by T. J. Klune
“Like—like it was anything.”
That’s what he’d told himself last summer when they’d been at that charity dinner, the benefit for the CUE Center for Missing Persons. David had shown up in an ill-fitting tux, and Phillip had been there looking as dapper as ever, and they’d tried acting like everything was okay, but Keith had been there with Phillip. Keith, he of the firm handshake, the broad shoulders, the wide smile and the tux that looked tailored specifically for him. His eyes had been this weird ice-cold blue, and David had disliked him immediately.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Keith had said, which by the way Phillip had elbowed him, he should have known was the wrong thing to say.
“It’s not a loss,” David had gritted out. “She just hasn’t been found.”
Later, after David had spoken to the enraptured audience, telling them about Alice, Alice, Alice, and after the man had shown him the picture of the older woman and had cried on his shoulder, Phillip had gripped David by the arm, dragging him to a quiet alcove, eyes bright, lips thinned.
“It’s not what you think,” he’d said. “It’s not.”
“I’m not thinking anything,” David had replied, even though that certainly wasn’t the truth.
“He’s a friend. I didn’t want to come alone tonight, and he volunteered.”
“What a nice friend,” David said. “How nice.”
“I didn’t even know if you were coming.”
And—yeah, okay, that’d been fair, because David hadn’t responded to any one of Phillip’s three phone calls or five text messages, but still. It wasn’t as if David had brought a friend.
“I’m here,” David had said.
“Are you?” Phillip had asked him. “Because I don’t think you’ve been here for a long time.”
He’d left shortly after, not looking to where Phillip and Keith were standing side by side, talking with a group of people he hadn’t recognized.
There’d been hints, sometimes, from friends, the ones David hadn’t quite managed to drive away yet with his bullshit, though that was coming soon. Hints as subtle as a sledgehammer, things like oh, I just had lunch the other day with Phillip and—with Phillip and Phillip seems to be happier lately, David, maybe it’s okay for you to be too?
David didn’t have many friends these days.
In all honesty, he really didn’t have any at all.
But that was okay. Mostly. He had other things to focus on. His job. His phone calls to Detective Harper on Mondays. Searching, though it was mostly done online and in message boards these days. After all, the trail was almost six years old now.
“It wasn’t like that,” Phillip repeated. “I told you that.”
“Oh” was all David said.
Phillip picked up his fork, slid the broccoli off, and speared a potato. He put it into his mouth and chewed angrily. No one could chew food angrily like Phillip.
David waited because he knew Phillip wasn’t finished.
And in fact, he swallowed and set the fork down again. “I didn’t want it to be anything.”
“Okay,” David said. “Did he?”
Phillip gaped at him.
Back off, David thought, because they were so far beyond reminiscing now. Back off, back off, back off.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” Phillip said coolly, “but he did after I told him.”
“He seemed like a nice guy.”
The skin under Phillip’s left eye twitched. “The nicest.”
“That’s good,” David said, picking at the broccoli. It was so green, it looked fake. He didn’t know if he could stomach it.
“You aggravate me.”
“I know.”
“You don’t even know how much.”
“I have a good idea.”
Phillip ate another potato, but he wasn’t chewing as violently as he had been before. There was still a little bit in his mouth when he said, “I didn’t want that from him. He was just a friend. I’m allowed to have friends. And even if I wanted more, I don’t know that it would be any concern of yours.”
Right. Because David wasn’t anything to Phillip.
He ate a piece of broccoli. He could almost taste the green. He chewed quickly and choked it down. For a moment, it stuck in his throat and he couldn’t breathe, but then it passed and everything was fine. Everything was just fine.
He put down his fork. His finger brushed against the receipt. Unbidden, he glanced at the bar to find Matteo laughing with the young couple again. Like he’d felt David’s gaze, he turned and caught his eye. He winked before going back to the couple.
He almost said, Why are we here? Why did you want to see me?
Instead, he said, “I spoke with—”
Phillip said, “He kissed me once.”
David thought the broccoli was stuck in his throat again.
Phillip said, “And maybe I kissed him back, for just a little bit, but that was it. That was it, and I pushed him away and told him I wasn’t ready for anything like that and I didn’t know if I would be for a long time. He was a gentleman, said he understood, and I haven’t seen him in almost three months. I heard he’s dating an investment broker. So. There’s that.”
“I’m sorry.”
Phillip looked up at him sharply. “What for?”
Everything. “If you liked him.” He shrugged.
“I liked him,” Phillip said, and before David could do something with that, he added, “I liked him because he was my friend. He listened to me. He understood what I was going through.”
“Who?” David said quietly.
“His brother. Back in 1998. He’d been out with friends, said good night outside a bar, saying he was going to walk home. He never made it. They never found him. No leads, it was just as if he’d vanished without a trace. It’s been cold for a very long time.”
David hadn’t known that. He didn’t know if it would have changed anything, but he hadn’t known that about Keith. Hadn’t known that at all.
