmas Eve. I’ll probably get off the plane in time to go grocery shopping.” And you will never know where I went or why, and why it was so important, even if there’s no sex involved. You’ll never know that I could fuck the whole Johnnies stable, and it wouldn’t feel as disloyal as this one goddamned act.
Mercy shook her head. “Babe, you’d better. I can’t be in here with that man by myself.”
Chase nodded, promising that he would, and then went into their room to look up tickets on the computer. On his way, he made a call to John.
DEX came with him, because John had called him and apparently he and Tango were friends from way back. John also took care of the ticket, which was a load off of Chase’s mind, just because he didn’t want to explain the expense to Mercy. The two of them caught the red-eye to Boston out of Sacramento, and Chase barely remembered to pack his warm jacket, gloves, and scarf. Mercy had given him a deep, sad “I’ll miss you” kiss as Dex had sat waiting patiently in the car he was going to leave in long-term parking, and Dex’s eyebrows raised ironically as Chase got in, shivering from the concrete cold of Solstice December.
“What did you tell her?” he asked, and for a moment Chase wondered if there was judgment in his voice, and then he remembered that Dex and Scott had shared the same room—and the same bed—for a week before Dex went back to Sacramento and a girlfriend. No, no judgment there. Probably just taking notes.
“I’m working road construction and a bridge collapsed in Boston.”
Dex was drinking coffee from a Starbucks mug, and he made the raspberry sound that said he’d just spit some back. “And she bought that?”
“What did you tell your girlfriend?”
Dex sobered. “An old friend from Montana called with a sick mother.”
“Yeah, well, Mercy knows my old friends and she knows the neighborhood where I grew up and she knows where I go to school. All I got is my job, and that’s a lie too. I ran with that.” It was his own guilt that was making his voice sharp, they both knew it, and Dex nodded and grunted, and they didn’t say anything else on the way to the airport. When they got there, it was all terse instructions and surfing on their phones as they hopped from foot to foot in the airport holiday traffic and hoped they got to their flight on time.
Finally, they were boarded, overnight bags stowed above them, and some of the tension of getting onto the flight seemed to have dissipated the tension of talking about lies they told to keep their lives from unraveling. The attendant came by with soda and nuts and blankets, and Chase was about to put his earbuds in, pull the hood of his Sac State sweatshirt up, and listen to music when Dex made a sound in his throat like he wanted to talk.
“Hmm?” Chase turned to him, all of his defensiveness apparently left on the ground in Sacramento.
“I was his first top,” Dex explained bluntly, a reminiscent smile on his face. “God, he’s fun in bed.”
He’s wonderful out of it.
“Yeah? He’s a nice guy.”
Dex looked at him and shook his head in confusion. “I don’t know—I’d say more wicked than nice. But in a fun way. Why’d he call you?”
Chase shrugged and looked out the plane window, thinking that this was his second time in a month on a plane, when he hadn’t left his home state for the entire twenty years before.
He knows my real name and I know his.
“Just needed someone, I guess.”
Suddenly there was a warmth on Chase’s cold hand, and Dex’s long, capable fingers folded over them. Chase looked at him, startled, and Dex shrugged.
“I can fuck another guy on camera, Chance. Why can’t I comfort a friend?”
Chase smiled, and when Dex smiled back, Chase could see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes that said he was getting closer to thirty than to twenty. “I’m a friend?”
“Yeah. Why not? We’ve barbecued together.”
Chase managed a faint chuckle. “Besties forever, right?”
“You’re a jock, Chase. Maybe forget ‘besties’.”
I’m a gay man, Dex. Maybe forget everything about myself.
“Yeah, maybe so.” They were quiet for a moment, and then Chase said, “How do… how do you put this shit in boxes? You know. In your heart.”
He actually heard Dex swallow. “I don’t know, man. You figure it out, let me know.”
“I don’t even know what we’re going to do for him when we get there.”
“I don’t think we have to do anything. I think maybe we just have to be there.”
The sound Chase made then was so bitter it almost filled his mouth and choked him with bile. “Yeah. Until Christmas Eve morning, when I come back and help my girlfriend cook for the fucker who spawned me. God, I need a fucking box for that.”
Dex’s hand tightened on his, and Chase kept his face turned away, looking outside the plane window as the moonlit tops of the silver clouds shifted beneath the plane.
DEX was like Bruce Wayne or something. He had Tommy’s mom’s address from emergency contacts or something like that, and they landed, called a cab, and there they were. It wasn’t a great neighborhood, but it wasn’t a ghetto either: worn, working class, but with neatly trimmed lawns under the ragged layers of dirty snow. There were modest Christmas decorations on almost every house, including the one where Tommy was supposed to live, and tiny garages where the cars went to defend themselves from the cold and the salt that broke the ice on the roads.
Dex was the one who used the old-fashioned knocker on the wooden door, and Tommy looked as surprised as hell when he saw them there.
