Chase in Shadow

by Amy Lane

  “I hear you,” Chase said soberly. “I hear you, Tommy. I do. I’ll….”

  I’ll move in with you. We can live in a little house with that old brown cat on your mother’s couch. We can talk all night whenever we want, and I will hold your hand without thinking. We will be happy.

  He trailed off, and Tommy appeared to be listening to the things he wasn’t saying. When the silence had stretched on too long, he met Chase’s eyes with a look that was faintly ironic.

  “I wonder sometimes, Chase, at all that shit I think you’re not talking about.”

  Chase flushed. “I think two people in a happy home is better than a whole boatload of people in an unhappy home,” he muttered. “But I think I’m the last person who would know.”

  Tommy sighed and stood up, patting his shoulder. “I think that’s a damned shame,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah, well, you can still have it, Tommy. You haven’t made any decisions that you can’t turn back from.”

  “I maybe made one,” Tommy murmured—or at least that’s what it sounded like, and Chase startled and said, “Hm?”

  “Neither have you,” Tommy said, his voice stronger, and Chase shrugged, wondering if he had the balls to actually talk about the tiny little woman in his room three thousand miles away.

  He was saved by the Church, which was pretty fucking ironic, actually. The priest came in at that exact moment and told Tommy that his mom wanted him, and that the nurse was coming to give her a sedative and settle her down for the night. Tommy stood up and gave Chase another squeeze on the shoulder as he left. Chase patted his hand as he pulled it away, trying hard not to linger at the precious touch of skin.

  “So, where did you say you know Tommy from?” the priest asked, his eyes sharp and unfriendly.

  He helped himself to a cup of coffee while Chase said, “Work,” feeling supremely uncomfortable.

  “Oh? I thought Tommy said school?” the man said, with some suspicion, and Chase shrugged.

  “Both. We work together; we know each other from school. It’s a small town, we’re the same age, it happens.”

  “And where do you work?” The man smiled like he’d cornered Chase on something, but Chase had heard Tommy when he came in, so Chase stuck with that.

  “John Carey Industries,” he said evenly. “I work the road crew when they have work. I don’t know what Tommy does, really.”

  “But you’re good enough friends to come all the way across the country?”

  I fell in love with him in a week. I’d die for him.

  “He needed someone,” Chase said, and then excused himself to go to the bathroom. When he got back, the priest was in the living room, and Tommy was in the kitchen, looking like one more heavy-duty conversation would crush him into dust.

  “So,” Chase said, “do I get to hold the cat?”

  Tommy smiled gratefully, and the next hour was spent talking about pets, with Tommy doing most of the talking. Chase held the aging tortoiseshell and listened to him purr, and wished that if nothing else, Mercy didn’t have allergies so he could get a pet of his own. Letting Buster purr himself into drool on his lap was really one of the nicest moments of the visit.

  Chase vaguely recalled offering to sleep on the couch that night, but Tommy led him up to a plain little room that nonetheless had some very female touches—a polished mirror and dresser set with burnished mother-of-pearl combs. A pale green coverlet with tiny, pale pink flowers dotting it at random intervals. A single woman’s dress suit, pink with a cream bow at the throat, hanging in front of the closet.

  “Your mom’s room,” he muttered, and Tommy’s mouth twisted.

  “I put Dex in my room, but I can’t… I don’t think I can sleep here… alone.”

  “It’ll fit two,” Chase slurred, thinking purely platonically. “Come in after you’ve had your cigarette.” He pulled some sweats out of his carry-on and looked up to an embarrassed Tommy.

  “I don’t smoke in California,” he apologized. “Something about being back in the neighborhood—”

  “I get it.” Chase stripped his hooded Sac State sweatshirt over his head, leaving the T-shirt on underneath. He stripped his jeans off unselfconsciously, and it wasn’t until he was pulling his sweats on that he realized that Tommy was looking at him with hunger. Chase blushed, and looked sideways, anywhere but at Tommy’s bright black-brown eyes.