“So yes, maybe even I wanted to like him,” Phillip said, cutting a potato. “Maybe I thought I could, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. He kissed me, and I kissed him back, neat as you please, but that was it.”
“Okay,” David said.
“Okay,” Phillip snapped. “That’s it? Just okay.”
“It’s—”
“How is everything?” Melissa asked, and David didn’t even flinch this time. “The swordfish?”
“It’s fine,” Phillip said. “Everything is wonderful.”
“Can I get you anything else?”
“I’ll have another glass of—”
“On it,” she said, not even letting him finish. She looked at David. “And you, sir?”
He wanted to tell her to take his plate away, to just trash it all, but he shook his head.
She left.
“What about you?” Phillip asked. “Are you—”
“No,” David said. “No. You know me. I don’t… do well. Like that.”
Phillip glanced down at the receipt pointedly.
“That’s not anything,” David said, embarrassed. “He probably just had a daddy kink or something.”
Phillip choked on a potato.
David felt oddly proud of himself.
Phillip coughed, turning a little red.
David waited.
“Jesus,” Phillip gasped. “You can’t just say that.”
David fought to keep the smile off his face. “Look at me. Look at him. He wanted to be my baby boy.”
“Oh my God,” Phillip said faintly. “That’s amazing. You have to call him now. Just to see what would happen.”
“Please,” David said. “He’d want to stay out late, dancing and drinking, and you know me.”
“Pajamas by six,” Phillip said.
“Pajamas by six,” David agreed. “Probably not very compatible.”
“He’s got a great ass. Nice arms too.”
“He probably forgets leg day.”
“It’s not like the porn.”
“No jocks in the locker room waiting for a four-way?”
“None at all. Lots of flab. And back hair.”
“Not on you.”
He patted his stomach. “Still got this.”
Phillip smiled. “You gotta keep that. I always—I always liked your belly.”
David flushed, looking down at the table, twisting the fork in his hand. “Thanks. I think.”
Melissa dropped off the glass of wine at the table and left without speaking. She did smile at the both of them, but that was all.
The silence that came then wasn’t quite as awkward. It wasn’t—it wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t like it’d been before either. He was nervous still, his palms a little sweaty, but his heartbeat had slowed, and he wasn’t struggling with something, anything to say. He didn’t know where this was going, what they were doing, and that question was still stuck in his throat, but it wasn’t… bad.
It was kind of nice.
And then David opened his mouth and ruined it. “I spoke to Detective Harper this week.”
A neutral “Did you?” was the only response he got.
“I, uh. I still call her. You know? Just on Mondays.”
“I know.”
“Okay. Good. I just… I wanted to point something out to her, just to see if they’d heard of it.”
“She told me.”
And that startled him. “She told you,” he repeated flatly.
Phillip didn’t even look like he’d been caught doing something wrong. “She told me.” He ate another potato. They were almost gone. He’d go on to the broccoli next. But the steak had been there for so long, he might just move on to it before it was lukewarm. Nobody liked lukewarm swordfish steaks.
“When?” David asked.
“When I spoke to her on Tuesday.”
And now maybe he knew why they were here. “Before or after?”
Phillip looked confused. “Before or after what?”
“Before or after you texted me. Before or after you said that you wanted to see me.”
Phillip picked the napkin off his lap and daintily wiped his mouth. He set it back on the table and sighed. “Before.”
David wanted to punch something very hard. “I see.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Isn’t it? I call and tell her that a sex-trafficking ring had been broken wide open in Baltimore and maybe they should look into it, and now here we are. You couldn’t call me, so you called her to check in, to check up, and once you heard that I’d fucking called her, trying to get them to do their goddamn jobs, you decided that maybe you should get me out, maybe you should make sure I wasn’t drowning like—”
“Lower your voice,” Phillip said.
“I’m not—”
“David. Please.”
And when had he ever been able to resist that? They’d found that out almost right away, that all Phillip had to do was say please. That’s all he had to do, and David was turned to putty, unable to do anything but what had been asked.
“I—” he choked out. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” Phillip said. “And I can see where you’re coming from. How that would look. David, do you trust me? Deep down. Do you really trust me?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation, because even after all that’d happened, even after all they’d been through, he trusted Phillip Greengrass with everything he had. The things he said in the past might have contradicted that, but this was his truth. It was one of the few he had left, and he hoarded it as if it were precious.
“Thank you,” Phillip said. He closed his eyes briefly. “I was going to call you. Or text you. I told myself to call, but maybe I chickened out a little. But I didn’t know if you’d ignore it, so I called Detective Harper first, because she was the only one you talked to with any regularity. So I waited until Tuesday and called her. She told me you’d spoken the day before. She told me what you spoke about. She said she was checking into it. That every little bit helped. Then I texted you.”
David believed him. Phillip had never lied to him, not about the big things. And this was a big thing. “Why?”
“Why?”
The words almost got stuck. “Why did you want to see me?”
“Because I miss you.”
