by Roan Parrish
Charlie waved him off and put the groceries away. He rolled his shoulders when he was through.
“So what’s your fascination with the neighbors?”
“No fascination,” Jack lied.
Charlie peered at him.
“You having a Rear Window moment or what?”
Jack always got a kick out of Charlie’s Hitchcock obsession. Those who didn’t know him well thought it was out of character, but the meticulous planning and the patience of a long game suited Charlie perfectly. At this particular moment, however, Jack glared.
“No.” Jack had shot for a casual tone, but Charlie kept looking at him. Jack didn’t do casual well. “Just curious.”
Charlie raised an eyebrow and Jack followed his gaze to the binoculars sitting on the coffee table.
“You want me to—”
“No, it’s fine,” Jack interrupted. It came out sharper than he’d intended. He wasn’t sure why he was embarrassed that Charlie knew what his boredom had driven him to.
“Guess I’ll take off, then.”
Jack nodded.
“Unless you want me to hang out? Watch a movie or something?”
Sometimes Jack couldn’t tell if Charlie made offers like this out of genuine desire for his company, out of obligation, or out of habit. Jack wasn’t sure Charlie knew himself.
They got along well, enjoyed each other’s company, but there was always something between them that only time would clear away. Or it wouldn’t.
Charlie still saw Jack as the thirteen-year-old kid he’d gotten saddled with at seventeen when their parents’ deaths had changed everything, and Jack still saw Charlie as the fierce authority figure who’d cared for him at the expense of his own desires. Not that Charlie would ever admit it. That, too, Jack wasn’t sure Charlie knew.
Jack was desperate for the distraction Charlie offered. He’d only been couch-and bed-bound for three days and he was already climbing the walls. But he’d probably snapped at Charlie enough for one day.
“No, that’s okay. Another time.”
Charlie nodded and stroked his beard—a clear indicator that he was concerned—but just dropped a hand on Jack’s shoulder.
“Let’s get you back to the couch.”
Jack wanted to scream. Also to burn the couch.
“Take care, bro,” Charlie said when Jack was settled, and as he walked out the door darkness closed over Jack again.
* * *
That night, when Simon returned with the dogs, he lingered in the doorway instead of coming inside. Jack accepted the licks and headbutts of the returning animals and felt his stomach lurch as Simon edged out the door.
He didn’t want Simon to go, leaving him all alone again to stare at the ceiling or the TV or a book or the animals.
“Um. Hey. Simon?” Simon turned. “Could you help me? With something.” Jack gestured to his cast. “Damn thing.”
Simon nodded and Jack wracked his brain, having spoken without thinking this through.
“Uh, in the kitchen.”
They walked to the kitchen. Jack’s crutches made every step an effort, giving him plenty of time to think.
What are you doing? What exactly are you trying to do?
“There’s, uh, coffee filters up there. Do you mind grabbing them?”
Jack pointed to the cabinet above the refrigerator and Simon stood on his toes to catch the edge of the cabinet. The line of his back was graceful, even beneath the oversized sweater he wore. He snagged the sheaf of filters and moved to set it on the counter next to the coffee machine, but he froze.
He turned slowly and looked at Jack, and Jack saw the neat stack of coffee filters Charlie must have placed there earlier.
Simon was looking at him like he’d played a nasty trick.
“Sorry. I thought I was out,” Jack muttered. “My brother—”
But Simon was already nodding and making his way to the door.
“Sorry,” Jack called after him again, but Simon didn’t answer, and the loneliness of a long night engulfed the house.
Chapter Five
Simon
“Goddamn motherfucking shit!” Simon let his head fall back and knock against the doorframe of his grandmother’s kitchen.
“Some of us are mothers, dear,” his grandmother trilled from the pantry.
“Shit, sorry!” Simon called back.
She emerged with her arms full of flour, sugar, and other canisters that indicated baking was imminent.
“What’re you making?” Simon asked at the same time as his grandmother said, “What happened?”
They both smiled.
“Snickerdoodles,” she replied, and he said, “Nothing.”
She raised an eyebrow and gestured for him to begin measuring the flour.
Baking was something they’d done together since Simon was a child. Kylie had never had any interest, always more excited about going fishing with their grandfather or playing soccer with the neighbors. But Simon enjoyed the way having something to do with his hands took the pressure off his mouth. He enjoyed the way his grandmother would narrate each step and all he needed to do was be with her. The fact that everything she made was delicious didn’t hurt either.
Snickerdoodles meant she was feeling nostalgic. They’d been something he’d loved as a boy—the taste and the word both—but he hadn’t requested them in a very long time.
As she creamed the butter and sugar, Simon felt a familiar calm settle over him.
“It was nothing, really,” he said. It was always easier for him to speak unprompted. “I thought for a second that he—Jack—was... I don’t know. Making fun of me. But it was just a misunderstanding.”
The moment he’d seen the coffee filters and felt Jack’s intense eyes on him he’d remembered others. Just say one thing, freak! What’s wrong with you? Can you even say your own name? Simple Simon, Simple Simon.