  “You can say no,” Tommy whispered. “Just don’t say her name.”

  Whose name? There’s no name I want to say but yours.

  “Come back up,” Chase said quietly. “I’ll hold you, if you want. Anything else that happens, that’s between us and the walls.”

  And Joy

  TWO boys in jeans and sweatshirts sat on the bed, looking a little bit embarrassed and a little bit goofy because they both had Christmas bows on their head. The smaller one, the one with the faintly Latino cast to his skin, kept rubbing his chest and his nipples through his shirt. The tall, rangy one with the dyed blond hair was comfortably massaging his crotch through his jeans while the guy behind the camera talked.

  “So, Chance, this is your second top. You must have liked the first one!”

  Chance smirked, his grip on his crotch growing stronger and more suggestive. “It was pretty fuckin’ awesome,” he said, his enthusiasm making the other boy crack up.

  “You can say that,” the other boy said, rolling his eyes. “You’re the one whose gonna stick that big thing up my ass!”

  Chance looked at him and winked. “I’ve got experience now, Reg. I’ll try to make sure you like it.”

  “Oh, you better!” Reg crowed, and then Chance stopped fluffing his cock and rolled over. In one smooth movement he’d pinned the other boy to the bed and was kissing him with an unhidden hunger.

  “Dayum,” Reg breathed. “If I’d known you were that excited—”

  Chance cut off anything else he might have said with a hard kiss. Reg groaned, wrapped his legs around Chance’s, and started grinding up against him. Chance pulled back and started shoving his hands up Reg’s sweatshirt, muttering, “God you’re hot!” before the kiss started up again and the clothes started coming off.

  CHASE viewed the rushes of the after-Christmas video as he was in line for the plane. John had helped him book the tickets again, and instead of the exasperation of goddammit, some more traveling during the frickin’ holidays, all Chase could summon was relief.

  Tommy was in Boston, and Chase was going to get to see him again.

  Because life in Sacramento had become completely sur-fuckin’-real from the moment Chase had gotten off the plane. Mercy had greeted him, breathless, harried, desperate for some help to get ready for the holidays, and Chase had spent the rest of the day working beside her. They started off grocery shopping together and then she’d put him on vegetable prep while she went and did the rest of the wrapping. He did what she asked, he anticipated her every need, and the whole time, while Chase was in their small, brightly lit apartment kitchen, brushing his head on the green and red spangles she’d strewn between the doorways and through the halls, he was wrenched back to a tiny house in Massachusetts where the light was a dingy yellow and the Christmas decorations were small and old, and a woman who had barely summoned four words to say to Chase was dying and breaking her son’s heart.

  One minute, Chase was pulling Mercy’s wrapped gifts from the back of their closet, and the next minute….

  TOMMY’S hard body, in sweats like Chase’s, was pulled up against Chase’s chest in the alien landscape of a stranger’s room. Tommy’s chest, ripped with muscle, was shaking hard with silent sobs against Chase’s clasped hands, as he fell completely apart. Chase was kissing the shorn back of his neck, where the thick black hair was nothing but stubble, and hushing into his ear, telling him anything, anything, as long as Tommy would stop crying in Chase’s arms.

  CHASE thought that the schism between what he was doing (Bath & Body Works Christmas CD on the stereo? Check. Hot chocolate warmin
g in the pan? Check. Phone call made to Donnie’s harried mother to double-check they were bringing rolls to dinner the next day? Check. Onions, mushrooms, and olives chopped for turkey stuffing? Check.) and where his brain seemed to live, would self-repair when his father arrived. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  TOMMY rolled over in the bed, his eyes shiny in the darkness and his face dark and flushed and crumpled from crying. Chase dotted his cheeks, his forehead, his chin with small kisses, wordless breaths, giving what comfort he could.