“Hey, Tango,” Dex said with a forced grin. “How you holding up?”
Tommy took one look at Chase, standing there next to Dex, and threw himself into Chase’s arms like a child. Dex met Chase’s eyes over Tommy’s head and excused himself inside, closing the door softly against the snowy cold.
Chase held him, just held him. Tommy didn’t cry or say anything, just huddled in Chase’s arms, a tight, shivering ball of energy, and Chase tried to shi
eld him from the darkness and the cold and the pain.
Eventually his teeth started chattering, though—God, it was freaky cold here in Boston—and Tommy looked up, that smile flashing through the… oh God. Tommy had been crying, and Chase had missed it.
“Pussy,” Tommy muttered thickly, trying to sound tough, and Chase felt his own chin quiver. He held up a hand to Tommy’s wet cheek and then pulled the sleeve of his sweatshirt over his thumb and started wiping his face.
“Yeah. I’m a total wimp in the cold,” Chase apologized, holding up the other sleeve and wiping off the other side. His gloves were still in his duffel and his hands were freezing and shaking, but Tommy was crying and it wasn’t right.
Tommy nodded and wiped his face on his shoulder. “Then let’s get you out of it,” he muttered. “God knows what Dex is telling my mom right now. Jesus. There’s a priest in there and everything, you know?”
Chase let a laugh escape. “We’re not going to say we fuck each other for a living, Tango, okay?”
Tommy nodded and grinned. “That would be a helluva thing, though. I always hated this fucking priest. Mom loves him, though. Guess they grew up together or something.” He sobered. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I said I would.”
“Yeah, but that’s easy to say. I just… I needed to tell someone who would give a shit, you know?”
“Well, you hit the right number.” Chase put his hands in his pockets and tried hard not to dance in the cold, and Tommy looked at him with big eyes brimming with something that should have made Chase very uncomfortable, but didn’t.
“Where you gonna stay tonight?” Tommy asked softly, and Chase shrugged.
“Tonight? Your couch. Tomorrow, we’ll probably get a hotel room or something. Dex is here ’til the day after Christmas, then he’s going on to Montana for his family.”
Tommy nodded, some of the brightness in his eyes diminishing. “And you?”
Chase flushed. “Three days. The plane takes off like 3 a.m., Christmas Eve. Get back in time to help Mercy cook, right?”
Tommy bit his lip, so clearly wanting more, but not wanting to ask for it. His smile in the next second was as fractured as Chase’s soul. “Well, you’re here. You brought cavalry. I didn’t even expect this much. It’ll be okay.”
Oh God, Tango. You deserve everything. You deserve someone here for you the whole time. You deserve to go up to bed and cry on someone’s shoulder, and maybe make love to get over the pain. So much you deserve, and I’m leaving you the day before Christmas. You deserve better’n me.
“Yeah. I’ll try and come back between Christmas and New Year’s, okay?”
Tommy’s smile healed itself, like child’s magic, and Chase’s heart took all the extra brokenness and it fell in pieces around his feet. “That would be great. Can you do that? Can you afford it? That would be so awesome. ’Cause that’s when we’re breaking down most of the house, before she goes into the hospital and everything. God, that’s gonna suck. Can you really come back?”
Chase nodded his head, once again committing in a half second to do what a minute ago he would have thought was completely impossible. His teeth were suddenly chattering so hard, he could barely answer, and Tommy finally, finally, had mercy on him and dragged him inside the house.
There were lights in there, but it was still dim. The front room was lit by a yellow bulb under a lampshade. There was a hospital bed with a woman, thin and worn, lines of illness and pain etched around her eyes. She was sleeping, with a priest reading quietly next to her. Tommy and Dex were moving around the small adjoining kitchen, making coffee and microwaving some pizza bites. Chase knew that smell; he always had a bag in his freezer.
The priest looked up at him and smiled blandly. He was a thin, nervous man in his midfifties with longish salt ’n’ pepper hair and rather protuberant eyes.
“Another friend of Tommy’s,” he said, with a bit of Irish in his voice, but no inflection whatsoever. “So good of you to come.”
“Yeah, well,” Chase muttered, unsure of what to say to a priest. He’d never been to church in all his life. “I guess it took him by surprise.”
The priest actually looked at him and nodded. “Tommy was doing so well in school. She didn’t want to pull him from his studies.”
Oh, for the love of crap.
“Well, he takes her pride in him real serious,” Chase said, and then excused himself to the kitchen.
“Pizza bites?” Dex was complaining. “If you’re going to do freezer food, Tango, couldn’t you at least scare up a microwave burrito?”
Tommy grinned crookedly. “Man, I’ll remember that the next time two complete ass… goombahs decide to fly out across the country on… on what? Two hours’ notice?” His gaze slid off of Chase’s like car tires off glazed ice, and he looked at Dex and shook his head. The microwave dinged and Tommy went to get it, obviously itching for a reason to move, for something to do.