“It was stupid.”
“What’s this Jack fellow like?”
“Tall,” Simon said without thinking. “Um. He’s nice-ish. Pissed off that he can’t take the dogs out himself, I think. He seems like the kind of person who’s used to being able to do anything he wants.”
His grandmother nodded and looked studiously at the cookie dough. “Handsome?”
Simon shot her a look. “That casual and innocent act does not work on me.”
“Who’s acting?” she said, cupping her hands beneath her chin in a ludicrous nod at a Shirley Temple pose. “I’m as casual and innocent as they come.”
He rolled his eyes and huffed out a sigh.
“Yeah. Yeah he really is.”
“Mmm,” his grandmother mused.
* * *
The next morning when Jack opened the door, his hair was rumpled and his sweatshirt was rucked up on one side, revealing a peek of muscled stomach. He blinked and gave Simon a sleepy smile.
It hit Simon like a punch in the gut. What would it feel like to step forward and be wrapped in those powerful arms, press his cheek against the softness of that sweatshirt and the firmness of the muscles beneath it? What would it be like to stroke Jack’s mussed hair into place and kiss his soft, smiling lips?
A shudder shook him. That didn’t happen for him. That would never happen for him.
He stuck out his hand, almost hitting Jack in the chest with the plastic container of cookies.
“These for me?” Jack asked, stepping back to let him inside.
Simon rolled his eyes.
No, they’re for the other person whose chest I just shoved them into.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jack said. He peeled off the lid and inhaled. His eyes got big. “Are these those cinnamon things with the weird name?” he asked, clearly enthused.
Simon nodded.
“Snickerdoodles.”
; The word came out choked but audible.
“Right, right. What the hell kind of name is that?”
What the hell kind of name is Bernard for a St. Bernard and Puddles for a dog afraid of puddles?
Jack’s brow furrowed and for a moment Simon had the ridiculous notion that the other man could read his mind.
“German, maybe? Sounds kind of German.” He shrugged and stuffed a cookie into his mouth.
His eyes got wide again.
“Mmmisooogood,” he garbled and Simon smiled. Cinnamon and sugar gilded Jack’s lips like they’d been caught in the sweetest flurry.
Jack grunted and held the container out to him.
Simon shook his head.
“Too early for me,” he said. The words came out and in their wake a deep heat flushed through his throat and face. But Jack just smiled and shrugged, then shoved another cookie in his mouth.
Jack gathered the dogs and Pirate with a whistle.
“Did you make these?”
“My grandma.”
Something flickered in Jack’s eyes that Simon couldn’t read.
“Wow. Real grandma cookies. Thanks.”
He sounded utterly serious, as if cookies baked by a grandmother were categorically different than cookies baked by someone else, and he held the container reverently, tucked under his arm like a football.
A pillow with a head-sized indentation lay on the couch, a comforter half on the floor. Had Jack been sleeping here instead of in a bed?
Jack’s eyes followed Simon’s.
“Uh. I don’t sleep well. Much.”
Now that he said it, Simon could see that he looked weary, not sleepy.
“Why?”
Jack ran a hand through messy hair the color of copper.
“I haven’t for a long time. Since I was a teenager. And usually when I can’t sleep I draw. But...”
He shook his head.
Why did you stop sleeping as a teenager? What changed? What do you draw? Why can’t you draw now? What do you do instead? How much sleep did you get last night? Does your leg hurt? How did you hurt your leg?
The familiar cacophony swelled in Simon’s head and chest as he opened his mouth, and what came out was...nothing.
Jack’s eyes on him were sharp and Simon looked at the floor. He blinked furiously and made for the door.
This part was always the hardest. The moment when he could see the person he would have been—the connections he would have made—if only he weren’t like he goddamn was.
* * *
He still didn’t entirely understand it, the war inside of him.
It had been raging as long as he could remember, and as in any war, all sides lost.
As a young child he’d been able to stay quiet, to watch the world from inside himself, and the only comment was to his parents at their luck that he was so well-behaved. He could press to his father’s side and be lifted high above the fear. He could turn his face toward his mother’s stomach and be gathered close in her arms, shielded and comforted.
But at a certain point—and Simon couldn’t have identified it because it passed without him noticing—rescue and comfort were rescinded. There was no discussion, no negotiation. One day he simply realized that when he pressed close to his father he was given a clap on the back; when he turned toward his mother, he got a smile and a hair tousle.
Without warning, he had been set adrift on dangerous waters even as he still lived under his parents’ roof. The praise for his good behavior was a thing of the past. Now the comments weren’t complimentary, but questioning. Eventually, they stopped altogether because everyone knew.
Something was wrong with Simon Burke.
“Nothing’s wrong physically,” the doctor told his parents. “He’s just a little shy, aren’t you, Simon?”
That he would grow out of it was the general consensus, and Simon began to imagine the present as hard-packed soil and the future as the moment his reedy seedling would press through earth and grow toward the sun.