  HIS father showed on their doorstep about a half an hour later than Mercy had asked him to be there, and for that half an hour, Chase thought that maybe he was the happiest guy on the freakin’ planet. For that half an hour, he actually came out of that darkened bedroom with Tommy, where he’d spent three furtive, painful nights doing things that wouldn’t look good on camera but which made their hearts feel good. For that half an hour he was Mercy’s devoted boyfriend, the guy who was saving to buy a house and getting an engineering degree to build a life with his girlfriend. The straight guy who thought that his girlfriend’s touch was maybe the most beautiful thing in the world. Then the doorbell rang, and Chase opened the door, and those eyes, so very like his own but bloodshot and flat, rheumy in swollen lids, stared back at him, and that part of Chase’s soul that was ripping its claws on the walls in an effort to be free went hiding back in that bedroom in Boston again, taking solace from the things that hurt it.

  TOMMY had brushed his teeth, so his breath didn’t reek of cigarette smoke, and when his mouth found Chase’s in the dark, it was open and wet, and Chase fell into it, into the feel of masculine lips under his and the faint prickle of what little stubble Tommy actually grew. Tommy gasped and breathed out into Chase’s mouth, and Chase swallowed the sound. The priest was still downstairs: their every move would be as silent as they could make it.

  “HIYA, Victor,” Chase said, his voice sounding cocky and casual, for all the world like this was a business contact or a professor or, hell, even the name of his post-Christmas shoot-mate, but it wasn’t. It was his father.

  “You gonna let me in, or let me stand out here in the cold, genius?”

  Chase took a deep breath and remembered that Mercy was a nice person who had done this because she thought it would make him happy. She was in the kitchen, taking over the finer points of dinner, and Chase took this opportunity to make his opinion clear.

  “You say one mean thing to her about dinner, Victor, and I will throw you down the stairs facedown. I’m not fucking around. She thinks you’re just misunderstood, but you and I know the truth, don’t we?”

  Chase’s father scowled. “Yeah? What’s the truth?”

  “That if you could have gotten away with it, you would have drowned me at birth like an unwanted puppy. So we both know who you are, okay? But for this night? We’re going to pretend you’re a human being.”

  Victor’s eyes got big, and a little shiny, and if Chase hadn’t grown up with the guy, he would have said he’d hurt Victor’s feelings—but he had grown up with him, and he knew better.

  “So are you coming in or what?” he asked sharply, and Victor walked in, shoving a market bag of something at Chase as he did so. Chase took it, looked in it, and sighed. Oh, Jesus. It would be just so damned much easier if the asshole would let Chase hate him, just to keep his worldview simple.

  “Thanks for the bread, Dad,” he said. “You picked a real nice kind. Come sit down in the living room—It’s a Wonderful Life is on, and Mercy needs me to help.”

  He stalked into the kitchen and handed Mercy the bread, and she raised her eyebrows. “That was nice of him,” she said softly.

  “I made note of it.”

  “Chase….” The warning in her voice was unmistakable. She stirred at the gravy with unnecessary force.

  “What?” he asked, grateful for the resentment backing up in his chest. It kept him in the now, and for a breath, those stolen moments with Tommy simply lurked in the membrane between his skull and his gray matter, waiting for a chance to slip into his consciousness with insidious joy.

  “I’m trying here to make this work,” she hissed. “It’s not going to work if you’re going to be a spoiled child about it.”

  Chase blinked, and a hideous laugh threatened to burst out. “Mercy,” he said, still choking on his own bile, “would it surprise you to know I have no idea what a spoiled child would actually act like?”

  She stopped and wiped her delicate little wrist across her forehead, and he sighed. She was wearing a deep ruby velour blouse, with little white lacy frou-frou things puffing through the V-neck, and she’d had to shove the sleeves up to her elbows. They were threatening to fall down and get into her cooking, and for a minute everything ceased between them as he stopped tossing the salad, wiped his hands off on a bright green kitchen towel, and rolled her sleeves back evenly.

  Mercy grinned gratefully. “Thanks,” she said, and then, “How about you go out there and sit with him. Bring a soda. Make him feel comfortable. He looks pretty damned miserable.”