“It was more like three,” Dex said, “and don’t blame me. It was all Chase’s idea. He asked John for a discount on the tickets.”
Tommy grimaced. “Oh God—and he sent you both? That was….” Tommy swallowed. “That was nice of him. You don’t expect that from a….” That wicked Loki smile appeared again. “A mogul,” he finished, raising his eyebrows.
Dex shrugged. “You’ve been with us a while. I think he likes to know we’re doing okay.”
Well, it figured, right? Weepy porn stars didn’t make a lot of tapes—although John was also a nice guy that way too.
“So,” Chase said, hating to ask this question. “What do we tell your mom?”
Tommy shrugged. “Friends from school,” he murmured, his voice really low. “Dex, you can study science; Chase, you’re already almost an engineer.”
Dex looked at him in surprise. “Really?”
Chase blushed. “Five more semesters,” he said. “Not so almost.”
“Still,” Dex nodded. “That’s great. You’ve got a place to go with this—that’s awesome.”
Odd how, with someone dying in the next room, their conversation was turning to how to live the rest of their lives.
“Tommy?” The voice was thin and quavery, and Tommy almost dropped the plate of pizza bites. Dex rescued them before they tipped off the little Formica table, and Chase touched his shoulder and leaned over to whisper in his ear.
“It’s going to be okay. Do you want me in there with you?”
Tommy shook his head. “Maybe tomorrow. Tonight….” His look was haunted, stripped and bleeding, and Chase’s stomach clenched, just taking it in. “Tonight, it’ll be easier to lie when you’re not in the room. But do me a favor, and don’t leave, okay?”
Chase took his hand, after casting a furtive look at the priest in the other room. “Yeah, Tommy. I’ll be here as long as I can, okay?”
Tommy walked into the adjoining room to talk to the priest and Chase turned to Dex.
“Dex, man,” he said quietly, “is there any way I could do a shoot soon, so I can take the plane fare out of the check before John cuts it?”
Dex nodded. “You’re getting a lot of hits—I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.” He looked over Chase’s shoulder as Tommy knelt by his mother’s bedside. “I don’t know if I’d want to leave him alone either.”
Which is how Chase ended up fucking Reg two days after Christmas and getting on a plane before he could hardly walk again—but that was after the most miserable five days of his life.
THE next two days and three nights in Tommy’s mother’s cramped house were hard. There was a nurse and the priest, and of course Tommy to take care of her needs, and Chase felt like the world’s biggest coward, because that meant he and Dex had to spend less time lying to her.
Instead, Chase spent the days helping Tommy box up stuff—some of it to give to thrift stores, some of it to send back to Tommy’s little house on the opposite coast—and developing a burning, itching obsession to touch Tommy Halloran sk
in to skin. That first night, Dex went up to sleep in the guest bedroom, and Chase and Tommy?
They stayed up most of the night talking in the plain, white-painted kitchen, much as they had in Orlando, except with a lot less joy. Chase told the story of how his father managed to be coming to eat Christmas night at his house, and Tommy wrinkled his almost Roman nose.
“God, Chase, he sounds like a real bastard. I can’t believe you got in his face like that. Don’t you know when someone’s going to start punching?”
Chase shook his head. “God, in his case, there was no warning,” he said, and then grimaced when Tommy looked stricken. “Look, Tommy, it’s no big, okay. Food, a roof, clothes—I had ’em.”
Tommy scowled at him and shook his head. “Look, this place is small, right? And our apartment before it was small too, but you know? It’s still got a tree. She’s still got me presents under the goddamned tree, Chase. Why do you think I come back here every year? It’s a good place, dammit! It may have been only us, but it was a good place.” Tommy’s eyes were red and he looked like he’d been up without sleep for too long. More than once Chase had seen him glance longingly at a pack of cigarettes over on the kitchen counter, and then glance guiltily at Chase, who had complained bitterly about the smell of smoke on the old man’s clothes. So his voice was pitching hysterically and his hands were wobbly as they gestured in the air, but he was so passionate about what he was trying to say that he had to clutch Chase’s knee or thigh or shoulder as he was talking. This meant something to him.
“It looks like a real good place, Tommy,” Chase said soberly, and Tommy shook his head.
“You’re not hearing me,” Tommy whispered. “It doesn’t need the house or parents or a big whole family to make it a good place. Sometimes it just needs two people who mean a damn to each other, you hear me?”
Chase had a sudden thought of him and Mercy, inviting his father, trying to visit her family, being invited to Donnie’s family’s house and being desperately glad of it. Two people. That’s all Tommy wanted from life. Two people, under the same roof, living for each other. For Tommy, that was the most perfect thing life had to offer, and Chase was tired and muddled, and couldn’t think of why someone would want more.