And there it was. There it was. The four words that meant more than anything he’d heard in the last six years other than we’ll find her, I promise, and he didn’t even know if he deserved them. After everything he’d done, he didn’t think he could have them and all that they potentially implied. Sure, it might have been just as a friend misses another, or something so much more, but still. It was something. And those four words were out there, Phillip just throwing them at him like it was nothing.
He didn’t deserve this.
He hadn’t earned it.
But he wanted it more than anything else in the world. So he said, “I miss you too.”
“Do you?” Phillip asked.
“All the time.”
Now they were reveling in it, weren’t they?
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
Phillip shrugged. “Okay.”
He moved on to the broccoli.
David tried the swordfish. He could barely choke it down.
He set down his fork.
“You need to eat more,” Phillip said. “You’re wasting away.”
“Yeah,” David said. “I don’t think that’s a thing.”
Phillip had a fragile smile on his face, like he was unsure if it was okay for it to be there. “Might be. I like the tie. Nice touch.”
“It’s—I don’t know why I wore it.”
“I taught you better than that,” Phillip said. “You never need an excuse to dress up. I think you look very handsome.”
“It took me a long time to tie it.”
“Clumsy fingers.”
“I even stared at the mirror and everything.”
“How long?”
David sighed, pushing his fork around on his plate. “An hour.”
“An hour,” Phillip said, snorting into his hand. “David.”
“Yeah, well you should have seen attempts one through sixteen. It looked like I was trying to hang myself.”
“An hour.”
“Speaking of excuses to dress up. Nice shoes.”
“Buddy, I’ll have you know these are limited-edition Converse,” Phillip said with a scowl. “Do you know what that means?”
“Yeah, you and five thousand other people have the same shoes.”
“Out of seven billion people. That’s—that’s, okay, math is stupidly hard, but I’m pretty sure that’s a very small percentage of the population. Do you know what the chances of me running into another person with these exact shoes is?”
“There’s a reason for that.”
“Excuse you,” he said, affronted. “These are brilliant.”
“They looked like they were made by someone who’s colorblind.”
“No accounting for taste.”
“Not your taste, that’s for sure.”
“You can just shut up,” Phillip said. “You philistine. Just because I wasn’t there to do your tie for you doesn’t mean you can take it out on my shoes.”
And that—that might have been too much. It wasn’t Phillip’s fault. No. It would never be Phillip’s fault. David was just as much a participant as Phillip had been. But the idea that Phillip hadn’t been there, hadn’t tied his tie for him was too much. The bowtie on the ill-fitted tux had been already pre-tied, hanging in the closet in a wrapped bag in the back. But this tie? This was the first tie he’d worn since… he couldn’t even remember when. Probably some meeting, like the group Phillip had found, other people having been through the same thing. David hadn’t wanted to go, but Phillip
said it’d be a good idea, and please, David, just do it for me. Please.
That had been in year two and the trail was so cold it might as well have been ice, no matter what they’d chosen to believe at the time. He hadn’t yet discovered the joys of waking up after spending four nights in a row chasing the bottom of a bottle. But oh, it would be coming, and there wasn’t really anything that could have stopped it.
But first, the group meetings, the people who showed up a little dead-eyed, a little frumpy, saying this is my wife or this is my son or it is my father, he isn’t sick, he really isn’t, he was just gone. The cookies had been stale, and the coffee might as well have been tar, and they talked about missing-white-woman syndrome, that extraordinarily odd little thing where people go missing every single day, but it’s the upper-class white girls or women that get all of the media coverage, their blonde hair and blue eyes selling much better than a Hispanic woman or a black man. Men in general didn’t get much press. They were just gone. Probably running from their responsibilities. After all, it wasn’t like men could get taken, right? That was just sounded implausible. That didn’t happen.
It was the pretty white women, always. They were the ones on the cover of People, they were the ones whose awkwardly shot cell phone videos of that slightly drunken day at the beach were shown on CNN and Fox News, saying, “Look at this all-American girl, in the prime of her life, have you seen her? Sure, four women of color have gone missing while you’ve watched this, but look at this woman. She’s more important than all the others.”
Alice was black.
She’d been on the news.
For a little while.
But her videos hadn’t been on TV, at least not on the national stage. Not even the one where she’s grinning at David holding the camera, saying, “Is this really for me? Did you really do this for me?” while she’s unwrapping a present, the snowman paper falling around her. She’d been in her pajamas still, her hair up lazily in a bun, her eyes a little puffy with sleep, but she had looked amazing, and even the local news hadn’t played it, so he’d uploaded it to YouTube under the heading HAVE YOU SEEN HER?
It’d gotten just over three hundred views. David was convinced half of those came from himself.
Yes. That might have been the last time he wore a tie. Trying to go to that group. Hearing about missing-white-woman syndrome and knowing the missing woman in his life was black and two years gone, and wondering if anyone still gave a shit about her aside from him and Phillip. He’d eaten a cookie. He’d drank the coffee. He’d smiled when he was supposed to, answered a question when called upon.