  Chase sighed. God. Tommy would get it. Tommy would totally understand why Chase never wanted to talk to his father again as long as he lived. But then, Chase had told Tommy more than he’d told Mercy. And whose fault was that?

  “We have any ginger ale?” Chase asked, feeling a combination of resignation and dread. “He says it tastes like alcohol.”

  They didn’t—because really, who buys that if they’re not told they have to?—and Chase walked in with Dr. Pepper and glasses filled with ice. He poured his dad a glass and took his, leaning back against the corner of the couch and watching the part of the movie where Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed answered the telephone together.

  Chase could see the sexual tension, the chemistry, and even though he always rooted for George Bailey to get out of town, he saw this moment, between two people who really loved each other, and thought that there were maybe worse things than living poor and working hard, as long as you were with someone you really cared for.

  “I hate this fucking movie,” Chase’s father said into the blue, and Chase sighed. He picked up the remote and went surfing through the cable box to find something else.

  “Shrek Christmas,” Chase said, his voice dead.

  “I mean seriously,” Victor continued, like Chase hadn’t done anything. “The guy offs himself and gets another chance? No one gets another chance when that happens. You should know that, Chase. That’s like the fucking end-all, be-all of last chances. I fucking hate that fucking movie.”

  Chase blinked. “Yeah, well… maybe when they succeed, they regret it, you ever think of that? Maybe (she) some people regret it.”

  Victor’s look at him was all contempt. “If she was gonna regret it, Chase, she wouldn’t have gone for the second wrist.”

  Chase’s entire body went cold and his vision went black.

  “WE CAN’T make noise,” Tommy whispered, when they came up from their first kiss.

  “We don’t need to,” Chase told him seriously. They were grinding up against each other, and Chase’s movements were becoming more and more frantic, more and more needy. God, they weren’t naked, they weren’t on top of the covers. There were no big-ticket sexual acts—no oral, no anal, no naked skin, no penetration—just their bodies, clenching together in the night, their breath mingling, and Tommy’s bright black eyes tightly screwed shut as he snuck his hands under Chase’s shirt and held Chase so tight he could barely breathe.

  Tommy was rubbing, hard, so hard against Chase’s thigh. Chase could feel his erection through his sweats, and it was hard, and his balls were swollen, and Tommy buried his face against Chase’s collarbone hard enough to leave bruises.

  “Oh God!” he whispered. “God! Please… please please please please….”

  Anything. Anything. Oh God, Tommy, anything. Please, just keep moving keep moving keep moving I want to feel you fall apart in my arms….

  “CHASE! Dinner’s ready!” Merc
y’s voice penetrated the fog in Chase’s brain, and Chase had to jerk himself back to his living room, where his father was looking at him like he was vomiting pea soup.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Victor asked, and Chase, caught between those stolen moments with Tommy and this degrading, depressing reality, was forced to blurt out the truth.

  “Maybe she would have regretted it,” he snapped, wanting Tommy’s skin against his with the forcible ache of a sprained ankle or bruised flesh. “But she knew you were coming home and that killed the pain.”

  With that, he stood up and walked to the tiny kitchen table adjoining the apartment dining room. Mercy had set up a table with a turkey in the center, and lovely new placemats. There were candles in the centerpiece and spangled napkin holders, a tiny turkey, and Chase’s stuffing, which he’d practiced before Thanksgiving and really wasn’t half-bad.

  Chase leaned over and kissed Mercy’s flushed forehead. She looked triumphant and proud and happy, and he wouldn’t kill that for the world.

  “It looks really good, babe,” he said, wanting her to know he was grateful. God, he was always so grateful to her. Why couldn’t some of that gratitude translate to need?

  Mercy looked at Chase’s father, still sitting on the couch and looking shell-shocked. “Mr. Summers?” she asked curiously. “Mr. Summers? Are you going to come eat?”

  Chase’s father stood up and wobbled to the table, glaring at Chase like Chase had kicked his puppy. “How do you know it wasn’t you?” he asked, throwing himself on the kitchen chair with enough force to make the cheap wooden frame squeak.