By high school he knew he was mired in the dirt permanently, buried alive, and instead of hoping to grow, he wished he’d stop.
His looks became less in sync with how he felt the taller and broader he got. Suddenly taller than most of the girls at school, taller than many of the boys, he wasn’t small enough to hide anymore, and he began to hunch his shoulders and duck his chin to his chest.
It had the added benefit that he couldn’t see the looks on people’s faces when he didn’t answer them. Teachers couldn’t catch his eye in the hallway and give him the perplexed, disappointed look they reserved for students failing to perform to their potential.
Its downsides were the predictable ones. He walked into things. His neck ached constantly, as did the spot between his shoulder blades and the small of his back. Fists and elbows and shoulders could come out of nowhere and he didn’t have time to evade them.
And no matter how low he kept his head, it didn’t stop him hearing the things people said.
Freak. Weirdo. Retard. Then, as inevitable as the slide from fear into anger: Faggot.
It was said about him and to him before he ever considered where his desires lay. Especially because his main desire was simply to disappear.
But as high school progressed, Simon added one more layer of distance between himself and the students of Bear Creek High.
Being gay didn’t bother Simon. It was being attracted to boys that was the problem. Because boys were awful. They seemed intent on making his life miserable in order to make their own more amusing, and the indignity of finding them beautiful or intriguing was humiliating.
Even if he could imagine a world in which a boy wasn’t awful to him, there would still be himself to contend with. How could he do...anything if he couldn’t even say hello?
Simon filed this curiosity and this desire away with all the others he’d quashed over the years. They stayed there, as quiet as he was, for a long, long time.
* * *
“I’m going to ask him a question,” Simon told the pack. “I’ll just ask one question and then he’ll know that I want him to talk. Right?”
This sometimes worked for Simon. Some people were so eager to talk about themselves that one question was all that was required of him to unlock them permanently. Somehow he didn’t think Jack was going to be one of those people, but he could hope.
His heart pounded harder and harder with each step back to Jack’s cabin.
By the time he opened the door and began unclipping leashes he was wound so tight with intention that the second Jack came into the room he practically yelled, “How’d you break your leg!”
Jack’s eyes widened at the bellow and Simon wished the floor would open up and swallow him. He sucked in a tight breath through nostrils narrowed with panic and squeezed his eyes shut tight so he couldn’t see himself be seen.
Jack’s voice, when it came, sounded normal. Too normal? Pityingly normal? Maybe not.
“Puddles got spooked and I took off after him. Rolled down this embankment or hill or whateverthehell you call it. Broke it on the way down. So stupid.”
In, out; in, out. Simon made himself breathe evenly and quietly. Made himself as unremarkable as possible. He flexed his left hand, the one where the muscle twitches always began. Then, slowly, slowly, he opened his eyes.
“I hate it,” Jack said. “Fucking hate being trapped here. Having to ask my brother to do shit for me.”
Simon looked up at Jack for a moment. Jack was wearing that sweatshirt again. The one that looked like hugging him in it would be the most wonderful thing.
“Do you want some coffee?” Jack asked.
Simon shook his head. At least, he meant to shake his head. But the next thing Jack said was “Cool.” So apparently he hadn’t.
He followed Jack into the kitchen
and sank into a chair, shoving his twitching hand under his thigh.
“Thanks for not offering to do it for me,” Jack said, bitterness twisting his voice. “Swear if my brother offers one more pity hang or favor I’ll lose it.”
Jack puttered around, making the coffee slowly and in clear pain. Frankly, Simon hadn’t offered to help because the last thing he could do was find more words, but seeing Jack’s struggle—leaning one crutch or the other against countertops, almost losing his balance once or twice, and righting himself in the nick of time—Simon felt like he should’ve despite Jack’s clear distaste for help. Must be nice, being accustomed to not needing it.
When Jack held two steaming mugs of coffee out to him, Simon took them and put them on the table, leaving Jack’s hands free for his crutches. Jack thunked into the chair next to him and Simon held very, very still.
“So, uh. You don’t talk much,” Jack said.
There it was.
Simon’s stomach knotted and he wanted to push his chair back and flee. Before he could, Jack went on.
“Do you not like to, or do you have stuff to say but you just don’t...talk much?”
Simon bit his lip and held up two fingers.
Jack nodded assessingly. “Wanna text me? Is that better?”
Against all odds, something tiny fluttered to life in the black hole of Simon’s stomach.
He slid his phone from his pocket cautiously in case it was a joke. But Jack took his own from his sweatshirt pocket and waited.
Simon’s fingers itched with all the unspoken words. All the questions he’d wanted to ask earlier. But those had been in the moment. Now, with the ability to write anything, what his fingers tapped out was: Sorry. It’s weird, I know.
Jack glanced at his phone and furrowed his brow.
“That you have a hard time talking? Well...yeah, I guess.” He shrugged. “Why do you?”
Simon’s face heated. In the question he couldn’t help but hear the echo of years of words.
I’m not... Simon deleted. There’s nothing wrong... Simon deleted.